by Anne Rice
Domenico's stage name would be Cellino, and someone had cried out, "Bravo, Cellino."
Suddenly Tonio had left his spot at the windowsill and run all the way down the four flights of stairs without stopping. He pushed through the knot of boys at the door. The cold air shocked him for an instant, but he caught the carriage just as it was starting. The coachman held the whip.
And Domenico's face appeared at the window, brightening so innocently that Tonio felt his throat tightening.
"You'll be a wonder in Rome," he said. "Everybody's sure of it. You've got nothing to fear from anyone."
And there was such a wistful, innocent smile then on Domenico's face that Tonio felt the tears rise. He stood on the cobblestones staring after the lumbering carriage, and then the cold commenced to close on him.
*
Now he sat very still on the bench in Guido's room and he knew he could not do any more tonight. He must sleep. Or he must lie in his little room and prepare for the missing of Domenico, for not having those warm limbs nestled close to him, that pliant and fragrant flesh ready to give him whatever he wanted, when in truth he didn't care if he ever set eyes on Domenico again.
He swallowed and made a little wish with a silent smile that Guido would beat him when he refused to practice further. He wondered what he would have to do to make Guido beat him. He was now taller than Guido. He imagined himself growing and growing until his head touched the ceiling. The tallest eunuch in Christendom, he heard a voice announce, and incomparably the finest of those singers over seven feet by a great margin.
Wearily he looked up and he saw that Guido had finished his notations and that Guido had been studying him.
That eerie feeling came over him that Guido knew all about him and Domenico, even of that miserable scene in the albergo. He thought of those rooms again, all those fine wax candles. And the sea outside. And he wanted to weep.
"Maestro, let me go tonight," he said. "I can't sing any more. I'm empty."
"You're warmed up. Your high notes are perfect," Guido said softly. "And I want you to sing this for me."
His voice had an uncommon gentleness to it. He struck a sulphur match and touched its odoriferous flame to his candle. The winter night had fallen down around them suddenly.
Tonio looked up, drowsy and numb, and saw the freshly copied music.
"It's what you are to sing at Christmas," Guido said. "I've written it myself, for your voice." And then, very low, he added, "It's the first time anything of mine will be performed here."
Tonio probed the face, looking for the edge of anger. But in the soft uneven flicker of the candle, Guido was calmly waiting. And there seemed at that moment a violent contrast between this man and Domenico, and yet something united them both, some feeling that flowed from Tonio. Ah, Domenico is the sylph, he thought, and this is the satyr. And what am I? The great white Venetian spider.
His smile was bitter. And he wondered what Guido thought of it, as he saw his expression darken.
"I want to sing it," Tonio whispered. "But it's too soon. I'll fail you if I try, I'll fail myself, and all those who listen."
Guido shook his head. There was the evanescent warmth of a smile, and then he said Tonio's name softly.
"Why are you so afraid of it?" he asked.
"Can't you leave me tonight? Can't you let me go!" Tonio asked. He stood up suddenly. "I want to get out of this place, I want to be anywhere but here." He started for the door and then he turned back. "Am I allowed to go out!" he demanded.
"You went out to an albergo not so very long ago," Guido said, "without begging anyone's permission."
This caught Tonio off guard, and it took the wind out of him. He stared at Guido, in a moment of apprehension that was almost panic.
But Guido's face remained empty of judgment or anger.
He appeared to be reflecting, and then he drew himself up as if he had made a decision.
He looked to Tonio with an uncommon patience, and when he spoke, his voice was slow and almost secretive.
"Tonio, you loved this boy," he said. "Everyone knew it."
Tonio was too surprised to answer.
"Do you think I've been blind to your struggle?" Guido asked. "But Tonio, you have known so much pain. Can this be such a loss to you? Surely you can turn to your work as you've done before, and you can forget him. This wound will heal, perhaps more quickly than you realize."
"Loved him?" Tonio whispered. "Domenico?"
