by Brian Hodge
“Splendid, Giovanni,” he whispered. “Absolutely splendid.”
I smiled, wondering if he could even see it. My entire worth was tied to his response. “More?”
“Soon. Sit, would you?” He kicked once beneath the sheets, indicated a spot near the foot of the bed.
I sat, wondering if Julius expected my favors to be physical as well as musical, and if so, if the seduction would begin this very first night. Castrati were strange creatures indeed, alluring to many women and to no few men, as well, even men who had never loved another of their own kind. Our hair was thick and lustrous, our skin soft and smooth, our faces never touched by a razor. We were androgynes whose service to either sex was limited only by our inclinations, and certainly I, with dark curls hanging to my shoulders and a bit of the brown-eyed, olive-skinned look of a peasant girl, broke no traditions.
“When you sing that type of music,” said Julius, “I can close my eyes and picture a cathedral full of boys in robes, who trust their priests and believe every word that crosses their young lips. Their faith is still … intact. Then I open my eyes and I see you, and I know that intact doesn’t necessarily mean inviolable. Is your faith the same as theirs, Giovanni?”
I was not expecting this, but welcomed it over desperate advances. “When I was their age, it was, probably. But I’m older now, and I know how many lies are told to children. So my faith lies in the beauty of the notes, not the meaning of the words. The words are immaterial to me now. I could sing of degradation, and the music would sound just as beautiful.”
“Latin has that insulating effect, doesn’t it?” Julius said, and we both laughed. “Keep your faith in beauty, then, and it’ll always be well-placed. I suspect beauty is one of the few things that’s always there to sustain us whenever we need it.”
I nodded, thinking of the young castrati — whose sacrifice was irreversible — who had lost their voices to impinging manhood just the same, to be left with nothing. The knife was no guarantee. In the old times they became voice teachers, composers, musicians, or let themselves be destroyed by their own despair. And today? They disappeared from the conservatory, quietly; last seen at supper, and absent from the breakfast table. None of the maestros ever said what happened to them. None of us dared ask. There but for the grace of God went I, some would think while staring at a boy’s empty chair, but none of us truly believed that God’s mercy had anything to do with it. How could infinite mercy be so … random?
“More, now, I think,” said Julius, motioning me to stand.
So again I sang, and by the time I finished for the night, I could swear that those lines on Julius’ face, which earlier seemed so prominent, had now faded away to all but nothing.
I settled in over the next weeks, and it felt like home, at least as much a home as the conservatory had ever felt. Francesca grew no warmer toward me, but to Julius I took a steadily growing liking. I couldn’t have asked for a more appreciative audience, and after mornings, when he attended to his investments, he would shed this cloak of obligations and we might often talk for hours of more timeless things: of music and art, of beauty and souls. He was endlessly curious about my vocal training, was deliriously happy to hang over my shoulder as I sat at the harpsichord and demonstrated exercises the maestros had used to shape us from our raw childish ore. Sometimes it felt as if Julius were digging into me, pawing about in some dogged search for answers that had always eluded him.
“Did you have hopes of being a singer once?” I asked him.
“No. Oh no. There are voices, and there are ears. I’ve never mistaken my place in the arrangement. Still,” and he shrugged, memories seeming to swell behind his eyes like forgotten sorrows, “to be one of those few voices worth listening to seems to me to be a holy thing. You make yourself sacred by what you’ve done with your voice. The rest of us? We just absorb it, and know we’ll never see or hear anything that pure emerging from ourselves.”
“You’re discounting yourself.” And why did I care to salve his feelings? He had, after all, paid money for me, my life. “Voices need those ears. You may love us, but we need you. What choir sings to itself?”
“So we both have a hold on the other, then.” He seemed happy with the truce, although perhaps I shouldn’t have been so quick to confess a need for something he could so easily withhold. A turned back, a deaf ear, could make my life miserable.
