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Carmen entered the flat blissful and full of beans because she had hunted down a lovely lacy black designer dress for herself at a very good price. No longer dripping with crucifixes, she had been exercising steadily for a year, was now looking fit and fabulous and was all set to get into her new frock and show it off to Dino as she always did with flashy new purchases. "Look" she had been all set to say, like Carson on "Queer eye for the Straight Guy," - "Black is the new black!"
As she twirled her lithe and firm thirty four year old body into the kitchen, black tresses flying and put the grocery shopping on the counter, she realized something in the apartment was wrong. Dino had expelled his butt plug on the floor of the bathroom and the sound of infinitely sorrowful singing, broken spirited like from a crying drunk came from behind the closed door of his room. She recognized the song instantly from her days at Calle Rosario. It was "Thy Hand Belinda" or "When I am laid in Earth" the Nahum Tate libretto for Henry Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas" of 1689. Thy hand Belinda - Darkness shades me On thy bosom Let me rest, More I would But death invades me Death is now a welcome guest. When I am laid in earth May my wrongs create No trouble in thy breast Remember me! Remember me! But ah forget my fate. Remember me! Remember me! But ah forget my fate. The beautiful, haunting song had long been Freddy's favorite. According to Freddy, the librettist Nahum Tate was an ancestor of his from his mother's side. Though it certainly was not written with castrati in mind, Freddy's had made an actual castrato especially to sing this particular song for him. Freddy was very proprietorial, both about his castrato and his song. Making his castrato was the first time he wielded a scalpel after being disqualified as a surgeon in Brazil. His bedside manner had been brusque at best, and he tended to cut a lot more off or out of people than could possibly have been necessary to save them. His aloof, calculating and volatile personality had never ingratiated him to the administration either. The end finally came for his career when he "accidentally" destroyed the penis of a boy while circumcising him to fix a case of phimosis. It had suddenly occurred to him as he sliced away at the terrified child why certain surgeons in the U.S. defended routine infant circumcision with such vigor. It was rollicking good fun to attack a screaming, struggling and defenseless infant with a scalpel! Although Freddy was pretty sure he was straight, he nevertheless had always found himself with a rampant boner while performing circumcisions. He had noticed male and female nurses showing signs of excitement and arousal as well. The enormity of what he was doing - changing someone like that irrevocably gave him delicious tingles in the base of his spine, and shortness of breath... he shook all over from the high of it. He didn't think it was too much of a leap of the imagination to suppose that a significant number of trusted surgeons and nursing staff in other hospitals around the world did as well, when performing this undeniably sexual operation. Felipe was the castrato's name, he had been "shaved" by Freddy before puberty to save his soprano voice. He died of heart failure at the age of twenty one after fourteen years of extremely satisfactory service. Freddy said it was cardiomyopathy, but every one knew that Felipe had simply pined to death from the hopelessness of his condition, that and the fact that he never got used to getting very uncomfortably fucked all the time by the same psychopath who had cut off his dick when he was a boy. If he had not gleaned so much solace from his exquisite singing, he would not have lasted as long as he did. Freddy hadn't needed to take Felipe's little dick as well to save his voice for the song, but Freddy's youth and inexperience at the time meant that excitement had gotten the better of him, and he hadn't been able to hold back with the scalpel. Sliding that tiny cock off the end of the catheter... Such power and potency he felt! To change another person so utterly, so irrevocably. It was no wonder he had become addicted to this. He couldn't wait to try it on a full grown man. Someone older and experienced enough to know what they were losing. He wanted to see the horrified, helpless, pleading look in his eyes as he cut it off him. The outrage, the defeat. The disbelief... To destroy a grown man, no, - Men! He already knew there would be no stopping at one. Virile men. Fathers whose bollocks had already proven themselves, men whose cocks were familiar with the interiors of women... How much more of a triumph it would be to remove those. To gaze upon a muscular virile