The Book of Thomas - Volume One: Heaven

by Robert Boyczuk

  “Don’t you fear being robbed?” I asked Ignatius one day after we passed a patrol herding three gaunt prisoners, their wrists roped behind them.

  “Worse,” he said, clucking his tongue reprovingly at Cross, who’d veered to the side of the road to nibble on a small patch of green grass. “But don’t fret, we’re relatively safe. For now. Most still fear God more than they fear hunger. And when God will no longer suffice, there is always the Church and its Suisse.” He pointed at a makeshift cross that had been erected at the crossroads through which we were about to pass. It was like a dozen other crosses I’d seen on our journey. Then I noticed something about this cross, something that had been hidden by the angle at which we approached: bodies hung from both ends of the horizontal beam. It wasn’t a Holy Cross. It was a gibbet.

  “The fear won’t last forever, though,” Ignatius said. “No matter how pious you hope to be, or how much you might fear the noose, in the end, hunger always gets the better of you.”

  Flies buzzed both corpses, and a crow worked away at the eye of the nearest one. Behind the gibbet, the field had been trampled, and there were two rows of unmarked mounds. Those in the last row had freshly turned earth. We passed in silence, and I mouthed a prayer for their wretched souls.

  “Why come here?” I asked, perhaps a kilometre farther on. “Why risk it?”

  “Because the Church, in its wisdom, deems only orphans fit for its most exalted choir.”

  “But—” I stopped, mid-sentence, suddenly understanding. The wealthier Spheres, closest to Lower Heaven, would present fewer opportunities and more problems. Parents would be either intractable or make ridiculous demands. But an orphan . . . what orphan wouldn’t prefer a life at the Vatican to the misery of Orphanotrophium? And where better to find a surfeit of orphanages than in a troubled Sphere?

  “A buyer’s market,” I said.

  “Down here, Thomas, the Church is very poor. It does what it must.”

  I was suddenly angry, when I really had no cause to be. But I was too young to know that. “God will not abide moneychangers in his temple,” I said. “‘My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.’”

  “‘Judge not that ye be not judged.’” Ignatius quoted back at me.

  “Selling the boys. It’s . . . it’s a sin.”

  He laughed. “Is it, now? Did you ever think one man’s sin might be another man’s blessing?” He put a hand on my shoulder. “Where do you think the boys go after San Savio, Thomas? Most end up on the street. They become beggars, thieves, and prostitutes. More than half don’t likely reach the age of twenty-five. Those who find work in a brothel, well, they are the lucky ones.”

  “No good can come of sin,” I said obstinately.

  “Tell that to the boys at San Savio. The coin I paid for you will feed them all for half a year.” He stopped, and stopped me, too, with a look. “You might choose to starve yourself for your piety. But would you starve them, as well?”

  The notion of the relativity of sin gave me pause.

  “I didn’t make the world,” Ignatius said wearily. “And I didn’t make the hearts of men. If you must blame someone for this mess, blame the one who did.”

  It may seem unnaturally naive, but I couldn’t fathom what he was saying, and I am sure it showed on my face.

  So he said it unequivocally for me: “God, Thomas. If anyone’s to blame for this mess, it’s God Almighty.”

  In the next week, the sad procession of migrants became a trickle, then gave out abruptly. The patrols, too, became much less frequent. We learned from the Parish Priest conducting the next recital that the Pope, hearing of the dire situation, had issued an edict forbidding men to move from place to place within the Sphere, except for Clergy and those who served them. In the same edict, he also allowed those in the camps to remain, and bid the Parishes of the cities to do what they could to help those unfortunate souls. It was a test, he said, of all men’s faith.

  So the journey became almost peaceful—we passed few travellers, and those were largely Clergymen or Deacons, hastening on Church business. The only sign of trouble was the dark smoke of sizable fires that sometimes smudged the horizon, and the haze of rain that showered down on them. Perhaps those restless young men, who no longer had to protect their towns and families from pillagers and outlaws, had begun turning their anger on their neighbours, the only people left to blame. In any case, the fires were always distant, and whether it was merely field burning to clear the land for the next planting, or something more calamitous, was impossible to say.

