The Consequences of Playing God: Tales from Lingor High School

By Robert Joseph Foley

In The Consequences of Playing God: Tales from Lingor High, Robert Joseph Foley takes the reader on a wicked journey through four decades of school life in the fictional town of Van der Donck, NY. Here is a mordant satire exploring a world filled with impossible to forget characters and incidents: a dark vision of American education that needs to be read and reread by anyone with an investment in our children and the school systems to which they are exposed. Parents,teachers, students, administratorsthis book leaves no one unscathed. Frightening! Compelling! At times harrowing and diabolical, at times both moving and hilarious, these Tales from Lingor High tread the thin line hovering between tragedy and farce. When all is said and done, it is the children who will be remembered. Try to wipe them from your mind. They will haunt you forever.

By the same Author of:

These Little Poems of Death and after Life

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9781479723386

Robert Joseph Foley

Robert Foley is a retired teacher of English and Drama. He has directed close to 150 plays in the New York area and lives with his wife of 44 years in Westchester County. Writing has always been an intrigue for him; since retirement, it has become a passion. These Little Poems of Life and after Life is his first foray into publishing a poetry collection. He is currently working toward production of two completed plays and working on a short story collection which will appear under the collective title, The Consequences of Playing God.

Book preview

Copyright © 2012 by Robert Joseph Foley.

Library of Congress Control Number:      2012918079

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

115914

Contents

THE BALLAD OF TOMASSO

PETER PENARIUS

THE BOOK OF TIMOTHY

MICHAEL, THE ARCHANGEL Book I

THE BOOK OF TIMOTHY

MICHAEL, THE ARCHANGEL Book II

THE BOOK OF TIMOTHY

MICHAEL, THE ARCHANGEL Book III

THE BOOK OF TIMOTHY

MICHAEL, THE ARCHANGEL Book IV

THE BOOK OF TIMOTHY

MICHAEL, THE ARCHANGEL Book V

THE BOOK OF TIMOTHY

MICHAEL, THE ARCHANGEL Book VI

THE BOOK OF TIMOTHY

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO TIM

LITTLE SALLY COREY AND HER FRIENDS

This book is dedicated to

Dr. David B. Samadi

without whom it would never have been written.

PART I

The Ballad of Tomasso

or

Home Education Rewarded

THE BALLAD OF TOMASSO

-i-

T here he stands. Four feet, three inches tall, my son with soul-searching, plangent eyes and a voice that, when he vocalizes, ravishes. That is who or what he is. A voice, and the sense to use it like a weapon against his peers. Without it, he is defenseless for they belittle him, not surprising, given his diminutive height at eleven years of age. Not a secondary sexual characteristic in sight. Not the trace of a sideburn or of secondary hair. Armpit as hairless as a conch’s shell. Luscious, seraphic curves fatted gently about his fragile bones. No waist, no shape but for an amorphous pendency of breasts, a timbre to his words that, when he talks, reinforces effeminacy. A penis obstinately withdrawn into his hairless scrotum like a shelled snail shying from the sun. He still wears pants held up by elastic which Rebecca threads through his beltline with a safety pin. And little polo shirts which she finds on bargain tables in small-fry shops. It is not through cruelty but necessity that he winds up wearing Garanimals.

Insensitively, salespersons in department stores reroute her to their kids’ collections. The Gap? Levis? Not in his stars. Imagine, Tomasso’s prepubescent body plastered in grainy photographs on the walls of Abercrombie and Fitch! Who would come? Or if they did, it would only be to smirk and point at his puny likeness. No. Such stores hardly cater to him; they consider him a child, or worse, a freak of nature.

There are times when I pity him, my son. Every day, he comes home uncomplaining but bruised from school. What I know must be painful hematomas appear like sodden tea bags beneath his skin. Purple and tender to the touch where some asshole bullies have pummeled him at recess. Cuffed him on the side of the head or played a cruel game of knuckles on his frail and unprotected arm while his teachers worked diligently at looking elsewhere. Every morning, he goes to school neat and clean, his satchel filled with sheets of staff paper on which are the random notes for a great opera that he is composing; and his lunch pail is packed with the healthiest of foods which Rebecca has painstakingly prepared. In the afternoon, when I come to whisk him home, he is invariably disheveled, smudged but never defeated.

And in the night of each day that he returns from school so proudly soiled, Rebecca’s hand clings to my own in our bedroom, and we lament the truth of Tomasso’s tender life, aware that his days in school must be a secret torment, aware that soon he will grow older, and the children in his classes bolder, unchecked in their determination to destroy what they can never hope to understand. In the end, he will be ours to love, to nurture, to teach to the best of our humble abilities; there is between Rebecca and me an unwritten understanding that we will not lose him to any school. Before the time comes for him to enter the upper grades at Lingor High, we will take upon ourselves the joy of teaching him.

I love dearly this child of mine, this son possessed of a gift that moves grown men to tears. At his elementary school graduation, he was chosen to sing The Star-Spangled Banner, that impossible anthem. Yet he made the impossible ring through the rafters. He brought silence to the auditorium. He thrilled adults and peers alike. Connoisseurs and the very trash who would trip him in the halls and make the most devastating remarks about his stature and masculinity stood side by side in silent awe at the bell-like clarity of his voice. And later in the program, when Tomasso was called back to the stage to sing Climb Every Mountain, his pure and powerful soprano found his dream on a high A-flat and hung there beating toward eternity. Not the piping, reedy sound of a choirboy dependent upon the recesses of cold gothic walls for resonance, but in and of itself, rich with layered overtones that enveloped the vast auditorium.

Born into the stream of history on Valentine’s Day, somewhere between John Lennon’s untimely assassination outside the Dakota and Ronald Reagan’s survival of John Warnock Hinckley’s bullet in a year when Ordinary People would ironically capture the public’s imagination, unique Tomasso comes home now to his routine as he has done for well almost half his life, for despite his growing celebrity, his uniqueness, we continue to try giving him the semblance of normalcy in childhood while keeping up with his rigorous training. Our rigidity has sometimes been met with rebellion, yet we remain determined to enforce a structure on his life that somehow balances his education with vocal practice for sometimes five, six, even seven hours a day.

