The Bells (15 page)

VI.

I
sealed my pledge to him. He had me kneel before him and he said a prayer and then he nodded kindly at the door. But to me, his prayer seemed an incantation, because everything I heard was changed. The creaking of the door, the hiss of my sliding steps across the empty foyer—for the first time in my life I didn’t gain any comfort from these sounds, or any others. Outside, a morning mist hung about the grass in lifeless swirls and dimmed the glimmers of candlelight in the windows of the church. I fell to my knees and was sick there on the grass, heaving until there was nothing left inside me. I cried until the tears were also spent.

But even as I sobbed into my hands, as I told myself I must be thankful for the abbot’s gift, my ears strained to hear: the monks chanting into the night, the swoop of a bat chasing an early morning fly. I fought the sounds. I pulled at the cold, damp grass until it came away in clumps. I clawed at the dirt until my fingers bled.

No! Those sounds are not for you. That world is not for you. Do not let it tempt you!
These sounds would just make me long for more, long for the mysteries that lay outside those walls, for friends, for love, for my mother’s bells, for Nicolai and Remus, and worst of all, it would make me long to sing again.

And so began the most miserable period of my life. I was forbidden to leave the abbey—even to venture into the Abbey Square, where some wandering layman might glimpse my seraphic, imperfect face. During the Holy Offices and Mass, I sat in the novices’ stalls, a pillar between me and the greater nave. I never raised my voice in chant or song, never even allowed my silent prayers to rise up inside my head in a memory of what my voice had been. Once or twice I remembered what my friend Amalia had said: “I can hear you. Even when twenty other voices sing.” I dreamed of calling to her, in the midst of the others’ song; I was sure Staudach would not hear me. But even then shame kept me silent. I never ventured near that gate again.

Staudach had offered me the chance one day to take my vows, and so I donned the novice’s habit, which is much like the monk’s but lacks the hooded cuculla. (Oh, how I wished for a hood to hide my face!) This would normally have meant studying with the other novices each day under the tutelage of the novice master, Brother Leodegar, but perhaps the abbot feared I would stain the pure noviate pool, for he deemed that I should be a lay monk, untaught. I would require neither Virgil nor St. Aquinas, only obedience and submission.

No novice had been raised this way in the abbey for many years, but Staudach claimed that I could never be a modern monk, who, through learning and piety, could give back to the world. At best, I would be like St. Gall himself: lonely, humble, a hermit.

Throughout this time, I fought with sounds, just as any monk battles with his passions. When I heard the delightful babble of the cloister fountain, I beat it down with prayer. When meat sizzled in the refectory, I fasted. When the mirthful cries of children rose up outside the abbey walls and I could have basked in the warmth of their glee, I exiled myself to some empty cellar and recited the rosary. If my ears began to stray to the charms of the wind along the roofing tiles above my room, I dug my fingernails into the skin of my hand, or pulled the downy hair at the nape of my neck. I found a hairshirt rotting in a cupboard, and its itching fibers distracted me during Offices from the beauty of the chants. I listened in on other men’s confessions, heard of the uncontrollable passions stirring in their loins and then, when my turn came, repeated what I had heard, hoping that through this deception I could somehow be absolved for my own sins of sound.

In this manner a year passed, and then another. As Staudach had promised, my condition remained a secret. My speaking voice was high and soft, but other men squeak and whine, so I was not betrayed. My appearance, though striking, was not enough to raise the suspicions of monks who had known me for years.

A new, mediocre choirmaster replaced the supremely talented Ulrich. This Brother Maximilian never spoke with me. No one dared openly discuss the former choirmaster, but I heard whispers. “The abbot sent him to a hospital in Zurich. He’ll never get out of his bed again,” said one monk. “I heard he’s dead,” whispered another. But when the monks saw my eyes upon them, they looked shyly at their feet. At first I did not comprehend what this mortified silence meant, but one day, as I shuffled quietly along a corridor, I overheard a conversation between three monks that made me understand that they mistook my shameful secret for another. “A boy brings such disgrace on himself,” one monk insisted to the others. “Brother Ulrich allowed himself to be tempted, indeed, and he sinned most gravely, none of us deny that. But that boy was never meant for this abbey. He is a snake in our midst. I expect he wanted … to … to be
petted.
” “Day after day, night after night,” agreed another of the monks, “Ulrich had to spend so much time alone with the boy; he was seduced, pure and simple.”