crotch that he had rendered passive and feminine and deprived of it's central treasure. To turn proud men into ruined things. Toys for him to use and cast aside. Freddy sometimes wondered whether he might be evil. He doubted the value of the concept of evil, let alone its existence, but he knew that if evil did exist, it was probably him. He wondered whether he was going to hell. He had been brought up a Lutheran. The pastor of his church had been very fire and brimstone and Manuel Friedrichs the child had been terrified of the eternal fires of hell, knowing even then that he was probably bound for them, spending his schooldays bullying the weaker children, his weekends hanging cats up by the balls, or drowning mice by tying stones to their tails and dropping them in a jar of his own piss, that he had saved up especially for the occasion. And now as an adult he found himself neglecting his second wife, just as he had neglected the first. Sex was nice with a girl when she was fresh but very soon it bored him. Now he was getting boners again dreaming of castrating and emasculating. He wanted to remove thousands of cocks and balls. He wanted to make mounds of them and set them on fire. He wanted armies of passive neutered males groveling at his uniquely potent and powerful feet. He wanted to be the only fertile man in the world, think how valuable his semen would be! He could sell each ejaculation for a billion cruzados and populate the whole planet with his own children. He had barely rested the child's limp little willy in a kidney bowl next to his excised testicles before he started wondering what kind of circumstances in the world would allow a person to get away with the kind of genital carnage that he was dreaming of. His reverie almost caused his new toy little Felipe to bleed to death. Snapping out of it, he reclamped the stump's dorsal artery and started suturing the deep one. Freddy's own penis had been damaged in a botched circumcision. He'd had the misfortune to be born while his parents were holidaying in the United States. According to them he had been whisked away by a nurse and operated on before they even knew what was happening. Freddy had sometimes wondered if the pain of it had affected him deep down, and whether this had contributed to his own psychotic compulsion to mutilate. His cock was perfectly functional, but there was an ugly scar on one side. Every time he looked at it he was reminded that as an infant he had been at another man's mercy. That his foreskin had been stolen without his consent. It was as if his cock were another man's property. The idea that another man might have had as much fun circumcising him as he would have under the circumstances infuriated him to distraction. Freddy already possessed all the status symbols that money could buy, and his imagination had played for a long while with the idea of making and owning something that money couldn't buy. A castrato for example. Once this dream had been accomplished he was immensely proud to have the only one he knew of in the world at the time. Luck was with Freddy in those days, and Felipe turned out to be a brilliant improvisationalist, embroidering his songs with glittering grace notes of his own invention, launching glissandos and subsidiary melodies and magically reeling it all back in and resolving it just when it seemed he had over reached himself, just when he knew that his audience feared that he had teased the song into lost territory. It was a game that he enjoyed tremendously. His flawless performance of Freddy's favorite parts of "Dido and Aeneas" had been utterly breathtaking every time, and yet he never performed a song exactly the same way twice. Freddy sent anonymous gifts of Felipe's recordings to famous professors at music conservatoria and university music departments. These recordings were copied and many of the copies found their way into the private collections of music aficionados all over the world. In the library of the musicology department at Cornell University is a rarely accessed tape labeled "010787 Henry Purcell - "Dido and Aeneas" Castrato simulation?