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presented themselves to him: voluptuous eunuchs were these, or women?
    In chapel after that he could not take his eyes off Gino’s feet, as the boy stood beside him. It was the leather cutting into the high instep of Gino’s foot that made Guido feel an odd catch in his throat. He watched the muscles move under Gino’stight stockings. The curve of the calf was beautiful to him, inviting. He wanted to touch it, and he watched in misery as the boy went up to the communion rail.
    On the afternoon of one day late in summer, he could not sing at all, he was so distracted by the tight-fitting black coat of a young maestro who was standing before him.
    This was a married teacher, with wife and children. He came by day to teach the poetry and enunciation all singers must learn thoroughly. And why, Guido growled to himself, am I staring at his coat like this?
    But each time the young man turned around, Guido would look at that cloth pulled taut over the small of the back, the snug fit of the waist, and then the gentle flaring over the hips, again wanting to touch it. He felt something akin to a soundless and invisible wallop with every tracing of the pattern.
    He shut his eyes. And when he opened them again he thought the teacher was smiling at him. The man had seated himself, and shifting in his chair, made a darting motion with his hand to arrange the burden between his legs more comfortably. His gaze was full of innocence when he looked at Guido. Or was it?
    Again at supper their eyes met. And at the evening meal hours after that.
    When darkness fell, slowly, languidly over the mountains, and the stained-glass windows were drained to a lusterless black, Guido found himself walking down an empty corridor past rooms long deserted.
    As he reached the maestro’s door, he saw the dim figure of the man out of the corner of his eye. A silvery light from an open casement fell on the man’s folded hands, his knee.
    “Guido!” he whispered from the dark.
    This was dreamlike. Yet it was more pungent and clumsy than any dream had ever been, the sharp scrape of Guido’s heels on the stone floor, the soft shutting of the door behind him.
    Lights twinkled on the hill beyond the window, lost in the shifting shapes of the trees.
    The young man stood up and snapped the painted shutters closed.
    For a moment Guido saw nothing, and his own breath was hoarse and pounding, and then he saw again those luminoushands, gathering what was left of the light from everywhere as they opened the front of the man’s breeches.
    So the secret sin he had imagined was known and shared.
    He reached out, as if his body wouldn’t obey him. And dropping down on his knees, he felt the smooth hairless flesh of the maestro’s belly before he drew the mystery of it all, that organ, longer, thicker than his own, into his mouth immediately.
    He needed no instruction. He felt it swelling as he stroked it with his tongue and his teeth. His body was becoming his mouth, while his fingers pressed into the flesh of the maestro’s buttocks, urging him forward, Guido’s moans rhythmic, desperate, over the man’s deliberate sighing.
    “Ah, gentle…” breathed the maestro, “gentle.” But with a thrust of his hips, he pressed against Guido all the mingled scents of his body, the damp curling hair, the flesh itself, full of musk and salt. Guido gave a guttural cry as he felt the dry, raw pinnacle of his own passion.
    But at that moment, as he clung, weakened and reverberating from the shock, to the maestro’s hips, the man’s seed flowed into him. It filled his mouth, and he opened to it with an overpowering thirst as the bitterness of it, the deliciousness of it, threatened to choke him.
    He bowed his head; he slumped down. And he realized that if he could not swallow it, in an instant, it would revolt him.
    He had not been prepared for this so abruptly and totally to finish.
    And then sickness did constrict him, causing him to pull away, struggling to keep his lips