from the glare of several lights. And then he saw a row of beds and an enormous crucifix hanging on the wall. There were cabinets by each bed. The floor was bare. And the smell of sickness hung over this long room, occupied as it was by two boys at one end, both of whom appeared to be asleep.
And there in the bed to the far left lay another figure, large and heavy under the coverlet, the face perfectly motionless as if in death.
Tonio could not move. The Maestro di Cappella gave him a sharp blow between the shoulders. Still he didn’t move, not until he was dragged forward and made to stand over the foot of the bed.
It was Guido.
His hair was slicked away from his face as if very wet and the face itself was, even in this dim light, not the color of a living man’s.
Tonio opened his mouth to speak, but then he pressed his lips together, and he found himself trembling with the lightest feeling in his head. It grew lighter and lighter. It was as if he were losing all of his bodily weight and would suddenly be lifted right out of this room, as if on the air. He tried to speak again. He could feel his mouth opening, he could feel it making the shape of a word. And before him the vision of this deathlike figure wavered as beyond a rain-drenched glass.
There were faces all around it, faces of those young instructors who had pushed him and pulled him through all the instruction in which he’d sought over and over to conceal himself and they were staring at him with mute accusation, and suddenly he heard a terrible moaning, an inhuman moaning that he realized was coming from himself.
“Maestro,” he murmured. Bile had come up in his mouth.
Then before his eyes some small miracle revealed itself. The figure in the bed was not dead. The eyes had movement, and there was the smallest heave of breath.
He realized that he was standing over it, and if he wanted to he could touch the Maestro’s face. No one was going to prevent it. No one was going to protect the Maestro, and again he spoke that one word.
The eyelids fell back and those immense brown eyes stared blindly up at him. And then slowly, they closed.
Then rough hands took hold of Tonio. They forced him down the length of the infirmary and into the hall. The Maestro di Cappella was cursing him.
“It was the fishermen who saw him, saw him under the moon, swimming out to the open sea, and if they had not seen him, if there had been no moon…”
The man’s eyes glittered, his heavy jaw trembling.
“This child I reared as if he were my own, with a voice like the angels he could sing, and twice now from the very maw of death I’ve taken him back. Once when he lost that voice and nothing could give it back to him, and now again, on your account!”
He forced Tonio against the door to the cloister, and held him there, peering through the dark as if he must see Tonio’s face.
“Do you think I don’t know what was done to you! Do you think I have not seen it again and again?
“But, oh, it is high tragedy that it was done to you, a Venetian prince! Rich, handsome, on the verge of manhood with all of life before you as if it were but a series of amusements you could pluck if you wanted like fruit from the very trees!
“Oh, tragedy, tragedy!” He spit the words. “And what was it for him? And for all of those others here? Were they but ordinary monsters, severed in childhood, from that which was not worth having to begin with? Is that how it goes?
“And what were you, what was it you stood to become? A strutting peacock on the Broglio of that vain and imperious city which is rotten to its very core? A government of wigs and robes parading back and forth before its own mirrors, drunk on its own reflection, while beyond its tiny orbit the world…yes, the world…sighs and heaves and passes by.
“Well, what would you think, my proud elegant young prince, if I told you I care not one whit for your lost kingdom, for your blind and bloated nobility, for your saturnine men and painted whores. I have lain between those thighs, I have drunk my fill at