by Alina Simone
The Punk Monk slipped through a side door near the altar and emerged in his vestments a few minutes later with a careworn Bible in his hand. He led me to a makeshift altar and proceeded to read the Nicene Creed in Old Church Slavonic, slowly and sonorously. I repeated the words after him, slowly and badly. He asked me to renounce Satan, then to spit on him three times. I renounced Satan, then spat on the nondescript patch of vinyl flooring the Punk Monk indicated. With Satan well spat on, I was led to a stainless steel vat sitting in the middle of the room. It looked like the kind of tank used to cure pickles. The Punk Monk blessed the water, swinging the censer freely over its surface, and then he pulled a chair up to the vat, and I understood it was time for me to climb inside. I lowered myself over the edge and felt the warm pressure of the water rise to my shoulders, the suddenly heavy cotton of my shapeless dress brushing against my skin. The Punk Monk placed his hand on top of my head. I took a deep breath and thought to myself: I am a conformist.
Then I stopped thinking, and went down.
THE BENEFITS OF SELF-CASTRATION
I blamed my obsession with the castrati on Italy. I would even go so far as to claim it was a form of self-defense, because Italy keeps trying to kill me. Everyone tells me that I am supposed to love Italy. I do not. Partly this has to do with being a vegetarian—a culinary handicap in a country where the recipe for salting ham in a certain way is guarded with more care than a reporter visiting Pyongyang. And while I think pasta is okay, I am not about to adopt it as a personal religion. So my anxieties in Italy generally begin with my first meal as I wonder whether death by cheese overdose is a realistic possibility. More blasphemous thoughts are quick to follow. Italy is beautiful, I would say to myself, but why am I so bored here? Why is everyone always discussing tonight’s dinner while today’s lunch is still languishing in our mouths? Why does a debate about the relative sponginess of bufala inevitably escalate into violence? Why are there so many lonely, morose men lolling about reading Rilke and living with their mothers well into middle age? And where do they have sex? I did my best to tease out a response to this last question, but the answer always slipped away, elided by that legendary Italian charm. Eventually, one of the guys I toured with let drop that the grounds of the picturesque castle in his village served an important secondary function the tour guides failed to mention. This new information was helpful, but seemed to relegate sex to warm, dry weather.
The first time I toured Italy it was with four men stuffed into a Monterosso. In addition to the Italian trio I shared a bill with each night, there was our tour manager, Laurent, a Frenchman who happened to drive with the utmost of care. Unfortunately, Laurent had to return to his job in Toulouse a couple of days before the tour ended, which meant leaving me in the care of the Italians for our remaining shows. This news was worrisome because the Italians, though exceedingly charismatic and lovable, did not inspire confidence behind the wheel. For one thing, they were very prone to distraction on Italy’s already dodgy highways. Within the space of ten seconds, they could go from speaking quietly in their beautiful, mellifluous tongue, to communicating in a violent form of hands-off-the-wheel sign language where the only words were go, fuck, and yourself. Moreover, getting to our remaining shows meant getting an early start, and mornings were a notoriously difficult time for the Italians, who required large quantities of cigarettes and five tiny espressos just to get over the tragedy of not being asleep anymore.
Laurent took me aside again one last time before leaving.
“Are you abzolutely zure eet vil be okay?” he asked, with a meaningful stare.
“Of course,” I replied, full of false American bluster. “Don’t worry, Laurent. Eat some more cheese! Be happy!”
Less than four hours later, we hit the truck.
To be fair to the Italians, it was not a serious accident. It might even have qualified as the world’s slowest collision. The truck—a giant semi—was merging into our lane from the left, seemingly forever. I remember watching it ride alongside us, almost parallel with our tinfoil station wagon, until eventually we simply glided into each other and congealed, like two balls of polenta. There was the sound of tearing metal and then a shocked silence followed by the now familiar sound of Italians yelling at one another. My window disintegrated into a web of tiny crystals. They hung there for a moment and then began to fall softly into my hair, my lap, one by one. I got out of the car and stood on the side of the road calmly picking bits of glass out of my handbag while the Italians argued about whose fault it was. It was raining. Waiting there for the militsia, someone raised the question of whether it would be safe to continue on to our show that night despite the mangled bumper, lack of a driver’s-side mirror, and a missing back window. The answer turned out to be yes.