  As we tramped the road, Ignatius tutored me. It quickly became apparent he surpassed Father Paul, in every respect, as a teacher. Whereas Father Paul stuck rigidly to a series of lessons he had developed over the years that focused exclusively on choral music, Ignatius understood the capacity of the human voice apart from any particular style of song. His expertise was more intimate and fundamental, one that preceded style and technique—the sort of knowledge that, once acquired, enabled one to master any form of vocal music.

  For my part, I was an eager student. In the mornings he taught me a series of exercises to wake up body, nose, and voice: breathing and humming exercises, pitch patterns and arpeggios. When we paused to break our fast he held his hand on my rib cage and throat as I sang, directing me to observe the proper movement of my musculus intercostalis and diaphragma. In the afternoons he had me sing to the fields the Mass I’d been taught. Then he sang me other Masses in falsetto and had me repeat them. When he discovered my ability to parrot the Masses after hearing them only once, he immediately questioned me to learn the extent of my gift, then changed the manner in which he taught me to better suit my abilities. He also began addressing me more as an adult might address another adult. I felt flattered, and I suppose he meant me to feel this way. Even so, at first I thought him needlessly exacting, picking at tiny differences in tone and timbre that were impossible to distinguish. But then, after a day or two passed, I realized I could hear the variations he was hearing, and wondered how it was I had never heard these glaring differences before. After this pattern repeated twice more, it occurred to me that he wasn’t so much teaching me to hear things I hadn’t before as he was teaching me to listen to myself in a way I hadn’t before. When I asked him about this, he replied, “Thomas, one of the most useful qualities a man can cultivate is the ability to hear himself as others hear him.” The sense of this, as it applied to improving my voice, was obvious. But it was clear he meant it also as a more general apothegm.

  One evening, when we shared a room, and wine had made him forget himself more than usual, he paced the room in an uncharacteristically dark mood because of the lack of suitable prospects at the Church we had visited that afternoon. Five weeks of travel and I was his only find—apparently an inauspicious start to the season. I didn’t know what to make of his candour, so I let him ramble, listening to his complaints, grunting the minimal affirmatives he seemed to require. All of a sudden he stopped and spun on his toes, teetering, but not losing his balance. He let himself down onto the creaking frame filled with straw that constituted his bed.

  “Boy, I’m going to teach you the most important thing about singing” he said, slurring his words slightly as he leaned towards me where I sat on my own meagre pile of straw. “How to sing with conviction, even when you have no experience upon which to draw.” With this, he burst into a song with a deep, basso voice I’d not heard him use before:

  She lay all naked on her bed and I myself lay by;

  No veil but curtains about her spread, no covering but I.

  Her head upon her shoulder seeks to hang in careless wise,

  And full of blushes were her cheeks, and of wishes were her eyes.

  Her blood still fresh into her face, as on a message came,

  To say that in another place it meant another game.

  Her cherry lip moist, plump and fair, millions of kisses crown,

  Which ripe and
uncropt dangled there and weighed the branches down.

  Her breasts, that well’d so plump and high, bread pleasant pain in me.

  For all the world I do defy the like felicity;

  Her thighs and belly, soft and fair, to me were only shown:

  To see such meat, and not to eat, would anger any stone.

  Her knees lay upward gently bent, and all lay hollow under,

  As if on easy terms, they meant to fall unforc’d asunder;

  Just so the Cyprian Queen did lie, expecting in her bower,

  When too long stay had kept the boy beyond his promis’d hour.

  “Dull clown” quoth she, “Why dost delay such proffer’d bliss to take?

  Canst thou find out no other way similitudes to make?”

  Mad with delight I, thundering, threw my arms about her,

  But pox upon’t ’twas but a dream, and so I lay without her.

  “Now you try it,” he said, clapping me on the back.

