Nita turned to accept the brandy. Imogen touched her glass against Nita’s and then they both drank.
“Why’d you pick me?” Nita asked.
“The name on the flyer outside the club first caught my eye,” Imogen said. “Then, when I began to study your life, I realized that we are much the same. I was like you, before the change—deadened by the ennui of my life, feeding on the admiration of those who courted my favour much the same as you do with those who come to watch you dance. It’s not such a great leap from using their base interest as a kind of sustenance to taking it from their flesh and blood.”
Nita couldn’t think of anything to say in response to that, so she took another sip of her brandy.
“I want you to have this when I’m gone,” Imogen went on.
“Have what?”
Imogen made a languid movement with her arm that encompassed the penthouse. “This place. Everything I have. I’ve already made the arrangements for everything to be transferred into your name—barring unforeseen difficulties, the transaction will be completed tomorrow at noon.”
“But—”
“I have amassed a considerable fortune over the years, Nita. I want it to go to you. It will give you a chance to make a new start with your life.”
Nita shook her head. “I don’t think it’d work out.”
She’d won a thousand dollars in a lotto once. She’d planned to do all sorts of sensible things with it, from taking some development courses to better herself to simply saving it. Instead, she’d partied so hearty over the space of one weekend she’d almost put herself in the hospital. The only reason she hadn’t ended up in emergency was that everybody else that weekend had been too wasted to help her. She still didn’t know how she’d managed to survive.
“It’d just make me fuck up big-time,” she said.
Imogen nodded—not so much in acceptance of what she was saying, Nita realized, as to indicate that she was listening.
“I have to admit that I haven’t been entirely honest with you,” Imogen said. “What we’re about to embark upon when the sun rises could be very dangerous to you.”
“I… don’t understand.”
“I won’t die the instant the sunlight strikes me,” Imogen said. “It will take a few minutes—enough time for the beast inside me to rise. If it can feed immediately and get out of the sun, it will survive.”
“You mean you’d… eat me?”
“It’s not something I would do, given a choice. But the survival instinct is very strong.”
Nita knew about that. She’d tried to kill herself three times to date—deliberately, that is. Twice with pills, once with a razor blade. It was astonishing how much she’d wanted to survive, once it seemed she had no choice but to die.
“I will fight that need,” Imogen told her. “It’s why I’ve been fasting. To make the beast weak. But I can’t guarantee your safety.”
Nita filled in the silence that followed by lighting a cigarette.
“Understand,” Imogen said. “It’s not what I want. I don’t normally have conversations with my meals any more than you would with a hamburger you’re about to eat. I truly believe that it’s time for me to put the monster to rest and to go on. Long past time. But the beast doesn’t agree.”
“You’ve tried this before, haven’t you?” Nita asked.
Imogen nodded.
“What happened?”
“I’m still here,” Imogen said.
Nita shivered. She silently finished her cigarette, then butted it out in an ornate silver ashtray.
“I’ll understand if you feel you must leave,” Imogen said,
“You’d let me go—even with everything I now know?”
Imogen gave her a sad smile. “Who’d believe you?”
Nita lit another cigarette. She was surprised to see that her hands weren’t even shaking.
“No,” she said. “I’ll do it. But not for the money or this place.”
“It will still be in your name,” Imogen said.
Unspoken between them lay the words: if you survive the dawn.
Nita shrugged. “Whatever.”
Imogen hesitated, then it seemed she had to ask. “Is it that you care so little about your life?”
“No,” Nita said. “No matter how bad shit gets, whenever it comes down to the crunch, I always surprise myself at how much I want to live.”
“Then why will you see this through?”
Nita smiled. “Because of you. Because of what you said about us having to be strong and stand up for each other. I won’t say I’m not scared, ‘cause I am, but…” She turned to the glass doors that led out onto the balcony. “I guess it’s time, huh? We better get to it before I bail on you.”
She put down the glass and butted out her cigarette after taking a last drag. Imogen stepped forward. She brushed Nita’s cheek with her lips, then hand in hand they went out onto the balcony to meet the dawn.
* * *
The Alchemy of the Throat
by Brian Hodge
My mutilation was accomplished when I was a child of seven. I no longer remember myself any other way.
