2003-01-08 - 7:45 p.m.

Just for Mr Sooner...the latest in an occassional series.

Bentine Potzo (1705 - 1752)

In the 18th Century, it was near impossible to move around the courts of Europe without chronically chaffing one of the much-feted 'castrati', the testicularly-challenged doyens of musical highbrow society and favourites of kings and surgical implement makers alike. To their adoring masses, they were extraordinary androgynous creatures with the voices of angels; to Gambas Potzo, oft-heard muttering his dissent around the Papal bordello, they were little more than "jammy knackerless warblers", ill-deserved of their global fame and fortune.

Gambas had reason enough for his jealousy - his only son, Bentine, had himself been primed for operatic stardom. Sadly, Gambas' wife had used childbirth as a convenient opportunity to feign her own death and escape their loveless, not to mention seafoodless marriage, and Bentine was raised solely by his father.

Bentine had been born marketably blind, and Gambas determined that his son was to become the greatest singing sensation the world had ever seen. A diehard pro-genitalist, Gambas wanted to have his son rise to stardom "the way God intended", and at the age when most young choristers were sent off to be de-sphericised, Gambas instead installed an intricate system of poking devices to ensure that the highest notes remained within his range throughout puberty.

Bentine's first public engagement, opening for the respected Fenarbachi twins at a prestigious conservatoire in Naples, is recorded as a fiasco. His affliction was considered too minor, and audiences were much more interested in the high-pitched stylings of cruelly mutilated aberrations of nature - merely not being able to see just didn't satisfy the crowd's strict standards of extreme physical impairment.

Whilst an accomplished soloist, Bentine's vocal dexterity was simply not on a par with his testes-free peers, and the Fenarbachi twins openly mocked him by performing their set eight octaves higher just for kicks, at a pitch only perceivable by certain types of sea mammal and, judging by her applause, Queen Isabella of Spain.

Publicly disgraced, Bentine found himself being booked for ever less fashionable concerts, his nadir commonly agreed to be the time he opened for Limoncello the sparrow-juggler during the coffee break in a Turin knocking-shop. Even amongst the sparrow-juggling fraternity, Limoncello was considered somewhat of an arriviste lowlife, having merely shaved his eyebrows in a pitiful attempt to cash in on the trend for disfigured artists.

On his deathbed, the aged Gambas had all but given up on his son, cursed with an unfashionable affliction. Meanwhile, the castrati became ever more popular, with the strictest choirs now insisting that new inductees be lopped off at the waist, to "ensure the most angelic sound", a view shared by the musical purists and pathological sadists of the day.

Bentine became obsessed by honouring his father's memory and fulfilling his dream. Hawking the family home, he persuaded an unscrupulous surgeon to perform an irregular castration procedure - at 47, the risks were high, but he had become irritatingly unwaverable in his quest.

Several weeks after the operation, Bentine tried a sublime aria that even the Fenarbachi twins had croaked on the week before. The sound is reported to have caused all present to openly weep, though hospital journals show that there had also been a suffocating ammonia leak at the time.

Bentine was ready to claim his place in musical eunuch history. Sadly for all concerned, at that very moment, the visiting Louis XV of France had been saved from choking on a walnut on being startled by a stray bass note from a court singer too poor to have had his nads wantonly removed. It was promptly proclaimed a miracle by the three attendant popes, and physically replete baritones instantly became the idols of choice.

Taking his own life some months later, Bentine took the news badly, but not as badly as the Fenarbachi twins, who immediately ate each other in sheer disbelief.

This really is (c) pablo, mofos.