  I did. He listened with his head cocked, then smiled when I finished. “You sang it well, as if you truly knew what you were singing.”

  “I know things,” I said, as any boy my age would, feeling the colour rise in my face.

  “There’s knowing and there’s knowing,” he said, grinning salaciously at me. “And if you knew too much, you’d be useless to me.” He must have misread my confusion for discomfort, because his smile fell away and he looked at me with concern. “Now there, boy, no need for that face. It’s easy to overvalue the things we’ve never had. What you do have is talent, and it’s a great honour to sing in the Choir of Capella Sixtina. And an easy life to boot. Your balls are a small price to pay.”

  How foolish it must sound that I hadn’t an inkling, until this moment, that I was to be castrated. Of course Ignatius wouldn’t have invested so much money and time in me if he were to lose everything when puberty wreaked havoc with my voice. The taunt at San Savio’s, the one I hadn’t understood, now came back to me so clearly it rang in my ears. I whispered, “Castrato.”

  Ignatius placed a meaty hand on my shoulder; his eyes brimmed over with sadness and what might have been pity. He nodded. Then he dropped his hand back to the bed, bringing the depleted wineskin to his lips for a pull, then stoppered it. “You’re a good lad,” he said, laying back on the bed and flinging the wineskin into my lap. His eyes fluttered shut. “Never forget that.”

  The idea of castration seemed to bother Ignatius more than it bothered me. The next day, and in the days that followed, he averted his gaze and quickly changed the subject whenever our words threatened to take us back in that direction. For a man given over almost completely to his baser desires, I suppose the idea of castration was the worst fate imaginable.

  But for me it was different.

  My only experiences of sexual desire had been those compelled upon me by Brother Finn and the fumbling boys at the orphanage. I’d also heard the unruly sounds of sexual congress that issued from the brothels we had visited, which reminded me of nothing so much as the frantic sounds of rutting dogs. The Church, while it said little about sexual desire, had told us unequivocally that desire was a sin. That only within the sanctity of marriage, with the explicit purpose of procreating, was this kind of desire acceptable. In all other cases these urges must be thwarted through heroic efforts of will, a task at which most were wanting, and which invariably led to all kinds of evils—some of which I had suffered first hand. To my thinking, then, castration in exchange for a life of ease, as well as freedom from unruly desires, didn’t seem like such a bad deal. No worse, say, than having an aching tooth pulled before it became septic. I foolishly imagined it would impart the same kind of relief. . . .

  So I reconciled myself to my fate, determined to be the best castrato whose voice ever echoed the magnificent frescoed ceilings of the Sistine Chapel.

  The New Boys

  Ignatius’s luck abruptly changed—at the next concert at the orphanage of Saint Alban, he purchased two more boys for his peripatetic choir. They couldn’t have been more unalike: Ali was thin, dark-complexioned and furtive; Lark was round, pale, and gregarious. Both boys seemed, at least initially, as shocked as I had been to be walking in tow behind Ignatius’s broad bottom. But children are infinitely more adaptable than adults, and what seemed incongruous on the first day took on the veneer of routine by the end of the second. As at San Savio, I kept my distance from the boys, even though they seemed, for the most part, less inimical. Even so, I found myself unaccountably happy to once again be in the proximity of boys my own age. I was less happy, however, that Ignatius now had to divide his attention three ways.

  Both boys had fine voices—perhaps not as good as mine, but then I’d already had the benefit of six weeks of Ignatius’s tutelage. Of the two, Lark had the better natural voice but lacked discipline, while Ali had wonderful control, but only in the octaves he’d mastered. At first Ignatius split his time in half, tutoring the new boys together in the mornings, then tutoring me in the afternoons. However, because of the diametrical nature of their talent, and because it quickly became apparent Lark would need more direct instruction, Ignatius rejigged his approach, teaching Lark in the mornings, and spending a shorter amount of time with Ali in the afternoon. My lessons stalled completely, although Ignatius still exhorted me to practise and, from time to time, drew me into the other boys’ sessions to demonstrate a point when his own falsetto was inadequate to the task. Lark always listened carefully to me, and did his best to mimic me; Ali, on the other hand, made no secret of his resentment, and glared at me as I sang, then attempted to outdo me—which, more often than not, bit him on his own arse, as Ignatius was fond of saying.

