Art & Lies (21 page)

Well, I am an old bird who has tried to choose his stuffing. Stuff me with the best, and although I might dilute it with my own fear and inadequacy, at least I will know what the best is. Don’t you want something better than yourself to live up to?

A colleague of mine, in hospital for hip surgery, put down his crossword and asked me why I bothered with the opera.

‘The plots are so ridiculous,’ he said.

‘I don’t care about the plots.’

‘The music then, the music is so artificial.’

‘Unlike your hip-replacement?’

‘Don’t be clever with me Handel.’

‘Wouldn’t dream of it, but tell me, don’t you think it odd that while you are happy for your daily existence to be as artificial as possible, pre-packaged food, the latest medical techniques, your every moment spent in front of a blinking screen, your life as independent as you can make it of the seasons and the hours, day for night, and night for day if you wish it, all this, and yet you criticise art because it is not natural. Art is not supposed to be natural.’

‘Art is the mirror of life,’ he said sententiously.

‘Get thee behind me Hamlet.’

‘Can’t contradict the Bard.’

‘Not even when the Bard contradicts himself? A single dramatic utterance of Hamlet’s is no more Shakespeare’s own view of art, than the speeches of Iago are his own views on morals. Read
The Tempest
and then tell me that art is the mirror of life.’

‘I know what I like.’

‘You have no idea. You blindly obey every impulse because you think that makes you a free spirit. What will it be tonight? A tart? A private view? A musical? A trash bestseller? Sparkling wine served with its vintner’s assurance that it is every bit as good as champagne for half the price and none of the effort? You are a slave to advertising, to fashion, to habit and to the media. You like to call yourself a free man but you are bound by rules of which you know nothing …’

He did not speak to me again.

Speak Parrot … In order to escape the arbitrary nature of existence I do what the artists do, and impose the most rigorous rules on myself, even if, inevitably, those rules are in turn arbitrary. Language, musical structure, colour and line, offer me a model of discipline out of their own disciplines. What liberties they take are for the sake of a more profound order, the rules they insist upon are for the sake of freedom. How shall I learn to discipline myself if not by copying the best models? The paradox is that the artificial and often mechanical nature of the rules produces inexhaustible freedom, just as the harsh Rule of the early great monasteries was designed to shut out every inessential, but to fully open spirit and mind. Of course rules are made to be broken but when they have been broken they must be made again. Periodically all the arts break their own rules, to renew themselves and to invigorate themselves when the letter is killing and the spirit is offering life. The Church has not been either as brave or as wise. I wanted to be a priestand not a traffic warden. I wanted to open the way to spiritual insights, not dole out penalties for every silly offence. That is why I left the Church, not the teachings of Christ but the dogmas of Man, and when I turn to the Church now, I know, God forgive me, that it is because I am too weak to turn to myself.

*

Myself. The accumulation of parts; menus, concert programmes, blood-pressure charts, books read, conversations overheard, irrational fears, recurring dreams, love lost and found, childhood miseries, adult compensations, cinema tickets, holidays, that day with you, the white rose, La Mortola, I keep pressed between the pages of a book.

Open me up, all these things and thousands more, digressions, digestions, dissipations, dissertations, dilettantism, dilatoriness, dilapidations, disassociations, dill-pickle. The man in brine preserved against change by habit. Teach the parrot his lines and he will re-order the words and you might think he is talking to you. He is not talking to you, he is talking to himself. He is such a novelty but he says nothing new.

Speke parot … whose lines are they?

Across the dying sky a veneer of light. Thunder light that bound the broken edges of the clouds into a single square of threat. The sea had turned black and left its shadow in dark waves on the sand. The discoloured sand and the oozing water, rock pools like oil drums, filmy and still. Over by the port the huge lorries chugged out their diesel, the little men, their servants, breathed it in. The motionless trucks, the scrambling stick men in yellow hard hats, a volley of tarpaulin. The storm was coming.

The man felt the first drops of rain, fat like falling fruit. The sky shook and the ground underneath him repeated the tremor. He heard the piccolo of the lesser birds and the kettle drum cattle warning in the fields. Then, the tiny note of quiet, and the sky was strung with lightning.

The Jehovah bass of deepening thunder.

The sea, that had been restless in quavers of foam, strengthened and lengthened into breves of black muscle that ran past the marker bars of high tide and pitched against the quay. Human dots were dragged away on the eight-fold power. The man heard a crazed whirling behind his head. He turned and saw the propellers of the wind farm blurred into white eyes that seemed to be advancing on him in a rhipidos of terror. The eyes, strangely illuminated by the sickly storm, had the look of operating lights, and he remembered the hideous moment, after the anaesthetic, when the patient revives, and sees, unfocused, the huge swimming lights, too close, much too close, and the green mask of the surgeon staring down.

She had woken and felt for her breast.

So often he had looked at them; a jelly of tissue and fat, the puckering dead skin and the useless nipple on the tin plate. What could he do with those breasts, sliced like kiwi fruit, soft variegated off-coloured flesh? He scraped them into the bin. Binfuls of breasts, although a country colleague of his used to take them to feed to the pigs, why not? Napoleon had had a plaster cast made of his sister Paulina’s breasts because they were considered to be the most beautiful breasts in the world. Handel had seen them often in the Napoleonic Museum in Rome.

I was brought up in Rome. We had a house a little way from the Spanish Steps. My mother used to go there every morning and play her ’cello to the beggars. (Man shall not live by bread alone.) My father was a Tax and Trusts lawyer to The Vatican. I was sent back to school in England when I was twelve but by then it was too late.

What can I tell you about those closed evenings in draped rooms?

It was customary for some of the more eminent clergy to gather together on Sunday evenings, to play cards, drink port, and to discuss theology. My father, who was well liked, as much for his acumen as for his piety, was often invited, and I went with him when I could.

Our room, high, circular, was decorated with a fresco of Christ and the Woman taken in Adultery. She was the only woman I ever saw, in that room, or any of the others in The Vatican. The Blessed Virgin is not a woman.

The furniture, Renaissance, Empire, Third Republic, priceless, was red covered and trimmed in gold. The room was lit by chandelier and sconces. The decanters were full. Opulence, comfort, gentle-manliness, good taste and reason. And it was in measured tones of opulence, comfort, gentlemanliness, good taste and reason, that we discussed the difficulties of Coitus Reservatus: Quando fornicare non è fornicare? When is a fuck not a fuck?

There is a delicious salacious pleasure in the abstract puzzle of sexual morality. None of us were fumbling, cock-hard, with the latest encyclical, while our wives lay under us in the marriage bed. Celibate subtleties: To put it in — when? To take it out — when? To resist it — should she? To demand it — could she? A roar of laughter and a lewd nudge of holy elbows: ‘Una scopata è sempre una scopata?’

All this and a young boy’s burning face.

I had a friend, an old Cardinal, worldly wise, cunning, traditional, reactionary even, if that can seem possible in a Church whose progress is forever backwards. At the same time, in a contradiction tolerated only by the Catholic Church, he entertained, quietly of course, personal eccentricities of faith and behaviour which would have been unacceptable in a more usual setting.

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.