The Bells (18 page)

XII.

O
ne night every week I was alive.

I prayed that Karoline’s ailing aunt would not pass away, and for one blissful year, at least, my prayers were answered. Every Thursday, as soon as it was dark, Amalia and I both escaped our respective prisons. I was there to grab her hand and lead her to our room as soon as the blindfold was fixed around her head. Ulrich was always at his table, his head bowed as if he were asleep. I knew he was not asleep, and that he heard our every noise. But I soon forgot him, and he was no more to me than a statue in that house.

Those Thursday nights on which Karoline had to forgo her weekly journey due to snow or some other impediment, Amalia left a note for me on a windowsill. She had given me a key, with which I slipped into the Duft garden and up against the house. I dreaded to reach my hand up to the cold stone sill; my heart ached if I found a scrap of paper there. Then I would wander the streets alone, hunting sounds that reminded me of her.

In the attic room, I lay beside her on that bed, and she would hold my ear or my hair, lay a hand on my cheek or on my chest, as if without it I would float away. “Sing, Moses,” she asked, and even though I had sworn to Ulrich in this very house that I would never do so, I found myself singing again. Whatever came to me: the Masses Ulrich had taught me and that I had sung for Frau Duft, or the monks’ chants, or Nicolai’s pastorals (Amalia laughed at my arbitrary pronunciation of the French), or Bach’s cantatas, or improvisations on all of these. Sometimes I merely sang notes that would have seemed unconnected to anyone but Amalia and me.

I watched her lay supine, and at my first notes she would gently raise her chin and arch her toes, slightly turn her feet outward, then inward and then outward again, like a violinist twisting his tuning pegs. She did not even realize she was doing this until I told her, but she did it without fail. It pleased her.

Then I always closed my eyes. We both were blinded as I pressed my ear to every inch of her skin so I could hear what rang beneath it. Her body was my bell.

She tried several times to remove the bandage-like cloth that protected my secret. But I stopped her. She thought I was protecting her chastity (for which she mounted no defense). I certainly had nothing of the sort in mind. Any forbearance was due only to my castration. There are rumors of castrati who can still commit the act of love. Don’t believe them. We are cut too early.

Amalia was the first person I ever told of my mother. “We slept on straw,” I said one night, and watched her face for repulsion. There was none. “We ate with our hands. She bathed me in a stream. I wore scraps of fabric which before had been some farmer’s undergarment.” Still, she did not shy away from me. She lay beside me and ran a finger up and down my arm, which tickled at the elbow. “Amalia,” I said. “Doesn’t this surprise you?”

“Surprise me?” she said. She laid her ear on my arm, as if listening to my muscles tremble. “No.”

My neck grew hot. So she had always thought I was a dirty peasant?

“You see,” she said, kissing my wrist, tasting it, “I thought at first you were just like those other boys who wanted to be monks. I thought you had some rich father who loved God and wished for you to be like the abbot. What you tell me now explains why I liked you so. If you had told me you were a peasant orphan maybe I wouldn’t have been so mean. I would have helped you more. As it was, I just thought you were stupid.”

She bit into my forearm.

My life outside that room stood still. Staudach saw no rush for me to take my vows, so I remained a neglected novice who attended only enough Holy Offices to avoid notice. If my life in the abbey was to change, I would need to take action, but I did not desire change. I was ready to grow old in that room.

But upon Amalia, the only daughter of the wealthiest man St. Gall had ever known, the world intended to act. Suitors were a constant hassle. She wove elegant condemnations of their faults that, for a time, convinced even Karoline that Amalia had a discerning eye for the Perfect Man.

“Karoline has simply intensified her search,” Amalia told me one Thursday night. “The paper she has wasted sending for her ‘applicants’! ‘One more year,’ she says, ‘at the very most. If you can’t decide, then your father must!’ At this Father snorted. ‘Patience, Karoline,’ he said. ‘We will find a fit; there always is a perfect fit.’ ”

We laughed at all of this, knowing that no perfect fit would ever come along.

But then:

“Marry me,” she said one night.

Suddenly, I could not breathe. I did not move. I said nothing. I felt as if any sound might reveal my deceit and my shame.

“Moses?” she asked.

“Yes?”

“I asked you to marry me.”

“I cannot.”

