quietly.
“What?” The Maestro stopped.
“I do not intend to study singing,” Tonio said.
“What?”
“If you will look at those papers again you will see that I intend to study music, but nowhere does it say that I must study singing….” Tonio’s face had hardened again, though his voice was quavering.
“Maestro, allow me to talk to this boy…” Guido started.
“Nor do I intend to wear any costume,” Tonio continued, “that advertises that I am a…a castrato.”
“What is the meaning of this!” The Maestro rose, his knuckles white as he pressed them to the desk.
“I shall study music…keyboard, string, composition, whatever you put me to study, but I will not study singing!” Tonio said. “I will not now, nor will I ever sing! And I will not be costumed like a capon.”
“This is madness!” The Maestro turned on Guido. “Is there no one from that marshland in the north who is not out of his senses! Why in the name of God did you consent to have yourself castrated! Get the physician!” he said to Guido.
“Maestro, the boy’s been cut, please allow me to reason with him.”
“Reason with him!” The Maestro glared at Tonio. “You are under my care and my authority,” he said, and reaching out for the neatly folded black uniform that lay on the desk beside him, he thrust it at Tonio. “And you will put on the official dress of a castrato.”
“I will never. I will obey in all else, but I will not sing and I will never wear that costume.”
“Maestro, dismiss him, please,” Guido said.
As soon as Tonio had left, the Maestro slumped back in his chair.
“What is happening here?” he demanded. “I have two hundred students under this roof, I do not intend to—”
“Maestro, let the boy enroll in the general program, and allow me please to reason with him.”
The Maestro said nothing for a while. Then when his temper had cooled, he asked, “You have heard this boy sing?”
“Yes,” Guido answered. “More than once.”
“And what sort of voice is it?”
Guido was considering. “When you are alone, and you are reading a new score, and you shut your eyes for a moment to hear it sung perfectly…it is that voice which you hear in your head.”
The Maestro absorbed this. Then he nodded. “All right, reason with him. And if that fails, I shall not be ordered around by a Venetian patrician.”
4
THIS WAS A NIGHTMARE, yet it was impossible to wake up or get out. It went on and on, and every time he opened his eyes he was still there.
Two hours before dawn, the first bell sounded. He sat upright as if jerked by a chain, sweating, staring out into the black sky with its wealth of stars drifting slowly down into the sea, and for a moment—for a moment—there was that ineffable beauty like a hand laid on his head.
It was not possible that this was happening to him, that he was in this low-ceilinged room five hundred miles from Venice, that this had been done to him.
He rose, washed his face, staggering into the corridor, and with the other thirty castrati filing out of the dormitory descended the stone stairway.
Two hundred pupils moved like termites through these corridors, somewhere a little child was crying—little whimpering, despairing cries—and all found without a word their place at harpsichords, cellos, study tables.
The house came alive with shrill sounds, each fragment of melody caught up in the general dissonance. Doors slammed. He struggled to listen to the Maestro, his vision blurred, the man’s words ripping fast through concepts he could barely grasp, the other students dipping their pens; he plunged into the exercise on the barest faith that it might yield itself to him as he scribbled.
And seated finally at the keyboard, he played until his back ached, the day’s pressures and miseries alleviated for these few sweet hours when he was doing what he knew how to do, and had always known how to do, and just for this little while he was on a par with those boys his age who, if they had not been here since early childhood, had been admitted late only on account of their immense skill and talent.
“You do not even know how to hold a violin? You have never played a violin?” He struggled to draw the bow across the strings without that dissonant screech. His shoulders ached so badly, he hunched forward from time to time, no matter how sharp the tongues that ate at him, the switch coming down