“Some friends will be coming here next week, and I’d like you to prepare a recital for them.” Julius’ eyes hazed over, a deeper gray, and he seemed so deliberately cryptic as he gave me a thin smile, a smile that hinted at all the things I didn’t yet know about him. He could have hidden lifetimes behind that smile. “Oh, they’ll love you.”
The days passed, a countdown toward some event that I knew nothing about, and Julius refused to tell me more. I believe he sensed my apprehension, and attempted to alleviate it by diverting me with a plump girl he brought in from the countryside. Women were a pleasure all but unknown to me, and while she warmed my bed without making note of my scars, my heart wasn’t really in it.
Then she was gone, and that same day Julius kindly dismissed Francesca for the better part of a week. He sent her away by train to visit her family and, if it was possible to read anything at all from her stern countenance, she was glad to be going. I’d not even thought of her as having family, wondering if instead she hadn’t one day stepped alive out of Julius’ gardens from among the ranks of old statues, stone-faced and unyielding.
I began to truly fear for whatever Julius was planning. What could be so grandiose or ghastly that even Francesca would not be allowed to set her flinty eyes upon it? She knew my secrets, of course, and proved trustworthy with them. What could send her off with an expression of relief? And had she sent my way the merest glance of sympathy when leaving, or had that been imagination?
I again knew the same drops I used to sweat my first year at the conservatory, upon hearing footsteps approach my room in the night, wondering what else they might be coming to cut away. The villa seemed huge, a barren museum that rang coldly with my feeble attempts to give it the life of song.
And then it was suddenly, the next nightfall, home to some two dozen others. They overran it like a Mongol horde, spilling both wine and blood in their wake, and wherever they came from, it couldn’t have been far enough away once they were gone.
They were men and they were women, in appearance, but in personae they seemed both more and less. They were all the baser appetites given flesh to house them, mouths with which to consume, throats with which to swallow. They couldn’t all have come from the same place, so different were they. Some may have come down from Rome, others from Paris, still others from London … and beyond. One brown-skinned man had the wide, deep-brown features and dusty ringlets of hair of an aboriginal Australian; he laughed at my expression, said he had run very fast to arrive on time.
“You’re teasing me,” I said desperately, “aren’t you?”
“Fast traveling, boy.” He winked. “It’s a state of mind as well as place.” Then he laughed with even greater uproar.
They wore lace or leather or furs, black and carmine, royal purple and deepest blue. They sprawled arrogantly about as if they were drunken aristocrats, or chased each other in carnal frenzy; a few of the more enthusiastic began coupling almost immediately, pounding their bodies together with a bruising hunger before their clothes were half-shed. Noise was constant, their din augmented by a chamber ensemble whose musicians were blind, every one of them, as they played from memory, without need of a conductor. Violins screeched as if played by Paganini at his most devilish, with terrifying runs at the strings that could make fingers bleed; sweat poured as violin bows sawed with feverish intensity. They played as if to slow down would mean to die.
I watched from a corner, not even daring to move until Julius came up to me with a radiant and feral smile.
“You’re frightened,” he said.
“And you wouldn’t be, if our
positions were reversed?” I shut my eyes but found it worse, what imagination conjured from sound alone. “Who are they? How do you know these people? I know my life has been a sheltered one, but … but this?”
“‘More things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’” Julius put his hands on my shoulders until I stopped trembling. I stared into the smooth chiseled planes of his face, stared with a thousand questions, and he gazed back with eyes that could never have grown so deep within a single lifetime. He was everything to me in that moment — benefactor and father, brother and protector. “You’ll not be harmed, I promise you that. No matter what happens here, you’ll not be harmed.”
I wanted to fall into his arms, have him enfold me and make that promise again and again. What pathetic creatures we modern castrati were, so dependent on just one other. And when they died, would we be buried alive with them, like servants entombed with their pharaohs?
