Shako

I always picture you hurrying down a staircase, white gloves to your elbows, a braided military jacket slung over your shoulder, your muslin dress trailing behind. I once saw you lift the hem of your dress, exposing not petticoats but—what else?—trousers. I wondered, did a different mystery lie hidden beneath every woman’s dress? Maybe some wore layers of skirts while others concealed striped breeches; maybe some women wore a corset under their gown but others hid pistols.

Soon enough I learned the nature of my error. You told everyone you were a castrato, a recent escapee from Rome who had come to our country to make a dirty fortune. But your card tricks were pitiful, your fingers too slow to con anyone. The emperor called you his darling boy, said he wished his daughters were more like you. The empress wished her sons were.

You looked terribly out of place in ballrooms, like chinoiserie in a dugout or an ancient cannon in a midwife’s closet. All occasions were masquerades to you. If you could afford a white horse I am sure you would’ve ridden it everywhere, always galloping in not a minute too late. When you sang, you sang off-key. Mozart’s arias washed like ice water over you and left you shivering. If you really were a castrato, I pitied you more than all the others I’d met, wished a lingering disease of the lungs on the parents who’d done this to you.

Things went wrong when you were around. Girls challenged each other to duels, soldiers surrendered their arms to vases of flowers, cats chased dogs under tablecloths. The tallest general in the army knelt down and put his shako on your head: tall and black, its ostrich plume like a gushing fountain, it made you look like a wooden toy in a shop window. Against all sense, the general went bareheaded on his next campaign and died of a musket-ball to the eye. The shako wouldn’t have saved him anyway, but for the rest of the war I couldn’t stop thinking of you: I saw you everywhere. What are you doing here, you silly thing, get out of here before you get hurt.

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