and it seemed for one solid hour he sat still watching this boy who never once altered his expression. Nothing changed. Nothing happened. And then finally the boy’s weakness and sickness overcame him, and he slid down against the mattress.
He could not resist when Guido brought the cover up over him. Nor did it seem he could protest when Guido lifted his head and told him to drink the wine given him.
When he lay back down, his eyes were like two pieces of glass, and they moved only a little now and then over the ceiling as Guido talked to him.
Guido took his time. It was silent in the inn, and the stars appeared only now and then, brilliant and tiny beyond the shifting shadows of the poplars. And in a low, measured voice, Guido described the man who had approached him in Venice, the men who had taken him all but forcibly to Flovigo. Then he described the papers that bore Tonio’s signature.
Without comment, he explained carefully how he himself had been implicated in the matter, and how these men had played upon this to force him to take Tonio out of the Venetian State. And lastly he described to Tonio the carriage which was his, and the purse, and that if Tonio so wished, Guido would take him to the Conservatorio San Angelo.
This was Tonio’s choice, he explained. But then he paused, and finally in a half murmur confided the bravo’s admission that Tonio would receive no further support if he did not go to the conservatorio and stay there.
“Nevertheless you are free to go with me or do as you wish,” Guido said. The purse was heavy.
At this the boy turned his head and shut his eyes, and the gesture seemed such an eloquent plea for silence that Guido said nothing after that.
He stood against the wall, his arms folded, until he heard the boy’s breath become even.
All madness had drained from the face; it lay softened and white against the pillow. The mouth was again a boy’s mouth, perfectly molded and yet supple. But it was the faint light playing on the exquisite bones of the face that revealed its greatest beauty.
The light touched the line of the jaw, the high cheekbones, the smooth plane of the forehead.
Guido drew closer. And for a long time he looked at the boy’s lean limbs, released in sleep, and the one hand that lay half closed on top of the cover.
The forehead was warm now. The boy did not even stir when he touched it.
And slipping out the door, Guido went down into the open field beneath the window.
The moon was covered with clouds. The town itself showed no lights to the sky from this vantage point.
And walking through high damp grass, Guido soon found a dry spot where he sank down to lie on his back and pick out those few stars that were now and again visible.
A terrible despair was creeping over Guido.
It was coming like the cold of winter, and he knew it from the past by the shivering that always accompanied it, and the peculiar taste in his mouth that was like sickness.
Only he was not sick. He was whole, and empty, and all of his life was simply meaningless. It had never been more than a mesh of absurd accidents, and there was in it nothing noble and nothing good and nothing that gave comfort.
It mattered not one whit that men from the Venetian State might kill him. It seemed to have no more meaning than anything else that had ever happened to Guido. And without wanting it, he felt himself drawn back to that room in Naples where long ago he had tried to end his life by opening his veins as he drank himself into unconsciousness.
He could remember everything about that room. The painted walls, the border of flowers along the ceiling. And he could remember an obsession in his last moments with the sea, and how pleasantly he had imagined it.
His eyes grew moist. He felt the tears on the side of his face, and above the heavens seemed milky and full of an unwelcome white light that he would have covered over with blessed darkness.
He was hearing now, without even wanting it either, Tonio Treschi’s voice rising out of the tangled Venetian alleyways, and he felt a mingling of two places: that room in Naples where he had been so unspeakably happy when he’d thought he would die, and Venice