There was nothing to mark one day from the next. When I was able to calm my passion for sound, my misery was numbed; I ached only from loneliness. I thought often of Nicolai and Remus, wishing that there was some way of knowing how they fared.

The other novices were not cruel as the choirboys had been, but they were disdainful. They ignored me completely. Their fathers paid a tidy sum so they could be what I had become merely out of pity. They believed me an idiot—an opinion I did nothing to contradict. Instead, I left my cell window open so that pigeons would roost in my ceiling and give me company, but they never came.

I grew to my full height, a head taller than the other monks. My ribs grew and grew. Beneath them, my lungs expanded farther—“The Largest Lungs in Europe,” one London reviewer would boast many years later. But my grand stature and bulging chest struck no one in the abbey as majestic or imposing, for I slouched, and was pale and sickly. There were bruises around my eyes from lack of sleep, for I feared to shut them. When I did, I dreamed of my mother’s bells, of Nicolai’s singing, or of my own voice, ringing to my fingers, and then it hurt so much to wake.

…

There is a single event from that first year after my friends’ exile that I need to recount. It was a Sunday in winter. Mass was finished, and on opposite sides of the grating that split the nave in two, laity and monks streamed out of the church. I remained at my place in the novices’ stalls, hidden from the worshippers by one of the great white pillars.

“Moses!”

The familiar voice seemed to call from within my head. It filled me with sudden warmth, warmth I had recently felt only in my dreams. Before I could punish myself for enjoying this sound—

“Moses!”

The voice was real, because other monks were turning toward the grating.

I peered around the pillar. She stood at the grating, hands grasping the iron bars and golden vines as though she intended to tear the grating down. The decoration was not so elaborately wrought here as at the gate, and so I saw her face as she moved it from gap to gap, repeating my name into the crowd of monks, who stared at her in amazement. She ignored their shocked faces. It was as if she were seeking me in a forest of unmoving trees.

“Moses? Are you there?” she shouted again, so every ear in the church could hear. Behind her, I heard the voice of Karoline Duft approaching, pushing through the crowd, trying to save the Duft name from everlasting shame.

“Please, Moses,” Amalia yelled. “Are you there?”

She had not forgotten me. I felt hope stir from its slumber. I wanted to run to that grating. I wanted to touch my friend’s hand.

Amalia slid back along the grating away from her aunt. She peered at every face that stared at her, trying to find the boy she had known among these hooded men. I began to step around the pillar.

Suddenly, he was there, his hand on my shoulder. I turned toward him. The abbatial mitre brought his head as high as mine.

“Remember what you are, Moses,” he whispered. “You will only bring shame on her and on the abbey.”

I bowed my head. He watched me for a moment more, then glided away. When I looked back again, Karoline Duft had snatched Amalia into the throng.

I redoubled my efforts. I no longer resolved to destroy my passion for the world’s sounds like a tree dying slowly for want of water—now, I would strike that tree with lightning, burn it to ashes. I prayed for God to mingle every sound with pain, to make me loathe every note I heard. I drank draughts of tar water on Holy Days so I would be nauseated when the finest singers sang. I did not eat. I paced up and down my room so I would not sleep at night and dream. Then, one early morning, when I could not control my passion, and I found my memory tempting me with luscious symphonies of half-forgotten sounds, I smashed my mirror in fury. I used the icy shards to carve gashes in my arms. Soon my hands were so soaked in blood I could not hold the splinters, but for a moment, one blessed moment, I almost felt content.

