If he could only for one minute fall into the music, feel it uplift him, but this is not part of the nightmare; in this nightmare music is noise, music is penance, music has become two hammers at the temples. He felt the sharp cut of the switch across the back of his hand and stared at the welt, the feeling reverberating throughout his body, the welt seeming to have a life of its own as it rose.
Then the breakfast table. Bowls of steaming hot food that nauseated him. All had turned to sand on his tongue as if the slightest pleasure must be denied him. He refused to sit with the other castrati; he asked politely, softly, for another place.
“You will sit there.” He stepped back in the face of the advancing figure, the fist nudging his shoulder, the peremptory “You will sit there.”
He felt his face burning, burning. It was impossible for flesh to contain this fire. All the eyes of this silent room dusting him gently—“the Venetian prince,” he understood that much of their Neapolitan dialect—everyone knowing exactly what had been done to him, that he was one of them, these bowed heads, these mutilated bodies, these things that were not and would never be men.
“Put on the red sash!”
“I will not!”
This is not happening. None of it is happening. He wanted to rise suddenly and go out-of-doors, into the garden, but even that simple freedom of motion was forbidden here, silence locking each boy to the bench in his proper place, though beside him there came that contemptuous whisper, “Why don’t you take the sash and wad it into your breeches, Signore, then no one will know!” He turned suddenly. Who had spoken those words? Those mocking and devious smiles gave way suddenly to blank faces.
Guido Maeffeo’s door opened. He stepped inside. Blessed silence, if even for two hours he had to stare at that cold unfeeling face, those vicious eyes! The gelded master of the gelded. And worst of all, he knew, he knew exactly what had been done, that this is nightmare. He knows behind that insensible mask of anger.
“Why do you stare at me?”
Why do you think I stare at you, I stare at you because I am a monster and you are a monster and I want to see what it is I will become!
Why didn’t he strike Tonio? What was he waiting for? What lay behind that fixed expression of cruelty, all about the man being so much a mixture of fascination and allure, why is it that I cannot stop looking at him, though I cannot endure looking at him? Once when he was a child, Tonio’s mother had slapped him over and over again, stop crying, stop crying, what in God’s name do you want of me, stop! Looking at Guido Maffeo, he thought, I understand this for the first time. I cannot endure your questioning of me, leave me alone!
In this room for now, please, God, leave me alone.
“Sit quietly then. Watch. And listen.”
He brings this white-faced eunuch monster into the room. I do not even want to hear this, this is torture. And he commences with his instructions, he is no fool, this one, he is better perhaps than all the rest put together, but he will never, never teach me.
And at eight o’clock when the last bell sounded, going up the stairs so tired he could scarce lift one foot in front of the other, he fell down, down, down, into the nightmares within the nightmare. Please, just this one night, let me not dream. I am so tired. I cannot do battle in my own sleep, I will go mad.
There is someone outside the door again. He rose on his elbow. Then snatched it open so that the boy, surprised, could not get away. And there are two of them. They press forward as if they would come into this room. “Get away from me,” he snarled.
“We only want to see the Venetian prince who is too good to wear the red sash.”
Laughter, laughter, laughter.
“I am warning you, back away.”
“Oh, come now, you are not very friendly, it is not very gracious of you to let us stand at the door….”
“I am warning you….”
“Oooh? And how is that?”
Both of them were staring at the stiletto. The taller one, already monstrous with those thin dangling arms, laughed nervously. “Does the Maestro know you have that?”