I looked beyond Julius’ shoulder, to a fresco covering the far wall, a vineyard where peasants of old Italy pressed succulent grapes into wine. Before it, two swarthy men hoisted a thin dirty fellow up by the ankles — I’ve no idea where he came from — and as he screamed weakly, they opened his throat with their fingernails. A half-dozen of the guests scrambled beneath the flow, catching it with laughing mouths that seemed obscenely eager.
“Those two are old friends from Lebanon,” Julius said. “I’ve known them a long, long time. And her?” He motioned elsewhere to a limber woman with near-translucent skin and serpentine hair that fell past her waist. As she lay contorted on the floor, her mouth opened wide to receive the issue of four men who ejaculated in rapid succession. She writhed, swallowed, rubbed the spatterings across her face until her tongue could lick them away.
“She’s one of the Sisters of the Trinity. The sperm-eater.” Julius gestured back toward the dying man, where a near-identical woman wallowed bare-breasted in blood, partaking of her own feast. “And she’s another. The third one’s around here somewhere, the flesh-eater. When they’ve not fed for some time? It’s said there’s nothing left of a man but bones, cracked open and sucked dry.”
I wanted to cry, to crawl to the coast and swim the rest of the way back to the conservatory. There I’d known a world of safe routine, what to expect. Here outside of Capua, with Julius? It now felt as if I’d awakened in some Hell even Dante had ignored.
“These people here,” I whispered. “You … you’re one of them?”
He looked pained for a moment, took me gently by the hand, as if there was so much he wished to say, yet feared I would never listen to it all. Could never accept. “In most ways, I am. But think of yourself for a moment. You come from a secret school for boys who’ve lost their manhood. You each bear identical scars. But are each of you the same?”
I shook my head — of course we weren’t.
Julius clasped my hand harder. “And neither are we.”
“What are you, then, at the core?”
He smiled, a smile of ice and gray skies. “We’re the damned. A few among many, at least. And we’ve chosen to make the most of it.”
I let my gaze wander through this festival of grotesqueries. Drinkers of blood, eaters of flesh and seed; insatiable satyrs whose arousal made the statues of their mythical brethren in the garden seem models of temperance; carnivores of marrow and spirit. They were beasts and in them I could see a horrible beauty. They reveled in their bacchanal, recognizing no law but their own appetites.
As one who had spent the last thirteen years taking for granted the law of the knife, and what it had done to me, I couldn’t help but feel a longing for such freedom.
But what of Julius? He seemed at one with them, yet in my weeks here, I’d never witnessed a single indulgence like this. What was his ambrosia?
“Don’t be afraid of them. Oh, a few may sniff you, or lick you, but they’ll just be teasing. They wouldn’t dare try anything more.” Julius cupped my cheek. “You may even learn a thing or two from someone.” He winked slyly. “Stranger things have happened in this house.”
He left me to myself, and their questionable mercies, for a fearfully long time. I wandered from room to room but said nothing to anyone, for I believed they must all have lived nearly forever, and must be far wiser than I, in their ways. In their presence I felt like a dullard smart enough only to recognize his limitations, wandering down a hall peopled with the likes of Mozart and Einstein, Tesla and Shakespeare.
Julius later gathered everyone together and had me sing, and I thought it some miracle that I, in the small amphitheater beside the gardens, managed to hold their attention for over two hours. With Monteverdi I let my voice soar, let it sweep and fall, trill and sustain notes for a minute or longer. At my finale, the crowd of them erupted with applause and a cry that adoring audiences of old would bestow upon those deemed most worthy:
“Viva il coltello!” they shouted. “Viva il coltello!”
Long live the knife.
They descended on me, all ravenous smiles, and upon Julius as well, as my benefactor. He beamed, rosy-cheeked as a child; I’d never seen him more vibrant. He swept me into his arms, told me how happy he was with my performance. Another one tomorrow night, perhaps? I could not deny him.
They seemed to accept me as one of them, these self-proclaimed damned, and to me it felt proper. Wasn’t I damned as well, never to have a normal life, yet born in an age when I could no longer share my voice with an adoring world? I was as out of time as any of them.