But I could not defeat my ears, no more than I could hold my breath until I expired. My heart still beat like a drum, marking the seconds of my life. At night, I awoke and, half-conscious, I broke free and embraced the window’s rattle like a lover’s voice. Or worse, I woke directly from a dream of my mother’s bells or Nicolai’s rumbling bass and found my bedclothes wet from sweat, and the echoes of my dreams still ringing in my ears. In these moments, I closed my eyes and unlocked the library of my memory, and my imagination sampled the pleasures of every sound I had ever heard. My heart soared. Hope that I could be happy in this beautiful world began to reawaken inside of me.

Until I opened my eyes and found myself in my cell, in my prison, in this imperfect body, and once more I loathed myself for dreaming.

One night I resolved to take the final step. I stole a quill from a monk. I sat upon my bed, no light in my room save the block of moonlight cast upon the floor. I turned the quill over and over in my hands and imagined its golden tip passing through the drumheads of my ears. I sat there a long time, waiting for some reason not to do what I had planned, but instead of rebelling, the sounds in my memory seemed to slowly fade, acquiescing for the first time since I had begun to fight them down. The abbey and the city grew quiet in the early hours of the morning, and then it seemed to me that the whisper of that wooden wand sliding through my hands was the only sound in the world.

When my ears had given up any trace of struggle, I raised the quill to my right ear and prepared to stab myself into silence.

Three times in my life my dead mother called me with a bell. This night was the first: the abbey’s bell struck two. Two strident peals just as I would maim my most exquisite sense. Into the bleak silence of the world, the two strikes woke my ears. They clung to the subsiding rings for ten, twenty seconds until I heard just faint echoes from the distant city.

Deaf like you, mother, I would have been
.

I heard the whispering of her dancing feet on that wooden floor. I heard her body ringing with her bells. Oh, her prison had been worse than mine! My evil father lurking near her day and night. Yet she had reveled in every sound that she could grasp with the fibers of her body. And I—so blessed with perfect ears—was now ready to destroy them.

The quill clattered to the floor and I stared at it as if it were a blood-soaked knife. Suddenly the air felt so close in my narrow room; I could not breathe. I threw open the door, but the hallway seemed even more confining. The walls and ceiling were closing in. I turned about, dashed across my room, and leapt to my window. I could barely squeeze my shoulders through. The night air was so sweet, the heavens so far away, and I drank my fill of the cool summer’s night, but still I needed to escape. And so I clambered through, squatted on the sill, and clung to the wooden frame so I would not topple to the cloister far below. The infinite space above me pulled me farther from my prison. I needed to be free! I let go of my hold and slithered up the tiles of the steep roof until I lay heaving across the peak.

The white abbey shone in the moonlight. The streets of the city were black chasms between rows of gray roofs. I listened to the world.

Somewhere, a loose shutter swung open and banged against a house. A dog barked. A rat scurried along the street and paused to chew a rotten scrap. Liquid seeped between the cobblestones and tinkled into the gutter. Footsteps creaked inside a house. The light wind hummed as it wound through the alleys. Somewhere a door opened, whimpering on its hinges. Rats and cats and dogs ruled the warm night, picked at refuse, snapped at one another. I heard the city sleeping. I heard the heavy breathing of fat men, the sighs of women. I heard snores. I heard people babble desires in their sleep.

The world was huge again, and I had ears for its every sound.

VII.

I
could have been a great cat burglar if God had endowed me with a love of silver rather than a love of sounds.

Every night, I escaped my prison—and soon found that I was not the first to do so. Go and look in any of the so-called Great Monasteries of Europe. The ground is gently hollowed beneath a gate, a lock bent on a low window. Moreover, in the cellars there are secret tunnels and hidden doors, supposedly known only to the abbot, but these are found by any monk stirred by lust or curiosity—and all of us were stirred, all but those with shrunken souls.

In bad weather I would risk one of the paths frequented by other monks. My preference was for a tunnel in the medieval foundation of the stables, carved by centuries of stable boys too lazy to walk around to the gate. But when the ground was dry of rain and snow, and the wind did not blow fiercely, I scrambled up the roof. At first I took short, terrified steps along the rounded tiles at the peak; later I bounded. At the end of the wing, I crept down the roof and dropped to the top of the medieval tower, which was all that remained of the old, imperfect abbey. There I passed below windows of the abbatial apartments, in which a lamp gleamed from dusk till dawn. Thank God the abbot never came to his window to ponder the imperfect world.

