bold and so relentless that it commenced to irritate him. One evening when he could endure it no longer, he put down his spoon and looked back at Tonio.
Tonio’s stare was so hostile and so constant that for a moment Guido thought, This boy has been driven to madness. Then he realized that Tonio was so intent on looking at him that he did not even realize Guido was returning the look. It was as if Guido were inanimate. When Tonio’s eyes did shift, they did so in their own time, only to fix on Guido’s throat. Or was it the white linen tie there? Guido had no idea. Now Tonio was staring directly at his hands, and then again right into his eyes as if Guido were a painting.
And the disregard of Guido was so total, so blatant, that Guido felt his temper rising. Guido had, in fact, a terrible temper, the worst in the conservatorio, as any of his students could have testified. And now for the first time it was loosening itself against this boy, and it collected to itself a thousand small resentments.
After all, he had been doing the bidding of this child as if he were nothing more than Tonio’s lackey.
His inveterate hatred of any and all aristocracy began to surface, and he realized suddenly that he was confusing everything.
And that Tonio had laid down his napkin and risen from the table.
They were on this night, as they had been all along, provided with the most lavish accommodations the town had to offer—in this case, a wealthy monastery which let large and exquisitely furnished chambers to gentlemen who could afford them.
And Tonio had left their private dining room where the boys still scraped their plates, and had gone out into a narrow, high-walled garden.
For a long time, Guido sat thinking. He was thinking still as he led the boys to bed, and saw them under the covers.
But stepping out into the night, he still did not understand his own anger. He only knew that he resented this boy, resented his disregarding gaze, his eternal silence. He attempted to remind himself of the boy’s inevitable pain, his inevitable anguish. But he could not think of this. All along he had prevented himself from thinking of it, because it was simply too terrible to think about in the first place.
And every time his mind had forced him to ask what is happening to this boy now, what does he think, what does he feel, some stubborn little voice in Guido said, Ah, but you have always been a eunuch, you can never know, and all of this with the mock tone of superiority.
Whatever the reason, he felt rage when he stepped into the garden, and saw in the moonlight an immense reclining statue over a shell-shaped pool, and the slender, very straight figure of Tonio Treschi standing before it.
Rome is full of such statues, statues that are three or four times the size of a normal man. It seems they grow in every nook and cranny of the town, against walls, over gates, presiding over an infinite variety of fountains. And though one would think nothing of them in a church or great palazzo, they can sometimes be violently disturbing in a small place, when one comes on them suddenly.
Because at such a moment, one can be overcome with a sense of the grotesque. These statues are giants in these narrow circumstances, and yet they are so lifelike that it seems they might commence suddenly to breathe and then reach out with their immense hands to crush those around them.
The details of the statues impress themselves. One sees the white muscles moving under the marble, the veins on the backs of hands, the indentation on the toenail. But the whole is horrible to look at.
And Guido felt this jarring sensation when he stepped out of the cloister and into this narrow space behind Tonio.
A god reclined against the wall, its enormous bearded face hung forward. And through its fingers, open to the sky, water ran, trickling down to the moonlit surface of the pool beneath it.
Tonio Treschi was staring at its naked chest and at the broad hips that melted into a loose drapery exposing a powerfully muscled leg upon which the giant’s full weight rested.
Guido looked away from this monstrous god; he saw the moonlight shattered in the surface of the rippling water. And then he saw out of the corner of his eye that the