Once I chased after a scullery maid, sneaking out on her own mission of love, but I quickly heard in the evenness of her step that it was not my Amalia. At one o’clock the rain intensified, and even though I huddled in shadows that offered some shelter, my habit soon smelled like a flock of Nebelmatt sheep.
In my memory, she enters like the ringing of a bell; all the tones of her body fill the night with sudden warmth. My teeth cease to chatter. My toes stop aching with cold. But my memory must lie, for I know sound better than that. It must have been only a hint: the scuffing of her lame leg, the turn of the key in that garden gate, perhaps the whisper of my name hushed into the night.
I did not run to her, or call to her. I was terrified. But of what? This should be the second-act finale: The lovers have escaped their respective prisons, the love nest awaits. They may embrace until the pink fingers of morning crawl across the sky! This is no time for terror!
Do not believe what you learn in opera. Love is not the mere opening of two souls’ doors. Nor is it a palliative to the troubled heart; it is a stimulant. Under its influence, that heart grows until each tiny imperfection glows with painful evidence. And the castrato’s imperfection is not tiny. I knew enough from my nocturnal wanderings to understand I was engaged in the greatest of deceits. In this unhappy world, where we are all incomplete, I had lost the gift that could make us whole again.
And suddenly, there was my other half, beautiful and limping through the rain.
Some honorable part of my soul—a part I have since tried to starve of food and light—did speak then, as I hid from her in my shadow. It told me to go back to my abbey room and seek there whatever comfort I wished in life. This part quoted the abbot’s words to me again. You are an accident of nature, a product of sin rather than of grace. Do not burden others with your tragedy, this voice inside me said. Leave her in this rain. Do not share your misfortune—you shall never gain it back again.
But another part—the ardent part who loved and yearned—said: Her! Her! Her! He forgot the rain, the cold. With her this close, the world was so warm.
And so, like a thief, as she called my name and sought me with her eyes, I hid from her ears. My feet made no sound as they slid across the wet cobblestones. I did not call to her. Then I took from within my habit—where I had hidden it from the rain, against my chest—the flag of my deceit.
It was a strip of soft red silk, stolen from the abbot’s private store, where one day it was to have been part of the rarest vestments. I held it in both hands as I crept behind her—matching her steps with my longer strides—until I was so close I heard the drops of rain patter on her shoulder. Any man spotting us from his window would have assumed I was about to strangle her.
I raised the silk high and then drew it tight, just as it reached her eyes.
She screamed, of course. Yet I was afraid she would tear away the blindfold and see my face, and read in my soft features all my shame. So I tightened the silk yet more, and pulled her toward me, hoping the touch of my body—which was wet and cold, and stank of sheep—would calm her.
It did not. She screamed again.
“Amalia,” I said. “It is Moses. Do not be afraid.” This was, at least, a better strategy. She did not scream, but still her hands struggled at the silk, which must have pressed painfully into her eyes.
“It is Moses,” I said again.
She ceased to pull intently at the blindfold, and I relaxed my hold.
“Moses?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “It is I.”
“What are you doing?”
I chose silence. A light flickered on in the house nearest us, its inhabitants woken by her scream.
“Moses, please let me go.”
“You cannot take off the blindfold,” I blurted.
“Why?”
“You cannot see me.” The light grew brighter and then shrank to the point of a single candle at one of the windows.
“Why can’t I see you?”
“Quickly,” I said. “Someone is there.” A window began to creak open. I tied the blindfold behind her head. To my relief, she did not pull it off. I took her hand and led her up the street. She walked with her other hand out to ward off obstacles. We turned toward the narrower lanes of Ulrich’s quarter.
“Moses,” she said. “This is silly.”
Silly it was not, but how could I convince her?
She squeezed my hand, just like that little girl had squeezed my hand years before as she led me through an unfamiliar world. “There has to be a reason.”
Why did she need a reason? I would have let her blindfold me forever without a word. I could not say: If you see my face, you will see in my features that I am not the perfect other half of you that God meant for me to be. You will see I am broken, and you will not love me. I could not say: That man you see now, in your mind, that perfect man—he is the real me.
And so I said, “If you see me, I will disappear.” It was not a lie.
“But that is impossible,” she said.
“Please, Amalia. Believe me.”
She placed her hand on my shoulder, and I felt in the touch a probing, as if she were trying to see with her hands, to know me by the rise and fall of the bones of my shoulder. I squirmed under her touch.
“Are we going to walk through the rain all night?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “We are going somewhere.”
“Then I can take my blindfold off?”
“No.”
“When can I take it off?” Her hand moved along my shoulder.
“You cannot take it off.”
“Not ever?”
“Not when you are with me.”
“Or you will disappear?” Her fingers probed along the muscles to my neck.
“Yes.”
“But I thought you were Orpheus.”
“What?”
“You have got the story wrong, Moses.”
“What story?”
“Orpheus and Eurydice.”
“Who are they?”
“Do you learn nothing in that abbey? Orpheus was the son of a king and of the muse Calliope,” she recited as if reading from a book. Her hand explored the knobs of my spine. “A man like no other: beautiful and strong. But more, he was the greatest musician who ever lived. Eurydice was his wife,” she said. She stopped us. She turned me toward her so she could explore my neck with both her hands. “Eurydice dies, yet Orpheus tames the Furies in the underworld with his song and gets her back, but on one condition: He cannot look at her until they leave the underworld. If he does, she dies again, and he loses her forever. Is that how it is?”