- unknown source. " It is not the recording of a castrato simulation. It is the deeply strange yet infinitely beguiling voice of poor Felipe Iago. An assistant librarian, David Travis listens to it often as he updates the catalogue, and assists in the transfer of the collection to non degrading digital media. He was instrumental in insuring the dubious tape recording nevertheless made it's way into Cornell's permanent collection, and now he is instrumental in sealing Felipe's voice in binary code for future generations. Listened to carefully, the recording reveals the occasional metallic tinkling sound. In 1987 Freddy had turned his attentions elsewhere and still hadn't gotten around to removing Felipe's upper arms, Felipe had a tendency for resplendently bespangled gesticulation as he sang propped up on the piano, plump and naked but for Freddy's glorious glistening sapphires and platinum, wrought into semi abstract animal talismans, flowers, starbursts, blue planets, moons and suns shimmered all over him, hung from pearcings or draped on chains of the precious white gold. He had come to Freddy from his own destitute parents in lieu of payment for drugs, they had thought they were merely selling him into service as a house boy, or at worse a child prostitute, but the thirty year old Freddy had wasted no time castrating him. In fear of being discovered if they came to reclaim their son, he had arranged for the boy's parents to disappear. Several years later when he and Felipe moved to Calle Rosario from Rio de Janeiro the boy tried to run away. Freddy cut Felipe's legs off to prevent him doing it again, eating them because they were meat and because they were there, and that had been the dawning of his cannibalism. After Felipe's death Freddy'd had to make do with his next best voices, Dino and Jeremy in falsetto. Carmen had been with Freddy almost from the beginning of his reign of terror in Colon. As an intelligent, well connected and sadomasochisticaly intrepid young girl she had grown rapidly bored with nursing in conventional hospitals. Working at Calle Rosario with Freddy had at times been an existentially terrifying and soul damning experience, but at least she had never found it boring. She had been frustrated at times though, by Freddy's patronising misogynyn and he had never invited her dinner, as she knew he had with Balfor; But she was extremely well paid for her work, and she loved lording it over a bunch of destroyed men who depended on her utterly, so who was complaining? She had been with Freddy so long and had heard the "Dido and Aeneas" practiced and performed so often, she sometimes found the haunting music echoing in the back of her mind, as if ghostly ornaments were singing it on a piano in a neighboring apartment. She had heard the song for real, only once since those days. It came suddenly on the radio, intruding on their peace of mind when she and Dino had been listening to something else, sunning themselves on the balcony like the king and queen of Buenos Aires, sipping banana smoothies. She had gone to turn it off but Dino said no. He had gone very quiet as it played - how calm and yet how wild his eyes had looked. After the song had finished he had said simply "You know that stupid soprano just murdered it - Her enunciation was terrible. It sounded like she was singing "Remember me but forget my feet."" And then suddenly he had laughed himself into a terrifying hysterical stupor. He had not sung this song once since the last time Freddy forced him to. Now after all these years he was singing it again. The thought chilled her. What did it mean? The floodgates of Dino's well earned self pity had been thrown wide open and he was crying and singing it over and over, his beautiful voice round, hollow and wavering, tears streaming down his cheeks. As she listened at the door it seemed to her the desolation of Dino's grief ravaged voice tortured the aria into a glorious, piteous lament, a cry into the void. When it came to the "Remember me!" he was all but actually howling. He had always thought as he sang this part how hopeless it was to hope that a person could be remembered independently of their fate. He was himself the perfect example of how inextricable a person was from their fate. Of course Freddy had loved the song for its endless capacity to emotionally torture his piano ornaments as they sang it. Freddy had often liked to finish his special evenings on a lighter note, so he would have the torsos sing something more upbeat and Jazzy. The Seymour Simons/ Gerald Marks 1931 standard "All of Me" for example - You took my kisses and all my love You taught me how to care Am I to be just a remnant of a one side love affair?
All you took I gladly gave There's nothing left for me to save.
All of me Why not take all of me? Can't you see I'm no good without you Take my lips I want to loose them Take my arms I'll never use them Your good-bye left me with eyes that cry How can I go on dear without you You took the part that once was my heart So why not take all of me.
Nowadays Dino sang this and other apt songs at various SM and fetish functions, interspersed with a very black comedy routine. "Why did the torso cross the road? To get to the sale at Floresheim's " "How many surgeons does it take to change a light bulb? Change it into what? - there's nothing to cut off."
"How many torsos does it take to change a light bulb? - Oh my God it broke - Oh fuck- there's glass in my ass! Oh help!"
He often brought the house down depending on how drunk and drug fucked the crowd was, but he was not telling the jokes or singing the upbeat songs today. He'd gone back to the grandmother of his sorrows, a song so beautiful he could not help loving it in spite of its unpleasant association with the tortures of Calle Rosario. Dino needed the "Dido and Aeneas" today to really home in owl-like on his own emotional kill. He was twisting the song into himself like a knife, to excise the pain of his loneliness, his irrevocable outsider status , the pain that had been brought back into sharp focus by the shock of images from his old life on the screen of his computer. How efficiently it had slammed home the reality of his condition. He had not realized how much effort he put into shielding himself with fantasy and distraction. Today's web browsing mistake had left him with no choice but to exorcise this anguish by going straight back to the source. The mournful lilting music of the song resonated with his homesickness, his frustrated sentimental desire to see his parents again, his Mama, his Papa - to walk to them on phantom legs, to hug them with arms he no longer possessed, to let them know that he was all right, that he turned out to be a survivor, but that they could never see him again because of the awfulness of what had befallen him. He could do none of these things. He wanted to die without ever seeing them again to spare them the pain of knowing. He wanted them to remember him how he had been when they last saw him. A handsome successful model, the whole world and his future before him, not this lowly worm, this wriggling human fragment he had been reduced to. He needed them to be ignorant of his fate. And in the midst of this, providing the backdrop for all his other pain was the awful chasm he felt in his soul from missing the only man he had ever loved. His torturer's accomplice. Balfor. Balfor came flooding back to him in all his male glory. Balfor with his dark eyes, distant stars of intelligent light deep inside them, studying him, appraising him. Finding him worthy. Balfor with his deep resonant voice commanding him. Balfor with his great arms lifting him into bed. Balfor's warm lips kissing him, his big wet tongue licking him. Balfor's dark thick beard brushing his neck from behind. Balfor with his broad hairy chest and hard muscular stomach arching over him like architecture. Balfor's hairy crack descending towards his face, thick fingers spreading his downy arse cheeks apart, his odorous puckering hole demanding to be tongued. Balfor's implacable, insistent cock gruffly probing at his lips, entering his mouth, filling him up with hot humiliating piss. Always after this the inevitable instalation of the deep throat flange. (Dino tended to go a little wide eyed once it was in place, his mouth stretched open and so vulnerable. It made him feel like one of those clown heads at a sideshow - the ones that shake their heads slowly with open mouths waiting for you to insert the ping pong balls.) and then the long slow deep throat fucking. The salty male smell of Balfor's heaving scrotum. Balfor playing breath control with him, valving his nostrils off with his balls. Dino found this complete subjugation very arousing. If Freddy had left him any erectile tissue, he knew it would have given him a rampant boner every time. Balfor's heavy balls rolling in their hairy silky sac pumping wads of cum into his mouth, into his arse, onto his chest. How many times had Balfor slept face down with his legs apart, allowing him to nestle into and use his soft round buns for a pillow, sleeping with his body sandwiched between those big muscular thighs forested with black hair. (Balfor was a gentleman, and though he had been sorely tempted to, he had never farted while allowing Dino to sleep this way.) And how many times had he slept with Balfor's softened cock planted inside him, His body embraced effortlessly, no arms to interfere with comfort. Balfor had often told him how much he loved his soft fleshy "Dutch wife", his handsome little "Willy warmer"... That sick sweet sad day when he still had a proper cock. His first time, thinking it his last time. When Balfor had graciously submitted to him, the big mountain of a man spread beneath him, admitting him like a privileged cave explorer to an auspicious place so few ever breached. How embarrassed and how unworthy he had felt intruding there. How sweetly sad it had felt to visit that place once, never to return. His labored movements, the unfamiliar feeling of pelvic thrusting. His cheek resting on Balfor's broad undulating shoulder. The sweat on Balfor's thick neck. Balfor's