The Bells Read online

  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?

  The third movement of that Dixit Dominus is two minutes of the most beautiful counterpoint Vivaldi ever wrote for two sopranos. It was perfectly suited to Feder’s and my voices, which were not yet brilliant and full, but light and quick. I loved to watch the audience’s reaction as Feder began, Virgam virtutis tuae, and then, seconds later, I repeated the phrase. It took only this moment to lift the audience out of their torpor.

  We sang another phrase in unison before Vivaldi split us apart. Then we were like two dancing sparrows: We climbed in unison. We broke apart, but a moment later the unity was resolved, and we climbed together again. Feder’s voice was so nimble it sometimes seemed it might speed away from me. But for a moment we were brothers, and I almost wished I could reach out and embrace him as we sang.

  The people in the chapel sat forward and lifted slightly from their seats; the pews creaked beneath them. Duft merely stretched one foot to flick a spot of dirt off the other and yawned, as if he did not hear the music. But Amalia was listening. She stared at me—and in her belly there was a tiny ringing.

  The movement finished, and for the first time since we entered the chapel, there was total silence. No shuffling or coughs. No whispers or scolding. Several people wheezed slightly as they exhaled, their jaws hanging limp.

  The music continued. The next two movements featured more warring between tenors, bass, violins, and harpsichord, all parties renewed in their inspiration. Then the cornet and organ chorus, limply rewritten for our harpsichord and violins. The short eighth movement began with the kind of plodding violins that Vivaldi used so well to prepare the ear. It calmed the audience, and gave our two gray violins a chance to settle in. Then my soprano solo began, De Torrente.

  I was a tiny boy, barely half as tall as the man I am now. The choir stood obediently behind me. I was not loud, but my voice filled each corner of that room. My chin quavered as I stretched each syllable to runs of twenty notes or more. To the audience it appeared effortless—my eyes never tensed, my shoulders didn’t rise—but for me, it took the deepest concentration. My slight arms pointed down and slightly forward, and I felt my song in each outstretched finger. My lungs strained, and though my voice was only a tenth as full as it would one day grow to be, it was clear as the mountain air around my mother’s church. In the Duft chapel, eyes turned wet. Amalia, in the first row, had creases in her brow; her white fingers clasped the wooden pew. My song ruled her every fiber.

  When I finished, there was a silence. Feder was a stiff statue beside me. Ulrich gaped. He saw me, once again, for the first time. Duft still studied his shoe.

  Amalia sat still, pensive and enthralled, as if her snake had sprouted splendid wings and taken flight before her very eyes.

  XII.

  Afterward, we sat in a tight parlor and feasted. Food and drink were our only payment for singing (Abbot Coelestin of course receiving his by his own arrangements). It seemed everyone had forgotten me, except for Ulrich, whom I caught from time to time staring at my face, willing in vain for its image to summon a memory of my voice. I held a lamb shank in one hand, a chicken wing in the other, and tore at the flesh as if I intended to grow to full size that very night.

  “Psst!” I heard a whisper. No one else seemed to hear the voice. I turned toward the door. An eye peeked through. No one had ever wanted to speak to me before, except for Ulrich and Nicolai, so I ignored the voice and turned back to my feast.

  “Psst! Monk!” I turned again, and this time I saw Amalia Duft’s head poking through the door. “Come!”

  I obeyed, but cautiously, well aware by now that behind friendly overtures often lurked cruel tricks. When I reached the door, Amalia tugged me through and shut it behind us. She was wearing a white dressing gown and gazed crossly at my face.

  “You’re d
isgusting,” she said.

  I thought, Why do people seek me out only to insult me?

  But then it occurred to me that the bottom half of my face was, indeed, tingling with lamb juice and chicken fat. I cleaned it with my choir robe. Amalia groaned and grabbed my wrist. She pulled me down the hall. In a washroom she wiped my face and hands with a soft towel and threw it on the floor.

  “Quickly,” she said, pulling my sleeve. “I’m supposed to be in bed.”

  The clangs and drips and chatter of Haus Duft rose and fell as she led me down halls I could never have navigated on my own. We walked at a near run, as she swayed from side to side with her limp. She looked back at me.

  “Lots of people fall off roofs,” she said. “Matthias von Grubber fell off the same roof as I, but he landed in a pile of manure. I landed on a plough. Karoline says God did it to slow me down, but it does not slow me down, and anyway there is no God.”

  This last comment made me recoil in shock, but she just tugged me harder. When I still said nothing, she shook her head. “Why don’t you talk?”

  Because I don’t know what to say, I would have said, if I had had the courage.

  She just shrugged and continued speaking. “That’s fine with me. I hate listening to people. Marie won’t shut up. I tried to plug my ears with wax, but she just shouted to be heard. You, of course, you can’t keep quiet, but you don’t have to talk.”

  No one had ever spoken so many words to me, apart from Nicolai and Ulrich. It all seemed quite suspicious. I would never find my way back if she abandoned me or, worse, led me to a pack of her spiteful friends. We had not passed a window for a while, and the sounds from the walls grew fainter and fainter. I judged that we had entered an uninhabited wing of Haus Duft.