In the beginning, what did I know but the musical aspirations of my own youth unfulfilled? My parents, born Calabrese, who devoted their lives to my dream of garnering accolades in a glittering gilded horseshoe, no doubt had once hoped for a brain surgeon, a lawyer as their son, but died sadly, prematurely, aware only that I had introjected their passion for Verdi without the divinely bestowed talent to achieve my dream, consigning with their deaths, their awareness of my inability to succeed and leaving my hope to be quashed in a string of foster homes.

Until Tomasso’s birth, I existed in a world of forgotten dreams, a world where simple reality compelled me to forsake learning in the quest for survival. Drawn together by our love of music, Rebecca came too young into my life, and too foolishly I gifted her with Tomasso, a child of careless and reckless passion. I gave up my education at a noted conservatory of music to accept sanitation work. Short hours, good pay, great benefits, and surprisingly, no regrets on my part. The American Dream is fulfilled in so many surprising ways. Carpetbagger jest my noncollecting friends, but I found cause for hope in my chosen career. It said on my truck that I am a certified garbologist. That is what it said. I fancy myself a singing garbologist. The words give me a sense of dignity, of professionalism. Had I been talented enough to qualify for Jeopardy, I would gleefully hear Alex Trebbek rebuking me, mildly condescending on the words singing garbologist. No matter. The hours ensured that I was always there to monitor Tomasso’s afternoon practices with Rebecca, my lovely wife and teacher of my son, and slowly I became absorbed in the vicarity of watching Tomasso bloom.

Rebecca herself actually possesses a voice of exquisite beauty, cautiously trained, superb in technique, intelligent through its limitless colorations; but she never desired a career, never really felt the drive that I have painstakingly instilled in Tomasso; nor had she (nor I, for that matter) the marketability, the handle of being a perennial adolescent, perfectly formed and handsome with a squillo in the voice that pierces like a diamond gorgeous in the sun. No, Rebecca, though she has no affinity toward God, is content to blend into the ladies’ choir of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, a congregation of lovely singers who draw their inspiration from musical sisterhood and their culture from reading fashion magazines. On Saturday nights, the men congregate at our local espresso bar while their wives begin preparation for the Sunday feast. Who is to say what frustration these women feel because they do not have the opportunity to live vicariously through a God-gifted prodigy like Tomasso.

Two years ago, our fears began in earnest when Dr. D’Agnoli, Tomasso’s pediatrician since birth, predicted that our boy would soon begin to develop.

How can you predict that? I asked.

He was a wizened man, this doctor, a specialist in adolescent growth, with himself a diminutive frame, translucent skin, and a perfectly symmetrical body given bulk by a loose-fitting lab coat, its pockets crammed with chrome instruments. He wore thin gold wire-framed glasses over angel-hair eyebrows that swept upward toward a thinning tuft of fine-spun golden graying hair, giving his expression a perpetual sense of wonder. D’Agnoli smiled. His penetrating blue eyes glinting in those wired golden circles made me uncomfortable.

The measurement of the bone in the forearm is the best indicator of growth, he said. Tomasso will be of normal height, not a giant but certainly at least five and a half feet.

And the voice?

Ah, God’s mystery. He nodded as if hearing Tomasso’s voice in his mind. Our musical Christmas card when the boy was eight had carried his voice everywhere among our acquaintances. The Alleluia from Mozart’s Exsultate jubilate replete with trills and the most intricate fioratura. He rivaled the luster of Sutherland, the bottomless contralto of Horne, the power of Corelli delivered with a rat-a-tat precision, a barrage of notes which he’d learned to fling out from the back of his tongue with deadly accuracy.

The voice? I repeated.

Alas, it will go one day, probably without warning.

How long? I knew he sensed the urgency in my questioning.

A year, perhaps two or three if the world is fortunate. He smiled paternally. I hope you have made many recordings to play for him one day.

Yes, of course. I barely knew how to reply to such callousness. No warning then?

Not usually. None except for the inevitable clock. I sensed he was mistakenly trying to reassure me as though he could even suspect the depth of my concern. Well, perhaps a crack in the middle of a selection at school. Then, an almost-immediate disintegration. You should speak to his voice teacher.

Only his mother, I said. I thought you knew.

Yes, well, from what I have heard—I am no expert in the human voice!—he should stop singing at once and not venture a strain until the pubic process is completed.

Impossible, I replied. He’s booked solidly for the next four years.

The last engagements, I assure you, will not take place.

They were words of such finality that I truly couldn’t bear to hear them. It seemed that Tomasso’s voice had always been there. Well, at least since that first Christmas when at five years of age, he’d begun to sing along with my Rebecca. They had begun Silent Night, gliding octaves apart in almost-perfect unison, the eerie effect of Verdi’s Agnus Dei; but at the words so tender and mild, Rebecca had suddenly become aware of Tomasso and stopped singing herself. He’d been singing no words, of course; then, songs were purely vocalics to him, pristine open-throated sound following Rebecca’s technique and phrasing in perfect imitation. He filled the room with an electric silver joy.

She said, A natural portamento, her eyes wide in amazement.

I wasn’t then certain of the term, and questioned her.

Seamless, she whispered. Absolutely seamless, and the range, the sense of pitch, Marco, it’s all there.

It was the strangest of moments. I barely understood her awe, but I sensed that we had wandered into the presence of something extraordinary, something I alone could never have achieved. One of those seminal moments in life that would be recalled in perfect detail to the instant of our deaths.

Tomasso moved to the bay window in our modest living room. We gathered behind him. The lightest fluttering of snow had magically begun to carpet the familiar landscape before us, the trees and the drooping rhododendron shrubs, the ground itself clean in the nighttime lamplight. Across the street, neighboring lights pulsed, glittering jeweled offerings for the birthday of Our Lord and Savior. I opened the window. I wanted to share our moment of discovery with the universe. But at a blast of cold December air, I became instinctively protective for the first time in my life. My hands fell gently across Tomasso’s chest as his voice continued, filling everywhere the void of night with a tranquility that I recognized would never again be ours.

-ii-

Seven years old, two years since we discovered his voice. Tiny as Tom Thumb and already studying Amahl, which he is not scheduled to sing for another year. Menotti has heard him and wept. Presented to him the crutch from the original production. From the basement, I hear him practicing with Rebecca.

Don’t you dare,

Don’t you dare,

Don’t you dare to hurt my mother . . .

