Lies & Ugliness

by Brian Hodge

  Centuries of practice had evolved me into a warrior beyond reckoning. I’d seen every possible strategy of attack, by sword and spear, mace and war hammer, and by virtue of repetition only had to see the merest shift of foot or flex of arm to know how to counter. I couldn’t be fooled. I couldn’t be killed. I could scarcely even be touched.

  Kill ten enemies in a single battle and you’re worthy of respect. Kill twenty and you’re a hero. Fifty, and you’re a god. They fell to my blades like stalks of wheat before a sickle, and even Vlad Dracula took notice.

  “You fight like no mercenary I’ve ever seen,” he told me on a corpse-strewn field. “You fight as though you’d be here even if there was no pay in it.”

  I lodged in his castle. I shared his table. Surrounded by the bodies he’d had impaled and erected into a makeshift forest in his courtyard, we broke bread together and dipped it in bowls of warm blood.

  It was inevitable, I can see it now, that he would eventually spot me on a field littered with Turks, glutting myself from the very source. I’d done it so often I’d grown careless. When our eyes met, as I knelt on all fours over my kill like a jealous wolf, I knew that he finally understood. That he would see me dead for the abomination that I was.

  “Were you once a man?” he asked instead, while smoke gusted black and greasy from the burning dead.

  “Almost longer ago than I can remember,” I said. “I was.”

  He nodded with hideous desire. “Then you must have been made by another just like you. The same as you can make me.”

  I found it a horrible thing to ask. No one had ever asked to be what I was. Never.

  “The conquests still left before me,” he said, “and all the lives I’ve yet to take … these can’t be accomplished in one man’s lifetime. Perhaps they can be in one like yours.”

  And after it was done — days, maybe — I found myself wandering through that reeking forest of poles and corpses, blood and flies, once again in tears, begging for forgiveness. Not from them. But from all who would be sure to follow in their wake.

  I thought I was alone.

  But even then he seemed to see everything.

  VII

  On the morning of my latest execution:

  My elbows were broken by heavy mallets. Great gouges of flesh were ripped from my back by a man wielding an ugly chain flail. My thumbs were crushed in thumbscrews, while currents of electricity were jolted through my genitals and rectum.

  It would all heal in time, but the pain was real enough.

  When they deemed me sufficiently purified, I was dragged out before the public into a piazza adapted for executions, tied to a post, and shot with five rifles.

  That’s difficult for even one like me to shrug off. I suppose I looked dead enough for the moment.

  I understand that I bled spectacularly.

  VIII

  And in my dreams, while bone reformed and flesh knitted, the dreams I never seemed to have during ordinary sleep, because I was too guarded to be bothered by such things as simple regret…

  But in my death-dreams I see her again.

  It’s been just short of two weeks and yet I’ve forgotten so much about her. But in my dreams I remember what matters most.

  She sketches in a piazza, and for as long as I look at her the world seems friendly and promising again. I forget ghosts, I can no longer hear volcanoes. I dismiss every suspicious eye and the fear that narrows them, and I almost feel that I can be better than the thing that I am.

  Everywhere she goes she must carry with her a rare world in which grace is still possible. She looks at smoke but sees clouds. She looks past fallen trees and notices saplings. She holds the sketchpad against her knee and a fat charcoal pencil in her hand; an espresso rests beside her foot. She is the most beautiful creature who’s spoken to me in longer than I can remember.

  “Your face … is so familiar,” she tells me. “I may draw you, yes?”

  I let her. She does one sketch, then another. A third and a fourth. I rest between flips of the page, and once I close my eyes and tip back my head and feel the hair spill over my shoulders.

  “I have it now!” she cries, and then glances self-consciously about. She hurries closer because she thinks better of speaking too loudly. “Your face … is so like the face on the Shroud. Is amazing, the resemblance.”

  I smile, telling her I’ve heard this before.

  Aching so deep inside because I can’t tell her there’s a good reason for the familiarity.

  IX

  The bodies of political prisoners and religious penitents were rarely given burial, not when there was ample space beneath Rome, in catacombs that had been swallowing bones for centuries. There they would be laid and forgotten, and so was I.

  When I awoke to the smell of dust and mold and decay, he was waiting. He turned some anonymous ivory skull in his hands.

  “These weren’t my original plans at all, you know. But when you came to Rome, it was impossible to resist,” Vlad said. “I’ve felt your presence passing nearby at least a dozen times over the centuries. Close. But never so close as this time. You can’t have thought you’d walk in and out of my city without meeting again.”

  I shook my head. Probably not.

  “And you can’t have failed to realize it’s your face on that Shroud of theirs.”

  Again, I shook my head. My long-haired, bearded head, growing more recognizable by the day.

  “Then you wanted this, Hugh. You wanted it. I have the power to grant it. The Shroud has been locked away at Turin for many years. But I own the keys now.”

  “I think you want it more than I do,” I said.

  “Of course. I love the Church, but I’m not above destroying it completely. Which may happen, when people realize what we’ve done, who they’ll think we’ve put to death. I’ll take that chance. Your first public act can be forgiving your executioners. Or, instead of peace, you can bring a sword — as I said, I don’t need the cardinals anymore, now that I have you.

  “Either way, I’m giving the world something the Church never managed. Something it’s been promised for two thousand years. That should give my cattle enough to rally around, to survive the next few years. If they’ve lost faith in themselves, then perhaps the sight of you, and the news of your resurrection, will be enough to restore it.”

  “Your cattle? You still don’t care any more for them than that?”

  “Why should I? It’s an ancient principle, played out in nature countless times. If the deer die off, the wolves starve. Beyond that, what else is there to care about?”

  I tried to sit up, naked and sore and scabbed in this newest burial rag. “You really are the Devil, aren’t you?”

  He extended his hand. “So pleased to make your acquaintance, after all this time.”

  I took it, because what else could I do, too stiff to haul myself off that rough stone slab. Vlad steadied me on my feet.

  “Just remember,” he warned me. “You may be God incarnate. But you’re still in my hands.”

  He led me past the more fortunate dead, to the steps that would take us back up to the daylight world of affliction and need.

  The Alchemy of the Throat

  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 my little boy’s penis back toward my stomach, while another pair applied the knife to the soft parts below. My scrotum would ha
ve 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 away, the excess skin 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 chamber 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 the 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 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 adornment.

  “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’ 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 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 household 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 tiled 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.

&
nbsp; Francesca tapped once at Julius’ door, opened it, shut it after me without following. It seemed a vast room, dominated by a bed in which Julius’ 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, boy 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 now 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’ 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: