domes blazed with angels and saints, and all around arches, walls, vaults pulsed with gold in millions upon millions of tiny twinkling facets.
Without a word, Tonio scrambled into his mother’s arms. He climbed her like a tree. She rocked backwards under his weight, laughing.
And then it seemed a shock passed through the crowd like the rustle of burning kindling. Trumpets blared. Tonio turned back and forth frantically, unable to find them.
“See!” his mother whispered, squeezing his hand. And above the heads of the crowd the Doge appeared in his great chair under a swaying canopy. The sharp heavy scent of incense filled the air. And the trumpets rose in pitch, shrill and brilliant and chilling.
Then came the Grand Council in their brilliant robes. “Your father!” said Tonio’s mother with a spasm of girlish excitement.
The tall bone-thin figure of Andrea Treschi came into view, sleeves down to the floor, his white hair the shape of a lion’s mane, his deep-set pale eyes fixed like those of a statue before him.
“Papa!” Tonio’s whisper carried sharply. Heads turned, there was muffled laughter. And when the Councillor’s gaze wavered and fixed his son in the crowd, the ancient face was transformed, its smile almost rapturous, those eyes brilliantly enlivened.
Tonio’s mother was blushing.
But suddenly from out of the air it seemed a great singing burst forth, voices high and clear and declaring. Tonio felt a catch in his throat. For a second he could not move, his body perfectly rigid as he absorbed the shock of this singing, and then he squirmed, eyes upward, the candles for the moment blinding him. “Be still,” said his mother, who could hardly hold him. The singing grew richer, fuller.
It came in waves from either side of the immense nave, melody interwoven with melody. Tonio could almost see it. A great golden net thrown out as if on the lapping sea in shimmering sunlight. The very air teemed with sound. And finally he saw, right above, the singers.
They stood in two huge lofts to the left and right side of the church, mouths open, faces gleaming in reflected light; they appeared like the angels in the mosaics.
In a second, Tonio had dropped to the floor. He felt his mother’s hand slip as she went to catch him. He dashed through the press of skirts and cloaks, perfume and winter air, and saw the open door to the stairway.
It seemed the walls around him throbbed with the chords of the organ as he climbed, and suddenly he stood in the warmth of the choir loft itself, among these tall singers.
A little commotion ensued. He was at the very rail and looking up into the eyes of a giant of a man whose voice poured out of him as clean and golden as the clarion of the trumpet. The man sang the one great word, “Alleluia!” which had the peculiar sound of a call to someone, a summoning. And all the men behind him picked it up, singing it over and over again at intervals, overlapping one upon the other.
While across the church the other choir returned it in mounting volume.
Tonio opened his mouth. He started singing. He sang the one word right in time with the tall singer and he felt the man’s hand close warmly on his shoulder. The singer was nodding to him, he was saying with his large, almost sleepy brown eyes, Yes, sing, without saying it. Tonio felt the man’s lean flank beneath his robe, and then an arm wound down about his waist to lift him.
The whole congregation shimmered below, the Doge in his chair of golden cloth, the Senate in their purple robes, councillors in scarlet, all the patricians of Venice in their white wigs, but Tonio’s eyes were fixed on the singer’s face as he heard his own voice like a bell ringing out distinct from the singer’s clarion. Tonio’s body went away. He left it, carried out on the air with his voice and the singer’s voice as the sounds became indistinguishable. He saw the pleasure in the singer’s quivering eyes, that sleepiness lifted. But the powerful sound erupting from the man’s chest astonished him.
When it was over and he was placed in his mother’s arms again, she looked up to this giant as he made her a deep bow, and said:
“Thank you, Alessandro.”
“Alessandro, Alessandro,” Tonio whispered. And as he snuggled next to her in the gondola he said desperately, “Mamma, when I grow up will I sing like that? Will I