The passion is already intense. The performance will surely be a sensation, televised around the world. The following year, John Paul II himself will invite Tomasso to sing the Vatican midnight mass on Christmas Eve. Gounod, the vocal line unbroken and pure, the silk of a spider’s filament. Tomasso, floating pianissimi like the soft wings of swans riding cadenzas into eternity, his voice cresting the harmonies of a seraphic choir touched by chimes. Already he has made a private recording of Franck’s Panis Angelicus that melts the heart, its slowly ascending melodic thread a wisp of smoke wafting toward the stars.

Panis angelicus fit panis hominum,

Dat panis coelicus figuris terminum.

Surely the angels have fed my Tomasso their holy bread. He will be immortal in ways of which we can only begin to dream.

*     *     *

Obsession came to me in those early years of his life. The very possibility sprang from the fear of loss. Paul’s dicta against the voices of women in church giving me comfort and the encouragement to pursue my imaginings to their only logical conclusion. First Corinthians 14:34:

Let your women keep silence in church; it is not

permitted unto them to speak.

The sagacity of centuries gone, of Pontiffs Clement VIII and Sixtus V hearkening back to ancient cantorial traditions. Always the willingness to exchange the sexual for the ethereal, one form of promiscuity for another, but only one truly eternal.

It would be my—no, our legacy to the world. Not only the voice but the rekindling of music long forgotten, music that sent generations of listeners into paroxysms of ecstasy that we can scarcely imagine today. Mancini, Caldara, Gizziello, scores of forgotten masters and their works cruelly languishing, patiently awaiting the dawn of resurrection in moldy archives. Tomasso, my Tomasso, shall be your savior, shall bring you to the world as in a second coming. And what a renaissance it will be.

Historically, the procedure was without pain, at least physically. The prepubescent languorous in a bath sufficiently hot to soften the vas deferens that the tube might be skillfully crushed; but even in less experienced hands where cutting occurred, the child, derooted from reality in the miasma of an opiate-induced reverie, will not even realize when the moment of transformation occurs. The rising steam heavily perfumed. Lutes and pipes reverberating against the marbled walls engulf the boy so that as the surgeon wields his scalpel, there is no intrusion into the wistful fantasies of a child preened with promises of grandeur, echoing cries of eviva il coltello filling his thoughts. In his mind, buxom women swoon at his feet, his voice and stature soaring beyond imagination. The universe is at his command.

From the earliest emergence of his talent, I have filled Tomasso with such musings, visions of contemporary power and stardom. Sensual beauties who would collapse at the mere sight of him, eclipsing on MTV the David Bowies, the Stings (and arrows of outrageous fortune, if I may be permitted the levity of punishment), the stars producing pitiful voices that must be amplified with microphones crammed into their throats; the Michael Jacksons, the twentieth century’s phenomena of estrogen-created voices that merely mimic the authenticity of centuries past. You, Tomasso, in your power, your authenticity will fly to realms untouched by their celebrity.

You, my Tomasso, will have their fame, their fortunes. Heads of state will grapple to hear you perform.

Tomasso, with dreams of fame and fortune instilled, says, Let’s do it, Dad.

But nothing comes without sacrifice, I say. Not in this life, son. That is the one lesson you must take from me, the wisdom you must cling to long after I am gone.

Sacrifice? he asks, tentative, almost shyly inquisitive with no apparent comprehension, his eyes dark and limpid reservoirs of trust and love.

A word you will come to understand, my boy.

Tomasso is in his room. A nine-year-old’s room already filled with the music and memorabilia of his career. (How odd it seems to apply that word to a nine-year-old child.) The walls surrounding him boast ample verification of his genius. Framed reviews and articles, the stuff of legend and apocrypha. The story of how when playing muted Trouble in the cradling arms of Freni, he sent out such waves of passion that she lost her emotions, her very voice, in the penultimate moments of Butterfly as Tomasso, his tiny head resting on her shoulder, poured out the passions of Cio-Cio San:

Tu, tu, piccolo iddio,

Amor, amor e mio . . .

until at that final wrenching gasp of giocca, giocca, go and play, he rushed from the stage waving his little American flag, leaving the great spinto reduced to astonishment at the surge of bravos erupting throughout the house. And filling almost one entire wall with photographed luminaries, their images autographed with inscriptions of devotion and respect: composers who now devote themselves to creating the most caressing melodies for his unique timbre, conductors who research hopelessly forgotten scores and with him bring them back to life, and the stars from every repertoire and range addressing him respectfully, in awe of his talent. The sentiments are love, idolatry; in some, more than a throb of envy for my wonder is destined to supersede their fame in every corner of the planet. One photograph in particular he treasures above all: manly in formal dress, propped against a pianoforte, his ice-blue eyes pinpoints beneath a brilliant shock of flaming scarlet hair, there is Russell Oberlin, dean of countertenors, whose lip arches into an enigmatic smile. But it is the inscription that speaks volumes, an unsubtle theft of Eliot acknowledging Ezra Pound: il miglior fabbro, he writes in an unwavering hand. Into the world of his room, Tomasso awakens each morning to the approbation of the stars.

*     *     *

Against such overwhelming evidence, I found myself questioning my own scruples, my own intent. I questioned the purity of my vision. I questioned the morality of my ideal. And in truth, I am still occasionally terrified by the answers forthcoming. An obsession with filicide pervades my thoughts. What, I wonder, is one to expect from a Judeo-Christian culture where God is the Father, but Christ, the Son, gets all the glory. Envious, God the Father has expelled his Adam from the garden, again and again; a god no less envious dooms his chosen progeny to a history that meanders in search of annihilation. Demands of filial sacrifice rain through the Testaments: Job, Abraham, the firstborn in all of Egypt, the Day of Judgment yet to come. It is a world where fathers visit their sins upon their issue; where fathers create wars so that their sons may die in distant lands; inevitably, a world where Beethovanian foetuses in petri dishes will be silenced before they compose a single measure. It seems all monsters once created by their Frankensteins must inevitably be destroyed by their makers.

There were years when I became fixated on the so-called Laius Complex, applauded Oedipus for making what I thought a pre-emptive move. Rather a peculiar inversion of what has come to be expected and accepted in nature, like dog bites man becoming man bites dog. Are there motives? I wonder. Out of some profane indignation, unable to tolerate their potential for success, their potential to supersede paternal accomplishments, or more fundamentally, covetous of the child’s potential to breathe in the sweet air of future flowers, to bask in as yet undreamed of moments of pain and pleasure, do all fathers harbor in secret the dream of burying their sons before they themselves are committed to the dank, enfolding clay?

I think these thoughts mostly while watching him with Rebecca when they practice; I, always on the threshold looking at them at the piano across the room in auburn light, so diminutive like a mother and child etched upon a postage stamp, his head bonded against her breast while she lovingly teaches, demonstrates gently a technique that I could never master. Such adoration in their eyes that it pains me so that I close my own and listen to the perfect harmony of their voices.

*     *     *

There was an afternoon when he was ten, not unlike so many other afternoons except for the ever-increasing threat of puberty, the fear that each of us awoke with every morning knowing that the day, as any given day, might be his last and that Dr. D’Agnoli’s prophecy could manifest itself in the crack of a note, cast a pall over each festive event. It was the coldest December anyone could remember. Tomasso had been bundled off to middle school early, a trailing flannel scarf wound in endless protection around his throat and mouth. Snowy clouds of breath preceded him onto the doorsill. Waving from the bus, he looked for all the world an alien, a diminutive yellow spaceman, zipped and puffed in a snowsuit of down. From the zipper of his jacket there dangled a plastic angel gowned in holly. So weightless, he barely made an impression in the snow crusted under his footfall. His eyes were radiant and alive as always with the anticipation of performance. You could sense the overwhelming thrill of expectant joy in the very light of his gaze.

Later in the morning, we joined him at school for the annual Christmas concert, ourselves doleful and certain that on that morning, Adolphe Adam had surely wept in his grave for the final time. Never again would Cantique de Noel float heavenward with such ingenuous coloring, such exquisite purity of tone and even range. Other than our unspoken dread that Tomasso might be singing for his final Christmas, it was an exhilarating morning for each of us. Gone were the days of dress-up assemblies in our public schools. Gone were the days when even the gruffest of boys were made to dress in shirt and tie for such occasions, brogues polished and laced, clipped on cravats straight and pressed, their more rambunctious behavior corseted in starch; yet on this morning, even the most rambunctious ruffians sat entranced by the wonder of his timbre, swept up by Tomasso’s clarion peal to universal peace and brotherhood.

Yet that very afternoon returning home, under a gray-white sky that ominously threatened to inter us in a sepulcher of snow, still smiling, he descended from the bus in pain, but no longer glowing and fulfilled as we had seen him on stage. His poor body was bruised and swollen blue from the pummeling he had received. Seeing then, a trickle of dried blood snaked from a crevice in his lips, his scarf undone so that the little plastic angel, now dragged along the ground, was a seminal moment in my awareness that here was a child unable to defend himself without his music.

It was then I knew what would be.

Have you thought where all this is going? I asked Rebecca who was mutely applying compresses to a nasty hematoma on his arm as Tomasso drifted into an exhausted slumber. In his room, the photographed portraits of opera’s luminaries looked down sadly upon their sleeping angel.

Who did this to him?

You know, he’ll never say. For years, Tomasso had come home beaten and abused. When questioned, his responses were always the same. Who did this to you? It was an accident. What happened? Nothing. I want to practice now. And off he would go to his room, his portfolio of compositions clenched in his tiny hand. The curative power of his creativity in overcoming adversity never ceased to astound us.

And while he slept, we went to the kitchen. Rebecca made a pot of Darjeeling, and we sat in our lovely bay window overlooking the heavily frosted yard, the snow compacted with layers and layers of mulch that in autumn Tomasso had eagerly helped me to spread. A birdless, leafless bough of evergreen had snapped under the weight of snow. It lay barren and forlorn, a nasty scar upon the landscape that would see no life come spring. I thought of how Tomasso and I had gone out to coat the gaping wound with shellac, insulating the tree from any invasion of vermin. And I looked sadly at the counter where stood a framed picture of Tomasso and Placido Domingo still dressed for Tosca. Tomasso, in the thin unprotecting tunic of a shepherd child, held in his expression the despondent loss of a Dickensian waif.

Rebecca, how will this boy grow without his music?

I don’t know. She sipped her tea and stopped to press the warm pottery mug against her red swollen eyes. I honestly don’t know. Sometimes I think we’ve made a terrible mistake revolving his life around music as we have.

Nonsense, I said. God gave him his voice, just as God gave us no choice.

God? she snapped. God gave Joseph Schmidt a life of ridicule and persecution. To Caruso he gave cancer of the throat. Don’t talk to me of God, not where my child is concerned.

I took her hands in mine as tenderly as I could, realizing that I had always loved this woman for the intensity of her passion. Rebecca had a stalwartness, an inner strength that had always held us together even in the most perilous times of Tomasso’s brief career, but now she averted my gaze. I wondered if she too were sensing that at ten years old, Tomasso’s career, perhaps his life, was waning toward an anticlimactic end. And with it what I was loathe to call our own vicarious existence, for as surely as there were leaves upon the trees, our lives had been reduced to parasites feeding on Tomasso’s genius. I knew my love for her was as firm as hers for me. For all the world, I did not want to make her my Clytemnestra bent on vengefully ensnaring me with nets in a marble tub. In truth, so carefully have I masked my agenda that she has never known my harbored fantasy; yet now I wondered that if I were to tap her most secret thought, would I not find a partner complicit with my plan.

Do you remember Giacomo Guzzo? I asked.

The maestro, she said. Of course, in Firenze. Tomasso was barely seven when we met him at the Vatican.

An acrid edge crept into her tone, for she had suspected, as did I, that the maestro was a pedophile. The rumor, never acknowledged or addressed, had been bruited in the opera world for years; but such was the majesty of his musical achievements that the world forgave, or at least pretended the scandal did not exist. In rehearsals, he had been known to dote on the children, even to leave the pit and climb to the stage where he would personally direct them through the capers of a Boheme or Carmen. His hands, gently guiding them through their blocking, would tousle hair, pat a note of approval on some unsuspecting prepubescent rump, or drape uncomfortably long over their rag-clad shoulders while he whispered encouragement. Their birthdays were personally noted with gifts and sometimes outings where he would join their families. The season of Christmas never passed without their being invited en masse to a celebration at his home. Many of the children he trained personally in liturgical repertoire; and on Sabbaths, frequently, he found time to take his little choir on guest appearances to the churches of Firenze.

Nor were the avenues or charities he chose overlooked by wagging tongues. Chiesa della Misericordia dedicated to San Sebastian with its black-robed brotherhood devoted to the assistance of abandoned children was a particular favorite as was the startlingly contemporary Sacro Cuore where the Frati Bigi had established a boarding school for minors. There in one of Firenze’s most congested neighborhoods, Tomasso had once come to sing an ancient cantata under the maestro’s controlling baton. Among the soaring pilasters supporting that unique bell tower, Tomasso and the church itself were bound as one under God.

Throughout the rehearsal period for that now-legendary concert beneath Father Ludovico’s carillon, Rebecca and I had never once let Tomasso alone with Guzzo. After all, we were certainly not comparable to those avaricious, frequently impoverished parents who had been known to offer their unsuspecting children as indulgences to his caresses. It was somewhat ironic that such tradition could be traced back to the inception of castrati centuries ago. How many urchin choirboys past had been sacrificed to the church on the altar of income, their parents fabricating gruesome stories of household accidents or animal attacks to justify the scrotal invasions of their issue.

But from his first encounter with our beautiful Tomasso, we sensed nothing with which to concern ourselves; their relationship became at once professional, so in awe was the great conductor of Tomasso’s vocal prowess.

Giacomo Guzzo was a large man, physically somewhat repulsive with a hooked Umbrian nose, his leathery skin disfigured further by a patchwork of carbuncles. His was a profile of Marchesan sensibility rather suggesting an unrecorded descent from Federico da Montefeltro, so immortally captured in tempera by Piero della Francesca. It was hardly a face that would suggest the copious tears spilling from his eyes when Tomasso sang.

Next year we will do Humperdinck together, he promised before we departed Florence.

But that Hansel was not to materialize for the most mundane of reasons: it was an impossibility to find a Gretel of Tomasso’s age with power enough to cut through Humperdinck’s Wagnerian orchestration. Another such creature was simply not of this earth, and directors deemed it ludicrous to pair Tomasso with the requisite Valkyrie. Engulfed between such a primordial creature’s breasts, he would become a laughingstock. That at least was the public reason for cancellation of the production, but I more than suspected what the maestro himself intimated when he called us personally with the news: financial backing simply could not be found to mount a production for a talent many viewed as fragile and ephemeral.

Tragico, he said, his voice peppered with finial vowels. "He would have been the sensation of Maggio Musicale. A Hansel like none other, and the following season? Königskinder."

Is nothing to be done? I demanded when we next met after cancellation of the contract. The child has learned the role. He will be heartbroken.

Insuring his voice would be impossible.

In the breath-punctuated silence which followed, I sensed an enigma of veneration in his gaze which haunts me to this day.

"In the centuries gone, there would have been no such problem. No problemo. He mocked a rueful parody of Schwarzenegger, perhaps determined to mask the genuine heartbreak in his own tone. His voice would have outlived his life. Tomasso would have been, how you say, canonizzare?"

Canonized.

Like the children of Porpora.

Nicola Porpora, I knew, had been in the eighteenth century the greatest of Neapolitan voice teachers. In Naples, he had become attached to the Conservatorio di Santa. Maria di Loreto, and there the greats, Farinelli, Caffarelli, even Antonio Uberti who diminutized and immortalized his master’s name became the idols of their time. Women, even men, wore pendants bearing their pictures in the way that we wear the hats and T-shirts of rock stars today. They flocked to concerts, disrobed at the feet of Porpora’s greatest prodigies.

But today, such a practice would be unthinkable.

You were baiting the man, Rebecca said in the hotel room later that night.

I remember smirking to avoid an answer, quoting instead the maestro.

Unthinkable, nonetheless, fools still try to attain such an effect with drugs. Male sopranists they call themselves. A new category of countertenor. Pah, they all sound like Charlotte Church, loons in the choir of God. Not a chest tone among them. Piping thin voices inadequate to the great music conceived for the castrati.

Guzzo, a plaintive sense of impending loss in every vowel, every gesture, looked adoringly at Tomasso who across the room stood on a step stool to examine the great man’s unrivaled collection of baroque scores. Tedeschi, Gizziello, they were all there. Their music scratched on paper, bound and locked behind cabinets of leaded glass. Both of us knew Tomasso alone held the key.

If only . . . , I suggested incompletely, my eye fixed on the rapt Tomasso.

Again flashed the maestro’s enigmatic smile, a wispy simper of possibility, incongruous on his great, craggy countenance. Do we not live in a world where all things are possible?

I stared at the maestro, astonished, as he fingered a gold chain that disappeared into his plaited pocket and withdrew an antique fob. Time, he said. It is all a matter of time.

He crossed to a great mahogany table, its legs carved with gilded angels trumpeting a day of future judgment. On it was a variety of playing instruments surrounded by stacks of discs and records illuminated under a Tiffany shade of exquisite intricacy. Guzzo selected a fragile one-sided platter with parental care and waited, his eyes closed, for the sound dating back a century to the infancy of recorded time.

Beneath a surface of dryly rushing air, a voice emerged, a voice at first unpleasant, almost creepy to the ear with high tones pushed from the chest that seemed to flounder from pitch, the whole sound cracking with dust and imperfections; but I knew the artist at once. Alessandro Moreschi, last of an ancient line who had died in 1922, leaving behind the only recorded legacy of a bygone Vatican era. Tosti’s Ideale as only he could have sung it.

A capon who never properly trained, Guzzo said. His eyes remained riveted on the boy across the room. But Tomasso, ah, Tomasso caro.

Now those conversations had all come rushing upon me, and I suspected upon Rebecca as well.

We knew. Had both known. Known that there would be a time for that conversation to reshape itself. We never spoke of this before, Rebecca said. With purposeful fingers, she scraped the remains of a cinnamon cracker from the corner of her lips and pushed away from the table, cup held in the bridge of her fingers. Obsessively, she picked at a stubborn crumb clinging to her blouse and moved into the bay window. Her back was toward me, still a beautifully proportioned woman, yet I noticed how prematurely silver her hair had become. Her eyes seemed to focus on the fallen branch of evergreen.

Did we have to speak of it? I asked. Aren’t there those words in life which are simply understood, which are more real for being left unspoken?

