The Bells (9 page)

XV.

U
lrich was furious. Of course, if he were sick in bed, the only medicine he would wish to have would be me singing Bach’s heretical songs, but this did not stop him from protesting the next time Staudach looked in on our rehearsal. “Abbot,” Ulrich whispered so the boys would not hear, “he is crucial to the choir. I have chosen the pieces for
his voice
. I cannot do without him, even for one afternoon.”

“It is for the church,” the abbot said. “
For the church.
” He twisted the ruby ring on his finger.

“Then send another boy, Abbot. Any boy. Anyone but him.”

“What is it about
this boy?
” the abbot said through clamped teeth. He clenched his hands as though he would like to take me in his claws. “Duft would have no other. Of course I tried to send a proper man. And now you say
you
cannot spare him. Why can’t you teach the other boys to sing like him?”

With gaping mouth, Ulrich shook his head, lost for what to say. “Abbot,” he finally muttered, childlike pleading on his face, “please reconsider.”

“For the church,” the abbot said flatly. “For now it must be first in all our thoughts.”

How could it not have been first in our thoughts? The perfect symmetry of the church’s double towers loomed over the Abbey Square. On sunny days, the glare of the white stone made me shield my eyes. “Half a million gulden,” Remus hissed one night to Nicolai. “Do you have any idea how much that is?”

“You try to destroy a church eight hundred years old and build a perfect one,” Nicolai responded and took a sip of wine. Perched on his chair, his elbow raised, for a moment he was as refined as a prince. “You’d spend all that and more. Staudach probably makes those masons work for nothing more than the security of their souls. They’d make a scoundrel like you pay them double.”

“It’s not a question of how I’d do it,” Remus said. “You’re not listening to what I say. None of the monks do.”

“I wonder why?” Nicolai winked at me. I suppressed a giggle.

“Every gulden from the pocket of a farmer or a weaver,” Remus continued. “Some have nothing to eat after they have paid his taxes. What will he give them in return?”

Nicolai needed to consider only for a moment. “Beauty,” he said with a nod, as if this were an incontrovertible reply.

“Beauty?” Remus said. He looked at me. “Beauty?”

We both turned back to Nicolai. I’d never held even one single gulden in my hands. I wanted to know as much as Remus how beauty could be worth half a million.

Nicolai took a deep breath and put down his glass. “Remus,” he said. “Moses. Don’t think that I like this man. I don’t. I loathe him. He’s like wine that’s drunk ten years too late. But with this church he’s got it right. Haven’t you seen it?” Nicolai pointed out the window, where even in the dim moonlight the white church shone as if candles burned within its stone. “That’s God’s work he’s doing, and though Staudach may be a fool when it comes to his fellow men, he understands God just fine.” Nicolai’s face was smooth and joyful as if he’d glimpsed an angel hovering above the church. “God is beautiful. He’s perfect. And he inspires us to be beautiful and perfect, too. We’re not, of course. And that’s exactly why we need beauty in our lives: to remind us how good we could be. That’s why we chant. That’s why Moses sings. And that’s why Staudach is building us a perfect church. For if we know perfect beauty, with our eyes and with our ears, even for a second, we’ll come that tiny bit closer to being it ourselves.” As Nicolai finished he laid a hand on his heart, and he gave a final nod, to emphasize his sermon. I found myself nodding back, for I wanted nothing more than to be like this beautiful music that I sang, like this perfect church that was rising out of crude blocks of stone.

“What stupid rot,” Remus said. He scowled at us both and took up his book again. “Half a million gulden.”

…

But Nicolai had infected me. Would this church make me pure? I watched it grow with nervous longing, month after month—the towers finished, red tiles laid on the roof. Then it was nearly complete, and news of the inauguration seeped into the abbey like the promise of a miracle. Thousands would come to the event, from the Swiss Confederation and from Austria. Staudach would bless us with a morning Mass. Then we would march throughout the abbey’s lands in a procession, before returning for the symbolic completion of the church: the transfer of the abbey’s holy relics back into the crypt. And then, when Holy Otmar’s head, St. Erasmus’s hair, St. Hyacinthus’s ribs, and many other scraps of hair and bone were again laid to rest, the day would be crowned with a song of glory: Charpentier’s magnificent
Te Deum
. Ulrich had sent to Innsbruck for four renowned soloists to sing the demanding parts. I was to sing in the choir.

But then Staudach read Ulrich’s letter to the Innsbruck Kapellmeister and discovered that Ulrich intended a male falsetto for the mezzo-soprano and a musico for soprano. Staudach stormed into the practice room one evening as I rehearsed alone with Ulrich. The choirmaster had me wrapped in an embrace, his head against my chest, his hands fondling the hollows beneath my ears. When Staudach entered, slamming the doors open, he recoiled, and I tumbled off my stool.

“You do not mean a castrate? Not a half-man!” Staudach bellowed, waving Ulrich’s letter like a death warrant.

Ulrich sighed, but clearly he was already prepared for this argument. “Yes, Abbot. That is what a musico is. A castrato. An
evirato.
” Ulrich nodded at me as if I should agree with him, but my eyes only grew wide as I tried to picture this mysterious being he described.

“In my church?” the abbot stammered. “At its inauguration?”

“They sing in the Sistine Chapel, Abbot.”

Staudach’s face had grown a deep red. “This church,” he said slowly, “
my
church is not the Sistine Chapel, Brother Ulrich.”

Ulrich looked down at me as if he sought my opinion on this matter. I cringed from the abbot’s attention.

“I could as well preach in front of half an altar,” Staudach said, waving the letter again. “Finish only half the roof. Leave out half the pews. Half a man will not sing in my church!”

“Their voices are beautiful—”

“Perfection is beautiful,” the abbot said. He stared down Ulrich’s protest, as if his words alone could wipe castrati from all the world’s churches. He finally looked at me beside my stool and his sneer deepened. “Get a whole man to sing the part.”

“Falsetti are unsatisfactory for Charpentier’s first soprano,” said Ulrich, trying again. “The music is too high. The singer must be … angelic. Perhaps we could consider … that is … perhaps … a w-woman?”

Staudach’s eyes bulged. Ulrich quickly waved this suggestion off.

“Then just leave it out,” Staudach said.

My breath caught in my throat at this. I could see Ulrich trying to hide a similar reaction. “Leave the first soprano out?” he stammered.

“Or sing it lower.”

Ulrich was silent. He shook his head.

Staudach tore Ulrich’s letter into pieces, spitting out his words with every rip. “I will. Not have. A eunuch. In my church!”

“Abbot, I see no—”

Staudach looked at me. “He can sing it.” He said it like an accusation.

At this, Ulrich lost all his composure. He gaped at me, then Staudach. “The boy?” he said in amazement.

“You say he is good.”

“Yes. He is great. But—”

Staudach nodded. “Good. Then it is decided.”

“But he is not ready to sing with professionals,” Ulrich said. “He is ten years old.”

Staudach was finished. He pointed at me again. “It is he, Brother Ulrich, or else you rewrite it for a trumpet,” he said and stormed out.

…

And so my debut was set: I would sing the soprano of Charpentier’s
Te Deum
at the church’s inauguration. I ran to tell Nicolai. “Charpentier!” he said. He looked up through his ceiling as if this news had enabled him to see straight to heaven. “Remus! Don’t you remember? In Rome!”

Remus shrugged and said he could not be sure. But he smiled at me, which was so rare it made me tingle with shyness. “This is quite an honor, Moses,” he said. “You should be very proud.”

“You will be great,” Nicolai added, and messed my hair.

And then, for the first time in my life, with those two smiling faces staring down at me, I felt that queasy fear well up inside me as I realized that if I could be great, I could also be a disaster. This could be my making—or my undoing.

Ulrich’s thinking was much the same. We spent the next months concerned with nothing else. I woke in the middle of the night with the sixth movement’s soprano solo in my head, and worried how my voice would fill that giant church. Ulrich feared damage to my tender throat from singing alongside grown men—these men with lungs four or six times as large as mine. But no man has ever lived who understood better than Ulrich how to make a body ring. In the weeks before my debut, his hands petted their encouragement with even more desperation, as he reached deeper and taught me how to sing like a man.

For the inauguration, Staudach awaited eighteen Swiss abbots, as well as the bishops from Konstanz and Petera. “They promise to bring me Diderot’s
Encyclopédie,
” Remus said, speaking of the Geneva delegation.

“An
encyclopody?
” Nicolai asked, mangling the French. “Is that some kind of bug? Please don’t bring it in this room.”

