It seemed another age, and what was said was unimportant.
He looked at the Maestro’s large hands, the hair on the backs of his fingers. He looked at the broad black leather belt encircling his cassock. And he envisioned beneath it, effortlessly, the man’s unmutilated anatomy. And then looking up slowly, he saw the shadow of the Maestro’s shaven beard darkening face and throat.
But the Maestro’s eyes, confronted at last, surprised him.
They were soft and wide with awe and anticipation. And Guido was looking at Tonio with the same expression. They were both of them locked to him, waiting.
He let out his breath and started to sing. And this time he heard his own voice perfectly.
He let the notes rise, following them in his mind without the slightest effort to modulate them. The simpler, lustier parts of the song came. His voice took wing. And at some indefinable moment, the joy in all its purity was returned to him.
He could have wept then.
Had there been tears to shed, he would have wept, and it did not matter to him that he was not alone, that they would have seen.
His voice was his again.
The song was finished.
He looked out through the cloister at the light flickering in the leaves and felt a great delicious weariness overcoming him. The afternoon was warm. And in the far distance it seemed he heard the soft cacophony of children at play.
But a shadow rose before him. And turning almost reluctantly, he looked into Maestro Guido’s face.
Then Guido put his arms around him, and slowly, tentatively, Tonio gave himself over to that embrace.
Yet it seemed he was remembering some other moment, some other time when he had held someone in his arms, and there had been this same sweet, violent, and concealed emotion. But whatever it was—whenever it was—it was gone. He could not now recall it.
Maestro Cavalla stepped forward.
He said, “Your voice is magnificent.”
PART IV
1
EVEN AS TONIO unpacked his trunk that first afternoon at the conservatorio (and his family had indeed sent him everything that belonged to him), filling the red and gilt cabinet with a few favorite clothes and arranging his books on the shelves of his room, he was aware that the transformation he had undergone on Vesuvius had yet to be really tested.
This was one reason he wouldn’t give up this little room though the Maestro di Cappella had immediately told him he might have an unused apartment on the first floor should he want it. He wanted to see Vesuvius from his window. He wanted to lie in bed at night and see the fire of the mountain against the moonlit sky. He wanted to remember always that on that mountain he had learned what it meant to be completely alone.
Because as the future commenced to make known to him the true meaning of his new life, he needed his resolves to stand by him. There would be moments of acute pain. And he had some inkling, no matter how resigned he felt now, and no matter how appalling had been the pain of the last month, that the worst was yet to come.
And he was right about that.
The little moments of pain came immediately.
They came in the warm sunlight of the afternoon as he lifted from his trunks those brocade and velvet coats he’d once worn to suppers and balls in Venice, as he held up the fur-lined cloak he’d once wrapped around himself in the drafty pit of the theater as he sat gazing up into the face of the singer Caffarelli.
It was pain, too, that he felt when that night at the evening meal, he took his place among the other castrati, ignoring the shock on their hostile faces.
But all this he bore with the most serene expression. He nodded to his fellow students. He flashed a disarming smile at those who had ridiculed him. He reached out to touch the hair of that little one, Paolo, who had ridden with him from Florence and often approached him in the days afterwards.
And it was with the same apparent calm that he gave up his purse to the Maestro di Cappella.
And again he smiled graciously when told to give up his sword and stiletto. But trembling inside, he refused with a little shake of the head as though he didn’t understand Italian. The pistols, of course, he would give them up. But his sword? No, he smiled. He could not do that.