“But that’s—that’s unnatural!” I exclaimed.
My companion shrugged her shoulders up into the gold lace about her throat so that their lack of youthful firmness was evident.
“Society puts unnatural claims on us all,” she said simply. “We find ways around them. Then who is to say what is natural and what is not? You are but young yet, or you would know.”
Thoughtfully she rubbed the blatant, naked finger on her left hand.
The continuo struck two more warning, introductory chords and then fell silent, unshackling Apollo from all ties to the ground. And he soared, skipping notes from cloud to cloud like the lightest of sparrow flocks catching the setting sun on their wings.
The music affected me deeply, but I cannot say that I was struck with open-mouthed awe like the rest of my company in that theater that night. From my present perspective, I am tempted to suggest that the sparrow-flight of notes hung in the air over my head like some grave consequence, as yet unborn, as yet even undreamed.
At the time, the juxtaposition of a creature the butt of cruel jokes one moment, the same creature adored for his unnatural, otherworldly nature the next—I found it too perverse. God that this Apollo was, he was limited. There would endlessly never be any two-year-old for him to father. What kind of god was this, who knew limitations? Like many another contradiction many another fifteen-year-old has perceived in his surroundings, it niggled me with fear. And to escape fear—to which age soon grows blind—I turned it quickly on its head as scorn.
Desperately, I looked across the hall, hoping youth, even in another sex, would have sympathy with what I felt. Then through all the wild ether of sound came the hard bass of realization in my heart: Sofia Baffo was no longer cloistered at her aunt’s side.
“Business!” I exclaimed, as much to convince myself as my companions.
I jumped to my feet. It was, I suddenly remembered, the second intermedio.
IV
A man in scarlet livery directed me through the lobby, disappointingly empty save for glowering Foscari portraits and the Titians, to a chamber on the left. “Gentlemen retire this direction,” he said.
“Gentlemen” were not at all what I was about, but I didn’t know how to contradict him. And since the man himself—or his twin—had given me the message with the eloquent S in the first place, I decided to take this advice as well.
I found myself in a lavishly wood-paneled hall illuminated by low-burning beeswax candles, even more alone than in the foyer. The most art-dreading of gentlemen was not going to miss the spectacle of a castrato. The paradox of high notes pushed by a man’s lungs forced its way into this room as well. How clever of Madonna Baffo to plan our meeting for this time! But, then, where was she?
A curtain concealed a balcony where a man could add his water to the Grand Canal. To ease my nervousness, I used it, thinking how fresh the air smelled in the dark for the night’s rain. This action restored my equilibrium somewhat. Odd that the organ we are always at such pains to conceal from the world should be so much a part of connecting with it. As my water joined that of the Grand Canal, so I felt myself joined once again to the human race, male as well as female. The disturbing world of castrati and harem attendants vanished behind flats and scrims like a conjuror’s illusion. I felt ready for reality again.
And that reality would tonight contain Sofia Baffo! Sofia Baffo, who only waited for me to find her.
Back from the balcony, I followed the stretch of a sideboard, heavy with food and drink. Oddly, the usual scents of such a board failed to reach my nostrils. The entire spread all seemed untouched, as if more than just the goblets were encrusted with gold. Whole birds glistened in their juices like brass. The burnished pears, the coppery figs, the oranges, the pyramids of nuts, even the intervening bunches of bay and sage had a high, della Robbia gloss to them. In the guttering light, they feasted the eye more than the belly—decorative, opulent, but unnourishing, hard, and unnatural.
I noticed briefly how the room’s floor was made of four colors of marble, inlaid in such a way that the darkest gray seemed to retreat and the lightest gold to leap forward. It fooled my eye into believing I was walking on cubes.
And as I walked, I heard the click of rapid footsteps echoing off that floor. I turned, looked up and then adjusted my hat and mask carefully as I found myself in the presence of an unknown youth. The youth wore a parti-colored Harlequin mask and a large, droopy sack of a hat. Of course, this was the salon for gentlemen, but the sound of those footsteps had at first made me think—
And then I saw the boy move and I knew it was no boy. The galliard and “Come to the Budding Grove” were no less incongruous in a hose and doublet than in the convent garden.
“Madonna?” I stammered.
“You didn’t recognize me? Then I shall easily fool them all.”
I wasn’t hearing very clearly. When I saw what the hose revealed, I understood why women’s legs are customarily draped in fabric, the more yards the better.
“In
