“I don’t know how it happened to me. All I know is that the deeper my despair took me, the more strength I seemed to take from the moans of those I was outliving. I know that I prayed, but my faith in the god we’d trusted for our victory was gone, so I prayed to whatever might listen, without caring what it was. Maybe something did. Or maybe it was something inside me and me alone, that hated so deeply and wanted so badly to live that it took the only thing left as its fuel to keep me alive: the things I could hear. The beautiful as well as the terrible. I fed on the deaths of my fellow slaves, until they all were gone, as far as the ear could hear. After that, I fed on the songs of birds. I hung there for nine days before the Romans grew so terrified of me laughing at them and cursing them that a centurion ordered me taken down and released. He begged me to forgive them. They thought they might have mistakenly crucified a minor god. I still find the irony in that very appealing.”
“What power you must have had over them,” I said.
“I told the centurion that forgiveness would be granted if he would fall on his sword in atonement.” Julius smiled. “He did it at once. I listened to the death-rattle in his chest, and it was as invigorating as a full night’s sleep.
“But I was never the same after that. Something inside me had changed forever. Whether it was a gain or a loss, I was never able to decide. But instead of looking at the world, from then on I was forced to hear it. I can drink so deeply of everything from the sound of wars to violins, it becomes part of me, sustains me. I hear colors, I hear smells. I hear the need in a bird that sings for a mate, and I hear the bland evil monotony in the machines of a factory. I hear things most people could, but never do, because they never take time to close their eyes and listen.”
I wondered what such a life would be like, drawing sustenance from the world’s ticking clockwork . . . no distinction between its ugliness and its beauty. They told us in the conservatory that one could behold no greater grandeur than what ears would admit – even the sight of a celestial choir would diminish in comparison to its song – and this was why we castrati were so special, anointed. As Julius had said, we made ourselves sacred by our voices. Did some of that grace seep into him, through the act of listening?
Perhaps this was why Julius had brought me here. Such sounds as war, as children screaming in an inferno, might have kept him alive, but might they not also have slowly poisoned him without some antidote to soothe their distilled misery?
Julius’ hand slid higher, to my knee. “You were wrong about one thing, not long ago. You said that those of us lucky enough to hear you may love the sound of your voices, but that the need was yours. The need to be heard. But I need you more than you can ever know. You keep me young. Since you came, I’ve felt more whole than I have in a very long time. Against the years, you are my tonic.”
“Then why did you chance driving me away with the past four days?”
“Before I came to depend on you any deeper, I had to know if you would stay. And I had to know what I could endure to keep you. When I found you with Lilah? I didn’t know until then that I still could feel the pain of jealousy.” His eyes began to drift closed. “Or maybe all I wanted was to dirty you up, turn you into something closer to what I am, and the rest of us.” He laughed. “How strange, all of us coming together the way we do. But we’re proof that, if you live long enough, no matter how aberrant you may be, you’ll eventually find you’re not completely alone.”
Alone. I dwelt upon the word, its implications like the tolling of a funeral bell. Was anyone more alone than a castrato who had grown up with others like himself, only to be separated from them forever? How outcast must he be that he felt grateful for being accepted by those who bled and milked those weaker than they, who sodomized angels?
But if being part of the normal world meant spending my days with those who might point and mock me for what I was, who would think me their lesser for what I had lost, I wanted no part of it.
Was it this rejection of convention that gave the damned their defiant lusts? If this is what the world has made me, they seemed to be saying, then let it live with the consequences.
I smiled at Julius, handed him a slippery cake of soap.
“You smell like a pile of dirty bedsheets in a brothel,” I said.
His laughter rang from the tiles. “However would you recognize that smell?”
“I have imagination, don’t I?”
He joined me in the tub, and we filled it to overflowing with fresh hot water, curling into its depths and into one another. We soaped each other with great slick lathers, and when we kissed for the very first time, for me it was like being devoured by a creature made of time, beyond time. His mouth might engulf me whole, in a way that Lilah’s never could.