And one night, Ulrich managed to terrify me even more. “Moses,” he whispered, as if he worried someone might be listening at the door. “I have written to Stuttgart. I want them to know of you. North of the Alps there is no better place for music. They are sending a man, an Italian, who must know something of music or they would not have chosen him.” Ulrich reached out and touched my cheek with his finger. I tensed at the cold and lifeless touch. “Moses, would you like one day to travel to that city with me? Would you like to sing for Duke Karl Eugen?” He finished this speech with his lips not far from mine. I shivered at the thought of going anywhere with him.

Then one day Nicolai appeared at our dormitory room as the boys were readying for bed. He looked very cross. “Moses, come with me,” he said, his voice gruff and serious. “Abbot’s orders. You’re to bring everything you own.” For several seconds I couldn’t move, but then he winked at me and smiled. “But I’m serious about bringing all your things,” he said. “I’ve got a surprise for you.” I gathered up my spare clothes into my arms—I had no other possessions that had escaped the other boys’ destruction.

“Have fun,” Thomas whispered cruelly as I left, and the last sound I heard was a general snigger. I followed Nicolai up the stairs, and then we passed even his floor and went on to the attic. He opened the door to a tiny room with a bed beneath a square window and nothing but a mirror on the wall.

“Ulrich says an artist needs his peace,” said Nicolai, “and he was able to convince the abbot. This is your room! No one may enter without your permission—not even me.” Then he kissed me on the forehead and left. He shut the door.

I just stood there, the bundle of clothes in my arms. I stared at the closed door and listened to the silence.
Alone
, I thought,
I have to live alone? Is this what it means to be an artist?

I dropped my clothes on the floor and the
whoomp
they made seemed a clap of thunder. I climbed onto the bed and pressed my nose up against the window. The new church shimmered in the uneven moonlight. The sight of it cleansed me. It was perfect, and I could be as well. I imagined my voice ringing in its heights. I saw Nicolai and Remus smiling. I even saw the other boys staring at me in admiration. And then I lay down on
my bed
. For the first time in my life, as I crossed into sleep, mine was the only breath I heard.

XVI.

T
oday it remains an evil, looming presence in my mind, although I haven’t seen it for half a century. If an earthquake had knocked Staudach’s church to the ground the day before that inauguration, this all would have been so different. But I cannot deceive you. It is perfection embodied in stone. Symmetry rules its architecture. The double towers, pure and white, dominate the city’s rooftops. A high rotunda sits exactly in the center, and beneath it, a golden grating splits the church in two perfect halves, just as the world is divided: at the high altar, the shepherds; on the other side, the flock. Great windows of glass are tinted the faintest green, so the brilliant sun shines through them as through a mountain stream. Eighteen white pillars hold the heavens up.

The night before the inauguration, the scaffolding was removed, the red velvet curtains were hung on the confessionals, and the stone floor was polished to a gleam. Staudach unlocked the door through the sacristy to the monks’ quarters, and the monks and novices and choirboys poured in as a flood of black. Then I began to understand how architecture is made of sound as much as sight. When the monks crooned at the holy fathers painted on the arched ceiling, the saints crooned back at us. The reverberation of our feet upon the stone consecrated our every step. The oaken choir stalls did not creak even under Nicolai’s massive weight. When our knuckles brushed the grating as we pointed into the laymen’s nave, the hum of the metal made us feel how solid was this barrier that split them from us. And when Nicolai sang first into the unspoilt heavens, the rumbling of his voice in distant corners made us feel that God, His church, and His music were truly greater than we could know.

I woke eager for the changes that would finally come when my voice sang the most beautiful music of the day. Best of all, my only friend my age, Amalia, would be there to hear it all. And when I was nearly dressed, and the abbey’s new bells tolled the beginning of the Mass, my mind recalled the one person who would not be there to hear my completion. I bowed my head and several tears dropped to the floor for my mother.

I listened to the Mass from my window—Ulrich had ordered me to stay in my room and rest my voice. While every Catholic soul for several leagues joined the procession, I strolled alone up and down the abbey’s hallways and peeked secretly into monks’ cells. I stole food from the empty kitchen. Finally, in the evening, after I heard the crowds returning, warm with food and drink, I sat on my bed and watched my door. Then I heard the thumps of Nicolai running up the stairs. He burst into the room. “It is time!” he shouted. He licked his fingers and slicked down my hair, pinched both my cheeks, then lifted me and flipped me over and spun me about to check for blemishes. Then he carried me out the door. He stopped at the top of the stairs and looked into my eyes. “Moses,” he said, his eyes wet with joy, “I thank God every day that he chose me to save you from that river.” And then he carried me to the church.

