The Bells (6 page)

X.

A
nd so my singing life began. I lay one last night on Nicolai’s divan, and he spoke long into the morning of the splendor of my fortune. “You won’t have to share a room anymore with an old, snoring monk,” he said, and his smile was so sad one would have thought I was moving farther away than down the two flights of stairs. “You’ll have friends your own age to play with. You’ll laugh and run about. At night you’ll whisper secrets to each other.”

Even after Nicolai began to snore, I lay awake. His hope had infected me. I had never wanted for more when I lived with my mother, but now I realized I would have friends. Would we have fun? Would we play together as the children in the village had? Would I start to speak?

The next morning, Nicolai packed a parcel with two apples, some nuts, and a rosary, and put it in my hand. He opened his door and motioned for me to precede him out. I hesitated for a moment, and then reached up for the giant palm. I looked into his face. “Thank you, Nicolai,” I said.

Tears leapt into his eyes and he took me in his arms.

He carried me down the stairs and along a hallway to where Ulrich waited outside the practice room. When Ulrich bade him leave us, Nicolai hugged me even tighter, then took a deep breath and set me down. He bit his lip, nodded, and tried to smile, and then turned and hurried away, never glancing back.

There had not yet been time to get me new clothes, and so I still wore the simple ones that Nicolai had bought for me several weeks before in Uri. I still had no shoes. When Ulrich opened the door, twelve pairs of prepubescent eyes had turned on me.

Ulrich told these boys what little he knew of me: that I was from a wild mountain village; that I had an extraordinary, untrained voice that one day might be the finest their choir had ever known. He said all this as if I were a bottle of fine wine about to be stored in the abbey’s cellar.

“He is your brother now,” Ulrich said to them, “and for as long as you and he remain in this choir. Help him to understand this world, which is so unfamiliar to him.”

The boys nodded at their master. I watched this man who had repulsed me so, and now I felt such gratitude. I hadn’t been so happy since before I lost my mother.

Next, Ulrich instructed a boy named Feder to lead us in warm-up exercises. He pushed me lightly toward the boys, and then left the room. The boys gathered about this Feder. “Hello,” he said to me. He looked about my age, but taller. He smiled.

I nodded and smiled back—the warmest, most genuine smile the world had ever known. I thought to say something, but my mouth would not comply. I was too frightened that I might sound foolish in front of my new friends.

Feder walked toward me, still smiling, until he towered over me. I only reached his shoulders. Then the smile vanished from his face so suddenly I cringed in surprise. The boys behind him laughed.

“You may sing with us—if you can,” he said. His eyes were as cold as his voice. “But you are not one of us.” He peered down into my eyes as if looking for the signal that I understood, and I did not disappoint him. Tears began to pool. I struggled not to blink, but then I did, and two drops rolled down my cheeks. The boys snickered and shouted for him to knock me down, but he did not. As my tears flowed freely, he sniffed the air and said, “Does everyone in your family smell like a goat?”

And so my brief dream of friends my own age was abandoned almost as soon as I had conceived it. But I did not complain to Nicolai or to anyone else, for, as an orphan, what more could I expect? At noon I followed the pack of boys to the refectory. I took a plate of food, and in the other hand the largest, reddest apple I had ever seen. But then Feder appeared behind me, pinched my arm, and led me to a chair that faced the wall. “This is your seat,” he whispered in my ear. “And that food is a gift from me.
A gift from me
. That peasant who does the spooning out—his cousin works on our estate.” Feder pointed at the blank wall. “You’ll look at that wall. If you dare turn around to look at us, I’ll take my gift away. You say a word to my friends, I’ll take my gift away. Understand?” He pinched my arm so hard I almost dropped my plate. “And this,” he said, taking the apple from my other hand, “is not meant for those like you.”

My bed was as soft and warm as my mother’s embrace, and I would have slept the deepest sleep on it if only I had been allowed. Five other boys shared my room, and though Feder was not one of them, his orders were communicated. “What are you doing?” fat Thomas asked when he found me lying on my bed that first night. “Dogs sleep on the floor.” He kicked me in the shin and again in my behind as I scrambled off the bed. No one complained when I sneaked up a hand to grab a blanket. I curled up underneath my bed, and fell asleep to the boys telling jokes about foul-smelling hounds.

The very next day Nicolai rushed into the practice room bearing new clothes and shoes for me. I turned red and the boys sniggered as he stripped me naked in the corner. But at least, it seemed to me, I looked just like them now. However, I soon learned that there were other signals of their supremacy too faint for me to read. These sons of officials, master weavers, or heirs to landed farmers had fathers, uncles, cousins with names that made the others lick their lips. Their parents merely stored them here in the choir for some years, hoping frequent contact with God and so much gold would prepare them for their destinies as landed gentry. And so it was their constant struggle to climb a ladder, which I anchored from the very bottom. Balthasar beat Thomas’s term
dog
with
swine
. Proud Gerhard pretended not to see me, but ground his heel into my foot as he passed. Johannes, blond and angel-faced, saw me admiring the rosary Nicolai had gifted me. He made sure that the others were gathered around when he tore it from my hands, snapped the string, and scattered the beads down the passage. Hubert, a gaunt, yellow child with sunken eyes, who could not sing but was said to be the richest of the lot, had a devil’s ear for taunts. “Look, it’s the giant monk’s plaything,” he said one night as I entered the crowded room. And then to me: “I am sure you preferred sleeping in
his
room.” I turned red even though at the time I did not understand the implication. I came to dread passing Nicolai when I was with the boys. “Why does he always smile at you?” Feder would ask, so innocently. “Perhaps tonight,
late at night
, you should visit him in his room.”

And when I began to sing with relish, Feder whispered to the boys, “Look, he so wants to be
a singer!
Of course he does! But what else lies open to those like him?” He turned to me. “Who did you say your parents were? Did they keep swine?” For the first time in my life I was ashamed of my mother. I knew a swineherd would have looked down upon her. I feared that somehow Feder knew more than he said; that cruel smile told me as much. He walked toward me, and though I backed away, he wrapped an arm around my neck and drew me tighter with each word. “Don’t worry, boy,” he growled. “In five years, when that fine voice of yours is rough, and that vile monk doesn’t want you as his toy, there will still be pigs enough for you to tend.”

We rose at six, long after the monks. After breakfast we rehearsed until Mass, then studied pronunciation of the Latin texts, practiced letters, and performed exercises until lunch. After a midday break, Ulrich sat us on the floor around the harpsichord and supplied us with sheets of paper and stubs of pencils. He pounded the keys, and the boys stared blankly up at him. He explained the difference between the hypophrygian and Ionian modes, or paced back and forth berating the Council of Trent. Almost every day he’d poke a single finger into the keys. “That’s the monks,” he’d say. “A thousand years the same: chromatic, mostly monophonic, with dashes of bravado slipped in by the geniuses.” And then he’d pound some chords. “It is all different now. What you must learn to sing—polyphony. Heavy sonorities, contrasts. Even if you cannot learn to hear it here,” he tapped his head, “and most of us never do, you must understand it, or you will remain brainless tools, as stupid as this harpsichord.” Then he’d play some Vivaldi and tell us to write it down, which I could soon do as easily as other children could sketch a house with two windows and a door. The other boys would peer over my shoulder and copy exactly what I wrote. When Ulrich’s patience waned, he set us free until our rehearsal with the adult singers and instrumental accompaniment, which continued until supper. In all those years, we learned neither mathematics nor French, and what I know of the Bible and of God I learned only from the daily sermons.

For the first six months after I joined his choir, though Ulrich owned my days, he left me alone from supper until breakfast. But as I learned to control my voice, he grew more frantic in his attention. When we were lined up in front of our practice mirrors, it was always I who saw him in my glass, just behind me, his eyes closed, as if he were trying to catch the scent of my hair. Soon, rarely an evening passed in which he did not linger outside the refectory door. He’d lay a firm hand on my shoulder. “Moses,” he’d say, “there was one last thing I wished to show you,” and then he’d lead me to the practice room, his hand never straying from my shoulder. I loathed being alone with him—his stink, his cold voice, his lack of human sounds. Sometimes I thought I would have preferred to spend the time with a corpse, for at least it could not have reached out to touch me.

Yet, just as I had learned to hear in the belfry, it was there, alone with Ulrich in the studio, that I learned to master my voice. A goat could have learned to sing if it had had the attention of that man! To those who say I am a genius who appeared from nothing, my talent needing no time to ripen—to them I say,
Practice! Practice!
There is no other path to greatness.

In those many hours with Ulrich, I learned my fluid poise, exact phrasing, precise pronunciation of the Latin. He would touch me. His icy hands ran down my back or caressed my chest, sometimes reaching down as far as the backs of my knees or up to my temples. It was the kind of touch one might use to stroke a flower’s petals. Ulrich’s hand found those parts of me that were still quiet—he reached the stubborn limits to my ringing. And so it seemed to me his touch was magic, for the voice that first came only from my throat spread in just seconds to my jaw, and with his yellowed hands on my chest and back, soon song rang through me as though I were a bell. The hands sought deeper. They found more song hidden in tightened thighs, in clenched fists, in the slumping arches of my feet. Mine was a tiny body, but he made it huge with song.

The first time he came at night, he stumbled into our room, tripped over a bed, and drove knees and elbows into the guts of sleeping boys. I crawled from beneath my bed and peeked across the room—a mole from out his hole. Ulrich shook Thomas. “Where is Moses?” he asked the boy, whose wide eyes perceived a murderer. “There’s something … I must …” Thomas raised a shaking finger and pointed at my gleaming eyes.

Ulrich yanked me onto his shoulder and carried me from the room. The halls were dark; the abbey slept. He held me against the wall, his warm breath of rotting hay wafting across my face. His nose brushed mine. “I have forgotten it,” he whispered, and I would have thought him drunk, but everyone knew wine never touched his lips. “It is gone again!”

He put me on the floor, took my wrist, and dragged me through the halls, both our steps as quiet as ghosts’.

The practice room was dark, but he lifted me again and I found the stool below my feet. I listened for him, and did not hear a sound. I just prayed that he was gone. When he spoke again I felt a chill.

“There are deaf composers,” he whispered from the darkness, “who hear the music in their heads. As beautiful in deafness as in life, they claim!”

I reached a hand out to locate the voice. Before my elbow was straight, my hand brushed his face. He gasped at my touch, and I withdrew in terror. But then he grabbed my arm and clenched my wrist so hard I whimpered. “I would give my ears for that!” he shouted. “Cut them off and never hear you sing again, if only I could hear it there!” He tapped my head firmly with his finger, and I almost fell, but he pulled me toward him by the wrist until I was pressed up against him. Again, I felt his breath along my cheek. He whispered in my ear. “I lie awake, Moses. Every night since you came. It is as though you were outside my window, but there is a wind blowing, and though I strain to hear you, I cannot.”

He pressed his forehead to mine, his cold cheek against my warmth. “You shouldn’t have come,” he whispered.

He let go of my arm and pushed me back so I could stand. His footsteps retreated. His fingers fumbled at the harpsichord. He played a note.

“Sing,” he said. I sang the single note. Terror made it small.

“No!” he cried. “Sing!” He slammed his finger into the key.

I took a breath, and as I exhaled again I heard my breath in my chest. I did not force it open, but as Ulrich had taught me, I felt my next inhalation flow to those closed places, so that they, too, were open. My fear receded. With my next exhalation came the note—this time not loud, but clear. I sang, filling the room with my voice, until my breath ended. There was a silence.

“The Credo from today,” he said and played the soprano melody from the third movement. I sang.

Suddenly his hands were on me again—the hand petting the flower. On my chest, under my arms, the small of my back, until all these parts were vibrating with the song. Then his hands pushed against my back and pressed my chest against his ear.

“Sing!” he ordered. I felt the song spread through me. It shook my knees.

“Yes!” he gasped. I felt that he was right, that my voice had never rung so brilliantly. As I stood and sang for many minutes, he kept his head against my chest, like a child against his mother’s bosom.

XI.

W
e should blame St. Paul for the choirboy. Without his interdiction
Mulier taceat in ecclesia
, the world would have no need for these brats. For St. Paul, in ordering women silent in his churches, could not silence the female voice. From months before our birth, our ears are tuned to our mother’s sounds (as mine were to my mother’s bells), and thus, in the quest for perfect beauty, the church needed a substitution. In the choir of St. Gall, I was the best substitute they had ever known.

Suddenly the abbot prized me as he prized the jewel in his ring, or the pure white stone of the twin towers of his new church, which began to rise like two unfinished staircases to heaven. When he heard me sing, or took a moment to observe our practice, he smiled greedily as if a feast were being prepared for him to eat. My reticence was an asset. I spoke only to Nicolai, in whose room I hid whenever I could evade Ulrich and the choir, but even then I offered little more than mumbles. When Nicolai asked me who my father was, I shrugged. When he asked me my real name, I said, “Moses.”

For the Holy Offices, and most of the Masses, the chanting of the choir monks such as Nicolai was adequate to raise Staudach’s flock toward heaven. But on Holy Days, or for the celebration of the arrival of holy relics, or for Masses in memory of a generous bequest, the abbot called on Ulrich’s choir and we assumed our liturgical reason for existing. In all, we sang some twenty Masses each year as a united choir, and portions of our group were sent out on many more occasions to honor the smaller parishes in the abbey’s vast lands. Ulrich’s sublime taste selected our repertoire, which included ethereal masses from Cavalli, Charpentier, Monteverdi, Vivaldi, and Dufay. At our furtive midnight rehearsals, the repulsive man withdrew cantatas smuggled in from Leipzig, and in secret, I polluted the abbey with Bach’s Protestant song.

Just as the richest St. Gall Catholics desired cotton from America, books from Paris, tea from India, and coffee from Turkey, neither funeral nor parish procession nor parish feast day could be complete without some musical accompaniment from the Choir of St. Gall. In my memory, these many venues are just a blur of frilly muslin in dank chapels, a hush of snores and wheezes.

All of them, that is, except for one.

We typically traveled in oxcarts to our concerts, for the majority of the St. Gall Catholics lived outside the city walls. On one particular evening, however, we marched single file out the abbey’s western gate and into the Protestant city. Ulrich led the way, followed by two gray-faced, gray-haired violinists; fat-necked Harpsichord Heinrich; the bass Andreas; two fully grown tenors and two prepubescent contraltos; the soprano Feder; Ueli, a former choirboy whom cruel puberty had reduced to a gangly luggage carrier and page turner; and lastly, stalling more often than not to capture every sound that leaked out of the city’s open windows, me.

I lost sight of Ueli’s rear several times as we crossed the city, but it was no trouble to catch up. I closed my eyes and tuned my ears to his heels dragging on the street. After ten minutes of walking, I found the others waiting at a palatial house of gray stone. This was Haus Duft, Ulrich told us, the home of the Duft und Söhne textile family. “A Catholic house,” he said, “though we are inside the city’s walls.” Feder whispered a little too loudly that
his family
would never live among the rats. “Be this a lesson to you,” Ulrich replied severely. “Those who put industry before religion benefit from their tolerance. Indeed, the Dufts are by far the wealthiest in our canton, Catholic or Reformer. Tonight you must perform at your best.”

We entered through a side door, like contracted pastry chefs. The cellar passage to the chapel was murky and damp. I followed Ueli’s coattails for several steps, but then I stopped. I heard the clanging of metal pots distinctly to my left, but when I turned to look, I saw only the gray stone of the wall. I took a step forward; the clanging faded, but now a woman spoke. Two more steps forward and I heard chatter: a group of men, at least a dozen.

I paused. The sound flowed as though I had passed three open windows, to three different rooms, but the wall was merely blank stone. I studied it minutely. I could find no holes, so I shuddered, concluding that ghosts must inhabit this passage. However, today I can see that it was not a miracle or devilry at all, just a
phénomène
. I have read that limestone is composed of ancient shells, and the Duft shells must have been particularly cavernous, because, like the seashell of our cochlea, they trapped all the sounds emitted in that giant house, and transmitted them farther. Just as the buzz of a trumpetist’s lips is conveyed from the mouthpiece to the bell along the twists and turns of brass, so too the sounds in the Duft house were swallowed up, conveyed from shell to shell, and spat out through the walls of an entirely different room.

As I continued down that gloomy corridor after my companions, I heard a glass shattering on a floor, a hand pounding a desk, a man singing a silly song, a child weeping, and a woman relieving herself. (If you wonder how I ascertained gender from the hiss you should be banned from concert halls. God gave you ears to listen.) Behind these identifiable sounds, flitting in and out, I heard a great number of clangs and bangs, as if a mute army were mining silver within the walls.

It took me several minutes to descend that short passage. I stopped at every sound and tried in vain to spy a hole in the stone. When I finally reached the end, where the passage split left and right, I was alone. I listened for Ueli’s heels, determined their direction, walked two steps left, realized I had been mistaken, returned to the fork, heard the scuffing heels both to the left and to the right, then heard them above my head.

I was lost.

I am useless without my ears. My other senses were stunted from disuse. With each step in any direction, the walls of Haus Duft spat out new sounds that I tried to fit into a map—but to no avail. Though to others the long halls and right angles of Haus Duft might have been as plain as an open field, to me they were a labyrinth.

Finally, I chose one direction and walked to the end of the passage. To my left was a door, and to my right the passage continued into darkness. I was about to choose the door when I heard a friendly voice call from the shadows.

“Come on,” the voice said. “Come on now. I’m your friend. Don’t be shy.”

I crept down the dark passage and toward the voice. A door opened into some sort of dimly lit pantry in which hundreds of glass jars filled rows of wooden shelves.

“It’s all right,” the kind voice said. “I’m not going to hurt you. I want to help you.”

Reassured, I stepped into the room.

I was so focused on the sounds that it took me several steps into the room before I glimpsed an eye peering at me. I froze. Then I saw another, then two more, and then a thousand severed heads glared down at me. I saw the heads of chickens, of dozens of wild birds, the head of a pig, of a goat with tiny horns. In green glass vats along the top shelf floated the heads of wild beasts: deer, a wolf, the giant head of a bear, three huge cats, and the smaller heads of several marmots. Gaping, clouded eyes stared through the clear liquid.
Run!
they seemed to say.
They will get your head as well
.

But just as I turned to flee, the soothing voice spoke again. “It’s all right,” it said. “Don’t be afraid.”

But then I realized the comfort in this voice was not meant for me at all, for this person had her back to me. I saw black shoes and white stockings, the green back of a velvet dress with white bows on the shoulders, and two blond braids. I was looking at a girl, a type of creature I had often seen in church, but apart from two scrawny Nebelmatt sisters who held more in common with mice than with women, I had never been so close to one.

She was bending into a large wooden cage, submerging her shoulders and bringing one leg up to balance, affording me a view of her white stockings from her thin ankle to the curve of her narrow buttocks. With sudden interest, I was aware that a mystery dwelt in that smooth spot where the seams of her stockings met. She dove deeper into the cage, and her dress fell further, like an opened parasol, her legs squirming toward the ceiling. I wanted to touch them. Were they warm or cold? Rough or soft?

“Got you!” she gasped. Her foot kicked in triumph.

The legs came down. The dress fell into place. A shoulder with a soiled white bow was extracted, then another with bow absent, and then golden braids with clinging wisps of hay, a red face smudged with dirt, then two bare arms, two dirty hands, and a snake.

It was as long as my leg and shone oily black in the glimmer of the lamp. The girl swung a braid out of her face, pulled the writhing snake toward her lips, kissed its back, and said, “It’s all right, Jean-Jacques. You’re free.”

I can remember every aspect of that sight. Her freckles. Every speck of dirt on her face. The proud, loving smile for the snake. Perhaps what I see now in my mind’s eye is just a memory of a memory of another distant memory, like an old watch that has been repaired so many times no original cog remains. I have called it to mind so often: that girl with messy hair, hands filthy, and a terrified Ringelnatter held against her mouth.

With her lips a mere breath from the snake, she saw me.

In the flicker of the lamp, I watched embarrassment rise to her cheeks. She tried to hide the snake behind her back, but its wriggling was too much for a single hand, and it escaped to the floor. For an instant she paused, considering, then pounced onto knees and elbows, her two hands clutching Jean-Jacques while her braids hung like long ears to the floor. She turned up to me.

“Who are you?” she said. “What are you doing here?”

I was immediately taken with the confidence of her voice, the clear enunciation of her words. No trace of a rural dialect. Instantly, I knew this girl was of better class than even the choirboys who taunted me. No matter how close she stood right now, surely there was no one further from me in the entire world.

She got a firm grip on Jean-Jacques and struggled to her knees, then stood up, holding the snake before her like a priest clasping a chalice filled with wine. She was a head taller than I, and had an extraordinary face, almost like a canvas for emotion: curiosity in the tightness of her brow, caution in the stretch of her eyes, embarrassment in the tuck of her chin, a touch of joy in the broadening of her mouth. She studied my choir robe.

“Are you a monk?” Her tone suggested she preferred snakes to monks.

Again, I said nothing.

“When I am grown up,” she said, coming toward me very slowly and yet speaking quickly, “there won’t be monks anymore, just
philosophes
, which women can be, even though women cannot run manufactories.” When she finished speaking, Jean-Jacques was near my face. He stopped writhing and stared limply into the darkness. The girl looked into my eyes. I retreated a step. She advanced.

Her dress rustled when she moved. Her stiff black shoes creaked. She tapped her teeth together twice. “If you ever tell anyone what you saw, I will bash your face,” she said.

Then she walked right past me.

I turned to watch her go, and only then did I notice that she limped. Her right foot was turned inward and her knee did not bend. She glanced backward as she left the room and caught me studying her leg. A flash of hurt joined the battle of her face. “It is cruel to stare,” she said.

Then she was gone. I watched the doorway, then closed my eyes so I could run back through her sounds, now stored in my memory. The swish of her dress, the soft snake-charming voice awakened my other senses. Was that her scent of soap and citrus still lingering in the room?

I returned to the main hallway and leaned against the wall until I heard Ueli dragging his feet along the floor, for he had been sent to find me.

We were there to sing a Sunday Vespers—we sang Vivaldi’s
Dixit Dominus
, a piece that offered the right virtuosity, harmony, and piety to impress geniuses and wealthy imbeciles alike, and thus to inspire revisions of last wills and testaments in ways most generous to the abbey. The Duft chapel was a dank block of limestone filled with a surfeit of icons and thirty or so worshippers. Feder and I stood shoulder to shoulder at the front of the choir. This evening he did not conceal a needle in his fist and poke it into my arm, or whisper that the abbot had locked Nicolai away for his indecent crimes, both of which were common antics when we practiced. Now, the chapel full with the best St. Gall blood, he smiled like an angel, and gave no sign that he despised me.

Just as we were about to begin, the doors at the back of the chapel opened and in strode the master of the house, Willibald Duft. Not only was the head of the Duft und Söhne textile empire thin, he was short, and so among the other rotund men in the chapel, he had a boyish appearance. He did not pause to cross himself, but only dipped his finger in the stoup and drew a circle in the air, splashing holy water on the floor. His left hand held the now-clean hand of his only child, Amalia Duft, the snake-kisser. She limped along beside him.

They sat beside a woman in the first pew who had the unattractive combination of high, hollow cheeks, thin shoulders, and wide hips, making her appear a sagging, fleshy pyramid resting on the pew. Amalia sat between the two adults. I wrongly took the pear-shaped woman for Amalia’s mother and Willibald’s wife; instead, I later learned, she was Duft’s unmarried sister, Karoline Duft, the chief source of piety in the house and instigator of this particular service.

During the first two movements, I watched these three. The team of tenors and altos fought with each other and with the violins and harpsichord for possession of the chapel, using exaggerated volume and a barely perceptible extension of their notes as weapons. But the war was lost on the crowd; the clamor merely dulled their attention. Some smiled blankly. Others had a dumb look of faked fulfillment on their faces. Several worshippers fell asleep. Duft was staring at his shoes. Beside him, Amalia swung her feet listlessly and made no effort to disguise the boredom on her face. However, it appeared that Karoline Duft could not have been happier if the virtuoso Vivaldi himself had risen from the dead and taken up his violin. She closed her eyes and swayed to some rhythm that had no relation to the actual music. I wondered briefly,
Is she deaf?