Excerpt from Lawrence Louis Goldman's
THE CASTRATO
SOURCE: Lawrence Louis Goldman: The Castrato: A Novel (New York: The John Day Company, 1973)
Hard to imagine that once he did not know "il benedetto coltello." Yet the time had been when to the boy Carlo Broschi, pursuing his child's way through his native village of Maratea, the sign outside the window of the barber-surgeon had meant nothing.
"Cui se castrano ragazzi."
Not precisely nothing, either: from the simpering grins of the older boys, the words whispered behind a hand, words he strained to hear but could not, from the turned faces of the town's women as they passed the shop, from the very reluctance of anyone to discuss or explain, the message came over clearly. Here was something wrong, repulsive, nasty, and therefore magnetically attractive.
He tried asking his mother. She, always sickly and wrapped up in her own miseries, curtly put him off. "It's what happens to evil boys as punishment for their sins."
That came as a shock, and brought worry. God knew he had sins on his soul. Fra Marco had told him often enough that every sin carried its own terrible retribution. God (whom the child's mind pictured as another Fra Marco, death's-head features knifing darkly from beneath the enveloping monk's cowl, bony finger forever raised to upbraid little Carlo for some transgression), God saw all, overlooked nothing. If He delayed punishment, it was only that He might later bring it down on the transgressor all the more fearfully.
So, when it happened to Carlo, he could be sure it had happened in payment for sin. But which sin? The thunderclaps that had split open his world so suddenly ended his childhood in a trice - which of his vile trespasses had finally angered a vengeful Fra Marco-cum-God into such terrible judgment?
Could it be his sins with Maddalena in her father's tannery loft, amid the odoriferous stacked hides? Her father, coming upon them so engrossed in their exploration of each other's bodies had appeared to Carlo a bearded Moses with eyes flashing fury. Surely the drubbing he received for that should expiate such innocent sin?
They were forbidden to play together again, yet they did, many times, and were not caught again. According to Fra Marco, God must have watched silently, tallying up the mounting score, biding His good time to strike.
Could it have been the night when, unable to sleep, he had crept out of the bed he shared with Ricardo and investigated the noises in his parents' chamber? That had been a sin indeed! What was his father doing to his mother? And why?
Long after he learned otherwise, his mind persisted in tying that fearful memory to his mother's death. As a man, he knew that his mother had not died until later; still, on recalling the one, memory instantly trailed his mother's coffin down the dusty street, lowered it into the waiting grave, with harsh finality heard the dismal clump of clods and watched the lid disappear from sight.
Guilty! Guilty! Sinful! Wicked, wicked Carlo!
But it was with the matter of Pepito that a vengeful God seemed to lose whatever patience He had left for Carlo. Many times, trying to sleep on the punishing straw pallet in the monastery at Montelume, or later on the more comfortable bunk-bed provided by Niccolo Porpora at Sant'Onofre Conservatory, he courted sleep in sweat and trembling, ticking off his sins. Always he came to the conclusion that it must have been in the matter of Pepito.
The shattering revelation had begun with Vittorio, two years older than Carlo, and a bully.
Crowing: "You don't know what it's all about!"
And little Carlo, hotly denying the ignorance that shamed him: "Do, too!"
"Then tell me!"
"You know!"
"Tell me!"
The challenge had to be met. Scuffling, the older boy got Carlo down on the dirt of the road. A carter guided his horse to the side, avoiding the fighting boys but scarcely seeing them; old women in black hurried by, clutching string bags of onions gleaned from the fields, did not even glance at them.
"Tell me,"
I won't"'
"Because you can't"
No answer. The pain of his arm twisted behind his back was bearable. He felt very close to learning, at last, the straight of the furtive evasions. Or was it bearable because he knew that Vittorio and Maddalena were affianced from their cradles, and that the pain expiated his sin?
Vittorio released his arm with a scornful, "I'll show you," and clutched at Carlo's vital parts. The younger boy screamed.
"It hurts, eh?''
Outraged, he grabbed for Vittorio. "You... you... How'd you like it if..."
The older boy moved easily out of reach and laughed. And then he told him.
Carlos mouth dropped open. "But... why?''
"Makes you sing better."
Now Carlo laughed aloud, lie knew Vittorio was lying.
Nothing could make him sing better. Nothing like that, certainly. Wasn't he the star of the church choir, singled out even at his tender age for the solo passages by the hawk-faced Fra Marco? Didn't he have the sweetest soprano, the most perfect control? Hadn't he wrung out of Fra Marco himself the admission that no boy learned so quickly, grasped the essential musical phrase so readily?
Vittorio in the face of Carlo's unbelief, defended himself hotly. "All right. What about Roberto, 'Cesco, Guiliermo? You know where they are now?"
Carlo knew. "The Conservatore."
He felt a chill uttering the word. Among the children of the town the Conservatore had a vaguely dark, awesome, although not clearly defined reputation. It was a place where boys disappeared forever. Whispered rumors of bondage, mistreatment, prison-like existence filtered hack to the town, magnified in childish minds into some Dantean lower circle of hell.
Carlo still couldn't connect the Conservatore with the frightening mutilation Vittorio had described. It just didn't make sense.
"You know Pepito?" Vittorio persisted. "How about Pepito?"
"Pepito?" Carlo stared at him, stunned.
"Sure! Ask him!"
The image of Pepito Graffano struck Carlo as particularly outlandish. Almost twenty, gawky, prone to silly laughter and quick tears from the teasing of the younger choirboys, he stuck up like a Christmas candle in robes that had to be specially made for his lank, angular, knock-kneed frame, while his head seemed to be perpetually bowed from the constant vituperations of Fra Marco at his awkwardness.
"But he - his voice..."
Vittorio nodded wisely. "It don't always work." He edged closer to Carlo. "You know, Pepito would show you."
"He wouldn't!"
"If you paid him, he would."
"I don't have any money."
"Your father does."
Carlo's father, mayor of Maratea, strode importantly about the town always with his broad red magistrato's sash prominently across his peacock chest. Among the boys he was reputed to possess untold wealth. Carlo had never seen any of it, however; he heard only complaints about the exorbitant price of everything his mother, and later Aunt Rosa, had to purchase.
Vittorio urged, "Pepito would show you for a lira."
A lira? Carlo knew where he could find that much. Would it be missed? Was it a chance worth taking?
"Will you ask him?"
"Sure!" Vittorio was as excited by the prospect of seeing this freak of humankind as was Carlo. "You get the money, I'll ask him." He looked sharply at the other. "You'll get it?"
The dusty street toward home down which Carlo hurried took him past the tannery. Still, it would have meant the long way round to avoid it. As he expected, Maddalena's father sat in the sun before his shop, his scraper working a hide thrown across his knee. Carlo hoped he wouldn't look up, but he did, naturally, and glowered until the boy, feeling the grim eyes bore into his back, turned a corner of a building and escaped them.
He breathed easier, and slowed down.
"Carlo."
His heart jumped at that voice. "Hello, Maddalena."
She saw his involuntary glance backward and laughed. "Don't worry about Papa. He can't see us."
She came out of the shadow and stood, framed in sunlight. The sight of the fresh-faced girl, her eyes dancing with sparks of light, caused him as always to gasp a little and suck in his breath. It had happened to him only recently, this sudden separation of one girl creature from the landscape of which she had been another meaningless part all of his life. A strange, wonderful, devastating experience; nothing in his background had prepared him to cope with it. Every time he saw her he felt agonies of apprehension lest he shatter this frail and beautiful relationship; yet when he was out of her sight he could think only of being with her, near her once more.
"Carlo," she smiled, holding up a package wrapped in a napkin for him to see. "I have bread and cheese and fruit. We can go to the brook."
Under other circumstances the offer, so innocently made, would have caused him to bound out of his skin with joy. The promise of an afternoon alone with Maddalena, of bare feet dabbling in the cold water while they ate the picnic lunch, of tossed skirts and flashes of browned thigh; and later, of childish, delightful fumblings with strange forbidden emotions on the cool grass - it was too wonderful to believe, almost. After their last adventure in her father's loft, he had been afraid, he knew not why, that she would avoid him. Now, it turned out, she had been as eager as he! Incredible!
But something stronger pulled him now. Unschooled in tact, unskilled in dissembling, he could only blurt out: "I can't."
And then, having taken the plunge, there was no way to go but forward. "I got something important to do."
Her shock and hurt printed themselves indelibly on his mind, on his memory from that point onward. He wanted to say more, to explain, but how explain? He brushed rudely past her and continued toward home, leaving her small form planted forlornly in the road.
To his child's mind it all added up, horribly: crime and retribution. Even now, at the height of his adult independence and fame, he could not recall the sequence, only the blow upon blow. His last memory, his last clear memory, had him creeping into the kitchen and waiting for Rosa to leave. There was no danger: His aunt, who helped out his ailing mother, was hard of hearing and nearly blind. She buttered him a slice of fresh bread and soon left him alone. Tingling with guilt, he found his father's housekeeping money cache and extracted a single lira.
There were other hazy memories, swiftly moving, evanescent, hard to pin down. Hurrying back to Vittorio with the coin clutched in a wet fist. Both of them seeking out Pepito, son of the manure gatherer; they found him plying his pitchfork in the barn of his father's farm.
He could still remember Pepito's eyes widening at the sight of the lira piece; his foolish girl's giggle as Vittorio told him how he might earn it. Pepito blushed, again like a girl; but in the end he consented. The three of them entered the odoriferous barn, and after more coaxing, Pepito laid bare his mutilation.
It was not all that Carlo had been led to expect. Vittorio's gesture with the imaginary coltello had been more than graphic; but the reality was enough to cause the younger boy to gag and retch. The others mocked him while Pepito, babbling about the sweets he would buy with his newly-earned lira, buttoned up his woolen breeches.
The man Farinelli understood, of course, that Pepito had been one of the tragic rejects of the castrati age. For every boy who was submitted to the knife after some honest judgment of his potential, perhaps a hundred were castrated in the bare hope that the operation itself would miraculously produce a voice that the victim had not possessed before. Parents dreamed of transforming their crow-voiced sons into highly-paid idols of the operatic stage through the magic of ii coftello, of lifting their offspring out of the slime and degradation of a lifetime of peasant toil.
The rewards of eminence could be fabulous. The evirati, regardless of talent, held constantly before their eyes the image of the great Baldasarre Ferri, for example. Imagine! a voice powerful enough to stop a battle! Yet, it had happened. Queen Christina of Sweden, in the heat of the war against Poland, begged her enemy monarch Sigismund for a fortnight's loan of the great castrato. And Sigismund gallantly agreed! Imagine the sweating, bleeding soldiers on both sides, gazing in awe at the royal coach as it passed between the lines during the special truce called to insure the safety of the precious songbird!
Or Caffarelli, drawing a thousand guineas for a single season in Milan (a sum Farinelli would later better by half again!) Or the stories of female vocalists masquerading as castrati to cash in on the rich rewards accorded the mutilated nightingales!
Yes, one heard constantly of the famous ones, the great successes. Of the others, seldom a word. At the height of the castrato tradition some five thousand boys were deprived of their manhood in a single year. Few, a very few, gained the fame their tormentors sought for them.
Many died under the knife, or of the infection it carried. The lucky ones with some pretension of voice found niches in minor provincial opera houses, perhaps, or in larger cities, as chorus, supernumeraries, hangers-on. They were aided by the prohibition of the Church, just beginning to break down, against women on the stage. For the rest - nothing. They returned to the life of toil their parents had hoped to save them from, now deprived of one of their few compensations. Every village had its Pepitos, just as every village had its barber-surgeon, its midwife - or perhaps only its father with his sharp knife. Why not, with the rewards so stupendous to the winners, with the Church blinking at the practice, forbidding it officially, yet employing its products to the greater glory of God in the choir-lofts, excommunicating evirati who dared to marry, yet commissioning music for their voices?
If any of this coursed through little Carlo Broschi's consciousness as he half-blindly fought his way home after that shattering revelation, it was no more than darts and flashes of scarcely heard and half-forgotten talk between elders over the short years of his life. In the conscious realm he knew only the shock of emotional turmoil, so bewildering that what he came upon as he reached his home seemed more dream than reality. He stopped short, scarcely believing his own eyes.
The furniture, the chairs, tables, cabinets he had been born among, grew up with and knew with the intimate eve-level familiarity of childhood had been rooted from their proper places inside the house and were being piled helter-skelter on a cart by husky carriers. Here was the small - to him, huge - armoire that held all his clothes, his toys and earthly possessions, whose walnut grain he knew as he knew the lines of his own palm, unceremoniously dumped on top of the kitchen table and tied down with rope. The table itself, at which he had eaten so many solid country meals first from his mother's hand and after her decline and death from Rosa's - only he knew the flaw in the wood of its underside. How many times had he hidden under this table unsuspected, while pasta, vegetables, meat were pounded and sliced above his head, feeling the vibrations of the labor above as his finger traced thecurve of the groove, to him a road across mountains to unknown lands.
There was Rosa herself, wringing her hands and weeping from blind eyes, pushed aside by the laborers who came from the house with still more treasures. There was his father, standing immobile and hard-lipped, as neighbors closed about him, shaking fists in his face. One reached out and snatched the red sash of office from him; and it was not his title of sindico that they screamed now, but other, uglier words.
"Ladrone! Furfante! Malandrino!"
Shock piled on shock. Another man coming from the front door with arms clasped about a bundle of clothing. But Carlo had eyes for one thing only: his choir gown, the black bombazine gown with the white stiff linen collar that Rosa pridefully washed, starched, ironed into smooth perfection before each Sunday mass, trailing in the dust. Indignity of indignities! Carlo rushed up to the man and tugged at the garment.
"It's mine! Give it to me!"
Another figure appeared from nowhere. Fra Marco himself pulled the robe roughly from Carlo's grasp. "This is the property of the Church!" Before Carlo's startled eyes, the monk gained success and stowed the robe under his cassock.
The memories swirled, merged, sometimes cleared for the moment, then faded again into uncertainty. As often as he strove to sort them out afterward, they eluded him and always he failed.
Did he only imagine that he walked down an unfamiliar road with his hand in his father's big fist Had his father actually talked to him - an unusual enough occurrence? Had he told him that he must go away, that Carlo must obey Fra Marco... That much he remembered.
But was there really a sweet drink at a tavern? It didn't seem possible. His father never drank with him across a table, certainly not at a public inn. But the feeling persisted, of pride, of sudden adult acceptance. He wished that Vittorio, Maddalena, yes, even Pepito could see him thus. He remembered that the wine had a strange metallic taste, not like his mother's wine at home.
Now he was lying down, and misty faces floated above him. Fie made out Fra Marco and a bearded stranger. He lay in a warm bath, naked, drowsy, comfortable, relaxed. He did not want to move.
But he was moved. Lifted to a table, dripping, drooping, resenting faintly the cold shock of air against his warmed body.
Fra Marco. The stranger. Father? He couldn't recall.
And suddenly - pain. Sharp, searing pain between his legs.
He screamed.
He must have screamed.
But they had foreseen the scream, and muffled it with a cloth in his mouth.
He was back in the bath, more than half awake now from the agony that would not go away. The water swirled pink, then red.
Leaning over him, Fra Marco, his face contorted. In fright and pain, Carlo saw the swimming features as a twisted mask of malice, of abomination. Fra Marco's cowl had slipped back, he remembered this clearly. Fra Marco's head was completely bald.
Leaning from the other side, the bearded stranger, holding him down with one hand, while the other gripped the small razor-sharp knife, running with his blood, with Carlo's own blood.
Il coltello, il benedetto coltello.
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