Guido's brows came together in a frown that was almost innocent. "Who else?" he asked.
"Maestro, I never loved him! Maestro, I felt nothing for him. And oh, if there were only the smallest wound so that I might somehow atone for it!" He stopped, staring at this man, caught up in this unguarded moment.
"This is true?" Guido asked.
"Yes, it's true," said Tonio. "But the misfortune of it was that I alone knew it. And I had to show it to him. When he is off to Rome to the most important appointment he may ever have to keep in all his life, and God knows if ever I make that same journey how I will despise anyone who sends me off as I sent him! I wounded him, Maestro. I wounded him, and senselessly, and stupidly."
He paused.
All this he was saying to Maestro Guido? He stared before him, astonished at his own weakness. He loathed himself for this, and for the loneliness that lay behind it.
But Guido's face was unreadable as he sat waiting without a sound. And all the man's small cruelties in the past came back to Tonio.
He knew that he should leave this place, enough had been said, and he could no longer trust himself.
But suddenly, without will or design he continued:
"God, if you were not the brutal and unfeeling man you are," he found himself saying. "Why do you speak of all this to me! I struggle to believe that I am yet something that can be good inside, have worth, and yet I turned my life with Domenico into something that's not fit to cast into the gutter. And over nights such as those, he shed tears and I'm the cause of it."
He glared at Guido.
"Why was it you walked into the sea?" he demanded. "What was it that drove you to do that? The loss of my voice? The voice you went to Venice to bring back with you! Well, I am flesh and blood as well as a voice!" he said. "And yet I'm neither man nor woman and it makes no difference whom I lie with, and so I turn myself into carrion."
"Was it so wrong to lie with him!" Guido whispered. "Who was hurt by it, now that you are what you are, and he is what he is? Was it so wrong you sought some affection with each other?"
"Yes, it was wrong, because I despised him! And I lay with him as if I loved him, and I did not love him. And that is wrong for me. Even in this state, there are those things that matter!"
Guido stared straight forward. And then very slowly he nodded. "Then why did you do it?" he whispered.
"Because I needed him," Tonio said. "I am an orphan in this place, and I needed him! I could not do it alone! I tried, I failed, and I am alone now, and this is worse than any pain I've ever known. I have looked it in the face a thousand times and sworn to endure it. But it's sometimes more than I can bear, and he gave me the semblance of love and let me play the man, and so I took it."
He turned his back on Guido. Oh, this was fine, wasn't it? All his resolves washed away in the breaking of this dam, and all he could think of was that just for this moment he was pouring it out to another. And there was hatred here too, hatred and loathing just as surely as he'd felt it for Domenico.
"How can I endure it?" he asked. He turned slowly. "How can you endure it, every day of your life to work in such anger and such coldness! A voice that's nothing but invectives. Good God, don't you ever want just once to love those you instruct, to feel for those who struggle so hard to follow the merciless rhythm you beat for them!"
"Do you want love from me?" Guido asked softly.
"Yes, I want love from you!" Tonio said. "I would get down on my knees to have love from you. You are my teacher! You are the one w
ho guides me and shapes me and hears my voice as no one else has ever heard it. You are the one who strives to make it better than I myself could ever make it. How can you ask me if I want you to love me? Can't this be done in love? Isn't that possible, that if you showed to me the slightest warmth, I would open to you like the flowers of spring, that I would strive for you until my past progress seemed like nothing!
"Sing this music you've written, if you loved me, I could do anything you believed I could do, if you would just give me love hand in hand with your harshest, truest judgments. Mingle the two, and give that to me, and I could get through this darkness, I could find my way out, I could grow in this damp, strange place where I am some creature whose name I can't bear to speak. Help me!"