Yet, this time, I found that perfect space far less peaceful than it had been the night before. It was swarming with new faces and buzzing with excited chatter, and I would have been trampled long before I sang, had not Nicolai been my protector. I wrapped my arms around his neck as he carried me from the sacristy and into the mob of monkish black. Almost every face we passed was unknown to me, for I had always stared at knees, and now, looking down at them from Nicolai’s height, I could not discern which monk resided in the abbey and which had traveled many miles to be here for the inauguration. The flabby faces of eighteen abbots—a line of mitres in the stalls—chilled my spine. There must have been five hundred monks in all, and also among them I spotted the garb of many priests. For a moment, I imagined I heard my mother’s bells ringing a warning, and I looked fearfully for the face of my father. He was not there.

On our side of the grating there were also several guests not in ecclesiastical costume. Among them was Ulrich’s Stuttgart ambassador, Doctor Rapucci. The day before, my maestro had led me to a private concert for the man. The choirmaster’s hand shook in mine as he guided me through the door, and when the pale doctor approached me, his thin smile making every hair stand up on my neck, I felt Ulrich gently draw me back, as if he did not want the man to touch me. “You must sing for him,” Ulrich said, nervously, “but just briefly. Softly. Do not strain your voice.” Ulrich stared at the keys as he accompanied me, and then, as soon as I had finished, grabbed my hand and escorted me out as if he were afraid for me to remain another minute with this man. Now, in the church, Rapucci gave me a knowing smile, as if he and I shared a secret. And then he disappeared into the throng.

When Nicolai carried me far enough into the choir, I saw that this black, holy churning sea was only half the crowd. Across the grating, the other half of the nave was so awash with the garish merchandise of St. Gall textilers that it made me nauseated to look. In their pinks and greens and violets, St. Gall’s finest souls all seemed like stuffed dolls dressed up by little girls, chattering noisily. Every neck bent backward and every finger pointed at the vibrant paintings on the ceiling.

I turned and found Ulrich’s sallow face, which for once was a familiar comfort. The triple choir, tacked together from every passable voice within a hundred miles, sat in a semicircle in front of the stalls. Around them were the horns, the strings, and the two massive timpani, which I had at first mistaken for casks of holy wine. In the center of all of this, the three other soloists were already at their stations. Gerrit Glomser, bass, stared blankly through the nave, as if this perfect church were a place he had visited many times before. Joseph Schock was a small-headed, wide-shouldered tenor, who had been kind to me in rehearsals, but did not seem to see me now, for he had broken into a sweat and stared at his shaking hands.

But the third soloist, the mezzo-soprano Antonio Bugatti, smiled kindly at me. Two days before, after I had sung with him for the first time, I ran to Nicolai’s cell to inform my friend of the miracle I had witnessed—a man who sang a child’s high notes, but with the brilliance and power to match any man’s voice I had ever heard. The first time I had heard Bugatti singing, his voice had made my entire body tingle, and I forgot to sing my part. I felt tears in my eyes as I told Nicolai of this beauty.

But my friend had just smiled suspiciously. “I want to see Staudach’s falsetto for myself,” he said. “The abbot may be fooled, but I can spot an angel.” When I asked what he meant, he would not explain further, but promised to carry me to my station on the day of the inauguration so he could see the man up close.

And now, in the church, his task completed, Nicolai smiled as he knelt beside me, pretending to slick down my hair. “Moses,” he whispered in my ear, “I was right. Staudach’s falsetto is a musico. I can see it.”

I looked up at the mezzo-soprano Bugatti, who was as handsome as any man I had ever seen: fined-boned, as delicate in his movements as in his singing. I remembered that Staudach had forbid a musico to sing in his church.

“Nicolai,” I whispered, “what’s a musico?”

“A musico is a man,” said Nicolai, “who is not a man. He has been made into an angel.”

