The Bells (26 page)

“They loved him. He drank the dukes’ champagne and the peasants’ Schnapps. We did not need money. He had his smile and his laugh. “Saint Benedict and his wolf!” they would cry from windows of palaces, and no matter how late it was, we would have to stop for a drink. For a song. Often he would stay the night. Men, women. Princes, whores. He had love enough for all of them.

“When the sores came, suddenly he was dead to them. One lover sent him a doctor, who filled him so full of mercury that he could not eat for a month. The rest forgot him, even when he pounded on their doors. Finally he just stayed here, never going out. He would stare at a new sore for hours and watch it come. He watched his beauty fade, staring in his mirror for hours every day.

“And then one day, after a year of this, the sores were gone. And though he was ugly, he shouted in the street, invaded parties and yelled, ‘I am cured!’ But he was not cured. His eyes began to cloud and grew sensitive even to the faintest light. Then the lumps began—on his arms, in his neck—and with them the pains. I would wake up to hear his moaning. His nose began to soften. The bones seemed to dissolve. He would simply hold it in his fingers.”

Remus turned, and we both looked at our sleeping friend. The large armchair seemed intended for a child—the giant’s arms spilled over, his knees splayed. The pillow had slipped away, his head had fallen forward.

“And you were all alone,” I said.

Remus nodded. “But isn’t that what I had wished for? He and I alone? Our lonely cave? Perhaps we got all that we deserved.”

VIII.

W
hen the weather was fine and Guadagni had no other distraction, he ordered me into his carriage and had his coachman convey us to the Prater or to some other royal park to which he was granted entry, and we drove for hours along the roads the emperor had constructed for his hunt. I hated these days, for it meant that I had no chance to stalk the streets around the Riecher Palace. While we drove about, I always feared it would be this day, of all days, that my beloved would take a few steps in the street.

But one such afternoon, deep in the Prater’s woods, the birdcalls in the trees and the carriage wheels on the gravel my only distractions, I resolved to show my master that I, too, had a brain. I, too, had an ardent heart. I would raise the issue of most profound importance to us both. I asked Guadagni, “Signor, who castrated you?”

I held my breath, awaiting his reaction. He closed his eyes and slowly shook his head.

“
Mio
fratello,
” he said, “that is the one question you must never ask a musico.”

I apologized and shut my mouth.

But then he smiled. “I am sorry,” he said. “How are you to know such rules? You, of all people, deserve an answer. And so I give you one: Italy castrated me.”

I pictured an army of Rapuccis swarming across the Italian lands commanded by some evil king with a mitre on his head. But this was not what my master meant. He held up a finger.

“
Mio fratello
, castrates are as old as the knives that cut them—no culture is free from this barbarism—but those like you and me are a class alone among the castrates. Consider: in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, in India and in Islamic lands, the castrating cut has always been an insult. To be cut was to be reduced from man to something less—something simple, something tame.

“In London,” he continued, “a man once showed me an account of the Chinese eunuchs, who comprise a class of servants in that land. After the affair is done, these boys receive their pickled members in an earthen jar. They keep this jar with them always. They store it on a shelf.
Pao
they call it. When they seek promotion, or change employment, they bring this
Pao
to their new employer, who lifts the lid and inspects what the man has lost, as if it were evidence of his character.”

I swallowed, tugged at my collar. Guadagni laughed. “Does that disgust you?” he asked. “Why should it disgust you?”

“They must keep … it,” I muttered. “In a jar?”

“Yes,” he said. “In spirits. I suppose they change the liquid once a year so it does not cloud. One wants to see it
clearly.
”

“Please don’t talk of that,” I begged.

He chuckled. “Fine,” he said. “No more pickled
Pao
. I’ll tell you instead of Greece and Rome, those civilizations of renown. There they cut boys like trimming shrubs—fifty or more at a time, though a score of every batch died of their wounds.
Cut to the belly
they called it; just a tiny hole remained. This mutilation made them tame, it was thought, and so they were the most desirable kind of slave. They did not dig holes or wash floors. Dressed in gold, their bodies slicked with oil, they fed their masters, poured wine, massaged aging backs. Their bodies were vessels for their masters to enjoy. Nero is perhaps the most infamous such master. He had a boy slave, Sporus, whom he loved above all the rest. An innocent, beautiful child. He instructed his surgeon to cut off every sign of Sporus’s manly organ, and when the boy had healed, Nero dressed him in a bridal veil and married the little eunuch. Then he deflowered him on the imperial bed.”