I darted along the wall that separated the abbey from the Protestant town. Houses were built flush against it, so I slid down their uneven roofs and leapt to the ground below.

Then I was free.

Free only to hide, of course, but in any shadow I desired. I stole a cuculla and kept the hood pulled over my brow, so no one would see my pale face shining from its depths. I directed my ears to approaching footsteps, to the turn of a key, to a sleepless sigh emitted from an open window. The tolling of the church’s bells was my compass, and each hour I would scrutinize their volume and tone to decipher my position. Without them, I would have been lost among the convoluted streets, deprived as I was by the daytime sounds such as those that had guided Remus and me to Haus Duft.

Landscapes of sound, like paintings, are composed of layers. The wind forms the foundation, which is not a sound, technically, but creates sound as it plays the city: it clangs a loose shutter, hums in a keyhole, makes a whistle of the tin knife coat of arms that hangs above the butcher’s shop. With the wind come those other sounds of weather: The rain patters on the cobblestones, it drips off eaves, it rushes in gutters. Sleet hisses. Snow dampens other sounds with its blanket. The earth shifts. Houses creak.

On top of these are the sounds that feed upon the silence of dying and decay: the jaws of rats, dogs, and maggots; the bubbling streams of wash water and urine steaming in gutters; the piles of rotting scraps of food that cackle for the patient listener; the heaps of warm manure that sizzle their putrescence; the flit of falling leaves; the dirt settling on a fresh grave. In the twilight, winged beasts feast on the dead and dying: the flutter of the bat, the graceless clap of the alighting pigeon’s wings, the mosquito’s tenor, the fat fly’s ecstatic hum as he hops from shit to urine. No sound was ugly. I laid my ear to graves. I crouched at piles of manure. I followed the streams of urine along the gutters.

“In an opera, Moses, there are two kinds of songs,” Nicolai had instructed me one night years before, pacing back and forth in his cell, a glass of wine waving in his hand, spilling crimson drops on the creamy, priceless rug. “Pay attention, Moses, you will need this in your future.
Recitatives
, the first, move the story forward. Sometimes, in recitatives, the music starts and flows like speech. We hear information that some composer thinks we need.” He held up a finger. “In recitatives, sometimes I fall asleep. But that’s alright. Nothing to be ashamed of. Because no one goes to opera to hear these songs, my friend. They go to opera for the arias. Arias wrench my eyes wide open. Pure passion, pure music—no other consideration.”

I had stored this teaching away, never thinking I would need it, much less outside of any theater. But on my nightly outings I soon realized that I could divide the human sounds of night into Nicolai’s two categories of opera songs. On the stage of life, you can hear recitatives from the street on a warm night, and in winter you need no more than climb through a window or pick a lock and enter a front hallway. They, like their cousins in the world of opera, are the sounds that propel our life. They are the snore, the steady breath, the rasp, the rolling over groan, the dream babble. They are the hissing above a chamber pot, the trumpet of a congested nose. They are the chop of wood and the stoking of the fire in the winter, the kneading of dough in the dark hours of the morning. The recitatives of our nights are the turning of the page by a sleepless hand, the pacing of the sleepless foot. They are disgusting. They are dull. They are repetitive, ignored, unheard. They are necessary.

For many weeks I heard these sounds. I sat on vacant staircases, ate scraps of food in empty kitchens while the occupants slept above. I slipped into children’s rooms, leaned over cribs and drifted on their soft, calming breaths. The more I listened to these sounds the smaller I became; the world became large—and what a comfort this was to me. I became a ghost. It was not hands and faces and naked flesh that interested me. I wanted only sound. I slid through windows or crept down hallways, and I felt as guiltless as the angels who look in on our dreams.