And when he sculpted me so that I rested on my knees with my elbows propped on the rim of the tub, and took me as he had the Ophanim, a wet shuddering pressure bearing down upon my back, I discovered that Julius understood tenderness as thoroughly as he understood the intricacies of infernal pain.
* * *
I had to wonder what Francesca thought when she returned. Her flat gaze couldn’t help but pick up on that which already seemed obvious to me in the mirror: I was different, it would show in my face. I had seen Julius’ life as it really was, had tasted of it . . . and had been seduced by its exotic flavors.
I would sometimes catch Francesca watching me over the months that followed, when she wasn’t away on what was again explained as family visits. Happy months for me, secure beneath Julius’ wing as he himself was buoyed by my songs, and the hours seemed too short, filled as they were with wine and music, art and talk, the sacred and profane. And always, the sweaty delights of the flesh. I thought of those first few clumsy couplings at the conservatory, the way many of us had turned to one another in the absence of girls. A mouth was a mouth, the voice of a lover in an ear no less welcome for its male timbre. But they’d been boys; I had loved boys. Julius had had centuries to perfect the art of being the man he was.
Perhaps Francesca resented the way I was no longer a simple acquisition of her master, having instead become someone he truly cherished. Someone who could give her orders as well.
But when I awoke one day to discover I had sung so much my throat felt like a raw scrape, and lay weak and feverish beneath the covers, Francesca was there to feed me warm broth and sips of a lemon and honey mixture. Her stern face let me know that I was to finish every drop; her veined hands looked stronger than iron, the hands of a woman who has borne countless burdens, and is all the stronger for their weight and the bruises they left.
“He’s terrified of you losing your voice, you know,” she told me. “It would be more than he could bear now, I think.”
“It’s just strain, and a virus.” My speaking voice was a lame whisper. “I’ll be good as new in a week.”
She forced more broth down me. “I’m sure you will. But you’ll lose it one day. The years will take their toll.”
Living as we did for our music, this was the one tragedy that castrati did not want to think about. At the conservatory we had heard a recording of the last great castrato the world at large had been blessed to know. Alessandro Moreschi had, as an old man, still been singing at the dawn of the twentieth century, when recording technology was in its infancy. He’d been the only castrato of old ever recorded, and in listening, we, his grandsons under the knife, could spot the ravages of time. In this we could hear our own futures.
“I’ll be dead by the time that happens,” Francesca said. “But where will that leave Julius? The same place he’s been too many times, too many times.”
“But he’s lived so long,” I whispered. “If two thousand years isn’t time enough to learn to deal with it, what is?”
Francesca smacked the spoon into the empty bowl. “Of course Julius can deal with your loss. He found you when he needed you, didn’t he? He can find another. But he’ll hurt. How he will hurt.”
“After so long, he
’s not beyond pain?”
“He lives,” Francesca said, very simply. “And life is pain. You learned that lesson when you were a boy.” And then, of all the things I never expected from her, came the most unexpected. She smiled so disarmingly I might not have recognized her on a Capua road. “But enough talk. Rest. Rest that lovely voice of yours. And then, when you are well? There’s something I wish to show you.”
Julius doted on me during my days of recovery, sitting at my bedside. He chatted amiably, but it was just that: pleasantries with which to pass time, meant to build a wall around the fears of loss that for the first time seemed real. The honeymoon was over. I might be accepted by his immortal friends, but I could never be one of them. Perhaps this was what angered them most, caused them to rage so defiantly against a sterile heaven that would never accept them. They knew they were stuck with one another for the ages, that mortal friends and lovers, their lifespans like those of goldfish, would always be dying on them.
“How many were there before me?” I asked him one afternoon, the sky beyond the window the cold rainy gray of early winter.
He looked genuinely surprised I would ask this. “Why should it matter?”
“Because it does.”
Julius nodded. “Many. There have been many. But if you want numbers . . .”
“No.” I shook my head. “Were there other castrati?”
“One other, years ago. Beginning in the late thirties.” Fine lines creased his forehead. “I met Mussolini at that recital. He was getting his own, imagine that.” Julius met my eyes, seemed to read my mind, and that which seemed to me as important as it was pointless. “Of the two, yours is the better voice.”
“Did you love him?”
“I needed him. Just as I needed them all. Men and women and castrati alike. What a choir all of you would have made, if you’d lived the same lifetime.” Julius’ hands found my bedsheets, idly began to twist them into knotted cables as his voice grew ever more husky. “I needed them, the same as I need you . . . because the world I hear is a world that’s screaming, and those screams are my meat . . . and if I don’t have a voice like yours around me, then I just might lose what’s left of my mind. So I use you up until your throat is a dry husk, and I cast you aside and go on to the next. So you tell me, Vanni: Where in that process do you think there’s any room for love?”
“Where?” I echoed, with Mona Lisa’s smile. Knowing as only a trained musician can how music’s beauty is best defined not by its notes, but by its rests. “In the silence.”
But I was sure that Julius already knew.
Viruses burn themselves out, fevers cool, throats lose their rough edges. I was on my feet again and happy to be alive.
Francesca remained true to her word, waiting until late one morning when Julius was engrossed in paperwork and a conference call on the vast holdings he’d accumulated over his centuries. She led me out the back of the villa, past the amphitheater, through the gardens where statues now stood like lords over their withered flowers, with brittle stems and brown blossoms. I could crush one in my hand, grind it to a powdery spice of sweet decay, let it sift to the ground . . . and the frozen old gods would silently approve with their stone eyes.
“There’s no reason for you to have known this,” she told me, “but there has always been a Francesca in Julius’ house.”
“Always? For two thousand . . .?”
“Well, for many generations. To me that is always – at my age, especially. Before me, my mother; before her, my grandmother; her mother before her . . . for many generations a Francesca. A legacy from mother to daughter, passed along with the name. Through wars and bad times as well as good, our family has been well cared for by Julius’ generosity, and we’ve been proud to serve him.” She looked to the cold sky with such sadness that I wanted to hold her, in spite of how I still wasn’t sure I actually liked her. “But no more. All that? It’s about to come to its end. I birthed no daughters. No sons, either. I will be the last Francesca.”
Our long coats snapping loosely in the wind, she led me to a building that lay beyond the gardens, a squat marble hall half-swallowed by ivy. I’d been curious about it in the beginning, but it had always seemed unused, as forgotten as the gods one had to pass to get here. Francesca unlocked its heavy door with an iron key, and we stepped into its dim interior. It looked no more complicated inside than it had from out, just a simple length of hall, its air musty and brittle with the chill that only marble walls can hold.
When my eyes grew used to the gloom, I made out the rows of vaults lining the far wall, the older ones sealed with engraved stone slabs, newer ones adorned with lettered brass plates. The dead slept here, dozens of them, and I had never known.
“His nightingales,” said Francesca. “Julius claims he can still hear them, when he tries very hard, but I’ve never heard a thing. If it gives him comfort, though . . .”
I walked before the nearest stone facings, running my fingers over the names, dates . . . touching them as if I too could hear their songs arising from their pillows of rock. These singers who must have been magnificent.
Francesca took me by the hand, led me down the row until halting before one tomb with a marker that I first thought was freshly polished, so bright was the brass. Only when I saw the name did I realize that it had had no time yet to tarnish:
GIOVANNI PETRELLI
That there were no dates meant nothing. It’s still a fright to be shown your own grave.
“To my knowledge, this is the first time Julius has prepared a vault far before it’s needed,” said Francesca. “He needs it. He comes out here often, to remind himself that you too will someday leave him. Just . . . as I soon will.”