A recollection of such an act must be buried deep within, but beyond me, lost as I was to a drugged haze. Even so, when I dwell upon it, the event becomes as vivid as only imagination can make it. It must have been very much like this:
Those to whom my parents sold me plied me with sweets or trinkets, winning my trust until they got me to the conservatory hidden in the Sicilian countryside. And until they got me into the cutting room. Having rendered me insensible, they pulled my pants to my ankles, then held me flat atop a table that was as sterile as they could make it. Hands would have briefly held the little boy’s penis back toward my stomach, while another pair applied the knife to the soft parts below. My scrotum would have been opened swiftly, slit like a small plum and its contents cut out, unwanted pulp. I imagine some snaggletoothed mongrel being tossed these warm and bloody grapes, although there’s no reason to believe that actually happened. It distinguishes it for me, though, and that’s enough.
Once they were through, my empty sac would have been sewn shut, or the incision simply cauterized. As I grew, the useless and barren scrotum withered to nothing, the excess reabsorbed by my body, leaving nothing behind but the puckered ridge of scar that curves back between my thighs.
It was done for the sake of music, of course, just as it was done centuries ago. In Italy, some traditions date back so far they have become institutions with lives of their own, and to argue against them must be like trying to argue with God.
And when traditions must go underground to survive, it sets them in stone harder than granite.
To the world at large, the castrati sopranos are a vestige of centuries past. I know better, can sing a different tale with a voice that those who trained me told me surpassed even that of an angel. And training me, and others like me, is their life’s purpose, to preserve that which most believe lost to the past.
One of the maestros who taught me the vocal arts was fond of saying that a true castrato is born, not made.
It was several years before I knew what he meant by that.
I was twenty when sent away from the conservatory. My training was complete, my education beyond the arts comprehensive, and my voice honed and polished for thirteen years, an instrument on which a small fortune had been lavished.
An even greater fortune purchased it outright.
While our voices, our songs, were a part of daily life, once each year the maestros opened the conservatory to those whose wealth was so fabulous that nothing in the world was denied them. From across the globe they would fly to Palermo; then a small fleet of hired cars would sweep across the Sicilian countryside to converge upon our ancient edifice of stone and tiles. When rested and dined, they would fill the velvety purple seats in our auditorium, and we would take the stage—the castrati, from whom our lives of birth had been stolen, in their place substituted a regimen that we
came to embrace as we came of age because it was the only choice left to us. The outside world no longer existed for us, as we were no longer made for it.
So with our audience waiting, a small orchestra would take up its instruments, and we would sing in voices high and sweet and powerful, voices that could plunge even angels into despair over being denied them. Operas by Scarlatti, arias by Verdi, liturgies that had once rung out in the Sistine Chapel for the pleasure of popes… music penned for throats just such as ours. Voices whose beauty had always been unearthly—a soprano’s range driven by the power of a male chest—but never more so than now, with so few privileged to hear it.
As we performed, solos were taken by older castrati, those in their late teens whose days at the conservatory were drawing to a close. Librettos had been distributed to the audience so they might know who was who, with ample margins left for notetaking.
After the performance, we would mingle over wine and baroque chamber music with our potential benefactors, so they might get to know us up close, and pay us the adoration we had been awaiting for years. We craved it like starving puppies, lapped it up for hours. They would fly home then.
And within another day or two, the silent auction began.
His name was Julius, and when I learned he had offered top bid for me, I did recall him: a man of slight build and a slouching elegance when he sat, with the refined and light-skinned features of northern Italy. His blond hair he wore gathered back in a short limp ponytail, and his eyes I especially remembered as watchful and smoky gray.
I felt a distinct relief; Julius had seemed kind, even respectful. Many of the boys I had grown up with would be making their new homes with leering old men whose money could purchase only the thinnest veneer of refinement. In my room, a week before all the financial and travel arrangements would be completed, I remember feeling quite lucky.
He sent men in his employ to meet me in Palermo, and take me over from the conservatory’s escorts, and back I went with them to southern Italy, just outside of Capua. He lived in a huge old villa, a rambling fortress of cool marble worn smooth by centuries and laced with ivy. The gardens had gone to riot, choked with flowers that needed better tending, a colorful bedlam out of which rose crumbling statues of old Roman gods and goddesses, heroes and heroines. Fountains splashed with greenish water, in which frolicked frozen nymphs and satyrs.
It possessed an ageless beauty, and I, the castrato Giovanni, was but its newest fixture.
“It originally belonged to a Roman senator, as a secondary home,” Julius explained as he gave me the tour. “I’ve had it restored, and remodeled to accommodate modern conveniences, but beyond that, I’ve tried not to tamper with the feel of the place. I’m mostly content to know he walked here… whoever the fat old sybarite was. It’s my joke upon him, and that has to be enough. By now I can’t help but realize it can never be much of a triumph.”
