student here,” snapped the Maestro. “You do not carouse at will in the local taverns. And need I remind you that Lorenzo, the student you wounded, is still bedridden? I want no more quarrels. I want your sword and your stiletto.”
Again that gracious smile. Tonio was sorry for what had happened with Lorenzo. But Lorenzo had entered his room. He had been forced to protect himself. He could not give up his sword. And he didn’t volunteer the smaller and more useful stiletto either.
And no one could have perceived how astonished he was when the Maestro di Cappella gave in to him.
It wasn’t until he was safe in the privacy of his attic room that he started to laugh over this. He’d expected the injunction “Behave as if you were a man” to be his armor against humiliation. But he had not expected it to work upon others! He was just beginning to understand that what he had brought down from Vesuvius was a mode of behavior. No matter how he felt, he would behave as if he did not feel it, and everything would be better.
Of course, he deeply regretted the injury done Lorenzo. It was not that the boy hadn’t deserved it; it was that he might cause trouble later.
And Tonio was still thinking about this when, an hour after dark, he heard the older castrati in the passage outside, those boys who were responsible for seeing there was order in the dormitory, those who had in the past accompanied Lorenzo into Tonio’s room to harass him.
Now he was ready for them. He invited them in, and offering a bottle of excellent wine which he’d brought from the albergo by the sea, he apologized for the lack of cups or goblets. He’d rectify that soon enough. Would they join him for a little drink? He gestured for them to be seated along the side of the bed, and he took the chair from the desk, offering them the bottle again. And then again, because he saw they had enjoyed it.
Actually, they couldn’t resist it.
And all was done by Tonio with such quiet assurance that they weren’t sure they should refuse it.
Tonio was studying them for the first time, and while he did so, he commenced talking. In a low voice he spoke just enough of the weather in Naples and of a few peculiarities of the place that the silence didn’t weigh on them.
Yet he was not giving an impression of being talkative because in truth he wasn’t really talkative.
And he was trying to size them up, to determine who, if any, among them owed any loyalty to Lorenzo, who was still in bed because the wound had become infected.
The tallest was Giovanni, from the north of Italy, about eighteen years of age and possessed of a tolerable voice which Tonio had heard in Guido’s study. This one would never perform in the opera; but he was good as a young maestro with the younger boys, and many a church choir would later want him. His limp black hair he wore severely shaped like a pigtail wig with only a string of black silk ribbon. His eyes were soft, uninteresting, perhaps cowardly.
He seemed perfectly willing to accept Tonio.
Then there was Piero, that blond-haired one from the north of Italy, too, who had hissed so many epithets at Tonio, only to turn his head afterwards as if he hadn’t spoken. He had a better voice, a contralto that might even be great someday, but from what Tonio had heard of him in church he lacked something. Maybe it was passion, maybe it was imagination. He drank the wine now with a slight sneer, and his eyes were cold and suspicious. Yet when Tonio addressed him he seemed to melt immediately. When Tonio asked him questions, he preened with the answers. So what he wanted was attention.
By the end of this short visit he was attempting to woo Tonio and make an impression upon him, as if Tonio were the elder, which he wasn’t, as though Tonio were his superior.
And lastly, there was the sixteen-year-old Domenico. He was so exquisitely beautiful that he might have passed for either a man or a woman. His chest having expanded from the use of his lungs in singing and the flexibility of his eunuch bones, he had in fact the shape of a woman, with a narrow waist and a flare above it that suggested a bosom. But this was so subtle it