“Why not?” she asked. She laughed. “Because you are a monk? Moses, you do not even know the Bible. You spend every night with a woman. You—”

“It is not that, Amalia.”

“Then why?”

I thanked God for that blindfold then, for she could not see me shaking with the fear of all I stood to lose.

“I cannot.”

“But why not?” she said, no longer flippant.

“Please, do not ask me.”

She must have heard my sincerity, for she did not press me.

“I see,” she said. “Fine, I do not need to marry you. We will run away. I am tired of my days away from you. We can go to Zurich. Or to Stuttgart. Orpheus, you could sing.”

“Please do not call me that.”

“Why not? To me you are Orpheus. My Orpheus.”

I shook my head, though she could not see it. This name was a symbol of how terribly I had deceived her—and how much I had deceived myself. For what she desired was what I desired: To run away, to flee Staudach and Ulrich and our daytime prisons. To be one as man and wife. I wanted it as badly as she did, perhaps more.

“Please do not ask me to run away,” I said. “It cannot be.”

“I do not mind being poor,” she said.

“Never ask me that again,” I said as forcefully as I had ever spoken. I choked back my tears.

For several minutes we were both quiet. Then her hand began to feel along my chest, my neck, my chin. She touched my lips, and then she wet her finger on my tongue.

“I want to see you, Moses,” she said. “I want to see you with my eyes.”

“You cannot,” I said. “As long as you love me, you cannot.”

XIII.

S
oon, the future began to weigh on us like stacks of books piled upon a harpsichord. When I sang, I had to force air from my lungs to feel my voice ring in my knees and elbows. My hands and feet were clenched so tightly they would not resound if placed against a bell. I ground my ear against Amalia’s chest to hear her heart.

Only in the heights of our ecstasy did this weight seem to lift, and so our need for the touch and sound of each other’s bodies became a frantic hunger. While we were apart, I both longed for her and hated myself, and I resolved the next week to pull off that blindfold. But from the moment we entered the room, her hands pressed and groped at my body as if she sought some opening in my flesh. I heard the gradual tuning of her fibers until that beautiful body rang like a bell hung from heaven. Only then did bliss overcome me and I was sure this love we felt was real. Every doubt vanished.

But by the summer of 1761, twelve years after my arrival at the abbey, nine years after my castration, four years after Nicolai’s exile, and one full year after Amalia’s foray into my attic room, I knew that this could not go on. I was anguished.

“His name is Anton Riecher,” she said one night as we lay in bed. She sprawled supine, her left hand clasping my wrist. My back was pressed against the wall. “ ‘Anton
Josef
Riecher,’ Karoline says, as if a third name makes all the difference. ‘
Count
Sebastian Riecher’s eldest son,’ she adds to anyone who will listen, even though the man just bought the title several years ago. Have you heard of him?” She squeezed my wrist.

Except for the composers whose music Ulrich had brought to me, I had never heard of any living person but those residing in St. Gall. “No,” I said.

“Father has been in correspondence with him for many years. He’s to Vienna what my father is to Saint Gall—the empress wears Sebastian Riecher’s cloth, as do Austria’s peasants. I suppose he’s actually even richer than my father, Count Riecher is. Vienna is awfully large.” There was some hint of condescension, of knowing more than me about important persons, which, in all our nights, had been absent until now. She waved her hand glibly through the air. “I wonder how the son of such a wealthy man must act,” she continued. “Like a prince, I suppose. Anyhow, we soon will know. He’s traveling all this way just to meet
me
. He should be here in a matter of days.”

I pictured Anton Riecher as handsome as Nicolai, proud as Staudach, and as rich as Willibald Duft. As I pieced together this caricature of greatness, my attention was riveted to his center, which held his greatest advantage over me.

“Father and Karoline are determined that I marry him,” Amalia said. “Father says it is of course up to me, but that nothing could be better for his dealings, and Karoline says such a match is extraordinary. She says that I am
engaged
, though I have not even met him yet. They have told him about … about my leg, and he writes that the selection of a wife for him is not about such trivialities.”

I lay still. It was as if I had heard a tempest coming and saw no better plan than to lie close to the earth and cover my head.

“Moses?” she said. “Did you hear me?”

“Yes,” I said.

