Via Veneto and the narrow Via Condotti, musing as he watched the young castrati come and go, some boldly done up in luxuriant female dress, others slinking about like beautiful cats in the beguiling severity of clerical black, their fresh complexions and lovely hair drawing eyes to them everywhere.
And wandering into the summer theaters where the comic opera or the plays were being performed, he studied these boys as they pranced on the stage, coming better to understand here in Rome than in any other place he’d ever been, how eunuchs had come into fashion and necessity.
Here the Church had never relented its ban on performing women, that prohibition which had once dominated the stages of all Europe. And these audiences simply never saw a female creature before the footlights, never witnessed that spectacle of womanly flesh magnified by the cheers and clapping of thousands packed in a dark hall.
Even the ballet had its male dancers frolicking in long skirts.
And Guido perceived that when the woman is taken out of an entire realm of life that must needs imitate the world itself, then some substitute for that woman is inevitable.
Something must rise to take the place of what is feminine. Something must rise to be feminine. And the castrati were not mere singers, players, anomalies; they had become woman herself.
And they knew it. How they swung their hips, how they mocked and taunted their hungry audiences.
Guido wondered could Tonio see it, or did it make Tonio suffer beyond endurance? Could he not recognize in this place the violent amplification of all his powers which a female role would mean?
It was a grand irony, really, Guido reflected, hearing these sopranos rise and fall. There was the skill he’d known all his life, but here it had become a divine obscenity, more fraught with the sensual than that which it so reincarnated.
“It will give my enemies something to talk about,” the Cardinal had said in his unguarded moment. And he was right.
Guido sighed. He scratched a few notes on the pad he carried in his pocket. He noted the temperament, the habits, the unrestrained tastes of those he saw.
And he knew that on that stage at the Teatro Argentina on the first of the year, Tonio must appear as a woman. His voice could call the gods to attention; but in Rome, he and he alone must shine with that carnal power, and could suffer no other young singer to have that advantage if he did not have it; he must have it. Guido must win.
And this was but one aspect of the war that lay ahead of him. Guido must triumph on all counts. He must come to understand this city, forgive it its mercilessness, or he would be too afraid to do what he must do. And making it his landscape day after day, he sought to compass it with his mind.
And he fell in love with it.
San Giovanni in Laterano, San Pietro in Vincoli, the Vatican Treasures, the moldering hulk of the antique Colosseum overgrown with weeds, the sprawling fragments of the ancient Forum, all this he pondered, letting the roaring carriages of the cardinals pass, caught up again and again in the spectacle of hooded friars in procession, cassocked priests, clerics come from all the world to hear the voice of the Holy Father echoing through the largest church on earth and out across continents and seas to the very edges of Christendom.
But what was it he felt in the air around him as he stood in the Piazza San Pietro, what was it that made this city so seemingly solid, so seemingly invincible?
It was as if he could feel a hum, a seething. It was as if this immense metropolis were itself the core of a volcanic mountain. It was that cauldron from which the fire and smoke belched forth, and all those living and striving here were bound up in that communal force.
Was it not fair then that all must come here finally to be tested? Let the audiences curse and shout and drive from the theaters and the city itself all those not fit for the pantheon. It was not their sport, finally, it was their right.
* * *
He went home.
He wrote until his eyes failed him and he could no longer hear the notes he scribbled. He had a sheaf of arias; he had them for all emotions, all voices.