Tonio stopped. This was as terrible as he could ever have imagined it, and he was lost, utterly lost, and he did not even want to look at that brutal uncaring face, those eyes that seemed always afire with rage and so full of contempt for all pain and all weakness. He closed his eyes. He remembered that once in Rome what seemed like ages ago this man had embraced him, and he almost laughed aloud at the folly of all he'd said, but as the room swam in his vision, as the candle suddenly went out and he opened his eyes on a great obliterating darkness, he thought, Oh, these are just words, not actions. And somehow this will pass as all of it has passed, and tomorrow it will be the same as before, each of us in his own hell, and I will grow stronger yet, and more accustomed to it.
Because this is life, is it not? This is life, and years of this will pass, for this is what is meant to be, "Shut the doors, shut the doors, shut the doors." And the knife that brought me here was but the cutting edge of what awaits all of us.
The scent of burning wax lingered.
And then he heard Guido's footsteps ringing on the stones, and he thought, Ah, so this is the final humiliation, he is leaving me here.
His cruelty had never seemed so exquisite, so overpowering. Ah, the hours we two have spent together, this hideous marriage of exhausting work that mounts again and again to sublime torture.
And what have I learned? That in this as in all else I am alone, which I knew before, and come to realize with each passing day to its fullest meaning?
It seemed he was drifting.
And then quite suddenly he realized that the iron latch had been slipped into place against the door and that Guido had not left him.
He felt his breath halt. He could see nothing. And for the moment hear nothing. But he knew that Guido was there watching him. And such a sharp stab of desire caught him he was appalled by it.
Desire radiated from him. It radiated out into the darkness and seemed to find the four walls of this enclosing place, and he turned around waiting, waiting.
"Love you?" came Guido's voice. It was so low Tonio strained forward, as if yearning for it. "Love you?"
"Yes..." Tonio answered.
"I am in a hell of desire for you! Have you never guessed? Have you never looked beneath the coldness? Are you so blind to this suffering? In all my life I have never wooed and suffered as I have over you. But there is love and love, and I am spent trying to separate the one from the other...."
"Don't separate them!" Tonio whispered. And he reached out like a child, grasping for what he wanted. "Give it to me! Where are you? Maestro, where are you?"
There seemed a rush of air, a soft shuffling of garments and steps, and he felt the near smarting touch of Guido's hands, hands that in the past had only struck him, and then those arms enclosing him. And in this moment, he understood everything.
But that was but the last glimmer of thought, and he knew just how it had been and how it would be, and he felt Guido's chest, and then Guido's mouth tore at him.
"Yes," he whispered. "Now, yes, everything, all of it..." He was crying.
Guido sucked at his lips, his cheeks, his fingers digging into him as they gathered him up as though he were fit for devouring, and it seemed all cruelty was alchemized into a great outpouring that sought no parodies of hate or punishment, so much as the swiftest, most desperate union.
He sank down on his knees, pulling Guido with him. He was leading the way. He was offering himself, giving what Domenico had always given him, yet never asked of him.
The pain was no consideration in it.
Let there be pain. And though he could hardly bear to release this mouth that was opening his and widening his, and sucking even at his teeth, he lay down flat on the stones and said: "Do it. Do that to me, do it. I want it." Guido's weight came down full-length above him, crushing, him as he felt his clothes torn loose, and the first nudge terrified him. He gave a long gasp and then all of his body opened up, welcoming it, refusing on any account to deny it, and when it came again, short, but hard and thick and pounding, he found himself moving with it. For one instant they were bound together, Guido's lips pressed to the back of his neck, Guido's hands working his shoulders, clutching him close, and then from Guido's guttural cry he knew it was over.
But he was stunned, wiping his mouth, and charged and craving. He could not keep his hands off Guido, but it was Guido who lifted him, Guido's arms so tight around his hips that he held Tonio up in the air as his mouth surrounded Tonio's organ with a wet warmth, a delicious ravenous sucking. It was stronger, more violent than Domenico had ever been. He gritted his teeth not to cry out, and then fell back, released, turning over to bury his head in his arms, his knees drawing up as the last shocks of pleasure faded.
He was afraid.
He was alone. He could hear the silence again. And the world was coming back, and he could not even lift his head.