It was several weeks before I recognized another level: the aria of the night. To hear this you must be lucky, or else very bold. For people hide these sounds as they hide the most private patches of their flesh. To hear aria on a hot night, pull yourself up to an open window. Or, when it is colder, find an unlocked door—or learn to pick the lock by the sounds it makes when prodded with pins. Do not stop in the front hallway, but climb the stairs, crawl along the floor until you can place your ear against a door. Or, better yet, if you find occupants still busy washing, hide beneath their bed or in their wardrobe. If not that, then climb onto a roof and pry up the tiles until you find a hole through which you may mine the sounds below. Only ghosts, angels, and thieves have a right to aria.

Crying has a thousand forms: the baby’s needful whine, the sickly moan, the lonesome sob. Some cry into the mute of a pillow or press a fist against their teeth so they snort their sadness. Some sadnesses are floods of tears and snot spat out. Some are dry, raspy creatures that desiccate a heart. Sadness can sound like giving birth to an unwanted child. These species are impartial; the stoic, wrinkled man may drool and beat his forehead, while his frail granddaughter’s sorrow may merely make her shudder.

The sounds of hatred—part of any night—are, in their most spectacular form, the shouts and clanging swords the Neapolitan stage mimics so well. The angry slap and drunken fist count, too, and they are far more common. Insult and reproach are as common to a bedroom as the bed. I heard bones cracked, blood dripped upon the floor, clothing ripped. Though I could listen to sobbing for hours—I was always in awe of the depths of sorrow in this world—when slaps and insults flew, I bit my fist to endure them.

Or course, it is for love that opera lives, for which its temples are built in every city. And soon I was like those mobs of Italian men who go without supper for a week so they can afford a single ticket. I strained for the most sublime of all: the arias of love. I crept into bedrooms, hid in closets (and crept out only when sleep had come for good). The shy giggle. The urging murmur. The whisper of a hand on bare skin. The matching of the breaths. The warming of the exhalations until they seemed to whisper
Hot! Hot! Hot!
The kiss whose pitch deepened as it moved from lip to neck to breast.

I should stop here. Close the curtain. Love is allowed on the stages of Europe only because the most indecent sounds have been translated into Italian. Although the pope rewards the castrato’s aching love song with gold, the woman who puts her hand between her legs and moans in the presence of the Holy See will find herself in prison. But I must tell you of these illicit sounds, for listening to love helped me finally piece together what I was—and what I lacked. When kisses turned to gropes, and the breath was joined by other steady rhythms (the drum of the headboard, the sibilance of the sheets, the synchronized sighs), I did not excuse myself. My ears pursued the sounds of those bodies like one of Herr Duft’s microscopes focusing on the eye of a flea. I heard the crack of clenched toes, hands that kneaded breast and buttocks with a sound like the tightening of a leathern belt. Chest against chest was the slip of dry skin and the slide of sweat, the slap of breasts, the grind of rib against rib.

Lovemaking is like singing. At the first breath—the first thrust—the body is asleep to sound. Sighs and moans die in the throat. But as the tempo quickens, pleasure radiates, and the body tunes to its reception. Soon the sighs enter the chest, and though they may be no louder, the sighs are fuller; the moaner moans to her fingertips.

I could not know then that in lovemaking one feels a magic touch—I could have as easily understood the undulations of a hawk’s wings in soaring flight—so I thought at first that it was this song the lovers sought. They moved together, moaned together, gasped together. They whispered
Yes! Yes!
in each other’s ears, and shuddered from head to toe in their united song. I heard that when they came to rest—silent but for their racing breaths and hearts—their ecstasy was the same as mine in song, a body unified for a single purpose, ringing with its beauty.

It was in the sounds of the lovers’ arias that I finally understood what Nicolai had told me so many years before, sitting with him on his horse: the union of two halves in love. I understood this when I heard the ecstatic cries of union in those houses, but also because I heard my own soul call out,
Please! Please! I, too, wish to be loved! I wish to be complete!
But, so, too, did I understand my tragedy: that because of my imperfection, love for me was impossible. All at once, the musico’s exchange made sense. We had given up this song of union for a song that we must sing alone.