And yet Andrea had led him to believe that he was, setting Tonio against Carlo, to fight Andrea’s battle after Andrea’s death. That was a terrible, terrible betrayal.
Yet even now, Tonio knew what Andrea would say on his own behalf. Save for Andrea, what would Tonio have been? The first of a wretched brood of bastards, children of a disgraced nobleman and a ruined convent girl? What would Tonio’s life have been? Andrea had chastised a rebellious offspring who deserved nothing, saved the honor of his family, and made Tonio his son.
But even the will of Andrea could not work miracles. At his death, the illusions and laws he had created in his own house had crumbled. And he had never made Tonio understand what lay before him. He had sent Tonio to fight the battle sustained only by lies and half-truths.
Was it a miscalculation of pride finally? Tonio would never know.
All he knew and understood now was that he was not Andrea’s son, and the man who had given him a history and a destiny was gone from him, his wisdom and his intentions forever beyond Tonio’s reach.
Yes, he had lost Andrea.
And what of the Treschi remained? Carlo, Carlo who had done this to him, Carlo who had not the courage to kill him, but the cunning to know that for the House of Treschi Tonio could never point the finger of blame.
Clever, cowardly, but very clever. This spoilt and rebellious man who, for the love of a woman, had once threatened to doom his family to extinction, would now rebuild it on the cruelty and violence done to his blameless son.
So the Treschi were gone from him: Andrea, Carlo.
And yet the blood of the Treschi ran in his veins. There persisted in him a love for Treschi who had gone before these two men, father and grandfather, a love of Treschi who would come after, children who must inherit the traditions and the strength of a family in a world that would remember little or nothing of Tonio, Carlo, Andrea, this appalling tangle of injustice and suffering.
All right, that was hard.
But what comes now is the hardest.
What lay before Tonio? What emerged from this chaos? What had become of Tonio Treschi, who sat now on a veranda in the southern city of Naples, alone, staring out under the shadow of Vesuvius on the ever-changing surface of the sea?
Tonio Treschi was a eunuch.
Tonio Treschi was that half man, that less than man that arouses the contempt of every whole man who looks upon it. Tonio Treschi was that thing which women cannot leave alone and men find infinitely disturbing, frightening, pathetic, the butt of jokes and endless bullying, the necessary evil of the church choirs and the opera stage which is, outside that artifice and grace and soaring music, very simply monstrous.
All his life he’d heard the whispers behind the eunuch’s back, seen the sneers, the lift of eyebrows, the mock foppish gestures! All too perfectly he’d understood the rage of that proud singer Caffarelli at the footlights glaring at the Venetians who had paid to see him like the court ape perform vocal acrobatics.
And already within the confines of the conservatorio to which he’d clung like a shipwrecked prisoner to the remnants of his prison boat in alien water, he had seen the self-loathing of these neutered children, taunting him to share their degraded state. Slipping into his room at night with barbs of uncommon cruelty, “You are the same as we are!” they all but hissed at him in the dark.
Yes, he was the same as they were. And how the world took cognizance of it! Matrimony was forever denied him, his name no longer his to give to the lowliest woman nor the most needy stepchild. Nor would the Church ever receive him, save for the lowest Orders, and even then only by special dispensation.
No, he was outcast, from family, from church, from any great institution in this world that was his world, save one:
That was the conservatorio. And the world of music for which the conservatorio would prepare him.
Neither of which had the slightest actual connection with what had been done to him by his brother’s men.
But were it not for that conservatorio, and were it not for that music, then this thing truly would be worse than death.
As it was, it was not worse.
When he had lain in that bed in Flovigo, and that bravo, Alonso, had put a pistol to his head, saying: