It was this man who encouraged me to the priesthood. This man who paid my fees at a most exclusive Seminary reserved for the élite; the Pope’s Home Guard. The policy makers and theologians of Vatican City. The Casuists certain to find scriptural authority for any Popish whim.
The Pope is often an embarrassment. Each Pope nurses his own foibles and follies, pet truths and pet hates, and all must be accommodated within the seamless seemingly unchanging whole of Catholic Truth. Often the Popes contradict one another, and even more often, they contradict the great masters they reanimate to support their own certainties. The theologians take it as a joke. They are interested in the power of the Church and her authority. Power, authority and revenues, are what they are there to protect. They can dye black white.
They do.
That should have been my career. It brings with it both wealth and influence. Two things, an accident and a design, forked the plotted road.
I was the accident. I had the misfortune to believe. Yes, to believe sincerely, and, as an ardent boy, I wanted to carry that belief in front of me like a blazing torch. I wanted to go among the poor and dispossessed and bring them the Good News.
They did not want the good news; they wanted condoms, and I thought that they should have them. I was defrocked for slipping them in the free Bibles I gave out. That was in Brazil.
And the design?
The last castrato to sing in St Peter’s died in 1924. My Cardinal knew him, loved him, recorded him, and had in his private collection, eerie wax cylinders soaked in passion and loss. Not only church music but opera, the thing my friend really cared for, and the castrato had sung for him all the great arias that now belong to women.
The history of the castrati is a curious one: They had been used by the Greek Church since the twelfth century but they did not sing in the Sistine Chapel until the middle of the sixteenth century. The problem of course was Deuteronomy and its ordnances against men with crushed testicles in the house of God. But the Church had a more regular and pressing problem, namely, how to stock its choirs when women were forbidden to sing in them. A boy soprano is much but he is not everything. For that you need the power of a fully developed male voice. The voice of the castrato is very strong, hard-edged, resonant and high.
Officially, castrati were the result of sad accidents, a pig bite was a great favourite, the curious snout and fearsome teeth being at just the right height to make a pop-star out of a swine-herd. On the secular stage and in the opera houses, castrati enjoyed the charmed life of idols. Strictly speaking, castration was a crime, but there were plenty of families glad to exchange two bags of sperm for their weight in gold. The operation must be done before the boy reaches puberty. It need not prevent erection.
Delicacy. If the Church conceded the operation it broke the law. If it accepted the pig bite excuse it trespassed into uncleanliness in the sight of God.
Delicacy. Don’t ask questions about your castrati. And that’s what the Church chose not to do for nearly four hundred years.
Sixtus V, the sixteenth-century papal equivalent of a pit bull terrier, had a particular fondness for his castrati, and promoted them successfully by extending the ban on women beyond the church walls to the public stage. In 1588 no women were to appear in any role on any stage in Rome and the Papal States. This was not revoked until the French Revolution. Naturally, or at least with the aid of a knife, the castrati ranks were soon well swollen. At the same time he decided that they could not marry since none of them could produce ‘Verum semen’. This was a new twist to the barley sugar beating stick of Catholic morality. The eunuchs had no choice but to suck it. My friend, the Cardinal, was homosexual and I know that the castrato was his lover. The difference in their ages was very great, the Cardinal, a priest then, was young, the castrato, old out of reckoning. It was not the number of his years but what those years had been. He was antique. A man from another time when time was not counted. Is that him shuffling into the room in his red velvet and gold loops?
They had become lovers in 1900 when the Cardinal was a boy of ten. They remained lovers for the next twenty-four years and when the castrato died, my friend shut himself up in acts of charity until 1959 when he was turning seventy and I met him as a boy of ten.
He had been dining with my parents. I had been introduced to him in the stiff formal family manner and made a welcome escape to my room. I had a train set and I remember sitting in the middle of the oval track and putting the lights out so that I could see the stoked-up boiler powering my little steam engine. I must have fallen asleep there because I woke up and it was quite dark with far away noises from the Spanish Steps but no sound in our house. As I struggled up from beside the dead train still steaming I saw his face. I was afraid but I didn’t cry out. He held out his hand and I took it and went and sat over on the bed. My mother came in and told me to hurry and get undressed and then the Cardinal would say goodnight and bless me. She put on the small light by the window and went out.
I undressed. Shorts, long socks, woollen jersey and thick white shirt. I folded my clothes and put them on top of my sandals and rummaged under the pillow for my pyjamas. He put out his hand and stroked my shoulder.
‘Yes Father?’
He shook his head, not speaking, but by his directions I knew to lie down, naked as I was, on my back, my fair hair falling over my face. He stood over me in his red cassock and cape, and with his long hands, each finger ringed, he made a study of my body. Curious how hard his fingers felt on my schoolboy skin. At my penis, he stopped for a second, and then, with his index finger on one side and his thumb on the other, he vexed me to orgasm.
I remember the notch of his ring.
Very gently he covered me up and went downstairs.
I heard him say to my mother, ‘E un bravo ragazzo. L’ho benedetto.’
I used to sing in the choir. There I am, head thrown back, throat bare, God’s inamorato, a jet of praise. I sang. My Cardinal watched me, his pale hands gripping the rail.
Our friendship was encouraged. He took me to galleries, concerts, restaurants. At night, in the early evening dark, he would snatch up a candlestick, and take me, trembling, through the Vatican cellars, to look at secret Caravaggios, lost Michelangelos, the bones of mediaeval martyrs, the bodies of heretics, walled up.
‘Here,’ he said, ‘the silver chalice of Our Lord’s Last Supper.’
‘Here,’ he said, ‘the evil bed of the Blasphemer.’ It was a wooden torture rack, winched at either end, and spiked along its length. He told me it had been used in the Spanish Inquisition.
‘Here,’ he said, ‘do you know your Greek?’ I shook my head and he laughed at me, ‘Savonarola had this burned in the courtyard of the Medici. Sensibly they had made a copy first. It has never been seen outside these vaults.’
He turned the heavy brown page.
Then rose the white moon.
My love is whiter.
White as salt
Drawn from bitter pools.
*
He wrapped the brittle pages back into their clothes and returned the strange bound volume to its lead drawer. I was shivering with cold.
‘Exquisite, feminine, but strong, strong.’ He put his arm around me to keep out the chill. ‘A boy woman of the opposite sex. Do you understand?’
‘No Sir.’
‘A boy woman of our sex. Does that make sense to you?’
‘No Sir.’
He sighed. ‘The tradition is a long and noble one. Yes, of itself, ennobling. Did not Cardinal Borghese keep his mignon in Rome?’
‘Sir?’
‘Darling Boy, have you not yet read the memoirs of Casanova? Why, when I was your age I knew them as well as I knew the rosary. Here they are, that gentleman’s own copy, confiscated of course, by ourselves …’
He laughed. ‘Here, come here.’
I climbed on to his knees in the dry, freezing chamber, while he read to me in his deep sonorous voice that had no crack in it. His voice was that
of a young man, full of joy and vigour. Had I heard him but not seen him, the only clue to his years would have been a certain suggestiveness, that drew out from every, single word, its multiple possibilities. He was delighted by freshness, but he saw in it the beginnings of a more delightful corruption. He blessed the new wine, but as he ran his hands over the casks, it was with the anticipation of a nobleman, who holds in the newborn babe, his bride-to-be.
1726 Rome. ‘We went to the Aliberti theatre, where the castrato who took the prima donna’s role attracted all the town. He was the complaisant favourite, the mignon, of Cardinal Borghese, and supped every night, tête-à-tête with His Eminence. In a well-made corset, he had the waist of a nymph, and, what was almost incredible, his breast was in no way inferior, either in form or in beauty to any woman’s; and it was above all by this means that the monster made such ravages. Though one knew the negative nature of this unfortunate, curiosity made one glance at his chest, and an inexpressible charm acted upon one, so that you were madly in love before you realised it. To resist the temptation, or not to feel it, one would have had to be cold and earthbound as a German. When he walked about the stage during the ritornello of the aria he was to sing, his step was majestic and at the same time voluptuous; and when he favoured the boxes with his glances, his tender and modest rolling of his black eyes brought a ravishment to the heart. It was obvious that he hoped to inspire the love of those who liked him as a man, and probably would not have done so as a woman.’
‘He was a man?’
‘Yes, sweet boy.’
‘And he was a woman?’
‘Yes.’
‘God has not made such things.’
‘God has made everything.’
We went slowly back up the worn stone stairs, and out of the iron grating, and the huge door that led by a passage to the Cardinal’s own rooms.
He told me how he hated to hear a man sing falsetto after his voice had broken. He called it ‘Unnatural.’ ‘Unmanly.’ How different to the voice of the castrato which was a genuine soprano. The operation, he said, did not in any way interfere with manhood. Woman had been taken out of man. Why not put her back into man? Return to a man his femininity and the problem of Woman disappears. The perfect man. Male and Female He created him.
Night. The young boy and the old man. The young boy curled up in a corner of the vast bed, his hair over his face as he read, his hair drawing a fine curtain between himself and the old man, who watches him as if he were a miracle. He is a miracle; life, beauty, innocence, hope, and for the old man, in whom each had almost ebbed away, the boy was a flare, late-lit and brighter for it.
Music. The old man had been listening to Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. He and his lover had been present at the première, in Dresden, in 1911. The castrato had been consumed with a passion to sing the role of Marie Theres’, the sophisticated and wealthy Marschallin who helps her young lover to love someone else. The castrato had feared it often enough as his beloved boy grew older and he himself grew old. He need not have been afraid; the Cardinal had loved his Marschallin, and found no beauty in younger eyes.
Until now.
Music. Rich beyond avarice, the castrato had arranged his own opera, and had it recorded. He sang the role he craved, and all the while, held the Cardinal in his arms. Now, as the opera played towards its close, and out of the cylinder of the past, the Cardinal heard the final trio, and those strange high Gs and As, nearer to a scream than to a voice, the Cardinal wept.
‘Hab’ mir’s gelobt, ihn liebzuhaban in der richtigen Weis.’
(I promised to cherish him in the right way.)
The young boy looked up from his book, and scrambled across the vast bed, but he did not know how to console his friend, whose tears streamed out of what was gone, and made a sea where the future was drowned.
The Cardinal said, ‘Es sind die mehreren Dinge auf der Welt, so dab sie eins nicht glauben tät’, wenn man sie möcht’ erzählen hör’n. Alleinig, wer’s erlebt, der glaubt daran und weib nicht wie.’
And the boy said, ‘The majority of things in the world are such, that one would not believe them, if one were told about them. Only those who experience it, believe, but do not know how …’
Music. They sat together, the one fabulously old, the other, young enough. The boy and the man, the mantle, title and deed. They were in the flood waters and the boy must carry the man, Saint Christopher and his Christ, the naïf who bears the sins of the world and falls beneath their weight. It was too much to carry, although he wanted to carry it, wanted to carry him, red and gold and jewelled, singing through the black water to a resting place for both.
The date for the operation was agreed. My parents were not to be told. They understood that I would be taking a holiday with His Eminence, in Venice, at a private apartment in the Palazzo Rezzonico. There, in the great unbeatable rooms, I lay on a couch by the fire while he read to me from Robert Browning.
Even as I am speaking, there creeps Fra Lippo Lippi, his cheeks still burning from some girl’s hot kiss. There stands dread Saul with his lordly male-sapphires gleaming in his turban.
I had not become a Turkish Eunuch. The harem men lost everything, and displayed their status and their stigma, by a little silver pipe tucked in their headbands. When not a badge of office it served as a urine funnel.
No, I had, have, a small but decisive incision.
We travelled by gondola from church to church, leaving votive offerings to the Madonna, our Madonna, Madonna of the Womb and Phallus, the boy-woman who needed no man to make her complete. Heresy? Certainly it was, but no stranger in its reading than the premise of the Old Testament that woman was born out of man. The male mother and the woman father. It has a completion. The Old Covenant and the New Covenant. Read together, and strictly speaking, the two covenants ought to be read together, the conclusion is so radical that it is not surprising that the Church has chosen to ignore it. In Christ there is neither male nor female. Male and Female he created Them. And in His image.
All this we discussed together in the shallow scoop of the black boat. Late at night, through the winding waters, the red of the Cardinal and the white of the boy, visible under an orange flare. At the sight of us, the women curtsied and the men were silent, dropping their loads. His Eminence blessed them but not as he blessed me.
Venice. The Holy City. Stone-built out of the marvellous and the mundane and made an island from the world by its own nature.
The asynarte city; two rhythms unconnected, profanity, holiness, and out of that strange bed, art.
Through the streets, the old man and his boy, planning. They would buy an apartment and come here in the school holidays. There would be pictures, books, music, talk. The boy would learn to love beauty, and to distinguish her from her pleasing pretty sister, sought after. The boy would be honed and in the honing made keen, and return to the old man, his smooth stone, his novaculite, a sharper joy.
Light. Gold light on the golden city. Light on the boy to make an archangel of him. Hierarchy of wings.
The light made a shining plate of the lagoon, and burned into it the lines of the waterside houses, bent there. Etch of houses and the corroding water. Fire water, dissolving mirage of the moving solid, aqua vitae. Truth or the image of truth?
The boy in the boat dragged his hands through the drowned city. At his motion the houses burst apart, only to reunite again, whole, in another patch of water. He looked up from the water at the steady copies of the images he saw. Yellow houses where the women went to and fro, unmoved by his disturbance, unmindful of him. What should he trust? Their world or this other in his hands? Actual life or imaginative life. The world he could inherit or the world he could invent?
Invent: The word has altered in meaning. Strictly, from the Latin Invenire, Inventum, it means ‘To come upon.’ In = upon. Venire = to come. Hence the feast of the Invention of the True Cross, in commemoration of the discovery of the cross at Jerusalem in AD 326 by Helena, mother of Constan
tine the Great. Invent. Not to devise or contrive or fabricate but to find that which exists. Perhaps everything that can exist does exist, as Plato would say, in pure form, but perhaps those forms with which we have become the most familiar now pass for what we call actual life. The world of everyday experience is a world of redundant form. Form coarsened, cheapened, made easy and comfortable, the hackneyed and the clichéd, not what is found but what is lost. Invention then would return to us forms not killed through too much use. Art does it. And I? Why should I not live the art I love?
But if what can exist does exist, is memory invention or is invention memory?
I think back to that time. We were happy, I cannot recall being happier, safe in the invented city, purposeful in our pleasure. Canals of pleasure that flowed out to a limitless sea. There was no other place in the world. This was the world and it was ours. Romantic? yes, I suppose so, blame the Brownings for that, but honest too. The pleasure of the single voice but within the constraints of the larger score. An early Romanticism not yet debased into sentiment. We were gateways to one another.
I never saw his body, then or later, his body, portly, veined, secret. Would it have repulsed me? I don’t know, but even now, when I think of him, I think of Canova, Botticelli, Carpaccio, bodies of nymphs and angels, God in their chest. God-chested beauty, a strong box made out of bone.
I never saw his body but I knew his voice intimately. At evening I heard him in the garden calling me. His footsteps on the path, my name in his mouth. He called me by name, not my Christian name, which is Frederick, but his own name, in love and play and out of our shared delight. Handel. I kept the name but lost the namesake, Handel, a composer happy in his own enchantments. But the enchanted space is gone and there is a sword across the gate. I cannot return.