“He will inherit the whole Riecher fortune when his father dies, just as I will inherit the whole of Duft und Söhne, even though I cannot run it. You see how it makes sense, then? We would be the greatest textile family in the world—or at least outside England, and maybe some other places. We would go to Vienna, where Empress Maria Theresa lives. I would be free of this city, of that prison of a house. I would never see blasted Karoline again. I could do anything I wanted.”

In a crescent around her navel, the tiny golden hairs stood up and glimmered in the candlelight, as if a cool wind had awoken them.

“Our children would have to be Riechers, because they cannot be Dufts.”

I tried to quiet my breath.

“Moses, are you not listening?” She sat up and pointed her blindfolded eyes at me.

“I am.”

“Then why don’t you say something?”

I felt as if time slowed then, and I had an eternity to give her an answer.

“Moses, what should I do?” she asked.

“Marry him,” I said. No words had ever tasted so bitter.

She said nothing for a long time. Her hand held the red silk and it seemed that she would pull it away. I did not tell her to stop. Perhaps she felt my weakness, for she withdrew her hand.

She began to sob, and wet crimson patches blossomed on the silk. I listened to her sadness: the sobs, the soft gasps, the wetness in her nose and mouth. For an instant, I wished she would pull off that blindfold and see me for the weak half-man that I was. I lay there, her sobs jabbing me like hundreds of tiny daggers.

“You are weak, Moses,” she said. She turned her back to me, and I so wanted to press my ear into the hollow track of her spine, but I sensed this was forbidden to me now. With her bare feet, she felt for the floor. She stood, naked, her hands sweeping the air before her. She stumbled forward and knocked over one of the chairs at the artist’s paint-blistered table. She clutched the table’s edge and worked her way around it, the muscles of her back and buttocks twitching as she fought to balance herself. She had only to withdraw the blindfold and it all would have been so easy. But she would not make the choice for me.

She turned back toward me. “You do love me,” she said. “And that just makes you weaker. I don’t know what you are so afraid of, Moses, but no one should be so afraid of anything.” She tried again to find a place to step, but she could not, and she almost fell. “Do you know why I always need to touch you?” she said as soon as she had caught her balance. “Because if I let go I just see that little boy who did not reach my shoulder. Perhaps I am in love with a ghost.” I watched her struggle, and never had I wanted to be strong, to be a real man. But I was paralyzed with grief. And fear. She stumbled and fell to her knees and crawled along the floor until she reached the wall.

“Say something,” she yelled. As she stood up again, her hands came upon the canvas of the painter’s naked wife. I noticed for the first time how similar they were—they could have been sisters, or the same angel sent to two different men.

“Say something!” she yelled again.

I am sorry
, I mouthed, but I could not say it.

“Say something!” But the command dissolved into sobs. The soft insides of her naked thighs shook as she cried, and she tensed suddenly from heel to neck. She tore the painting off the wall. She threw it toward the bed. The frame splintered as it hit the floor in front of me, and I jumped. Amalia leaned against the wall and cried in wild gasps. She slid down the wall until she sat against the floor and embraced her knees. Still, she did not tear off that blindfold, just as her hands had never unwrapped the bandage around my middle.

I brought her clothes and helped her dress in silence. As I led her home that morning, I heard that something inside her had broken. I wanted to return to our attic room and press my ear to every inch of her flesh until I could repair it.

As we approached Haus Duft, Amalia stopped us before the gate. I did not like this change in our habits, and I gently led her on, but she resisted. For several seconds we stood without moving. A cock crowed in a nearby yard. I looked up nervously at the house. I thought I glimpsed movement at a window.

“Someone might see us,” I whispered. “The sky is turning gray.”

Abruptly, she turned toward me. “No more,” she said. “I will not do it anymore.” She reached up and slid her thumb beneath the blindfold, drawing it up. Every muscle in my body tensed.

She lifted the blindfold off. I could not move. I could not breathe.

Her eyes were closed.

She held the blindfold out and dropped it. I was too slow; it fluttered to the ground.

Still, she did not open her eyes. “Moses, I will not wear it again,” she said. “Not ever. Next week I will see you with my eyes. If you come.”

Her hand felt its way up my arm, along my shoulder and my neck until it found my cheek, her thumb resting on my lower lip. Her palm lingered.

“Goodnight, Orpheus,” she whispered.

I could not find my voice to reply.

She turned to the gate, and I knew her eyes were open, for she walked with a sure step. She did not look back, and though I could have called her to me then, I let her go.