Despite my misgivings, I was convinced to return to Italy a year later when an acquaintance of mine, a singer-songwriter from Canada, suggested we tour Europe together. He promised this time it would be fun. He knew people—artists and dancers and fire-eating clowns. There would be visits to ancient ruins and exotic Jewish graveyards. Stupidly, I agreed—because what lures me into vans and onto airplanes is never the promise of money, but rather the promise of fire-eating clowns and Jewish graveyards. Tickets were purchased, cars were rented, and a tour that spanned from the edge of Sicily to the northern border with Switzerland was booked.
Why was I unsurprised when everything fell apart two weeks before we were supposed to leave for Reggio Calabria? My Canadian friend canceled due to a family emergency, and all hope for fun and adventure suddenly became vanishingly small. Now my fate depended entirely on the opening act, an Italian man we will call Giuseppe, whom I’d never met. The new plan was to use Giuseppe’s car for the tour. As luck would have it, though, there was another last-minute problemo. Giuseppe knew nothing about what had happened during my last visit to Italy, but it turned out he’d also just gotten into a terrible car accident, one he swore was not his fault. His car was totaled, but not to worry, he reassured me, we would do the tour in the replacement rental his insurance company had provided. I was not reassured.
During my first trip to Italy, I’d spent the entire tour engrossed in a 576-page biography of Rasputin, the famous Russian mystic whom my parents—both trained scientists—insisted possessed magical healing powers. When I was the only person in the Monterosso to remain stubbornly healthy despite the miserable flulike ailment that reduced all of my tourmates to sweaty wraiths horking into their Proseccos, I had to concede that perhaps my parents were on to something. Now, in those last anxious days before I left for Italy to commence a tour with another car-crashing Italian, I needed a new book to bring along with me. A page-turner that would guarantee me nothing short of oblivion, a total eclipse of the outside world and everyone around me. That was when I realized that only Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom could save me.
I had Rasputin to thank for introducing me to the Skoptsy; he was rumored to be a member of a related sect, the Khlysty. The biography mentioned the Skoptsy only in passing, but one could not help being struck by the central tenet of their theology: the practice of self-castration as a means of excising sin. It was the kind of detail that really begs for more attention. So when I got back to the States, I decided to do some research. The Skoptsy, first documented in the eighteenth century, were led by a series of homegrown mystics who wandered from village to village, castrating the faithful. The tsarist regime condemned and scattered them, from the Romanian city of Yassi to the farthest reaches of Siberia, yet the Skoptsy continued to thrive throughout the nineteenth century. Membership in the sect was eventually rumored to reach the hundreds of thousands. What photographs I could find online showed somber people with fleshy cheeks and pasty skin, oozing moral rectitude and clutching white handkerchiefs in their laps as symbols of purity.
Without denying that there was something more than a little icky about castration, I couldn’t help but admire the strength of their convictions. Among my dissolute circle of f
riends, everything was negotiable. If I said to one of them: “Consider this: Perhaps God is actually a pepperoni pizza?” they would scoff at me, yes, but not without that flash of self-doubt. I would see the questions hovering in their eyes: “Am I being too quick to judge? Could it all be a matter of semantics? What did she mean by that? I don’t want to be a jerk. Maybe God is a pepperoni pizza?” For the Skoptsy, it was clearly all or nothing—God could never, under any circumstances, be a pepperoni pizza. And there was one other undeniable reason to admire them: cutting off your balls took balls.