I found it an odd thing to say, and frowned, as if there had to be more that he wasn’t telling me. I realized Julius was older than I’d thought at the conservatory, small lines cut around his mouth and his eyes. Perhaps it was the harshness of the sun. At my puzzlement, Julius waved his hand in the air, dismissive.
“You’ll understand, in time.”
I nodded, as if this made perfect sense. It was what my kind had been taught to do; we knew so little of the world beyond the conservatory. Our education was broad, so that we would be well equipped to converse with our benefactors. But what had we really seen, experienced? So little. We’d been born into poverty, every one of us, a salvation to our parents when we displayed precocious talent for song. But all we’d done was exchange the limitations of poverty for a cloistered life as carved throwbacks to an earlier century.
Capua, and life with a new master, was an entirely new world to me. My first night under Julius’s roof, I huddled in a corner of my room, hugging my arms about my body as it trembled, as tears ran freely. And where were the friends of my youth this night, my brothers, lovers, cut by the same cruel blade? Did they miss me as much as I missed them? I would never see them again, never know their fates. It seemed a deeper loss than that left between my legs. I’d not felt orphaned since I was seven years old, but this night it was as if my family had died to me all over again.
I was roused by a late-night knock at the door. I splashed my face with water from a bowl before answering. In the doorway stood Francesca, the short, compact old woman who, as near as I could tell, ran the daily business of the house for Julius. She cooked for him, supervised the cleaning by maids who came in from town, had seemed terribly unfriendly to me when we were first introduced and looked no kinder tonight. Her whitening hair she wore pulled back in a severe knot; her eyes were as even as an executioner’s, and nearly as warm.
“He’s ready for you now.”
I blinked stupidly. I’d not been told to expect a summons.
“In his bedchamber.” Francesca glared, impatient. “A song? Or did the maestros cut away a portion of your brain, too?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I—I…” Oh, what a terrible impression I was making on my first day here. I grabbed a towel to dry my face, then let her lead me to where Julius lay, awaiting some lullaby to ease him to sleep.
As I paced the cool stone floors, I thought of those who had, in centuries past, performed similar duties. History’s most famous castrato, an eighteenth-century Neapolitan known as Farinelli, conquered the stages of Europe, but gave up his career at the age of thirty-two to serve as nightingale to the court of King Philip V of Spain. Summoned by the queen, Farinelli first roused the king from a somber depression that confined him to bed, refusing to bathe, and afterward, for ten years sang the same four arias every night at Philip’s bedtime.
Our voices can work magic; this too is old tradition.
Francesca tapped once at Julius’s door, opened it, shut it after me without following. It seemed a vast room, dominated by a bed in which Julius’s slim form was nearly lost. Soft moonlight spilled through the windows, dappling the room with shadows and a blue luster. Approaching the bed, I felt a peculiar power steal over me. This was what I was meant for. Julius may have been the master, but once I opened my mouth, I would be the one in control.
Our eyes met in the gloom, each of us expectant. Lying there, he seemed many things to me, most of them contradictions. Julius was ageless and ancient, child and crone, a cruel sodomite and a tender saint.
“Is there some special song you have in mind?” I asked.
He shook his head against its pillows, the silky blond hair unbound and glowing with moonlight. “Whatever you like.”
I discarded all the music I knew for the stage; it might have been beautiful enough, but did not seem appropriate for a lullaby. Instead I lifted my voice with music intended to glorify something higher, written for the throats of young boys, with sweet innocent voices. What I lacked in innocence, I could more than compensate for in feeling. Through “L’abondance Cibavit” and “Alleluia,” “Pange Lingua” and “Ave Verum,” my voice rang warmly off the stone walls, cocooned us with its strange presence, turned Julius’s room into a sanctuary.
I gazed at him as the notes lifted, soared, watching as he lay with eyes closed, soaking in every nuance. He was a sponge, taking in all that poured from my throat, my soul. His brow would furrow, then relax; beneath the sheets his body would flex taut, then sink with exhaustive splendor.
Every singer hopes for such an audience: one who listens so raptly, riding the crest of every note, until it no longer feels as if the song is being shaped by the singer at all. It felt instead that the music lay within me, perfect and whole, as pure as it had been imagined by its composer as he set it to paper, and Julius was pulling it from me as he might reel in a rope. I lost myself, floating among the notes, until the music was finished.
Silence, for many moments. Then:
“Splendid, Giovanni,” he whispered. “Absolutely splendid.”
I smiled, wondering if he coul
d 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 own 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?
Love in Vein Page 25
