The Bells

by Richard Harvell

  I remained alone with Abbot Coelestin Gugger von Staudach. He stared at the candle on the table, its flame glowing perfectly like the world he always longed to realize in this abbey. After several minutes, he looked up at me. His eyes had lost their coldness, their hatred.

  “Come here, my son,” he said. He nodded kindly, as if to say, It is all over now.

  I hesitated only for a moment. Though I found him repulsive, I had no one else in the world now. I walked around his desk and stood beside him in the light of his candle. I bowed my head. His eyes moved across my face, down along my tall, thin form.

  “You wish to go with them, do you not?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  His eyes looked deeply into mine. “Moses, do you know what you are?”

  I did not answer.

  He regarded me carefully in the candle’s flicker, his gaze sliding across each feature of my face, then he nodded gravely, as if he were the bearer of terrible news. His voice was calm and measured once again. “My son, you are a eunuch. You are not a man. Nor are you a woman. You are a creature that God never intended to create, and so you are destined to remain outside God’s design. His law says you cannot marry; nor may you become a priest. This is not cruelty. I expect if you are sincere, you see why it must be so. Moses, your body will not let you be a father. You are weak—a woman’s muscles on a man’s heavy frame. You cannot work the fields. And your mind is also weak. You will never know manly reason. Did your friends tell you this, Moses?”

  I shook my head. Though I had never heard those things said before, I had always feared them.

  “They want to help you, but they cannot. They have no roof to sleep under.” He waved his hand dismissively. “No abbey will shelter them, for they are sodomites. Any abbot will easily read sin in their faces, as I have, and will turn them away. You could follow them, and you would starve together. Only they are men, Moses, and you are not. People will laugh at you outside these walls. Here we have been deceived by the slow progression of your condition. Only now do I see it clearly in your form. You are an accident of nature, a product of sin rather than of grace.”

  The abbot looked past me, searching for a solution to my existence in the dark corners of his office. He shook his head. “This is so unfortunate, Moses,” he said. “So unfortunate. This world was simply not made for those like you.”

  I felt a great weakness extending from my center, a vibration that threatened to bring me to my knees. Everything he said was true. How could I deny it? In the abbot’s worried face, for the first time, I saw that perhaps he was not so cold and heartless. He was merely a man who worked so hard to put the chaotic world into order. One hundred thousand people depended on his guidance, and now, here he was, hours before dawn, caring for one single soul alone.

  His eyes appraised me carefully. “Moses, I cannot keep you here against your will. I will not. The abbey is not a prison. What I said before—that they could not take you with them—I said that for their good and for yours. But now that we are alone, you must make your choice. Go, if you wish; you may still find them. Go and tell them that they must care for you, that they must take you with them. They will not deny you. They will find a way to feed you, they will find a way to care for you, even if it means they will suffer for it.”

  The abbot was silent. He watched me carefully.

  Go? I wanted nothing more. With my friends departed, I already felt the lonely emptiness of the abbey creeping into every room. And out there, two friends who loved me.

  Still, the abbot did not speak. His measured breath flowed in, out, in, out.

  “I will allow you to stay here, Moses,” he finally said. “Those in this abbey have done you a great wrong, and so I shall do what I can to correct it. If you choose it, I will grant you what I denied you years ago: the chance to become a novice and, one day perhaps, a monk. You shall keep your cell. We shall continue to provide for you. I will see that you damage no one with your weakness. No one must know of your imperfection. I alone will know. Moses, I hope you see there is nothing more that I or anyone can offer you.”

  I pictured Nicolai and Remus, not as I had met them—on the finest stallions, Nicolai with enough abbey coins in his pockets to toss at beggars on the road—but as they were now: stealing through the city, on foot, pockets empty, Remus without a single book to read. How long would Nicolai’s strident certainty endure? One day? One week? He had never walked a mile in his life. Would they be the beggars now? Surely they had enough burdens without another, without, as the abbot said, an accident of nature to carry with them. Nicolai had done so much for me already: for me he had been exiled from his home.

  “Moses,” the abbot said. “You must choose.”

  My nod was slight, but sufficient.

  “Good. But you must promise me something, too, Moses.”

  I looked into his narrow, shining eyes.

  “You must promise never to sing again.”

  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 clattere
d 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.