The cup slipped from her fingers and clattered to the floor. The noise made no impression whatever upon her, merely accentuated the silence connecting our thoughts. She turned on me, a study in gray. An aura of snow glaring from beyond the window illuminated her body. She was wearing tailored wool, the gray of winter bark, perfectly groomed and pressed as always with her hair swept back into a jeweled snood. Her eyes were the color of silver rain copied almost perfectly in the sleety color of her brooch-clasped blouse. Everything about Rebecca had always been monochromatic, a reflection of the tunnel vision she had for our Tomasso. Her passions were channeled into complete devotion to him, his protection, his voice, his tutoring. She had never been one to put on airs. I knew that the bluntness of her speech was a shield both for Tomasso and her own suppressed rage at the cruel joke God would one day play upon him.

Her fingers prodded at her throat, kneading at her vocal cords as though they were the source of some terrible curse she had transmitted to her child. He’s so young, so unguarded,. Marco, it wouldn’t be moral.

Forget what’s moral, I said.

There are laws. Marco, it’s a horror we could not possibly justify.

There are youthful offenders that the laws allow to beat him every day of his life. We can’t justify those laws, but we can insulate him, protect him against the shits of this world who have absolutely no understanding or care about his dreams.

Marco, they’re your dreams, perhaps mine, as well, but certainly not his.

They’re Tomasso’s, goddamnit. His dreams. His alone. The music, the applause, the adulation is what he lives for, not being beaten by brutes or exploited by scientists who would rip out his vocal cords and throw them into a jar of formaldehyde.

This is madness, she said. We’re not having this discussion. How did we even get here?

Anxiously, Rebecca scooped up the fragments of her cup and placed them on the side counter. She took the framed Tosca photo in hand and glared at it scathingly. Here was our rail-thin child as the shepherd, nested in the crook of Placido’s arm. One side of Domingo’s face was drawn up into a wry grin. Rebecca could not bear to read the great tenor’s inscription:

To Tomasso,

You are the greatest of us all.

Whatever came to mind, she slammed it facedown and grabbed at the counter for support. After a moment, she turned and scanned the room, the sleet of her eyes beginning to thaw. The conspiracy of Tomasso’s existence was everywhere: autographed recipe books from the stars cluttered a shelf over the electric range, magnetic notes on the refrigerator which Tomasso had grouped into a theme from his great opus in progress. On the far wall hangs an ornately framed watercolor of Tomasso as Amahl, the Menotti crutch propped on a shelf beneath it like a fugitive from a Dali sculpture.

Because that child is ten years old. I answered her bitterly but as logically as I could. One more year, and life as he knows it, loves it, will be snatched from him and the world by a cruel joke of nature.

Don’t you hear yourself? Nature, it’s nature. It happens. It was always going to happen. It will happen, Marco, because it is nature.

In a distant part of the house, Tomasso had begun to vocalize. Appoggiotura glittered light and leaping, springboards to full-throated, glorious tones; arpeggios running to heights which only served to extend the range of my own passion.

So are storms, cataclysms, mountains that explode. Events that snatch thousands of lives in a single eruption. All nature, Rebecca! Nature is a destroyer. It takes life, sucks the marrow from the bones and spits it back into the earth.

I won’t hear this.

It’s in our power, Rebecca.

It’s not in our power. We are his parents. We have no right to steal his future from him.

We are his parents, and we have not only the right, we have the obligation to shape his future for him.

What you’re suggesting is illegal. We could go to prison. What right do we have to tamper with his sexuality?

Do you honestly believe this child is destined for normal sexuality? I cried. Without his music, he’s a cipher. Rebecca, he is a totally asexual human being.

He’s asexual because he’s ten years old. Doesn’t he even deserve to have a voice in such a decision? Rebecca fairly choked on her unintended pun. Her arm waved unconsciously toward the direction of his voice, an extended finger jabbing emphasis in the air. Or have you already discussed this with him? Christ, Marco, have you discussed this unspeakable act, this mutilation with an eleven-year-old boy, because if you have—

"So what would you have, Rebecca, what would you wish for, that his intellect might develop before his gonads? That he might cry out, Cut me before I fuck?"

Monster, monster! she screamed, the only word to escape her liquefied expression, all those shades of her gray and silver bleeding together in an agony of expressed disdain as she repeated the word again and again so that it reverberated through the house.

And then the most extraordinary extension of sound occurred as though the column of her agony had reached the heavens in a mighty crescendo only there to blossom, transformed magically into a Corinthian capitol of breathtaking beauty, birds and leaves entwined eternally in stone. For there was Tomasso’s secure and wonderful sound, an a capella sound so powerful we knew he was desperate to shut our rage and rancor out of his life, or perhaps, more tellingly, to forgive us.

Ah! mes frères je connai ma triste indignité

Jour et nuit je la pleure

Vous me raillez, c’est peu

Votre courroux, sur l’heure

Devrait m’anéantir je l’ai bien mérité.

Jongleur de Notre Dame. It was to become his most famous performance: the part of Jean, gamin of the streets with huge Piafian eyes dominating his frail and threadlike body, was to become Tomasso’s signature role. Massenet’s work, Jean transposed for Tomasso’s voice by Prêtre himself, would open triumphantly in Paris and tour the world. And when at the final curtain, the sadly abused waif surrounded by weeping monks in tender candlelight would die in the arms of the Virgin, knowing at last his talent was simple and pure enough to gain him entry into heaven, the world would weep as the monks cried miracle.

Spent with anguish, Rebecca stood by the sink and pressed cold water under her eyes.

Are you listening, Rebecca? He’s singing to us, telling us that everything is all right.

Yes, she whispered, her lips barely moving.

You’re teaching him the role, Rebecca, preparing his heart for a performance that may never take place.

Yes, she whispered again.

Listen to the words, I said softly, translating them as he sang.

Ah! My dear brothers, I understand my sad indignity

Every day, every night I weep

You ridicule me, it is meaningless . . .

When I touched her, she did not pull away.

-iii-

When a decade later I returned with Tomasso from abroad, he had achieved the status of superstar. No longer did the public speculate on the mystery of his voice which had continued to grow in beauty and power through the years. He had become protégé of the now-stooped and increasingly frail Maestro Guzzo who, having further refined Tomasso’s technique, was bringing him home to America at a time when my prodigy’s sheer vocal agility had become the nonpareil of the operatic universe.