And telling himself he expected nothing, he felt that in this moment he could have begged for anything. But he felt Guido near; Guido's hands, so heavy, so strong, were tugging at him, and rising abruptly he thrust his heated face into the crook of Guido's shoulder. Those dusty curls brushed him, and it seemed all of Guido cradled him, even the fingers so firm and warm, and this was Guido with him in this place, Guido holding him and loving him and kissing him now with the tenderest mouth and they were absolutely together.
It seemed Tonio was dazed and did not know where he was going, only that they were walking through the clean cold streets and the glare of torches against a wall had a frightening beauty.
The air was full of the hot scent of cooking fires and burning coals, and the windows looming at every turn out of the dark were filled with lovely yellow light and then there was the blackness, the rustle of dry winter leaves, and Guido and he locked together with those rough and cruel kisses, embraces that knew nothing of tenderness, only starvation.
When they reached the tavern, the swing of the door threw out an inviting warmth and they pressed together into the deepest alcove amid the noise and rattle of swords and tankards smacked to the wooden tables. A woman sang, her voice dark and full like the tones of an organ, and one of those shepherds from the hills played his pipes, and the people all around them were singing.
Shadows fell over the table. They fell with the swinging of the lamps and the swell of the crowd, and gazing across this narrow space, it seemed a sweet agony that he could not now touch Guido. And yet as he sat against the wooden wall of this small place and looked into Guido's eyes, he saw such love there that he was content to smile and hold the wine in his mouth that was full of the tart flavor of the grape and the wood of the cask from which it had been taken.
They drank and drank, and when it was that Guido began to talk he did not know except that in a low, roughened voice, that defiant whisper deep from his chest, Guido was telling him all those secrets he had never dared to tell and again Tonio felt his mouth spreading into that smile he couldn't resist, and the only words that came to his mind were: Love, love, you are my love, and then at some moment in this warm and raucous place, he said those words and saw the flame in Guido's eyes. Love, love, you are my love, and I am not alone, no, not alone, for this little while.
8
IT WAS LOVEMAKING every night,
full of insatiable hunger and animal cruelty, and yet redolent afterwards of an unspoken tenderness that had shaped the whole. And they slept locked in one another's arms as if the flesh itself were a barrier that must be broken down with the tightest embrace, and there were always those rough, ravenous kisses, and then in the morning, the two of them rising with one mind, to get to work again in Guido's studio before the first light.
And with the lessons, all was changed.
It was not that they were any less demanding, or that Guido was any less severe or hot-tempered when Tonio fell short of the mark. It was that the whole was more intense, and suffused with their new intimacy and absorption in one another.
Tonio had promised in that gush of unwise language and emotion fused to words that he would open to Guido, but he came to realize he had always been open, at least when it came to music, and now it was Guido who opened to him. Guido for the first time acknowledged the mind that governed Tonio's body and his voice, and Guido began to confide in that mind the principles that underlay his relentless practice repetitions.
Actually this tendency to talk was nothing new in Guido, but at the opera or during their long seaside drives afterwards the subjects had invariably been other singers. And there had been an illusion of impersonality, and even something of coldness mixed in with the way that all this heat coming from Guido must be attached to other music, other men.
Now Guido spoke of the music they shared, and it seemed in these early weeks of their hottest and most eager love that this talking was more important to Guido even than their amorous embraces.
Not an evening went by that they did not go out, hiring a carriage perhaps for a coastal drive, or to seek out some quiet tavern where over the table they might talk in heated whispers until a certain taste in the mouth from the wine, a certain lightness of the head, told them to go home.
They did not take their evening meal anymore at the conservatorio. They walked arm in arm through pitch-dark streets, and finding here a darkened door, there the cover of a stand of trees, they touched one another, clung to one another feeding on the danger of it, and some infatuation with the night itself, its rustling sounds, its carriages groaning uphill out of nothingness to appear suddenly with a rocking yellow beam to find them out.
