sing like Alessandro?” It was impossible to explain it to her. “Mamma, I want to be one of those singers!”
“Good Lord, Tonio, no!” She burst out laughing. And with a foppish gesture of her wrist to his nurse, Lena, she looked to heaven.
The entire household was clattering and groaning up to the roof. And gazing towards the mouth of the Grand Canal, anticipating that infinite spell of darkness that was the lagoon, Tonio saw the sea ablaze: hundreds upon hundreds of lights bobbing on the water. It was as if all the flickering illumination of San Marco had been spilled out, and in a reverent whisper his mother told him that the men of state were going to venerate the relics on San Giorgio.
All was still for a moment, except the whistling wind that had long ago torn the fragile lattices of the ruined roof garden. Dead trees lay here and there on their sides, anchored still by their overturned pots of root and earth, their leaves snapped by the wind, crackling.
Tonio bent his head. He gave the tender stretch of his neck to his mother’s warm hand, and felt a wordless and terrifying dread that pushed him close to her.
Late that night, covered to the chin in bed, he did not sleep. His mother lay back, lips slack, her angular face softened as if against her will, her close-set eyes, so unlike his own, drawn to the center of her face in a frown that seemed the very opposite of sleep, more accurately preoccupation.
And shoving back the covers (his father never slept with them; he was always in his own apartments), Tonio slipped to the cold floor, barefoot.
There were street singers out in the night, he was certain of it. And wrenching open the wooden shutters, he listened, head cocked, until he picked up the faint strains of the distant tenor. There came a basso underneath, the raw dissonance of strings, and round and round the melody rising higher, wider.
The night was misted, without forms or shapes save for the aureole of a single resin torch below that lent its heavy smell to the salt from the sea. And as he listened, his head against the damp wall, knees drawn up in a loose clasp, he was still in the choir loft of San Marco. Alessandro’s voice eluded him now, but he felt the sensation, the dreamy sweep of the music.
He parted his lips, sang a few high notes in time with those distant singers in the street, and felt again Alessandro’s hand on his shoulder.
What was nagging at him suddenly? What came like a gnat to the eye? His mind, ever so sharp and unclouded as yet by written language, felt again the palm of that hand resting so gently at his neck, saw the billowing sleeve rising and rising to the shoulder above it. All the other tall men he had ever known had to bend to caress a boy as little as Tonio. And he remembered that even in the choir loft, in the midst of that singing, he had been startled to feel that hand rest so easily on him.
It seemed monstrous, magical, the arm that scooped him up, the hand that had caught the bones of his chest as if he were a toy and brought him higher into the music.
But the song was tugging at him, pulling him out of these thoughts as melody always pulled him, making him feel desperate for the harpsichord that his mother played, or her tambourine, or only the mingled sound of their voices. Anything to make it go on. And suddenly, shivering on the sill, he was sleeping.
He was seven years old before he learned that Alessandro and all the tall singers of San Marco were eunuchs.
3
AND BY THE TIME he was nine years old he knew just what had been cut away from these spidery beings and what had been left them, and that it was an accident of the knife, their height and their long limbs, for after that terrible cutting their bones didn’t harden like those of men who could father children.
But it was a commonplace mystery. They sang in all the churches of Venice. They taught music when they were old. Tonio’s tutor, Beppo, was a eunuch.
And in the opera, which Tonio was much too young to see, they were celestial wonders. Nicolino, Carestini, Senesino, the servants sighed as they said the names the next day, and even once Tonio’s mother had been