  When Ignatius tutored Ali, the two walked abreast on the road, Ignatius pulling Cross in his wake. I would tramp a half a dozen paces behind the mule, and Lark would amble beside me, talking incessantly about anything and everything, but mostly about the parsimonious portions of food and the malicious bullies at Saint Alban. I bore it patiently, not wanting to offend. When it was Lark’s turn for a lesson, the boys switched places, but Ali said not a word to me and quickly dropped another half dozen paces behind. From time to time I felt his dark scrutiny prickle the hairs of my neck, and I would snap my head around to try to catch him at it, but his eyes were always averted, on the yellowing wheat stalks, tracing a bird in the sky, or absorbed by the small dust cloud kicked up by his feet.

  It soon became apparent Lark and Ali would not get along. Though they had come from the same orphanage, they had had nothing to do with each other (Ali having arrived only the month previous); now the overtures of friendship Lark essayed, Ali rebuffed with disdain. Indeed, Ali showed the fat boy nothing but contempt—having only a modest appetite, Ali had taken to dumping whatever leftovers he had into the stable muck, while Lark looked on forlornly.

  It fell to me to teach the other boys how to care for Cross. Lark showed little interest and was a poor student; Ali took to it readily enough, though. After showing him the routines twice (Ali never asking a single question), he jumped in the next day and performed them without hesitation. He asked for no help, and seemed to want none, so I was glad to give these duties over to him completely. I found I missed brushing Cross and stroking her warm muzzle; I even missed the rough feel of her tongue when she licked salt from my palm. But the work occupied Ali, and his moody silences seemed not to bother Cross at all.

  Towards the end of our first week together, as we were passing through withering corn fields, Ali disappeared.

  Ignatius was up front with Lark, while Ali had been lagging farther and farther behind each time I looked back. Then he was gone. I’d been humming an exercise to myself, but had stopped abruptly—Ignatius glanced back and halted. He frowned for a few seconds, then turning his back, he picked up right where he’d left off in his lesson as if nothing were amiss.

  I hesitated for a moment, but there seemed nothing to do. So I followed man and boy and mule.

  Less than a minute l
ater, when I glanced back, Ali was there again, as if he’d never left.

  Initially, I suspected that Ali had run off, then thought better of it. Ali didn’t seem stupid, and there would have been far better places and opportunities to make good his escape than a desiccated corn field in the middle of nowhere. My second notion was that he’d darted into the stalks to relieve himself. I, too, would have used the cornfield if I’d felt the pressure of an imminent bowel movement. But if it had been that, it had been remarkably quick. For a piss, he would have used the side of the road like we all did. It made no sense, and bothered me, though I couldn’t have articulated why I should care a whit about anything Ali did.

  It also bothered me that Ignatius seemed unperturbed. Perhaps he knew something I didn’t.

  When Ali went forward for his lesson that afternoon, I took the opportunity to quietly grill Lark. He told me that Ali had arrived at the orphanage only a week before Ignatius purchased him. “He weren’t from around our village,” Lark said. “I heard his Da came looking for work in the fields, only there weren’t none. What with the rains the last few years, there’s been a whole lot less to harvest.” He scuffed his foot along the ground, kicking up dust to illustrate his point. “When Ali’s Da didn’t want to leave, those others that came before him, looking for work, too, well, they did for him, on account of they was afraid of losing what little work they had.” He sniffed. Lark had little else of importance to add, other than he’d heard Ali’s father had brought him into taverns and inns to sing for their supper. “I think it were a man who’d heard him sing what brought him to Saint Alban,” Lark told me, shaking his head.