Another man stood. “Has the, uh, subject been clean shaven? Does, he, she, uh—” His words trailed off as he searched for the appropriate pronoun to apply to her.
Nouns always sprang with ease to the audience’s lips when they beheld her—freak, specimen, subject, monstrosity. At the Paris school of medicine where she’d been taken for observation as a child, she’d been labeled le malade, the ill one. But no one ever knew what pronoun to apply to her. Sometimes they labeled her “her,” sometimes “him,” and worst of all, in imitation of Salerno, “it.”
“You may to refer to the subject as ‘La Maschera’ or ‘it,’” Salerno informed him.
“Very well then,” the man continued. “Does it have a beard?”
“Of course, just look between its legs,” joked another voice from somewhere in the audience.
The group guffawed. Jordan affected a bored expression. She’d heard the jest before from other doctors in other theaters.
“I only wondered if its jaw might have been clean shaven before this event in order to throw us off a proper diagnosis,” the man protested.
Salerno’s hand cupped her jaw, massaging. “Soft as an infant’s behind, I assure you. Come. I invite you to feel for yourself.”
Jordan steeled herself for what was to come. This invitation would be the first of many.
The questioner strode forward. His fingers stroked Jordan’s cheeks, neck, and throat. He tilted her jaw one way and then the other. She purposely caught his gaze, hoping to startle him with her unusual obsidian eyes.
Under her unwavering stare, he quickly dropped his hand. Wiping it on his pants leg, he stepped away.
“Beardless,” he pronounced to the audience, before striding back to his seat.
More questions came, thick and fast. None were new to her. But she lay in wait for the one question to which her answer would be new. It would almost be pleasant to see the shock on Salerno’s face.
“Is the vaginal canal blind?” someone asked.
“No, there is a small perforation at its climax,” Salerno assured him.
“How small?” asked yet another.
“Discover it for yourselves.” Salerno beckoned the two questioners toward the stage.
Jordan lay back, folding her hands across her midriff. This was proceeding as all the other events had in prior years. In some ways, it was boring. In others, painful. But first and foremost the exploitation engendered a deep, private humiliation in her.
Salerno produced a pot of ointment. It was passed between the two men. The first of them scooped a dollop onto two of his fingers.
Salerno sought a glass of water to soothe his vocal chords as he waited.
A cold, lubricated finger slid along her slit, finding her opening. It poked inside her. Anger filled her as steadily as the finger, but she focused on breathing evenly, waiting for it to be over.
“No virginal barrier,” announced the first poker, suspicion coloring his tone.
“It once existed, I assure you,” said Salerno. “It was breeched years ago by other investigations.”
Yes. Jordan remembered.
The finger probed deeper, searching, until even the knuckles of the hand had folded into her. Eventually the finger prodded the end of her canal, exploring the perforation it found.
“Ah! Yes, I feel it.”
Jordan gritted her teeth against the cramping in her abdomen.
He pulled out.
The lubricated finger of another replaced his in her vaginal channel, probing again. The man found the opening, nodded in agreement, and then withdrew.
Fury swelled in her, but she tried to tamp it down. Whatever was done to her on this day, she must allow, she reminded herself. Her mother’s as well as her own continued comfort depended on her obedience.
Obedience. How she detested the word. Every year she balked when Salerno came for her at dawn, but her mother always wept and pleaded. Was one day too much to ask of a child so that her only parent might live in luxury for the other 364 days of the year? she wheedled.
Jordan’s father’s wealth—a considerable fortune—had hung in the balance that morning when she was born nineteen years ago to this day. He had been struck dead in a hunting accident only a week prior. If Jordan had been pronounced female upon her birth, a distant male cousin would have inherited it all. She and her mother would have lost the lovely house and its sumptuous furnishings, the investments, the jewels, the social standing, and the esteem of every patrician family in Venice.
But were Jordan to be pronounced a male—ah! That was entirely different.
Salerno, a young surgeon at the time, had attended her mother at the difficult birth. When Jordan had been born a case of ambiguous sex—one body possessing both male and female parts—he’d been crafty enough to see the potential for his future. A bargain had been struck between him and her mother. He had pronounced Jordan male. And her mother had inherited the entire Cietta family fortune.
For all of her nineteen years, Jordan had faced the world as a man. She wore trousers, was addressed as signore, and was given the respect due a wealthy young man of family name and status.
But this was not what she wanted. And as each day passed, she chafed under her masculine mantle and grew ever more desperate to make a change.
“If a creature has a phallus, it is male. It’s as simple as that,” a man in the audience postulated.
“You call that puny little cannoli a phallus?” scoffed another, waving a hand in the general direction of Jordan’s genitals.
“I hear that’s what the ladies say to you in the privacy of their bedchambers,” Jordan quipped.
Laughter exploded.
“Yes, I call it a phallus,” Salerno interjected, raising his voice in an attempt to restore order. “What would you have it called?”
“A hypertrophied clitoris,” the man replied, loudly so as to be heard over the din.
Salerno sliced the air with his hand. “Absolutely not. There’s no such organ to be found here. I contend the phallus has displaced it.”
“May I put a question directly to the subject?” another man called out.
“Yes,” Jordan shouted back, before Salerno could. “But I don’t guarantee an answer.”
“Quiet, please!” Salerno commanded moving to the forefront of the stage. “Only then will we continue.”
When order was finally regained, the man tossed his query at her. “Do you bleed?”
“No,” she replied with a shrug. It was an easy question.
The questioner snapped his fingers. “That’s settles it then. There is no uterus. No womb.”
“Whether or not a uterus exists is a matter undetermined as yet,” said Salerno. “I’m sure you realize that some women who possess female organs do not bleed, yet they are still female.”
“Overall, do you have a sense of maleness?” another voice asked her. “Or femaleness?”
Her eyes found Salerno’s. “Femaleness,” she said defiantly.
“Never of maleness?” the questioner pressed.
She hesitated. “That’s difficult to say. For instance, I enjoy needlework and female fripperies. But at the same time, I enjoy male pursuits—riding a good mount or having a stiff drink and a good laugh with friends. Of