The Bells (36 page)

With each booming of the bell she doubled her attack. Then she had one hand tugging on my hair while the other tried to crush my neck. I could not breathe. She could not hear me wheeze, but I heard her growl in my ear.

I pulled out my knife and swung it at her face. It missed, but she glimpsed it glinting in the moonlight and she recoiled, letting loose my neck. She backed against the wall. I pointed the shaking knife at her chest and heaved for air.

I had bought the knife only for the bell. I did not wish to stain its metal with her evil blood.

There was a chest on the floor that looked as if it had accompanied some noble general on an important campaign. I deemed it suitable to store the countess until the bell quieted and I was gone. I gestured with the knife for her to climb in, which she did, but with her final glance, I felt a chill, for her eyes told me that I would not survive our next encounter. I latched the chest, and continued on my mission.

The palace was alive. Fortunately, everyone needed both hands to protect their ears, so the Riechers and their servants were but clumsy shadows in the dark passages. It seemed as if the pealing had actually increased in volume. I pictured my three friends leaping to the ceiling and being gently lowered down again. My feet tingled as the house shook beneath them.

My ears heard every footstep, every voice cursing the blasted bell—and finally there was the sound for which I had come: a baby’s cry. I slipped past human shadows as I ascended the stairs, toward the crying, down the passage that led to Anton’s wing. There I almost collided with another shadow, and when he mumbled, “That blasted bell!” I heard that it was Anton Riecher himself.

But he was deaf to his crying son, even though the screams came from a door not ten paces away. He ran past me down the passage toward the stairs, no doubt hunting for his mother. I sprawled along the wall as the footsteps disappeared down the stairs. Then I hurried down the passage and burst into the nursery.

XXIV.

T
hat kind nurse, and the baby: four ears to protect and only two hands that knew how. The sight broke my heart. The woman was lying on the bare wooden floor, contorted as if she’d fallen down a flight of stairs. From the single window, a blade of moonlight cut across them. The baby lay against the nurse’s chest, one ear pressed into her bosom. The nurse held her right hand against the child’s outer ear—only one hand left for herself. Her head twisted against her left shoulder, her left arm wrapped around her skull to reach her right ear.

This might have worked, but the child writhed in her hold, his body wracked with screams. I dashed toward them and snatched the child, pressing him to my chest. One hand sheltered his exposed ear, and with the other, I drew a glob of beeswax from my pocket. I plugged one ear and then the other as he thrashed in my arms. His face was red and he paused his cry only when he had no air left to scream.

I clutched him to my birdlike chest—which was wrought to sing, not to grasp a child—and held his head with my palm, my long, delicate fingers petting his brow. The bell still shook the city. I began to sing so the child—my son!—felt my voice inside of him. It calmed him just as it had calmed his grandmother in her sickbed, his mother at his birth. Soon his crying stopped, and he looked into my eyes.

I knew this face. His mother’s eyes stared up at me. And then, as I sang, those eyes fluttered. He was asleep.

The nurse on the floor was still shaken, still pressing her ears with all her might. She looked up gratefully, trying to make out which of the household servants had come to her aid. When I stepped forward into the moonlight, she seemed no more surprised than Gluck had been to see Orpheus in his room. Perhaps she, too, had dreamed of me.

“I am afraid I will have to lock you in that wardrobe,” I said to her, and pointed. She studied my moving lips. “I would not want them to blame you. Tell them you put up a fight.” No, she did not understand a word, but she let me lead her to the wardrobe, and stepped inside it as if I were helping her into a waiting carriage. I locked her in. She did not yell for help.

And then I was alone with my son. This lovely sleeping face! An angel in my arms! But as I cocked my head back and forth, I realized that the buzzing sensation was reduced. I listened: each booming crash was softer than the last. There was only one explanation: someone had climbed those stairs and seized my friends. The bell still rang from momentum, which meant I had only several minutes until it subsided into silence, and there was still much to do.

I wrapped the child in some blankets from his cradle and dashed down the passage. The house had calmed somewhat—everyone had found a spot to sit quietly and hold their ears until the pealing stopped. But I heard one person as I reached the bottom of the stairs. Anton was standing in the door to Countess Riecher’s study—the door to my escape.

“Mother!” he yelled. He stepped into the room. He regarded the broken window. “Mother!” he yelled again. With his stoppered ears, he must have heard his own voice as if down a long tunnel.

“Mother?” he cried once more, not three paces from the chest, from which occasional thumping sounded. Then he shrugged and closed the door. He turned toward the stairs—if he had looked up he might have glimpsed me peering down at him—but he chose to continue the search for his mother on the story below. He vanished down the stairs.

In a moment, I was in the study, the door closed behind me. I had one foot on the window ledge when I looked down at that chest. In my haste I had shut the clasp, but left the lock ajar. I corrected this mistake and threw the key into the icy street.

It would be hours before they had the woman out.

…

I stepped carefully out onto the carriage and climbed into Tasso’s seat, which the little man had suited to himself, not to a musico twice as tall. I clutched my precious bundle with one arm while with the other hand I took the reins.
Careful
, I told myself,
with horses you are a fool
. I turned the beasts as if they were a team of rheumatic grandmothers. “Slow,” I told the gentle mares. “No need to rush. We have four hundred miles ahead of us.”

We clunked to the door of the Stephansdom. As I stopped the carriage, I heard the Pummerin strike the naked clapper for the final time. Her ringing still hung in the air, but it no longer hurt Vienna’s ears. I climbed down, and with the Riecher heir tucked safely against my chest, I went into the church.

It was exactly as I had feared. I hid behind a pillar and peeked around it to see my friends in shackles. Six soldiers guarded them, while another man, the church’s
Kirchner
, shouted in their faces. They had undone the wrapping around their heads, though Nicolai’s muslin was still wound around his neck like a scarf. All three men picked occasionally at the wax in their ears.

“Do you know what you have done?” the
Kirchner
roared. “That is a holy bell! You have woken every soul in this city. The empress herself! She must think we are besieged!”

Nicolai squinted and tried to make out the man.

“You will be punished!”

“I would do it a thousand times again!” Nicolai said. He held his hands above his head as if he would tear apart his shackles. “No prison will ever hold me!”

Remus told his friend to quiet down. “Now is the time for meekness,” he murmured. “I would prefer to keep our time in the empress’s detention to a minimum.”

“Years!” shouted the
Kirchner
. “That is what you have before you. Look what you have done!” The
Kirchner
pointed at the floor of the church, where tiny shards of the stained-glass windows sparkled like a million rubies.

“They can be fixed,” said Nicolai. “Tasso here could fix them in a day.”

“Can he fix every window in Vienna?” the
Kirchner
screamed.

“Better than an army of your half-wit—”

“Nicolai!” Remus yelled.

The
Kirchner
instructed the soldiers to take the men away to the most unpleasant of the empress’s prisons. Two soldiers pushed Nicolai toward the door, and one took each of the other two. The last two marched behind. I crept around the pillar so they would not arrest me as well.

Hurry!
I implored.

And, as an answer to my prayer, just then the church’s door burst open and a man hurried through. From under a long, warm coat peeked his white dressing gown. He saw the soldiers and their captives. “Stop!” he yelled. He raised both hands like a conductor calling for attention.

The party obeyed his forceful order. The
Kirchner
peered at him. He gasped. “Chevalier!”

“Release these men!” Gluck bellowed as if speaking to the distant altar. He strode to Nicolai. “Give me the key!” he ordered the nearest soldier. The man obeyed, and Gluck began to unlock the shackles.

“But Chevalier!” the
Kirchner
said. “Did you not hear? It was these men who rang the bell!”

“Of course it was these men!” Gluck exclaimed, still speaking as if to a distant audience. “I ordered it!”

Nicolai was free. He rubbed his wrists and stared in awe at the composer.

“You?” gasped the
Kirchner
.

“Him?” Nicolai muttered.

“I!” Gluck bellowed to the heavens. He set to work on Remus’s shackles. While no one was looking, Tasso had slipped his hands through his and laid the shackles silently on the floor. He scurried behind a pillar.

“But why?” asked the
Kirchner
. “Why?”

Gluck paused in his work. To me it seemed as if he held Remus’s hands in his—as a lover would. He looked at the
Kirchner
. “Have you no ears? Have you no heart?”

“I … I do,” stammered the
Kirchner
.

“Then, sir,” Gluck said in a reproaching tone, “next time you hear beauty calling in the night, I suggest you listen.”

XXV.

T
asso drove us from that city as though all the devils of my past made chase just behind us. Early morning traders jumped out of our path as we raced west and joined the Salzburg Road. But we had gone only as far as Hütteldorf before we were confronted with a problem. The child had begun to scream. Singing did no good this time. Tasso told me to stick my little finger in his mouth, which seemed to work temporarily, but Remus knew better; babies eat more than fingers. He told Tasso to stop the coach. We were in a dismal place. The taverns and shops along the wide, pitted road were fine enough, but the houses up the lanes sagged as if they were soaked through with water. The sun was rising. Soon the Riechers would be after us.

“But we cannot stop!” I insisted.

“This is imperative,” Remus said. “Remember, anyone hunting us will be seeking four impoverished men and a child. We must comport ourselves as the wealthy men we are, and hide the child as best we can. His screams, and our haste, will only draw attention to us.” Remus reached into Herr Duft’s small chest of gold, which was still nearly full. He took out a single coin, descended from the carriage, and disappeared up one of those dismal alleys. Thirty minutes passed, and the child began to mistrust my finger. He screamed until his face turned red. He screamed until his lungs were empty. Tears poured down his cheek. I watched helplessly and feared I had made a dreadful mistake.

Then Tasso pointed out the window. Remus was trudging down the lane. Lumbering just behind him was a slouching figure with long arms hanging almost to its knees. Countess Riecher’s ogre? But Remus looked pleased, and when they stepped closer, I saw that this gorilla was a woman—the most peculiar specimen I had ever seen. She was very tall, and round in all the right places, and many of the wrong ones as well, with cheeks that proceeded in rolls of fat down to her bulging bosom, and a belly that fell toward her knees.

Remus opened the door and she poked her square face into the coach. Her chin was much manlier than mine; she had black hairs where I did not. She considered Nicolai, Remus, and me. The baby renewed its screaming, its face purple, but she did not seem to see or hear it. She weighed Herr Duft’s gold coin in her hand and studied us again, as if she were trying to decide which was heavier.

“And the same again in three months’ time?” she asked Remus over her shoulder.

“The same again. But please hurry. We have no time.”

“I must have my things.”

“We will purchase whatever you require along the way.”

She gave a sly grin at this offer, and the carriage tilted as she squeezed through the door. She towered above me, massive. Her hands were huge and chapped—a butcher’s hands.

“Are you the father?” she yelled over the baby’s screams.

“It is his late sister’s boy,” Remus offered.

“But he shall call me Father,” I blurted.

“He can call you pope,” she said, “as long as you pay me when it’s due.”

I nodded that I would.

“Give him here.” She held out her arms. He kicked and batted his arms as I lifted him gently. She snatched him and held him up for her inspection. He cried into her face.

“Fine-looking boy,” she said. “What do you call him?”

In the excitement of our flight, this question had never occurred to me. Now everyone was looking at me. The baby turned and cried toward me as well.

“His name is Nicolai,” I said.

The older Nicolai clapped his hands in joy.

“Well, Nicolai,” she said into the baby’s face, “I suppose you’ll be wanting your breakfast.”

She shooed Tasso off the seat with a flick of her hand. The carriage’s springs groaned as she heaved her body down. Then she shocked us all; a dexterous finger popped two buttons in her chemise, which set free a flap. Suddenly, we were all staring at a swollen breast, a fat nipple as thick as a finger.