buttocks firm and hard pushing into his stomach. Rubbing his face on the knobs of his spine. Desperate for the experience of fucking, but ashamed of his own inadequacy. Flopping out. Balfor's arse cheeks parting patiently to admit him again. Balfor suffering him to worry his unworthy cock into that tight moist hole again and again. And all along wishing the roles reversed. Such paltry little orgasms he'd had that day, and not at all because of the terror he felt anticipating Freddy's impending ministrations, simply because he'd never had a toppish bone in his body. How much better it had been weeks later after he had recovered, when the roles had been irrevocably reversed, and he naturally became the cave, and Balfor the explorer, the conqueror, planting his explosives so brazenly deep. How familiar Balfor had become deep down in there. And always later, when Balfor embraced him, how he had loved the feel of the man all around him. The glorious healthy smell of him. At times like that he had actually thought the pleasure of Balfor worth the price of suffering Freddy. And now for so long he had been bereft, he had started to feel himself drying up inside, like one of his own shriveled hands in Carmen's handbag. A Freddy joke that, if ever there was one. Hands in a handbag. He had rolled and draped himself in silver embroidered blue-grey silk, and now lay in a shaft of weak afternoon sunlight on his low bed among velvet cushions spotted with his tears. Balthasar, Caspar and Melchior were curled up next to him, their eyes shut. It wasn't possible to tell whether they were listening to him or asleep. Carmen entered his room, forgetting to knock. When he saw her he stopped singing, blinked a few times to gather himself and sobbed, "Oh Carmen, please pack us up, we have to leave immediately, and we must arrange to sell the flat" "What?" She asked. His tone worried her. She had never seen him so deeply upset, even during his days with Freddy. He had overlooked her failure to knock. This alone was deeply disturbing. "This is sudden, what happened?" "They're going to find me." "Who, sweetheart, who's going to find us?" "My Papa, Germy's Papa. They're pissed off. They're coming... I don't think they'll give up." "What makes you say that?" Alarm was growing in her rapidly. He nodded toward his computer. It had gone to sleep. Carmen woke it up and read the saved web page intently and became very quiet. Gerald's page with pictures of Jeremy linked to another of Anselmo with lots of old photos of Dino, smiling and confident and so young and innocent, with bold muscular limbs and a proud bulge in his pants. A Catholicism shaped shadow of guilt, heavy as a grand piano began to grow in the room. She couldn't look at him. "There's no mention of me there. You wouldn't tell them about me?" She asked darkly, testingly. "I don't give a flying fuck what happens to you right now Carmen as long as you just get us the fuck out of here before my Papa finds out what you sick pricks did to me!" He screamed, glad to be letting fly with his feelings for once. The cats jumped up, ran out. "Look at me! Look what you did to me! I can't have my father and mother seeing me like this! I won't have it! Do you hear - for Christ's sake Carmen you owe me this - start packing we have to leave now! I need my family to think that I'm dead because I can't live otherwise - do you understand? I would not be able to bear their outrage or their fucking pity either. Now Pack!" "I didn't do it. Any of it, Freddy did it. You'll tell them that right? If they find us? - Dino?" She looked like she was enjoying the feeling of channeling a weasel, thought Dino. "Fine - what ever - just pack us up and get us out of here or throw me off the balcony - you choose I don't care!" She could tell he meant it. He would be happy right now to be thrown off the balcony. She pictured him falling. A trunk and a head plummeting like a stone. No limbs flailing. Something told her he would already have done it himself but for the railing. She wondered if he had wound himself up in the silk trying to strangle himself. "I would never throw you off the balcony sweetheart, you know that." It was true, Carmen was as fond of him as Freddy had been. She would probably have saved him in a house fire before she thought of her cats. He hated it when she called him sweetheart, but he knew he had to put up with it to stay on her good side. At least she never dared to try and give him a kiss. One thing Dino had usually managed to be was lovable. "Where will we go?" She continued. "Bali? We could stay with Oliver in Bali. He's always inviting us."
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