I was shocked to find that Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom was the only book available in English about the Skoptsy. Greedily, I purchased it right away and gave it a prominent place on my bookshelf, where it surprised and mortified houseguests for the better part of a year. Although I sometimes weakened and let myself flip through the insert in the middle featuring grisly black-and-white photos of naked castrati, mostly I waited for a sign that the right moment to read it had finally arrived. Giuseppe’s car crash, I decided, was that sign.
Giuseppe picked me up at the airport in Milan. On the way back to his apartment, he switched into reverse on a busy highway, traveled backward in the right lane for a good five hundred feet, then backed the wrong way down an off-ramp into a gas station he’d passed by accident. Normally, I would have found this kind of stunt to be quite alarming, but on that day it didn’t matter—I was already well into the story of Kondratii Selivanov, the wandering serf and early Skopets leader who rose to prominence in St. Petersburg high society. A few nights later, when Giuseppe slid into the car still clutching a tumbler full of Negroni from the bar where we’d just played, and drove home while drinking, barely palming the wheel with his free hand, I was too concerned with how the Skoptsy would weather their exile to Yakutsk—the coldest inhabited region on earth—to pay much attention. But it wasn’t until the last night of our tour that I realized the truly awesome power of the castrati to insulate and protect me.
It was our second-to-last show, and when the man approached me, I was sitting in a cavernous, cafeteria-like space in the community center in Trento, having just finished my sound check. As usual, I was reading Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom, and had become totally consumed by the tribulations of Nikifor Petrovich Latyshev, a long-suffering Skopets who lived well into the Stalin era.
“May I?” the man asked, gliding up and gesturing to the seat next to me. Reluctantly I nodded and put the book down. We were alone in a sea of empty tables and chairs.
“You will pardon me,” he began with a conspiratorial smile, leaning forward, “but I wanted to tell you that I only came here tonight for you. To hear you sing.”
“Is that right?” I asked brightly. I was deeply worried about Nikifor. It was 1932, his property had just been seized by the Soviet police, and they’d brought him in for questioning. What would they do once they learned he was a Skopets? Would Nikifor end up as just another victim thrown on the scrap heap of Stalin’s brutal collectivization policies?
“Yes. My friend told me to come. He found you on the internet.”
I couldn’t disagree that the internet had a wonderful way of bringing people together.
“Can I buy you a beer?” the man asked, after a longish pause.
I didn’t want a beer; I wanted to know whether Nikifor would be able to reclaim the little house he’d bought from Maria Bochkareva. Just four years earlier he’d been living peacefully with an elderly Skoptsina on a farmstead on the Kama River, raising cows and growing vegetables, but look at him now, with scarcely a potato to call his own …
“I actually get all the free beer I want for playing here tonight. But thank you.”
The man cast a glance around the room, looking a bit desperate. “Perhaps something to eat then … ?” he said.
“The venue already gave me dinner—another little perk of being a performer, I guess.” Here I tried to look wistful. “But it’s really very nice of you to offer.”
That is when his eyes lit hopefully upon the back cover of my book.
“Tell me,” he said, “what’s that you’re reading?”
Without thinking, I flipped the book over and handed it to the man, who seemed to wither visibly as he considered its title.
“It’s about the Skoptsy,” I offered. “They were a self-castrating Christian sect from Russia.”
“Sounds … painful,” he said, struggling to recast his grimace into a smile.
“Well, the Skoptsy actually practiced two forms of castration, one they referred to as the minor seal and the other as the major seal. I’m sure each was bad enough on its own, but I bet going in for both would have qualified as a real home run pain-wise, don’t you?”