“Close your mouths,” the wet nurse snapped, pushing little Nicolai’s head into that soft mound, but our jaws were too heavy. She shook her head. “Fine, but don’t expect me to hide the tools of my trade.”

The gorilla’s name was Fräulein Schmeck. She quickly took control of our establishment, one hand pressing little Nicolai to her breast, the other rubbing oil into big Nicolai’s temples (her huge hand could span his face), all the while shouting orders to Tasso as he steered the carriage, and detailing her demands to Remus and me of what we must buy at the next town. By noon of that first day, we all mused silently to ourselves over whether there was a way to evict her from our coach. But a day later, with a happy baby, Nicolai feeling healthier than he had in years, enough quiet for Remus to read his books, and many miles between us and Vienna, we abandoned all thought of overthrowing our new monarch. She was not a fine lady, but once she realized that our wealth had no apparent limits, she decided she should live as one. She bought creams and perfumes. In Salzburg, she ordered gowns. The baby must have silken and cotton dresses, she insisted, and all manner of wrappings to contend with the various solids and liquids he expunged. She commanded us as though we were the hired help—and we obeyed every order.

In fact, she ruled our home—whether coach or villa—from that New Year’s Eve for seven years, until, in 1769, she made me buy her a cottage above the Bay of Naples. I expect that she is still there now, smashing grapes in her massive fists to make their juices into wine.

And so our group was six as we crossed the Alps that winter. We raced through Salzburg and Innsbruck and reached the low Brenner Pass just in time for an early thaw. And then, by spring, I heard Italian spoken by toothless farmers and their black-haired daughters with sparkling eyes. The language I had once thought was made for opera resounded like the singing of birds as we passed through chestnut groves. We changed horses again and again, and the sun grew warmer every day. We sat on the roof of our coach as Tasso drove us down onto the Venetian Plain. Remus sprawled with a book. Nicolai called for us to behold the wonders he claimed to perceive through his lenses: fat grapes already ripe in March, nuggets of gold lying on the road, birds twice the size of a man flying before the sun.

I sang the arias I had heard Guadagni rehearse in his house, and farmers paused in their milking to listen as we passed. Children chased after us in wonder. In the middle of it all, atop that massive coach, Fräulein Schmeck sat cross-legged, like a goddess of fertility, one round breast drying in the sun, the other hugged by a fattened child, who gorged himself on milk.

I remember one day, so many years before that flight over the Alps, back in Nebelmatt, when I sat on the edge of our belfry and my mother rang her bells. I was looking down at the windings of the Uri Road far below, along which a column of soldiers slowly marched. The day was so still that I could hear the clanging of swords and the shouts of the wagon drivers. I must have craned my neck and leaned slightly forward, unconscious of the edge, curious to examine these exotic beings swarming past my home. I don’t think I would have fallen, but my mother, although entranced by her bells, was suddenly alarmed by my gentle leaning. She dropped her mallets and grabbed both my arms, drawing me back from the edge. She hugged me tight. Her face looked so alarmed that I pointed down at the column on the road as if to say,
Mother, I was only looking at the soldiers
. She, of course, had heard nothing, but now she squinted and perceived glinting metal—the dark human snake sliding down the road. And then her face grew sad. She looked at the soldiers and then down at me, as if to say,
Oh my son, I am so sorry
.

I had no idea then what she meant.

But years later, sitting on that coach, my friends and my son at my side, Italy opening before us, I finally understood:
I am sorry I have made your world so small
, she had meant to say to me. And so I smiled atop our coach, because I understood she had wished all of this for me.

Nicolai, my son, have I made up for all that I robbed from you? Have I replaced with love your destiny of wealth and privilege? Your double inheritance? Think back through all you know: Our life in London, just the two of us. So much fame that crowds mobbed our carriage. Perhaps you recall that I did have other loves—though in my heart they were all but echoes of that first. Does not the smell of horse’s dung bring back for you our travels throughout the Italian lands in our great black coach? By that time, our coach had satin curtains and mattresses of finest down, and gold and silver coins—the fruits of my success—that fell to the floor each time Fräulein Schmeck shook out our blankets.

Certainly you remember something of the years in Naples. You still had three laps to sit upon then, in addition to your father’s. You had your nurse, whom you loved as a grandmother. You had tiny Tasso, whom you soon outgrew. You had Remus, whom you called uncle, and whose books you stole and hid beneath your bed.

But the fourth, Nicolai, your namesake, I am sure you have forgotten. We had to leave him behind in Venice. We buried him beneath a paving stone on a narrow street, as is common in the city, with no mark of any kind. He had lived just six months after we arrived in that city he had always dreamed to visit. Remus found him dead one morning, fallen forward in his kneeling prayers the night before.

As to our life in Venice, even if you do not remember much, you know it well, both because we have spoken of it and because it is the stuff of legend. History records the footsteps of its heroes, and in late 1763, on the night of my debut in Teatro San Benedetto, I became a hero. Every record of my voice tells how I stunned the audiences in Venice, and the thicker volumes even tell of you in my arms as beautiful women showered us in rose petals from their balconies. Since that spring, my life has been recorded by so many others it is not mine to tell.

But I have reserved one last secret.

In that spring after we fled Vienna, Tasso drove our coach until, if he had swung his whip once more, we would have plunged into the sea. And then we all climbed down from our perch—small Tasso, giant Nicolai, ugly Remus, the gorilla nurse, the musico, and his baby. No one had thought to mention to me that Venice was an island, which would have been reason enough for me to choose another goal. I quaked and said I would not board the ferry. Nicolai and Fräulein Schmeck held me down while Remus drew a blindfold across my eyes. Still, as I lay on the deck, I wished I had a sack of buckwheat to embrace.

And then we had arrived. We marveled at the palaces sunken in the sea. Remus held Nicolai’s elbow so he would not tumble into the fetid water. We strolled the narrow lanes and bought Fräulein Schmeck whatever cloth or perfume or jewelry she desired. At Piazza San Marco you squealed in delight when you saw the ships on the Canale di San Marco. Nicolai stared up at the shadow of the basilica. He nodded once at me and then marched into Basilica San Marco like a soldier ready to face a foe that far outnumbered him. Fräulein Schmeck was swarmed by peddlers. She stroked or smelled or tasted everything they offered her. She spent our gold. Tasso wandered to the water and stared out at the ships at sea. Only Remus remained with us. He smiled at me.

“Will you wait for us right here?” I asked.

“Of course,” he replied.

Then you and I were alone. I carried you along narrow lanes the sun never touched, over bridges where we paused so you could stare at the gondolas sliding below us. I asked everyone,
Dov’ è il teatro?
They pointed, and I followed their directions, but when you gasped and strained your hand at a shaft of sunlight glinting in the windows of a palace, or at the Grand Canal, we took that direction instead. We lost ourselves again and again, but every passerby helped us on, until finally we came to the theater I sought, Teatro San Benedetto, whose name your mother and I had whispered so often to each other. It was still early in the afternoon, and the small square was empty, though I heard rehearsal from inside the theater. The building had a grand façade with pillars half-sunken into the wall and three double doors of polished oak. I sat on the stairs and placed you on my knee.

“Nicolai,” I said. “We are here.”

You looked at my mouth and bounced on my knee.

“I wish she were here with us, but she is not. I will do what she told me I should do. I will pound on those doors until they open them and let me sing. They will make us rich, and everyone will know our name. That is what she said would happen, and I am sure she was correct. Nicolai, we can never speak of her again. All that has happened must be a secret. We can let no one connect that poor castrate in Vienna to the musico I will become. No one may know that you are a stolen son. I do not want them to take you from me.”

You looked from my lips to my eyes, which were filling with tears. You did not understand a word. But you knew I was sad, and your lower lip began to curl.

So I stood up, and we paced back and forth across the empty square. I put you to my shoulder. I hugged you tight, and I let the world wait ten more minutes for my voice. For, at that moment, my son, I sang for you alone.