The delirium continued, as if all had been inspired by the sound of my voice. I surrendered myself to Lilah, the third dark-eyed Sister of the Trinity, as she pressed herself against me and murmured what a shame she’d not been present for my castration, so she might’ve eaten of its fruits.
“They were fed to a dog,” I told her as she drew my pants down, to rub a soft insistent palm at the empty space between my thighs.
“Such a delicacy — what a fortunate dog.” She laid me back and lowered her head, hypnotizing with her tongue. “I can still smell where they were. I so love the taste of scars.”
Little bites, she took. Little nips that all but devoured, and once I opened my eyes to see Julius gazing down upon us. What surprise his smooth face showed; then, right before his expression changed, he turned his back.
I wondered what it would have shown next.
On the revels went, the rest of the night, another day. Early the third day the great central room radiated with a quick blast that sent heat and light even through the adjoining rooms. A ferocious cheer arose from the heart of the villa, and I roused from a floor-bound stupor. Sticky with wine, encrusted with semen, I don’t suppose I was self-aware enough to wonder what I’d come to until I staggered about to investigate this newest party trick. I could hear the clinking of chains amid a chatter of excited voices.
I stood in the doorway, unsteady, squinting in at some fading radiance. Most of Julius’ guests were already here, milling before the frescoes, or anchoring chains that someone explained to me had been forged from an iron trellis stolen from the Bastille. All the sufferings it had heard, been saturated with? Chains forged from such iron could hold anything. A wise precaution.
What they held was like nothing I had ever seen.
“What is that?” I asked.
“The conjurings, boy. They worked,” the Australian said. “You didn’t hear them in here, all last night?
“No…”
“Right hard work. Well sod me, I didn’t think they could do it.” As he laughed, his long dusty curls jiggled.
What they’d captured had to have come from some other realm. Human in appearance, yet better, idealized, a master template from which all things human might have been cast. Its flesh like a translucent veil, it was beyond gender, elements of both male and female in a face I thought pitiful for its obvious terror. Matted and twitching beneath the chains were tattered membranes that might have resembled wings, if floating in some liquid plasm.
It chittered in no language I had ever heard, but, oh, such a voice. I wondered what its songs would sound like.
“An angel?” I guessed.
Julius heard me, left his companions to secure the final chains. He looked me up and down, the condition of me; what a fallen state I must have presented.
“Higher than an angel if you believe the myths of hierarchy,” Julius said. “We’ve done this before, but it’s the first time we’ve nabbed one of the Ophanim. They’re said to inhabit a region that begins to take on substance and form as we know it. Where heaven meets earth … and can be corrupted.” Julius swept his hair back from his forehead, mopped away sweat. What a portrait of bitter triumph he made. “But I think they’re all just as confused there as most are here. Why shouldn’t the centuries and millennia have driven them insane as well, and long before any of us were ever conceived? If there is a heaven, I think by now it must be the asylum of a mad universe.”
The Australian clapped Julius on the shoulder. “We’ll keep trying, mate. Someday we’ll nab us a Seraphim, and maybe then we’ll know more.”
Julius said nothing as he returned to the spot where the Ophanim lay, with limbs bound and tugged wide, one side of its glorious face pressed into the floor. Its sides heaved like a dog panting its last breath while the car that hit it sped heedlessly into the distance. Its cobalt eyes gazed farther than any of us could hope to see, and despite the pity I felt for it, I had to wonder if Julius hadn’t been correct: Suppose it really is insane? Was it a protector? Or might it have toyed with our lives for sport, another time?
Julius left his worn and soiled clothes in a heap, approached the Ophanim. As master of the estate, I surmised, it was his right to be first.
Fleshy veils and membranes were parted, and the rest cheered as Julius mounted the Ophanim from behind. He thrust into it like a man who had stored away lifetimes’ worth of fury. I turned away, wondering if everyone would have a go, debauching the divine, or what they thought divine, or what was, simply, close enough.
