boy had turned to him. He felt those relentless and greedy eyes moving over him.
“Why do you stare at me!” he demanded suddenly, and before he could stop himself his hand had closed on the loose cloth at Tonio’s shoulder.
He could feel the boy’s astonishment. The moon revealed his crumpling expression, his mouth slack and then silently, stupidly working.
The hard, bright angles of his young face dissolved in helplessness, in total remorse. And it seemed he would stammer some negation if he could; he started, stopped, and left off, his head shaking.
And Guido too was helpless. He reached out again as if he would touch the boy, but his hand hung in the air, and he watched in awful fear as the boy seemed all over to weaken.
The boy had looked down. He had lifted his hands and he was staring into the open palms of one and then the other. He reached out as if trying to capture something in the open air, or merely to look at his own arms. Yes, he was looking at his own arms, and suddenly there was a rattle in his throat, a groan, half strangled.
Turning to Guido he drew his breath in gasps as if he were a dumb beast that could not speak, his eyes growing wider and wider and more desperate.
And suddenly Guido understood everything.
Yet the boy still gasped, still held up his hands, staring at them, slapping them suddenly to his chest, and that half-strangled groan became a guttural cry growing louder and louder.
Guido reached out, took him in his arms, and held his stiff form with all his strength until he felt it suddenly go limp and silent against him.
The boy who lay so still against his shoulder before being led off silently to bed had uttered one word in Guido’s ear. It was “monster.”
3
IT WAS THE FIRST DAY of May when they entered Naples, and even the long drive through the green wheat fields did not prepare them for the spectacle of the great sprawling city itself, drenched in sunlight and cascading downhill in a blaze of pastel walls and burgeoning roof gardens to hold the panorama of the clear blue bay in its embrace, the harbor crowded with white sails, Vesuvius sending up its plume of smoke into the cloudless sky above it.
As the carriage rocked and struggled along, the tireless swarm that was the city’s population surrounded it, as if brought to life by the warmth that hung fragrant in the air, carriages whipping to and fro, donkeys blocking the path, vendors crying out their wares, or coming right to the windows to offer ices, snow water, fresh melon.
The driver cracked the whip, the horses straining uphill, and with each turn of the crooked street another vista of land and sea opened magically before them.
This was Eden. Guido had suddenly not the slightest doubt of it, and he was unprepared for the sense of well-being that flooded him.
One could not look on this place with its profusion of leaf and flower, this jagged shore, and that ominous mountain, and not feel joy to the marrow of one’s being.
He could see the excitement of the little boys, especially Paolo, the younger one, who leapt right into Tonio’s lap, thrusting his shoulders out of the window. But Tonio had also completely forgotten himself. He was straining for a view of Vesuvius at every angle.
“But it’s breathing smoke,” he whispered.
“It’s breathing smoke!” echoed Paolo.
“Yes,” Guido answered. “It has been doing that off and on for a long time. And don’t pay it so much attention. We never know when it will decide to really show off.”
Tonio’s lips moved as if saying some private prayer.
As the horses clopped into the stable yard, Tonio was the first to jump down, with Paolo in his arms. And letting the boy go, he followed him immediately into the courtyard. His eyes moved up the four walls that enclosed it, rising as they did over a four-cornered cloister of Roman arches, the whole covered almost entirely with an unruly fluttering green vine. It was alive with small white trumpet-shaped blossoms and the song of thousands of bees.
The din of instruments streamed out of the open doors. Tiny faces appeared at the glass. And the fountain, its worn cherubs stained by time as they clung to their open cornucopia, let loose a generous and muting spray that caught the sun.
Immediately, Maestro Cavalla came out of his office doors and embraced Guido.