The Bells

by Richard Harvell

  I so wish my child’s father were not a sheep, she had said.

  Finally, I told the coachman to take me to Spittelberg. He took me as far as the Burggasse before he said he would not break a wheel on the pitted street. I descended and walked from there.

  In the early morning, the sky was already turning gray. The filthy streets were as silent as I had ever heard them. No ladies beckoned from the windows of the decrepit taverns. In his coffeehouse, Herr Kost slept upon a bench. I did not wake him as I glided up the stairs.

  One resident of Spittelberg was awake: Nicolai sat in his chair at an open window. I sat beside him, and we stared together down the Burggasse toward the city. The street’s few remaining cobblestones poked out of the earth like old, crooked teeth. In the taverns, few lamps still burned, and in those windows grime coated the panes like frost.

  “I like to sit here and breathe the air,” Nicolai said, “before the sun comes up and hurts my eyes. There are just a few more minutes now. Then I will close the curtains for the day.”

  I did not say anything, and so he probed, “Are you out late or up early?”

  “Out late.”

  “Guadagni take you to a party?”

  I nodded. Two dogs moved out of the shadows and poked at the islands of rotting refuse in the street. We sat for several minutes more before I had the courage to speak.

  “Nicolai, do you remember when you told me that love was the meeting of two halves?”

  Nicolai shrugged. The gentle light of the rising sun made his bulbous face seem even softer, like a mold of warm wax. “Did I say that? I suppose I could have. I’ve certainly said even more foolish things in all these years,” he told the open window. “In any case, it would be so easy if it were true. Love like a meeting of lock and key! No, Moses. Any man who says that is a fool. I found my other half decades ago and look how I have hurt him. I should have left him alone.”

  Someone opened a door at one of the taverns and lurched off toward the city. The gray sky now had hints of pink along its surface, like the sheen of oil on a puddle.

  “Nicolai,” I said. “I am in love.”

  When he regarded me, his dulled eyes squinting in an effort to read my face, there was that astonishment I had so feared to see upon his face. From me, he never expected such a confession. But it did not wound me as I had expected, because with the surprise was also the purest joy.

  “In love!” he said.

  And so I told him all: of that high-born girl and her dying mother, of the young woman who stole into the abbey, of our nights in that attic room. I told him how she did not know my face, just my voice, how she called me her Orpheus. I told him also of the fool I had been, how I had missed my chance, how she had married the great Anton Riecher of Vienna. How she would soon have a child. I told him how she thought me dead, but loved me still.

  “But now you have a second chance!” he said, and his hope was so hot it warmed my own. “Orpheus can save his Eurydice!”

  Shamefaced, I told him of my failure at the party, and how I feared that I would never breach that prison of a house again, where she was locked away. How, soon, she would be leaving for the country.

  “Then we cannot delay!” he exclaimed. “We will get into that house if we must knock down its walls!”

  I thanked him for his courage, though I knew only a fool would try what he suggested. But I had one last idea. “She will be at the premiere of the opera in three weeks. If I could conspire some way to get her a message there, I could tell her to slip away. Perhaps we could escape.” My voice shook as I told my friend of my hope. Would he think it foolish?

  “You will steal her at the opera!” he exclaimed and looked so intently into the dawn it was as if he saw a vision of the two of us in the pink swirls of the sky.

  Excitement swelled within me, like a drumroll slowly building. I would be her Orpheus and spirit her away! But I calmed my heart. “Nicolai,” I said. “Caution is of first importance. If Countess Riecher suspects anything, I might never see her again.”

  “Caution?” he said. He considered. “Perhaps we should ask Remus for his advice.”

  I helped Nicolai struggle into Remus’s room. A narrow bed filled up most of the space, piles of books the rest. Nicolai tripped over some of these, half-fell onto the bed, and at the crack of the bed frame, Remus jerked awake just in time to avoid being crushed by Nicolai, who flailed about like a giant fish trying to flip back into its stream. When he had finally righted himself on the bed, he felt for Remus’s shirt. He shook the smaller man. “Remus, wake up! Moses is in love! In love! Wake up!”