I did not see the relics carried to the crypt. I could not see Staudach at his pulpit. I did not listen as he proclaimed to the crowds that this church was the manifestation of God’s will on earth, and that we should see in it what we ourselves have the potential to become. I ignored the whispers and the short breaths and the rustling flying at me from all directions. Instead, I stared at Bugatti’s long fingers laid upon his knees. Did the man have wings hidden beneath his robe? When the drums began to roll their prelude, Bugatti smiled down at me again, and there was no place I would rather have been than beside him. The horns began to play, and every face in the church, including mine, warmed at the sound of glory.

The bass Glomser sang. He released sounds of such volume it seemed impossible they came out of a single body. The man’s voice filled every corner of the church and silenced every whisper. I heard his voice ringing in many guts. The echoes from the high rotunda made his voice possess the church, and I think many believed the Almighty had joined him in his song.

In those first movements, inspired by Glomser’s voice, fed at the day’s constant feasting, warmed by the procession’s wine, we all filled the church with our sounds so its windows rang. Ulrich had found space in my tiny frame; I did not struggle to be heard among these men. My voice mixed with those of the other soloists like swirls of precious dye in water, and I knew mine was as fine as any other that resounded in that church, even as the clear power of Bugatti’s mesmerized us all. When I did not sing, I closed my eyes and heard his voice ringing in my chest. When he was silent, I opened my eyes again and peered through the grate, seeking in vain for Amalia’s face, the only one I cared to see in that crowd. But she was as obscured to me as I imagine I was to her.

When the fifth movement ended, Ulrich paused. There was a sudden, stark quiet in the church. His raised hands held the music back, and, for a moment, we were all forced to contemplate the emptiness, and made to feel the longing that was Ulrich’s curse—his desire for the freshly vanished beauty, just beyond his reach.

Then it was my turn; the sixth movement was my solo. And I sang. With the perfect hearing that had been my mother’s gift, with the tiny lungs that Ulrich’s hands had taught to breathe, with a body that could ring with song. I sang for Nicolai, for Amalia—and I sang for my dead mother and for Frau Duft. My voice filled that perfect church as it fluttered from note to note. When I paused to breathe, I heard the drawing of a thousand breaths with mine. Then, as I began again, they held their air for me. My highest notes seemed to lift me off the ground. Beside me, when I grabbed a secret look, Bugatti’s eyes were closed, a smile on his face. My slight body echoed in the rotunda and from the deepest recesses of the nave, and so, for the first time in my life, I felt huge, as huge as Staudach’s church.

Then it was over—not even a hundred seconds. No one stirred. The eyes of every monk and singer were fixed upon me, but I knew they stared not at this insignificant boy, but at the voice inside him, which they yearned to hear again. Through the grating, among the crowd of worshippers, I saw one head struggling above the rest, and I glimpsed, for an instant, Amalia standing eagerly upon her pew, until her aunt yanked her down.

Then I looked at Ulrich. His face was ashen. Eyes wide, he had ceased to breathe, as if a knife had been stabbed into his chest.

We feasted again through that evening and long into the night. I crept from table to table and filled my mouth and pockets with food that would have made kings and princes drool. I must have consumed my body weight in roast lamb that day, and where it hid I do not know. Still that little body did not grow.

The wine cellars of the abbey were opened to the visiting and resident monks alike. Midnight found me at my attic window listening to scores of drunken monks in the cloister below, as they celebrated the complete and perfect abbey. From one window, lit like a stage, Nicolai sang French ballads to a crowd that cheered whenever he rhymed. His audience danced in a circle until they collapsed in a drunken pile. Beyond the monastery buildings, the Abbey Square was quiet, the laity long since sent home without food or wine. In the most distant recess of the cloister, I heard Ulrich’s voice whispering urgent pleading to the calm nasal drone of the Stuttgart doctor. Opposite them, Remus muttered under the white façade of the new church, where he seemed to be carrying on a debate with a Frenchman, but when I peered into the shadow, I saw no one beside him, just a book clutched before his eyes. From other shadows, I heard seducing whispers. On a night like this, with so many visiting brothers who would never meet one another again, and with wine to dull the conscience, many monks sought to taste the nectars of the world.

I heard frantic praying in slurred tongues. I heard one man singing my solo in a squeaking whisper. I heard a cask of wine rolled across the cloister. I heard goblets smashed against the walls.

I remember my thoughts exactly: How lucky I am. I want to be a monk.

For the first time since I had come to the monastery, I felt that I belonged. Like the stones of Staudach’s church, I had once been low and rough, but now I was formed into something fine and good and holy.

How wrong I was.