The man was gone. He had slipped away, mumbling some excuse and leaving his glass of beer still half full on the table beside me. Without hesitating for a moment, I snatched up the book again, relieved to be reunited with Nikifor and very much hoping for some news about his elderly brother Fedor as well—but then I stopped, suddenly struck by the momentousness of what had just happened. Was it possible that I had just discovered the world’s first light, portable, and nonadhesive Annoying Man Repellent? One that could reach its full potency only here, in Italy, where men worship nothing so much as their own balls? The Italians were like free-jazz players when it came to describing their balls, with each new variation corresponding to a specific note on the scale of human discomfort. I’d heard them all: Ey! Quit breaking my balls! Stop squeezing my balls! Resist poking my balls! Do not apply a vibrating cell phone to my balls! I didn’t even know what Italian men would have left to say to one another if you took away their balls—they saw the world through ball-colored glasses. I gazed at the book, stunned, thinking this must be how those giant-squid hunters from Japan felt the first time the elusive Architeuthis swam into view. Did the author realize she had the makings of an empire here? Perhaps it wasn’t too late to entice her into some kind of partnership? Together, we could produce a dummy edition of the book, one made up of little more than a cover and a gruesome illustration, a version designed to do nothing more than allow girls the world over to sit in bars alone, unmolested …
My favorite line in Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom also serves as a succinct summary of the book itself: “The Skoptsy are difficult to love.” I could understand why people felt that way, and yet for some reason I didn’t find the Skoptsy difficult to love at all. True, mine was a love tinged with pity and muddled with horrified fascination—a cloudy, caipirinha kind of love. I loved the Skoptsy because they were creative free-thinkers. Unwilling to accept the strictures of the Russian Orthodox Church, they demonstrated a very bootstrappy, can-do attitude by simply inventing their own religion from scratch. Then, instead of just running about and proclaiming their weirdness, the Skoptsy quietly became successful farmers and traders, well known for their sobriety and diligence. Unwittingly, I found myself considering the benefits of self-castration. Didn’t all of us have certain urges we wished we could just walk away from? I started to think about what I might accomplish if, for example, I wasn’t so distractible, so easily scuttled by things like castrati research. Having banished physical desire, the Skoptsy in Bucharest were able to apply their newly acquired laser focus to cornering the horse-powered cab market. The possibilities, in other words, were endless.
But dedicated as the Skoptsy might have been to their cause, it was not difficult to poke holes in their theology. Even as far back as 1819, the first tract Tsar Alexander I commissioned to discredit the Skoptsy did a pretty good job by pointing out their failure “to realize that evil inhabits not the body but the soul.” The Skoptsy clung to some obscure bits of scripture to justify their antigenitalia stance, and pointed to Origen, an early Christian father who was supposedly castrated, as a role model, but all in all, I tended to agree with the tsar. Wasn’t it kind of cheating to just lop off one’s offending parts and sashay right up to Heaven? Moreover, even if the Skoptsy were right
about castration as a means of purification, the question remained, why stop at the privates? I mean, what about one’s covetous eyes and troublemaking mouth? Why weren’t fingers, which are very versatile and potentially evil appendages when you stop to consider them, included in the toolkit of sin? Maybe it was this failure to think through all the details that made the Skoptsy so endearing to me. After all, I too was a person resistant to analytic thinking and prone to making reckless decisions. And yet, becoming a Skopets was not like buying an armless mannequin at a sidewalk sale or trying out for a strip club in Pigalle on a dare. Becoming a Skopets is forever. You cannot hit Control-Z. You can’t undo. And because I had a keen sense of my own capacity to get very excited about something and then make irreversible, potentially disastrous decisions, when I considered the Skoptsy I did not feel at all self-righteous. Instead I thought: There but for the grace of God go I.
Eventually biology and the unforgiving march of progress wore the Skoptsy down. After the Russian Revolution, they found themselves stranded in an atheist country increasingly hostile to the quaint sectarian holdouts of the previous regime. Thwarted by their inability to procreate and saddled with a membership requirement many would consider a nonstarter, the Skoptsy vanished sometime in the 1930s. The final nail in their coffin was delivered in a series of show trials, punctuated by testimony from creepy Soviet outfits like the League of the Militant Godless. The demise of a self-castrating sect was clearly inevitable, but still, I found the news hard to accept. Because if they were truly gone, it meant that I would never fulfill my new dream, which was to hear the Skoptsy sing.
