They came this time not in the dead of night with a sack of money from a golden tower and a hidden blade. He came with a gilded carriage in the garish light of day, the horses white and shining like a painting by an idealistic dreamer. His clothes ornate and rich and glistening in the sun, a harsh contract to the simple rough clothing I had grown used to. He was like a single thorned rose in a field of soft green grass. A beaded drop of crimson poison falling into a vase of pure water.
The day that he walked up the long path to the main gate I had had no new tutors for weeks. Long ago I had absorbed the library, memorized every word, every theory and idea, the news papers were filled with nothing but the mindless penance of crimes so easy to solve that the solution and the problem were held within the span of a single article. Even then at that early age I could feel the slow black panic of endless nothing rising upon me. I suffered mental stagnation which not even my violin could save me from.
I was in shadow and darkness when he came with his too vibrant voice, his accent something sweet and melodic as if the very air of the city from which he came was made of melody and light. This was the Italian I had known before the words had meaning and there was nothing more than notes, this was not the language I had learned in the dead of night with the scent of blood rising around me, not the one I clambered to learn and posses so I could never again be left in the dark.
When he spoke I knew that I had become the commodity they had set out to create, I was in their eyes, invaluable, the product of perfection they had desired for so long. He did not speak of generalities to me, he spoke like a man who had done his research, a speech created just for me, to catch my eye and my heart.
He spoke of libraries larger than the monastery which had become my entire universe; he spoke of the best tutors of Naples and Rome, of Masters of the arts and sciences who would give me all they know. He spoke of a city which never sleeps, a city which attracted the great minds of the day, each attracted by the shining light of the city. He spoke of the opera, of playing a character, of traveling the world, of making so much money in a season that no one could ever harm me again, of being safe, being independent. A life lived in the realm of the mental and the exquisite.
He didn't speak of the truths I had already stolen from papers and minds, the ones I knew existed when the powers that be would have me ignorant. I knew the way men looked down on what I had become, the looks of distaste and disdain I would acquire, how I could never hide in the shadow, always the bright star of the opera. He didn't speak of whole opera houses knowing my secret, of the world being privy to my own private disaster.
He didn't speak of the way my voice could never override my mutilation, how beneath the shallow sound of applause they would only be thinking of my damage. They would never really see me at all.
But the world in which I lived grew smaller by the day.
I could suffocate in mental stagnation or be a toy on stage, a monkey trained to dance and sing and wallow in false tears.
What I was made to be, cut and torn and shaped into this unnatural thing.
A voice to justify my existence.
All he asked for the world was my soul.
What was an intangible soul when you had the knowledge of the world at your fingertips?
The day we arrived the school was in a state of controlled chaos. Not a single pair of eyes spared me second as they flew down halls and corridors in lurid costumes, instruments marched past me as if they had a mind of their own, the humans carrying them only dutifully following in their wake. Notes and bars of music erupted as if from nothing from the very walls, voices and instruments fell in harmony and then apart as if they had never joined. Boys ran under foot and not one stared at my rough clothing, not a single glance lingered on my too smooth cheek.
My guide led me but I hardly needed him at all. I followed the thread of chaos, wandering to the place where the music grew and fell, where voices laughed and footsteps hurried.
I heard the melancholy cry of a violin before anything else. It came to me as if cutting through the noise of the outside world, creating reason where only madness lingered before. As I approached the grand doors others joined in, instruments and musicians coming together to create one sound. I could see it perfectly in my mind's eye, an orchestra such as I had only ever dreamed of.
It was the first time I ever heard another of my own kind sing. I had until this point been in a species of two, orphans of a lost people, without a home, without a culture. Without knowing what we were or what we could be.
The music played and raged and dropped away with an abruptness that stole my breath. I pressed on, throwing open the doors to the theater to hear the first sweet sounds of the Italian castrato.
My eyes closed as the sound washed over me, something sweet and high, a perfect C. The piece was not familiar to me, obviously a student composer, but it did not matter to me as the voice rose and fell. Something more substantial than a womans voice, a sound that clung to childhood with every note, every trill making me imagine green fields and laughing children.
I stood there as unyielding as if I had been made of stone until the song ended releasing me from its grip. Children, boys I realized, ran onto stage with their colorful outfits, their young sweet voices rising with that same unique sound and I realized what they were. Castrati.
In the span of a heartbeat I had joined a civilization of creatures like myself and they sang on as if oblivious to my realization, as if it meant nothing at all.
My guide took my hand and led me to the front of the room. The empty theater looked as if it were sleeping, a room of empty chairs only waiting for the proper moment to fulfill their reason for existing. Only a handful of men sat in the third row, watching with rapt eye's, some taking notes, some looking as if they could absorb each detail so precisely that should you ask ten years from now they could tell you the smallest detail of the most negligible singer.