  “I am awake,” Remus said, pushing Nicolai’s hands away from his throat. “You’ve seen to that.”

  “Then get up and dance about! It’s true—and she loves him, too! For years they held secret trysts in an attic room and he sang for her until she cried. She is as beautiful as a princess, and best of all she’s here, right here in Vienna! Married to an evil man. We’ve got to save her and reunite them.” Nicolai fairly swooned.

  “He’s … he’s not exactly evil,” I muttered.

  “Oh, and I almost forgot the most romantic part,” Nicolai added. His hands had left the still-startled Remus and were reaching into space, trying to grasp some distant sun. “She doesn’t know his face.”

  “Doesn’t know his face?” Remus asked.

  “She wore a blindfold.”

  “A blindfold? Why?” Remus turned to me, and my neck grew hot.

  “It doesn’t matter why,” Nicolai said. “The important part is that she knows his voice, knows it better than most know their lover’s face. All he needs to do is speak—or sing! Then he’ll have her back and they can flee!”

  Nicolai swung his arm and tried to point toward our distant escape. He knocked over Remus’s unlit lamp. The glass shattered on the floor.

  “Would you be still!” Remus yelled.

  “How can I—”

  “And be quiet! I need to speak to Moses.” Remus regarded me gravely. “Is what he says true?”

  “He’s not an evil man, this Anton,” I said. “The rest is mostly true. She does not love him. That I know.”

  “And you are sure she loves you?” he asked. “Moses, this is a dangerous thing. Will she really betray her husband and his family?”

  They both waited for my answer. A moment was all I needed to review the history of our love in sounds. “I am sure,” I said. Nicolai clapped his hands, and even Remus smiled.

  “Then I will write a note,” he said.

  “A note?” Nicolai asked. “But Remus, your writing is so dull.”

  “That does not bear,” he said. “It is simply done. It will merely relay the facts. Moses is alive. He, too, is at the opera. She should slip away at a certain moment.”

  “When Orpheus looks into Eurydice’s eyes!” whispered Nicolai.

  “Or another moment,” Remus said. “It makes no difference.”

  “It makes no difference,” Nicolai chastised. “Remus, these books you read are wasted on you.” But Nicolai smiled with the jest. Suddenly, though, his face darkened. “But Remus, there is a problem with your plan. Something you have overlooked. How will she get the note?”

  Remus nodded knowingly at me.

  “Moses will lay it in her hands himself.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes,” said Remus. “You are Guadagni’s student, his messenger. You alone can gain entry to any loge at the opera. You could deliver a letter to the empress. You will tell anyone who asks that you carry a letter to the lady from the virtuoso himself. They will think he admired her from the stage.”

  “Remus,” said Nicolai, “this is genius!”

  Remus smiled proudly.

  And so our plan was set. I needed only wait for the premiere.

  XII.

  I first met the goddess of love one afternoon while Tasso and Gluck were trying to teach her to fly. As my teacher and I entered the theater, plump Lucia Clavarau stood in the middle of the sta
ge with miniature wings affixed to her back. “My God,” Guadagni muttered. “Don’t they know a boar with wings is still a boar?”

  “But you’re so small,” she said to Tasso, when he had her strapped into the harness, “you will dro—”

  She let out a shrill soprano scream as Tasso set loose the weight to lift her into the sky. She swung across the stage.

  “Don’t squirm!” Tasso shouted.

  “Let me down!” she yelled.

  Tasso yanked another line and she arced, screaming and thrashing, back across the stage.

  “Let her down,” Gluck said to Tasso. “She looks more like an insect than the god of love. We’ll put her on a pedestal.”

  Orpheus’s bride, Marianna Bianchi, was slight and pale, with a gorgeous voice that quickly brought tears to my eyes. In all my life I’d so rarely heard a woman sing, and I was suddenly sure my mother would have sung like that. During rehearsals each afternoon, I sat with Tasso, or in the wings waiting to receive my teacher. My Italian was good enough now, and Calzabigi’s simple enough, that after the first week of rehearsals I not only understood the story but could sing along with Guadagni under my breath. I noticed both the beauty and the flaws of his voice.