We had believed that with the passage of a decade, the proof of his vocal prowess would curtail public conjecture, even to quash the threats of legal action; but as Tomasso grew to produce a vocal luster unheard for centuries, the notoriety surrounding his sexuality became the fodder of tabloids. Fabrications of his prowess titillated. Every human encounter he made burgeoned with the most erotic speculation. Guards had to be hired to maneuver him through crowds of adoring fans who tore at his clothes, frenzied to touch his shrunken member. Adoring zealots stretched to grasp his hands, to be recipients of his enigmatic smile, his pupils the deep brown of sunflowers lost in ridges of the tender fat which was a byproduct of his condition. Infirm and crippled came to him on walkers, in wheelchairs, hobbled on crutches determinedly edging toward the stages where he performed in order to share firsthand the curative powers of his voice, for it was believed that its very sound could banish pain, that touching his throat would cure the lame, that even a glimpse of his penis would reverse forever the aging process. Headlines fairly (or unfairly) shrieked with stories of his mutilation, his dalliances, his sexual couplings, perversions, and the fetishes he was known to favor. At Christie’s, a dildo rumored to have been used by him in coupling with a celebrated movie star fetched twenty-six thousand dollars. On the black market, other relics curried far vaster fortunes: minuscule cuttings from his scrotum, fragments of his foreskin which circulated among his wealthiest patrons who harbored them in airtight crystal boxes secreted in the most secure reaches of their mansions, shavings from his very vocal cords. Vials of his breath and of his secretions, tissues bearing traces of his mucus or saliva, a drop of his urine or fecal matter purloined by chambermaids in foreign bedrooms were beyond price, bartered, and traded among his most affluent devotees. Guzzo himself was said to have somehow acquired and retained a unique pendant made from Tomasso’s left testicle, its mate having disappeared deep in the souks of Fez where the mythologized operation had been performed. Then there was the scalpel which had allegedly cut him, then the soiled and bloodied bandages which had bound the completion of his circumcision, and most handsomely, graphic original proofs of the operation itself which had first appeared in the Enquirer: all fetching stratospheric prices beyond anyone’s wildest imagination.

On the evening of his first New York appearance at Carnegie Hall, Fifty-Seventh Street had to be cordoned off, so great was the crush of humanity come to hear or condemn him. For as well as fans, the moral right was vigorously represented, seeming to emanate from Motown but a few hundred feet east of the concert hall: wizards and preachers who, along with their congregations, were bused into New York, drifted among the Zealots of Tomasso to proclaim apocrypha. They carried Scriptures and brandished crucifixes to denounce the fanatical opera-loving mayor of the city for daring to enter the concert hall, an act which gave both credence and official sanction to Tomasso’s mutilation; worse, for daring to hold out hope that, subsequent to the concert, the star would be feted through the canyons of Lower Manhattan in a ticker tape outpouring of New York’s idolatry. Extremists of the Christian world carried placards which prodded the air like the hoisted bayonets of counter—revolutionaries. Teenie Weenie: Have It Reattached, Ball-less Wonder Invades New York, Don’t Ejaculate Here!, the exclamation point extended into the shape of an exclamatory phallus balanced on a ball of sperm.

While somewhere across the street, iconoclasts appeared near the Hard Rock Cafe. They stormed in legions the gutters outside Planet Hollywood, their own signs proclaiming support for the fabled castrato. Viva the Cutting Edge, read the words of a gloriously gowned dowager while beside her a stinking derelict stretched his message between a pair of scrawny arms: He Sings, ‘After the Ball Was Over.’ Their masses swelled backward blocks through the city toward Lincoln Center where James Levine stood before choirs massed in the plaza and welcomed Tomasso’s return with Beethoven’s unending Chorale to Joy. From their midst there flew into the air hundreds of white doves, thousands of helium-lifted balloons stamped with the words bravo tomasso! all drifting skyward in an airborne display of unabandoned hope. Thousands produced kazoos and blew Va, pensiero into the crisp autumn air. Fly, thought, on wings of gold, swelled the people’s voices in a momentous surge of melody such as had not been heard since the great Verdi’s funeral cortege.

Confrontations of the most violent kind seemed inevitable. Behind boarded windows, proprietors combed their counters and racks in search of rumored bombs. A myriad small fires burned along the streets. Athletic supporters were set afire and held aloft. Stink bombs rolled along the curbs. Vitriol in all its forms, skirmishes, open rebellion erupted on every street corner from Times Square to Columbus Circle. The boarded windows of Patelson’s were imploded in a frenzied crush; and every shred of association to Tomasso—likenesses, scores, alabaster busts—thrown hysterically into the cavorting mobs.

Mounted police riding stallions, ironically gelded to pacify their temperaments, attempted vainly to maintain the peace, to at least forestall rioting and death. But to no avail: the weak were pushed beneath the swelling, delirious hordes. Women swooned in the path of oncoming traffic, men collapsed gasping and massaging constrictions in their chests, lives lost in the name of worship, families rent asunder, limbs snapped, and profiles bloodied in random confrontations with baton-wielding police. And above all, there was that din of human voices, voices of every tone and attitude heaved together into the air to produce a sound so clamorous and chilling it threatened to crack the very foundations of New York.

And then, at 8:00 p.m. precisely, as giant screens flickered to golden-hued life along Fifty-Seventh Street in Lincoln Plaza, one in the window of Harley-Davidson, another especially installed on a nearby skyscraper, the close-circuited cream-colored tiers of Carnegie Hall were projected by unseen cameras for all to see. The cameras panned the auditorium and stopped to rest on the stage where toward the already assembled orchestra Maestro Giacomo Guzzo moved slowly toward the podium for what was to prove his final concert.

From the hall came an unnatural silence. A held collective breath of anticipation. Or perhaps the silence was unreal; perhaps the sound of applause juxtaposed to the strident cacophony of the streets was merely blotted into auditory oblivion. On the huge screens, the maestro turned to his orchestra and limply raised his wrists as though he would downbeat an overture, paused, and then dropped them to his side knowing full well that no person in this hall, no person in this city would tolerate a note of prelude. Instead, he turned to the stage right wing and gestured Tomasso to appear.