I slowly turned away from the sight of my name to face her.
“I’m dying, Vanni. Soon. Much too soon. I have things growing inside me.” She had a narrow smile for my shocked expression. “All my ‘family trips’? Doctors. Julius doesn’t know yet, and I expect he won’t hear it from you, no? And I ask one other thing: I can guess what you must think of me. But don’t think me a cold old woman because I never tried to know you better. It wasn’t you I was trying to avoid . . . just the need to say goodbye someday.”
“It’s too late,” I told her, and we stood in the chill gloom, huddled within our coats as we dared one another to care, to feel, to reach out for a touch of warmth against whatever awaited us one day. I was drawn to look once more at my brass name. “Why? Why show me this?”
Sighing, Francesca drew herself very straight, tall as she could stand. Her gaze lingered on the crypt wall, and I noticed that her tight bun of hair was beginning to fray.
“All things end,” she said. “My life, yours, your voice . . . my family . . . empires. All things. Except for Julius. He goes on. But I believe he goes on because he fears what may come next. If it’s painful he will hate it. And if it’s too loving, I think he will hate it all the more. Even so, I think he would like to find out, if only he had the courage. And someone to find out with. To grow old and die with. We can endure a lot, if we’re not alone.”
As she must have been. Poor Francesca – she might never have spoken from any greater personal experience.
“How much would you sacrifice to live out the rest of your days as a normal man?” she said.
“I’m not the one to ask. Even though something wonderful did come of it . . . what was taken from me is gone forever.” And it was fed to a dog . . . wasn’t that right?
Her narrow smile reappeared. “But if you could trade your voice for what they cut away, would you?”
It forced me to think. Would I relinquish that seraphic voice for the chance to be all its creation had denied me? A husband and father; a grandfather? The greater part of me rejected it, for that life was so very commonplace. Yet it was exotic, too, for it was something I could never, ever achieve.
“I don’t know,” I told her.
“I believe Julius would. I believe he’s ready. At long last, he’
s ready.”
“But how? Julius is . . . what he is. As you say, he goes on.”
“All things end,” she said once more. “When they seem not to, the trick is to find the sacrifice. And” – her smile began to broaden – “the heart to love enough to look for it.”
* * *
She died two months later, when winter seemed its coldest, its wettest. She died with us at her side, not so far gone that she didn’t know we were there, although I wasn’t fooled. Francesca died alone, just the same. But she died well, her eyes open to the final minute, with spirit enough to extend either an open hand or a clenched fist to whatever met her beyond life’s lacy black veil, depending on whether she liked it or not.
I hoped to meet her again someday, when my turn came. But not too soon.
“No Francesca,” said Julius, the day after she was buried. He stood in the doorway to the kitchen that was nothing like the one she’d kept, filled now with dirty utensils and strong whiffs of food past its prime. “I’d forgotten what that was like. There was always a Francesca.”
“Always?”
His back to me, his short ponytail tangled upon one shoulder, Julius nodded. “As good as always.” When he turned in the doorway, I saw that he was crying, slow tears rolling down cheeks that had never seemed sharper. “I never told her foremothers to pass that name down through the generations. They just did it. All on their own. I think it must have been a kindness to me, so that when one died, or grew too ill to continue working, it would be all the easier to welcome the next. I’d always know whom to expect.”
“Is that such a good thing?”
Julius bit his lip before shrugging his slumped shoulders. “I don’t know anymore. Francescas came and Francescas went. I could know their name a hundred years before they got here; that, and one other thing: that someday they would die. I always knew to expect that much . . . and still, I was never ready when it happened.”
We lived in silence for the rest of the day, except for those lone moments when the winter wind blew especially hard, shifting course for a time, coming from the brittle gardens and the crypt beyond. On the wind seemed carried the songs of ages past, sung by dead throats, and we would look at each other, Julius and I, as if daring the other not to hear it.
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