Now I could hardly breathe. I had known that many boys had suffered a fate as bad as mine, but now I saw that many had suffered worse—much, much worse.

“Might we stop a moment,” I asked weakly. “I would like to walk about.”

“But that is nothing,” my master ploughed forth, his constant voice seemed to pin me to the seat. “Nero and his Sporus. Quite gentle in fact, when one considers other examples. Read the Book of Matthew. The apostle honors the noble ‘eunuchs who have made
themselves
eunuchs.’ God! It is one thing to have another do the cutting, quite another to do it to
oneself
. And how many have sliced themselves with daggers after Matthew’s wisdom? Thousands. Scholars, mystics, fools. I’ve read of one ecstatic rite, in ancient Anatolia: on ‘The Day of Blood,’ men gathered on a mountain and, together, praying to some kind, caring god, mutilated themselves with scraps of broken pottery.”

I opened the door to have some air, even though the carriage still bounced along. Light rain pattered on my shoes, but the air was like a cool, damp cloth on my burning brow.

Guadagni laughed and tugged at a lock of my hair, like an older brother might. “
Mio fratello
, don’t give it a second thought! Don’t you see? Those poor wretches have nothing to do with us. We are a different class—what made them despised as slaves makes us revered as gods. Even you, though you may not be rich, or known by anyone. No one will ever make you show them what you lost. You will never be inspected by your employer. You will never be ordered to lie facedown upon a bed. Your pain vanished years ago; you won’t die from your wound.”

He took my hand in his and held it up to the light. “Look,
mio fratello
, look what this cut has given you. No man has such beautiful hands. Such elegant fingers. And look at this.” He touched his own cheek, lightly painted to enhance its natural glow. “No man has pure skin like that; pimples are the scourge only of the uncastrated. More, look how short they are and how tall we stand.” He placed his hands on his breast, which bulged in the brocaded coat. “Does any man have such a chest? My lungs are twice the size of the world’s best uncastrated singer. I have the cruel cut to thank for that as well. It was the magic of the cut that made our ribs grow so long. And there’s more: our greatest treasure lies hidden until we sing.” He held up a finger and gazed at me, as if daring me to guess where it would point. He finally pointed to the middle of his neck. “
They
have that ugly jabbing thing,
la pomme d’Adam
, jutting from their throat. And to think that crooked protrusion is where their voice begins! As unsuited to singing as a violin with a splintered neck.” He massaged his own neck now as if it were the spine of a cat. “In contrast, our voice boxes remained undescended, hanging where God placed them.

“Don’t you see!” he exclaimed. He clasped my arm. “Our singing makes us so different from those castrates of other ages. They were cut because they were poor, or beautiful, or unlucky. I was cut because, as a boy, I sang like a nightingale. And so now, here in Vienna, they ask me to be their Orpheus! I have sung Orlando, Solomon, Julius Caesar. These are gods among men! I am not their slave. I am not their servant. I am their hero. I am their angel. I am the one they dream of when they fall asleep at night. Oh, and how easy it is for them to love me! Love between a woman and a normal man is tedious at its best, filthy and shameful at its worst. But when I am with them, their desire becomes a torrent. There is no fear to hold them back; there will be no children conceived this night, no forced marriage will occur, no everlasting shame. They know that in the morning the memory of their pleasure will be pure, without regret. God does not disapprove of an angel taking part in their lustful dreams. And so I play not only Orpheus, but Bacchus, too. Occasionally their stupid husbands sneer at me—I hear them say my sword cannot stab—but it is they who are the fools. For that pelvis-thrusting poke, which they think their greatest feat, can be replaced, reproduced, improved upon.”

Guadagni smirked, as if recalling a recent example of this boast. He stared out the window until his grin faded, and then turned back to me. “What was your question? Oh, yes: my castrator. I told you that Italy made me what I am. I cannot merely blame my father, nor the
buffo
company he sold me to, nor the barber they paid to cut me. Surely, I hope that all these men are in hell, but that would be little compensation, both for me, and for you, and for the thousands of other boys cut every year in Italian lands.
Mio fratello
, we were cut for the beauty of our voices. We were cut because every night in every Italian city, angels sing upon the stage and every man who has a son goes home thinking,
Could my son be an angel, too?
”

The cool air had calmed my swoon, and I raised my eyes again to my master. That smooth face was as collected as it ever was upon the stage, but I had heard a faint tremor in his voice. Now he looked out of the window as though he spoke no longer to me but only to himself. “I often ask myself,” he said, “as I take my bows, how many boys have I castrated with my voice tonight?”