The effect was instant and fantastic. For Tomasso had grown more than into the mere fulfillment of Dr. D’Agnoli’s prophecy. A pronounced yet ambiguous specter, his body, worked to perfection by personal trainers, he was heavily muscled and powerful, yet covered and puffed with curves of subcutaneous flesh so that he seemed soft and hard, alluring and repellent, at once. His frame stretched five feet eight inches, a height extended by platform-heeled boots, the corthornus of ancient heroes, which he wore to camouflage the unnatural length of his arms, simian arms which when extended drew his audience into his throbbing bosom. A pale and powdered salmon sheen radiated from his complexion offset by a crimson slash of Byronic mouth. Androgynous with waves of curling hair caressing his shoulders, he wore a scarlet silk tuxedo, the lapels encrusted with diamonds and sapphires. Draped from his shoulders and clasped with a diamond brooch to conceal the voluminous swelling of his breasts, a royal blue velvet cape lined in golden lame shimmered trailing across the stage. In the auditorium, the effect was instantly shocking and mesmerizing.

There was utter stillness in the hall. Stupefied and breathless was the judgmental air, not the wave of adulation one anticipates would greet a star of international stature, forgiven for indiscretion or incompetence by an adoring public before a note was sung. The very bulbs peered out of the chandelier in quivering expectation; the dimmed sconces glowed with eggshell translucency as they awaited the moment at hand. Tomasso himself was frozen, a sculpture in ice, arms outstretched in a dual gesture at once pitifully beseeching encouragement to perform and yet disdaining any resistance the public might offer. The silence continued for a seeming eternity, and then one pair of hands in the center of the orchestra came together in a single clap. A pause, and the man stood, clapped a second time, a third and then one and then another joined with Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in welcoming Tomasso back to America until Carnegie Hall resounded in joyous acclaim for a star arrived.

They sat as one on the edges of their seats as Maestro Guzzo raised his baton. But nothing could have prepared them for the sound which then emitted from Tomasso’s barely opened mouth. From his throat was launched a battle of angels and devils, dulcet and fiery at once. His opening aria had been deliberately placed. Artaserse, Hasse’s Son qual nave ch’agitata to announce that Farinelli had returned and been surpassed.

In the surrounding streets, Tomasso’s sound quickly became a drifting veil of intoxicant. Combatants froze in their fisticuffs, factions broke from their confrontations, as the stunned multitudes quieted and looked en masse, suddenly agape toward this second coming of a musical god. Above them, he was an overwhelming presence blown in televised magnifications to forty feet in height. The sound of his amplified voice filled the city, drowning out all traces of disharmony. As he—a god upon the mount, a mullah calling to prayer the faithful multitudes—continued to arrest their attention, first one, then two, then wave after wave of people withdrew from their contentions and, joining hands with the dismounting police, sank to their knees in obeisance, until at the last only the horses, ears sharply pointed, stood, towering above the subjugated masses, great equine sentinels over a populace transformed.

*     *     *

Two years earlier, Barbara Walters had journeyed to Rome to interview me for a 20/20 feature which was dubbed, The Ballad of Tomasso. My lawyers had advised against my ever returning to the United States where I could be arrested and charged, ridiculously I believed, with child abuse. Now they insisted that the telecast be taped using the Vatican itself for a backdrop. Such a setting would imply the historical sanction of the church for Tomasso’s procedure. Perfect, I thought. Did they also sense as did I that Michelangelo’s crowning cupola might symbolize Tomasso himself? As to me, for them did the magnificent Bernini colonnade conjure the image of Tomasso’s embracing arms?

Walters’s own voice sounded peculiarly gelded, an irony that lightened my heart.

Were you aware of the risks? Were you even aware that at age eleven, the chance to actually preserve his voice would have been diminished?

I’m not certain what you mean.

In past centuries, when the operation was done, it was done on a much younger child.

It is true that boys were usually altered at a much younger age, perhaps six or seven, sometimes only in the hope that a voice would later develop. But with Tomasso, the voice was already a proven fact. Our intention was to preserve something that was already formed, not to blindly stab in the dark.

And your wife, Rebecca, was willing to go along with this.

She certainly knew of his gift, I said.

You’re not answering my question, she persisted, leaning forward, head slightly angled to challenge my eyes. Her words were separated for deliberate emphasis as though she were talking to a child. Was your wife willing to go along with this procedure?

I feared choking on my own words, breaking into sobs. Preparing for the interview, I had determined to neither crack nor weep under Barbara’s unrelenting scrutiny. The meddlesome, nail-driving bitch would never have even warranted my time of day were it not for the publicity her interview would engender for Tomasso’s eventual return to the United States.

At first there was some hesitation. But later when Rebecca realized the potential loss to the world, when Tomasso agreed, she offered no objection.

Tomasso was eleven at the time, isn’t that right?

Yes.

Then what could have been in your mind, either of your minds, to even seek his agreement?

The pursuit, the fulfillment of beauty, I said.

Beauty, you call it, but some would say that what you did was barbaric, that you took a child and caused him irreparable damage.

That’s their opinion.

And you pay no attention to that?

Barbara, I was given the opportunity to preserve a wondrous gift. You are given choices in life. Mine was the preservation of a single child’s masculinity as opposed to a gift of enduring beauty and benefit to humanity.

Benefit?

Barbara, his gift could heal.

She uncrossed her legs and turned in the direction of the camera. I remember now that her normal expression, a journalist’s impassivity, betrayed a pursing glint of disgust. She balanced the sheaf of papers in her lap, methodically passing one page under another as the camera drew in for a close-up.

"When we come back, Mr. Tedesco talks poignantly of his wife’s battle with cancer and her final reconciliation with The Ballad of Tomasso."

There had been no break in our conversation, the commercial interruption having been spliced in at the studio as were the soft background strains of Tomasso’s plangent tones. They used a pirated recording, the boy then fifteen, perhaps only fourteen. Barely audible, but of course I recognized Handel’s Dove sei, Tomasso’s voice threaded with regret and hope at once, pining for the comfort of an absent wife. Unconsciously, I smiled, wondering if anyone would make the connection between Sesto and my young son who would never take a wife. As the music ebbed and faded into the next segment, a still photo of Tomasso, standing at Maestro Guzzo’s pianoforte while the great man caressed the air with one hand and played with the other, briefly filled the screen.

The gift to heal. Tell us about that, she said. Now there was an almost-sympathetic interest in her tone which I did not then recognize as bait.

There is ample evidence of the castrato voice having that effect, I said. "The most famous example was Farinelli himself who gave up the stage to sing at the bedside of Spain’s King Carlos V. The monarch was suffering from a then-undiagnosed clinical depression. He’d become incompetent to rule until his beloved Isabella brought Farinelli to their court. Nightly, for years, he would be summoned to sing the same songs for Carlos until gradually the king recovered