“Yes,” I said, the words A man like no other, echoing in my head. My deceit was complete.
“Then you need the blindfold, Orpheus.”
“You don’t want me to look at you?” I asked, sensing a compromise.
“Of course I do. I want you to look at me,” she said. She tilted her head upward, a hint of a smile playing on her lips. “Fine,” she continued. She held my head firmly in both hands. “I will wear the blindfold. But you have to let me touch you. Stop squirming.”
Her hands began to explore where my shame was hiding: in the slight roundness of my cheeks, in my delicate nose, in my narrow brow, in my skin as soft and hairless as a baby’s. Her hands touched all of these, and then touched them again as rain made my face and her hands cold and wet. Her left hand found my throat—where my Adam’s apple should have been—and rested there.
“What are you afraid of?” she asked.
“Afraid?”
“Your heart beats as if you were afraid of me.”
I listened to my heart and tried to slow it. But it would not obey me now. I gently pushed her probing hands away and nudged her forward into the night.
Soon I heard the three-spouted fountain and was relieved that we were going in the right direction. When I stopped her in front of Ulrich’s door, she turned her head as if trying to see through the blindfold.
I unlocked the door and led Amalia into Ulrich’s room. He sat at his table, with his head bowed as usual, but when we entered, his head shot up in surprise. I was worried she would hear him, but he made no more sound than the smoke swirling about the stove door.
“Come with me,” I said, as Ulrich’s empty eyes followed us across the room.
Climbing to the attic in the darkness, I was as blind as she. My right hand held her right hand, my left supported the small of her back so she would not fall. The steep stairs were awkward for her lame knee, which did not bend.
On the landing, I groped for the door—found it on my third lunge—and opened it. Warm air dried our cold faces. The glow from the stove was enough for me to see the black of the big table, the white of the bed, and the dark rectangles of the woman’s portraits on the wall.
“Moses?”
My hand on the small of her back, I pressed Amalia into the room and closed the door behind us.
Behind that door, at first, is merely silence. We face the stove, drips fall off my sopping sleeves and make puddles on the floor. I turn and look at her; the red silk blindfold, stained crimson by the rain, dangles down her back and mingles with her hair. She seems mesmerized by the heat, as if the hot coals draw her toward it.
Does she hear her aunt Karoline’s prophecies of dishonor cawing in her head? Who is this man? she must wonder. Who hides behind this blindfold? Is this the answer to my loneliness? What happened to that girl who sat for so many patient hours beside her mother’s bed? Am I trying to revive that girl tonight? Or am I about to lose her?
And in my head: My body is misery. It cannot love and it cannot be loved. How dare I lie to her? How dare I bring her to this awful house? I should pull that blindfold from her eyes—before she truly falls in love. I almost do this.
I hear the creak of the floorboards when she shifts her weight, the regular hush of the rain on the roof above our heads. In one corner, water seeps through a hole in the roof and drips into a puddle on the floor. And I do not remove her blindfold.
What saves me from exposing myself to her—saves me from her pity—is a drop of rainwater. It collects on the wet wisps of hair by her ear and slides down her cheek, along her jaw. It must tickle, because she raises a finger, and I hear that finger wipe her smooth, wet skin, so the raindrop balances on her knuckle. And then, like a sound from heaven, she kisses that raindrop.
Her lips envelop her finger. I move closer. Her breath, still deep from the climb up the stairs, hurts me, it is so lovely. I reach out my hand and stroke her chin, where moments before her finger rescued that raindrop, and I hear her skin like a warm wind passing through grasses. I realize it is the sound of my skin, too, brushing against hers.
Her breath hardens into a sigh.
Her cold fingers find the damp skin of my neck. I shudder as they creep into my hair. She tugs so hard it hurts, and her mouth tenses as if she feels the pain, too. But then her lips relax and she is pulling my face toward hers. It is an unlearned, frantic kiss, which mingles our sounds. I feel the vibration of her moan in the tip of my tongue.
She claws at my hood as if to tear it off. I lift it over my head and drop it. Then she pulls at my tunic. As I help her lift her dress, I place my head to her chest. Thump-thump, thump-thump. Her hands are shaking as she loosens her corset and kicks out of those last scraps of fine white fabric. Then she wears nothing but the red blindfold. Her pale, damp skin shivers, but I look a moment more before I embrace her.
I press my head to her chest to come as close as I can to that heart, and then I hear her breath in her lungs. It moans like a wind through a giant, damp cavern, and on every inhalation it climbs higher toward a sigh.
The first chilly touch of the abbey’s fine bed linen makes us draw in our breaths, but then it is so warm, and we are floating in it, fumbling for each other. She paws at my chest as if she has never known how large a body is. She reaches for the last bit of clothing I wear—a cloth wrapped tightly around my middle, like a bandage—but I draw her hand away, for there I will not let her touch.
She gasps when my hand strays below her navel. When I kiss her shoulder she exhales. The sounds she makes seem to come from inside my head. She gasps again. My hands graze across her breasts, feel the soft curve of her belly. They squeeze the protruding bones of her hip. Her breath is like weeping as my finger traces the scar that runs from the middle of her calf upward over her knee to the soft inside of her thigh. Her hands pull at mine, but I do not need the guide because her breath, her gasps and moans, guide me. She plays me with her sounds, and I play her with my touch. And as she begins to shudder under my hands, I press my ear to her hot moan so no drop of her sound escapes me.
XII.
One 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?”
The Bells Page 19