The music stopped and one of the men in the audience called out for a break as a fresh crew of workers appeared with paints and tools, their eyes greedy upon the stage set.
I watched not the men talking now in hushed tones but the boys filing off stage, how the apparent leader, the boy who had given me my first sound of this new life had his wary eyes locked on me.
He was, in my eyes, everything I was not. While I had grown tall in the intervening years, my limbs long and lithe as they are now, he was nearly a head beneath me and rounded around the edges, soft as I imagine a woman might be. His features were soft and pale, even his was hair such a shade of blond that it was as if he had no defining features at all, he was a human shade of grey. As indefinable as he was I was equally distinct. My features had grown sharp and blatant, the high cheekbones of my mother creating hollows in my cheeks, my long nose cutting across again, not ugly, but certainly not traditionally beautiful. Even my raven hair was in opposition to this soft creature, the harsh shining black even more shocking now that I had spent years keeping my skin from the light of the sun.
He had made his way down the stage and directly in front of me, all the while judging me, sizing me up without even offering a word or a single sign of the social grace the monks had insisted the rest of the world used in everyday practice. My guide had gone off to the whispering men and their notes, standing like a foolish child to their side waiting to be noticed, too unimportant to speak up. I was alone when the boy first spoke to me.
"Castrato." It was not a name or a greeting, it was not the greeting of brothers, it was antiseptic, unemotional. Nothing but a label. He looked me up and down as if he could read me with the same ease that he determined my dearest secret.
"You are too old to come here to train." His bland face churned, hip pale lips pulling into what might have been a sneer. "But there are always the churches for the ones that don't makeā¦the cut."
The voices to our right rose above a whisper, the men were standing now, looking at the two of us. My would-be guide had caught their attention, he was gesturing towards where we stood, his back to us so that I had no hope of disconcerting his words. The boy as indefinable as a thick mist smiled as if the year or two he had on my age constituted a lifetimes worth of superiority.
"It is a shame you came now. The masters will not even have time to hear you until days from now. The show, my show, opens tomorrow and all the great composers will come, all of the masters of the opera houses. No time to spare on the hopeless."
The way his words twisted with mirth and malice, his sweet soprano tinkling like the siren call of the devil, I knew he felt sure he had dealt me a devastating blow. As if my entire self worth rested on a single child who did not know enough of the world to understand that he knew nothing. His emotionless lips pulled higher into a facsimile of a smile as the masters came towards us, his hands raised to great them.
It was my hand they took. My ragged body they pulled into their arms with smiles as bright as the saved, as perfect as the images of angels painted on the very walls of this city. Their voices rained down on me, voices of the masters I would learn from reiterating my own story to me, the praise I had heard a million times over, imploring me to sing.
The boy who had been so quick to judge me, to alienate me from the people I did not even have the chance to hope to belong to looked scorned, beaten down with every word that fell. He stepped back, there was jealousy in his eyes, the glint of fear and the dare for me to do better.
Had I been more mature I would have sung for the masters, perhaps even gone into some private chamber with more dignity than the aisle of an empty theater, but I was only 15, a child with no concept of other children, of humanity. I wanted it to be my voice that sent him away from me.
I looked past him like I had never noticed he was there, as if he was not my first experience with someone like myself, like the hopes that had barely begun to live in me had not died with his words.
The workers banged out a tune of their own, hammer on nail, brush on cloth, the almost imperceptible hum of dozens of people working. I could feel eyes on me, I was the center of an impromptu performance, the man on a soapbox in a crowd, the one everyone wanted to see but no one knew why.
When I sang the workman stopped, the shuffle of feet and life and work and play stilled as if time had stopped and all eyes turned on me. Music no longer erupted from the pit in half thought melodies and careless songs. I was the only source of sound, my voice rising to the high ceiling, reverberating against the walls, filling us all. It was something simple and beautiful, unadorned like the student composition I had heard only a moment ago. I wanted to put that sound to shame, to erase his voice from my memory. With Handel's music my voice could not fail.
I was fulfilling the purpose for which I had been made.
The show went on, it opened the next night as planned and the crowds cheered and the boys sang and the lead with the jealous eyes bowed and reveled in false love. But every spare moment the masters possessed was spent with me.
The night they opened I sat in the first row with my silent companion of so many lifetimes ago as guests of honor. We watched the theater fill around us, people dressed as beautifully as the daydreams of children, like human butterflies drifting towards the light, painted and tied into beauty. I watched the crowd swell, heard them whisper in excited sweet Italian not of mutilation and stolen manhood, never speaking the word eunuch with its dark connotations, its pain and blood, but whispered with adoration and wonder. Castrato.
It was when the crowd was standing and cheering around us and at my side the child I had been created with was smiling like a real child that the master of the school leaned over and whispered in my ear that the next time I heard this sound, it would be for me.
