sloped, her eyes just two places that didn’t exist in all the whiteness of her face as she looked at him.
He sat upright. He disentangled himself from her gently. I’ve had her, he was thinking, loved her, had her, known her. And yet it gave no savor, no wondrous thrill, and he clung to her for a moment, smelling her hair, and kissing the hard roundness of her little forehead. And the voices drew nearer and nearer. They were his singers! And they were on their way home, most likely, and if he could just overtake them…He pushed his shirt into his breeches, tied back his hair.
“Excellency, don’t go,” she begged.
“Dearest,” he said, putting gold coins in her hands and closing her fingers on top of them. “Tomorrow night, right after dark, wait for me.” He slipped her skirt over her head, pulled on her soft rumpled blouse, and laced up her vest tightly, feeling with the last bit of pleasure the way that it hugged her and bound her.
The singers were almost to the canal, and it was Ernestino—how many times had he heard that name spoken under the window? And the basso, it was Pietro, the one with the light basso that had no thickness to it, a pure sound for all its depth, and the fiddler tonight was Felix.
As the boat shot away from him under the nearby bridge and vanished into the dark, he wished just for a moment he were very drunk, that he had had the presence of mind to buy a jug of wine at the piazza. He crept along the wall towards the calle, the stones so slick he might easily have fallen down into the water.
What do they look like? He had seen so little of them in the dark. Would they know him?
And in the light of an open door, he caught sight of the little band immediately. The big, heavyset one, bearded, coarsely dressed, that was Ernestino, and he was serenading a thick-armed woman who slouched on the step laughing softly at him. And the violinist pranced back and forth, his bow working furiously. The music was shrill and sweet.
And then Tonio raised his voice, an octave higher than Ernestino as he sang the same phrases right in time with him. Ernestino’s voice swelled; Tonio could see the change in his expression.
“Ah, it’s not possible!” he shouted. “It’s my seraph, it’s my prince from the Palazzo Treschi.”
And when he opened his arms, catching Tonio up, swinging him off his feet and around before setting him down again, “But, Excellency, what are you doing here?”
“I want to sing with you,” Tonio said. He took the jug of wine offered him. It spilled down his chin as he filled his mouth. “Wherever you’re going, I want to sing with you.”
He threw back his head. The rain was hitting his eyelids, and he sang an infinite ascension of notes, a pure and magnificent coloratura. He heard it echoed by the walls; it seemed to rise to the very margin of sky above, and in the narrow darkness lights flickered describing the shapes of small windows. Ernestino’s deeper voice rose under his, buoying it, dropping back to let Tonio soar, and waiting again for the closing phrase in rapturous harmony.
A voice called out a sharp “Bravo,” and there came soft explosions of compliments from the walls themselves, it seemed, dying as suddenly as they were uttered. And when the coins hit the wet stones, Felix scrambled to gather them.
* * *
Until dawn they wandered singing along the windy quais where they could find it; they went arm in arm through the spiderweb of calli. Sometimes the walls hugged them so tight they had to go one by one, but their voices became preternatural. Tonio knew all their favorite songs; he taught them others. Again and again he took the jug and when it was empty bought another.
Buttery windows broke open above them everywhere they went, and now and then they lingered to serenade some dim figure. Behind the big palazzi they roamed, drawing the richly dressed men and women away from their late-night gambling and supper tables. The blood pounded in Tonio’s head; his feet were reckless, slipping on the slick stones, but it seemed his voice had never known such unbridled power. Ernestino and Pietro were mad for him, and whenever he flagged, they taunted him into greater feats, giving their own applause for the piercing high notes, the long tender swelling