the conservatorio, if you continue like this! Lorenzo might have died from the wound you gave him!”
“Leave me alone.”
“Oh, so that brings tears to your eyes, does it? Say it again, I want to hear it.”
“Leave me alone!”
“I will not leave you alone, I will never leave you alone, not until you sing! Do you think I don’t understand what it is that prevents you? Do you think I don’t know what has happened to you! Good God, are you mad not to realize I risked my life to bring you here when it would have been better for me if I had gotten clear of you and your tormentors? Yet I took you out of the Veneto, I brought you here, where the emissaries of your government could have sent their bravos to tear me limb from limb out there in the street if they chose.”
“And why did you do it? Did I ask you to do it! What do you want of me, what have you always wanted of me!”
Guido struck him. Before he could stop himself, he had slapped him so forcefully that Tonio staggered backwards, reaching for his head as if he could not see. Guido struck him again. And then with both hands he grabbed hold of him and swung his head against the wall.
Tonio let out a short, guttural gasp. And again Guido’s hand caught him, twisting his head around on his neck.
Guido drew back away from him, his right hand clutching at his left wrist as if he meant to prevent himself from striking Tonio again. He stood with his back to Tonio, leaning over slightly as if trying to close into himself.
Loathing himself, in silence, Tonio could not prevent the tears from flowing, and finally with a slow resignation he withdrew his handkerchief and wiped them roughly away.
“All right, then,” came Guido’s voice, barely audible over his shoulder. “Sit there. Again. And watch.”
The afternoon sun was hot on the stone floor, and on the wall, and moving the bench to where he might rest in the sun, Tonio sat back and shut his eyes.
The first pupil was little Paolo, whose strong voice filled the room like a bright golden bell. He ran up and down the arpeggios with ease, and swelling the notes he infected them with what seemed to be almost joy.
Tonio opened his eyes to see the back of the boy’s brown head. He was drifting into sleep as he listened, and he felt some vague surprise at Guido’s admonitions, and the keen grasp of what the boy had done wrong. Or was it wrong? Guido was saying, I can hear your breath, I can see it, now go through it again more slowly, but do not let out your breath and this time…this time…this time…the little voice rose and fell, those long poignant notes….
And when Tonio awoke again, it was another child, older, this was the castrato voice, wasn’t it, just a shade richer or perhaps harder than that of a boy. Guido was angry. He banged the window shut. The boy was actually gone, and Tonio was rubbing his eyes. Had the air become cool? The sun was gone, but it was so caressingly warm in this place, and all along the sill of this deep first-story window there fluttered the white flowers of that never-ending vine.
He stood up, his back suddenly shot with pain. What was Guido doing at the window? He could not even see Guido’s head, only the hunch of his shoulders, and some vague movement in the garden beyond, children running, crying out.
Then Guido rose up and it seemed a great sigh rose with him as if it came from all of his heavy limbs, his massive shoulders, his shaggy head.
He turned to Tonio, his face dark against the brightness framed by the arch of the cloister where the sun still lingered at a different angle on the orange trees.
“If you do not change,” he began, “the Maestro di Cappella will dismiss you within one week.” The voice was so low and so raw that Tonio could not have said that it was Guido’s voice, even as it went on. “I cannot prevent it. I have done everything that I can do.”
Tonio stared in vague astonishment. He saw those voluble features that had so often seemed the perfect expression of anger softened into some terrible defeat that he could not understand. He wanted to ask, But why does it matter to you, why must