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.
Soon, 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.
XIV.
Do not think me such a coward to suppose I retrieved that blindfold, cleaned off the dirt, and hoped to make her wear it again. I left it in the street for the horses to trample.
As I endured the week of Holy Offices, I knew my deceit was at an end. She would know I was a castrate—even if she somehow did not read it in the softness of my face, I would tell her. Though I fought back visions of her laughter cruel as that of Feder and the other choirboys, in my heart I knew she would not be spiteful.
She might insist it made no difference. That she loved me as much as ever. This she might even believe. But I knew different. Orpheus was a man and I was not. If I took her back to that attic, we would both blush. We would stare at the spots of paint on the table and not know what to say. If our eyes met, we would smile shyly. Would she hug me like a sister?
I ached with regret as I sat in the stalls, oblivious to the chanting around me. The only sounds I heard were those in my memory that I treasured most, which soon I would have no right to hear. Yet, as the week wore on, I noticed an eagerness growing inside me. Soon someone would share my secret.
When the sun had finally set on that last day of waiting, I lit a candle and stood before the remaining shards of mirror on my wall. I had bathed, scrubbing off every speck of dirt. Since the last time I observed my own reflection, my eye sockets had lost their dark circles. My cheeks had grown fuller and gained a healthy flush.
Out in the city, I circled Haus Duft twice, waiting for the lights to extinguish. I tried to mine the sounds from within, but they still beguiled me. I heard the clangs of kitchens where I knew the sleeping quarters to be, excited talk from a room whose window was dark.
The last light was extinguished just after the abbey’s bell struck midnight. I hid outside the garden gate, listening for the creaking hinge. She did not come. At one, I grew impatient and resolved to see if she had left a note. I withdrew the key she had given me, opened the gate, and crept to the garden window.
What disappointment I felt to find a slip of paper on that sill! I retrieved it and tilted it toward the moonlight. I almost had to touch it to my nose to read it:
My dearest Moses,
How glad I will be in the morning when I find no note on this windowsill and know that you have come. I so want to see you with my eyes! I can think of nothing else. But tonight it is not to be. There is something about. Karoline is a crafty witch—she left for Bruggen, but then I heard her in the cellar. I dare not come. But next week she shall be gone again, and I will be out in the night, gazing at my Orpheus.
A.
I pressed the note to my chest, as if her voice could caress me through the ink. Another whole week! How could I fight back my doubts so long?
Then I heard a door open into the garden.
She had come after all! I nearly leapt out into view, but I did not want to frighten her, not on this night with so much at stake.
“Amalia,” I whispered.
There was a gasp, and I realized in an instant that I had made a most terrible mistake. That heavy breath was not Amalia’s.
“Did you hear that!” said Karoline Duft. “I told you I saw something coming through the gate. I have the eyes of a cat. We will catch this scoundrel yet.”
I had not seen her for several years, but I immediately knew that silhouette stamping into the garden, though now her hips were so wide one could have believed she hid her brother’s fortune in her underclothes. She whipped her narrow head from side to side as if she wished to shake something loose inside of it.
With a thump of boots, two men—the abbot’s soldiers both of them—stepped into the garden behind her. They moved slowly.
“He is here,” she said. “In this garden. Find him.”
They looked languidly behind bushes as she pulled up her skirts and hunted. She was the loudest cat ever known to nature, snapping limbs off shrubs, huffing with the effort, cursing quietly with whatever air remained.
I did not move. I prayed that they would search in the other direction first, so I could dart across the garden and out the gate, but the soldiers poked the hedges along the garden wall with their bludgeons, and Karoline drew nearer to me. Then she was upon me; her hips blackened out the night.
“Come out!” she instructed. “You are apprehended!”
I did come out. I sprang around her so silently and swiftly she squeaked and fell onto her soft behind. I darted for the gate. But a soldier waited there, and as I passed him, he raised his forearm and caught my throat. I fell to the ground. I choked and gasped and was sure I would never breathe again. A boot pinned my chest to the ground.
I heard her thumps along the ground. Then her white face appeared above me, partially obscured by the planet of her waist.
“A monk!” she cried.
“No, madam,” said the second soldier, whose weary face joined the two others staring down at me. “Just a novice.”
“Wickedness!” she said, and shook her finger as if she would drive the stuff out of my filthy soul. “But you shall not stain this house! Not while I am alive! These eyes are always watching. I saw the guilt in her eyes! Wickedness! Evil! And a monk! You wait until the abbot hears of this!”
“And he will,” said the soldier with his boot grinding into my chest. “First thing in the morning.”
“In the morning!” Karoline said. “Take me to him now!”
“Madam, the abbot is asleep.”
In the moonlight, I saw Karoline regard the soldier with as much scorn as she had just regarded me. “This is not some profanity with a parlor maid,” she said slowly. “He threatens the reputation of a family of first importance to the abbot. This boy threatens an engagement of first importance to this city. Take me to the abbot now.”
The soldier sighed, so softly I was sure only I had heard it. He grabbed my elbow and lifted me as if I were made of straw. “Any trouble and I’ll twist off your arm,” he said, and twisted once to confirm his proficiency in such procedures. He pushed me toward the gate.
“Give me that.” Karoline snatched the letter I still held in my hand. I had not thought to hide it.
She read it.
“I
can make nothing of this foul gibberish,” she said, “but it does seem best we leave this note where you found it. She need not know you were here at all. A little disappointment will do her good.”
Karoline stomped through the low bushes below the window and laid the note back on the sill. I thought to call to my love, to shout that I had indeed come to show my face, and that I would come again, and again, even if it meant my death. I turned and opened my mouth to sing, “Am—”
That soldier clamped a gloved hand over my mouth. “Keep quiet. You’ve disturbed enough sleep for one night.”
He dragged me silently through the streets, while the other soldier rushed to wake the abbot.
XV.
In a windowless cellar of the Abbey of St. Gall, there is a cell where a monk, having enough of the vicissitudes of the world, may withdraw into his own for a time. The door has a gap along the floor so food may be slid inside without disturbing his peace. A hole at one end of the short room drains the occupant’s refuse into the river. This monk may sing or pray or cry out his deepest sorrows without the slightest fear of being heard, for stone walls and several thick oaken doors separate him from the dormitories above.
In our modern age, with scant esteem of silly mystics, this cell is seldom used. A mold grows along the cold, damp floor. I imagine I was its first tenant in a dozen years or more.
The abbot was kind enough to visit me after several days. This visit did not require the interruption of meditation or holy prayers, for I was using the hours of my solitude in other ways. I had curled up into a ball and cried. I had erupted in fits of anger and pounded my hands against the door until I bruised my palms. Using Europe’s largest lungs, I screamed for them to let me out. When, after many hours, my first meal arrived—light and bland, according to the needs of monkish introspection—I dashed it against the walls in fury, and then slept an exhausted and troubled sleep in the remains. I dreamed of Amalia fiercely ringing my mother’s bells.
When the abbot finally came, my strength was much diminished. I am ashamed to say I accepted the cup he held to my lips, and no water had ever tasted so sweet. He propped me against the wall, and a soldier brought a stool so the abbot might sit beside me. He fed me figs that tasted as if they were soaked in blood. I ate them greedily.
The Bells Page 20