  “Master,” I said very carefully one evening as we returned to his house, “it is such an honor to hear you sing.”

  He bowed perfunctorily from his seat.

  “I wondered if I might, though, ask you one question.”

  He raised his brow.

  “The first two acts are so exquisite, don’t you think that the third act is too … too …”

  “Too what?” he snapped.

  I sought the correct word to describe the phenomenon. “Too … too … loud?”

  “Too loud?” He turned, and the ferocious glint in his eye made me lean back against the door.

  “Not too loud, exactly,” I retreated. “But … but only loud. You have the finest voice I have ever heard, Master, but, well, perhaps if you held back at places, at others your limited volume would be more convincing.”

  “Limited volume?” Guadagni peered at me as if he were witnessing some disgusting maggot crawling out of my nose.

  “Well, very ample. But—”

  He leaned forward. I realized he was shaking from his very core. “How dare you! You!” he shouted. “You know nothing! Nothing!”

  “I am sorry.” I waved my hands, hoping to put off his attack. “I should not have—”

  His anger lifted him off his seat so that he towered above me. “You know less of opera than the idiot princes at these parties. You are some choir singer cut for someone’s perverse enjoyment. Someone’s eunuch pet escaped.” He took several deep breaths. When he spoke, his velvet voice rippled with fury. “Never”—his face came so close to mine I thought he would bite me—“never again tell me what you think.”

  I never did, but later, so many others would. He would return to London, and though at first they greeted him as a victorious son returned, his voice failed to be what they had dreamed it was. He fled to Padua and obscurity, where he died a pauper, his fortune spread among the castrated wretches who surrounded him as his students. His only joy, in his final years, was the routine staging of a solo puppet show of Gluck’s great opera, which would be remembered as his finest achievement.

  You have certainly read much about the premiere of this opera. In mere weeks all of Europe knew of Guadagni and Gluck’s success. However, I must disappoint you: none of it is true. Not only are all accounts mistaken, because on that celebrated night in October 1762 events proceeded contrary to official history, they are doubly mistaken, because that night was not, in fact, the premiere at all. The true premiere took place several days in advance. The empress was not present, nor even the composer. In fact, the venue was a cramped parlor in Spittelberg. The official audience numbered only three: one stunted stagehand who had no Italian and who, until two months before, had thought Orpheus a species of flower; one syphilitic former monk; and a bookish wolf who knew two dozen versions of the Orpheus tale and could recite Ovid’s or Virgil’s in any language one could name.

  I fetched four cups of black magic. I turned Nicolai’s chair toward my makeshift stage at the empty fireplace. I bid Remus close his book. I told Tasso that Orpheus was the greatest musician ever, and that he had lived a long, long time ago, but that tonight I would bring him back to life. I explained that my beloved wife, Eurydice, was dead.

  “Then what’s the point?” Tasso said. “Why don’t you sing of something else instead?”

  Nicolai shook his head. I began.

  It was not the greatest performance of my life. The orchestra and the chorus played only in my head, and so my audience heard long periods of silence. When I began, in fact, I held my fists against my heart and did not move—as I had seen Guadagni do on his stage—for the entire four minutes of the opening coro. My audience heard only my three cries of Euridice! which I sang, as Gluck had instructed Guadagni, “as if someone were sawing through your bones.” Nicolai stiffened with each cry, and Tasso’s eyes widened from their beads.

  It was a warm night, and the windows were open. Occasional infant cries, drunken curses, sweet enticements, and moans of pleasure filtered through the air and reminded me that this was a place where one need not hide his sounds. Mine would simply mingle with all the others. Who would care to listen?

  But I was wrong: As I sang to the giant, the wolf, and the dwarf in that parlor, calling my dead bride, families left their crowded tables and stepped to their windows, trying to identify the mourner. The children in the streets ceased their play. Men put down their ale and looked up at the sky. These cries to my beloved awoke every heart in that quarter.