IX.

W
hen I asked Remus to teach me Italian, he took the request with surprising gravity. We began to study for two hours every day on which I could manage to be away from Guadagni. Remus was an even more demanding teacher of language than Ulrich had been of song; he saw through words and sentences to some secret structure beyond the grasp of my mind, where different languages connected in mathematical simplicity. Yet the building blocks of language are not words but sounds, and there was my gift: I recognized the basic sounds immediately, and though after two weeks Dante still made no coherent sense, as I recited, I began to grasp occasional clumps of meaning—a king pickled in swill; a bellowing Sicilian bull; a thousand choking, purple faces.

“His Italian is better than yours already, Remus,” Nicolai soon jested from his chair.

“Accent is not relevant,” Remus countered, “if he doesn’t know what he is saying.”

“I don’t understand it all either,” Nicolai said from the shadows, for we burned only a single candle on account of his eyes, “but what he reads is beautiful. Something about deepest love?”

“Lechery and lust,” Remus said flatly. “ ‘Groaning, tears, laments. They suffer here who sinned in carnal things. With never ease from pain nor hope of rest.’ ”

“How lucky we are to have you, Remus,” Nicolai replied. “Otherwise we would all mistake the basest lust for truest love.”

“Keep reading, Moses. Don’t let him distract you.”

“Is there any true love at all in that rotten book?” Nicolai asked.

“In all its forms,” Remus retorted. “Sundered hearts, unquenchable passion, idealizations from afar.”

“Get another book,” Nicolai said disdainfully. “I want love here and now. Dante is dead. Hell is so far away. Can’t someone tell me of something I could almost taste?”

“Read, Moses.”

I opened the book again, but my hands were shaking.
Tell them! Now! Tell them of her!
I so wanted to, but I could not. They would not laugh at me, I knew, but I was afraid to read astonishment in their eyes.
You? In love? You?

They would not say it, but it would be said.

One evening, when the Burgtheater had neither theater, nor opera, nor ballet on its program, I persuaded Tasso to leave his cave and join us in Spittelberg. He scampered behind me through the streets, staying in the shadows, as if he feared some hawk might swoop down and snatch him up.

When I led the little man up the stairs and into the dim parlor, he stopped at the threshold and examined the room as a man judging whether the ship he is about to board will float. Remus greeted us and offered Tasso his hand, but the stagehand did not take it. He peered around Remus at the massive shape in the chair.

“Just two men,” Tasso asked, “alone?”

“It is just the two of us,” Remus answered.

“No women?”

“No.”

Tasso peered up at Remus. His nose twitched.

Nicolai called without turning. “Moses, is this that little man you told us you would bring one day to meet us?”

“Yes,” I said uncomfortably. “This is Tasso. From the theater.”

“Come in,” yelled Nicolai. “Come in! Is it true you know the empress? Tell us of her daughters!”

Tasso looked up at Remus. He stuck a thumb toward Nicolai. “What’s wrong with your husband?”

“He is not my husband,” Remus said angrily. I had never seen him turn so red. “He is sick.”

“Sick in the head,” Tasso said, and then walked past Remus into the room.

“Moses,” said Nicolai, “I like this mousy man.”

Tasso sat beside Nicolai, in Remus’s chair.

“This calls for celebration!” Nicolai said. “Moses, sing! No, no, wait—something to get us in the mood. Remus, go downstairs and tell Herr Kost we’d like his blackest stuff.”

Remus reappeared a few minutes later carefully balancing four cups of steaming, black liquid, like the tar pools in Dante’s hell.

“Sugar,” Nicolai instructed us. “That’s the secret to getting it down your throat.”

We dissolved several lumps in each cup. Tasso held his nose while he drank. I could only get it down after doubling the sugar—enough to turn it into sweet sludge. But after ingested, it took only a minute for the magic to work its power: The dim room pulsed. I thought I would never need to sleep again. Tasso giggled secretively.

Nicolai shook his head as if a bumblebee buzzed about inside it.

“Sing for us, Moses,” Remus said. I smiled. Never once in all the years I’d known him had he asked me to sing before, and now, this potion throbbing in my veins, I wanted to let the ringing out.

I stood before them and showered my three friends with song. Nicolai reclined and closed his eyes. Tasso swung his feet, which reached but halfway to the floor. Remus leaned against the wall, swayed a foot with the music, joyful tears in his eyes.