  I did not realize then I was being heard outside the room. In the theater of my mind, the chorus left the stage, and I, Orpheus, stood there alone. Eurydice had been cruelly taken from me to a wakeless death. I sang out to her. Then, as the orchestra swelled, I felt my sadness turn to an anger purer than any I had ever known. I hated those greedy gods for what they had stolen from me.

  My hands tingled as I sang. When I again opened my eyes, Tasso was cowering in his chair under the power of my voice. My curses rattled the empty cups resting on the table. Downstairs, in the coffeehouse, the men had ceased to debate.

  Finished singing, I gasped for air. Nicolai clapped his round hands together. Remus shook his head in wonder. Tasso looked from one man to the next; he clenched and unclenched his fists.

  “I can’t sing the duets alone,” I said. Tasso’s brow tightened as if he smelled a cheat. “But I’ll tell you what you miss,” I continued. “My sadness is so great that Jove has pitied me. He sends Amor, the goddess of love, to tell me that if I can placate the Furies in the underworld with my song, I may have my Eurydice back.”

  Tasso pressed his palms together and looked at Remus, who was the expert on these things. When Remus nodded confirmation, Tasso grunted.

  “I knew she wasn’t really dead!” he said.

  “She is,” I said. “But I can save her!”

  “All right,” he said. “I am ready.” He clutched both armrests as if he feared that whatever followed would throw him from his chair.

  “But there is a condition,” I said.

  Tasso’s face hardened. “A condition?” he repeated.

  “Yes, Amor says once I have her back, I cannot look at her until we leave the caves beyond the River Styx.”

  “But why?”

  “That is the will of the gods.”

  “But it’s not fair!”

  “The gods are not fair.”

  “But you will get her back, won’t you?”

  “You must listen.”

  “Then begin already!” he barked.

  I sang. In my mind, I descended to the Stygian Caves. Angiolini’s Furies danced about me. I begged them to pity me, but they only swarmed and shouted to frighten me away. But they could not scare me, for their hell was nothing like the lonely hell inside my heart. I s
ang to them: you would not be so cruel if only you knew the depths of my love.

  Nicolai’s face was wet. He wiped the tears with the back of a swollen hand. Outside, the street was quiet, too; a crowd had gathered below our window. Drivers shouted because their carriages could not struggle past, and men elbowed to stand closer to the window. Finally, on the stage, the Furies suspended their dance. The demons backed away, amazed that love like this could exist in hell. They let me pass.

  The gates to the underworld slid open.

  I paused. There was silence in the parlor. Remus swallowed, and Nicolai wiped his brow with his sleeve. Tasso chewed his lip. I did not keep them waiting. I began that aria that had tempted me into Guadagni’s ballroom two months before. I left the dark, fiery caves for the warm and bright Elysian Fields. The sky was clear, and hope filled my heart. In my mind, I heard the soothing notes of Gluck’s oboe.

  My song was a warm blanket to lay over my friends. I wanted to soothe them as the music soothed me. I wanted them to feel the hope that was in my heart. Tasso pursed his lips, and Nicolai closed his eyes as if basking in the warmth of my voice. Remus’s brow was smooth, his eyes so calm. I had never seen him look so handsome.

  Outside the night was silent. This aria would change the street; I would never walk it again without people staring, without whispers: He is the one who sang that autumn night. He made us stop and listen. He made us shiver. He made my mother smile. He made our ailing father leave the bed and listen at the window. He is our Orpheus! How Gluck would have hated me, spoiling his genius on such simple ears.

  And then there she was, in my mind, the shadow of her form. I reached out my arm, but just as she came into the light—before I saw her face—I turned away, for I could not look at her, or she would die again.

  When I finished the aria, Nicolai’s breath was a gentle wave; his eyes remained closed. He could have been asleep. Tasso leaned close. “Is she back?” he whispered. He did not wish to disturb the night.

  “Yes,” I said. I lifted my hand. “I hold her here. She is alive again, but I cannot look at her, or she will die.”