Paddling a tender finger in the hollow of her husband’s cheek, Margalida said, ‘The nuns at Sant Clara will take her with a small one. With very little; almost nothing . . .’
‘Holy Mary!’ cried Taddeo, sitting bolt upright. ‘Even the cats are allowed to litter before they’re spayed!’
‘What a way to talk about a life of prayer, husband!’ said Margalida, genuinely shocked. ‘We could ask her, couldn’t we?’
‘We must speak softly; she will hear us,’ said Taddeo. ‘Won’t it be too much for you, doing her work as well as your own?’
‘I can make sacrifices to see the motherless girl well-placed,’ said Margalida.
Taddeo lay awake for a long time.
In the morning, two conversations took place. Margalida went to visit her mother. After all, she needed to know what an older woman might think of her if she contrived to get her stepdaughter sent to Sant Clara. Margalida’s mother reassured her. ‘They won’t have her as a novice, Margalida. Only as a servant. You have to have some schooling to be a nun. And a servant can always be fetched back again if you need her later. Don’t let Taddeo overdo the dowry at the last minute. Men are so sentimental. A few goats will do.’
While Margalida was gone, Taddeo put the suggestion to Josefa.
‘Is it the only alternative to staying here, Father?’
‘I’m afraid so. But you may choose either possibility, as you like.’
‘Take me to Sant Clara, then,’ she said.
Like the Galilea, the nunnery of Sant Clara was remote. The road to it ascended the face of the mountains, rising from the plain a few miles further north than the road which passed through the gorge to the Galilea. It was steep and rough all the way, and Taddeo and Josefa had to stop several times to let their donkeys rest. At last it arrived at a narrow pass between bare crests, going along a rocky, narrow floor below the facing steeps. Nothing grew so high but little clumps of thorn and a pungent form of creeping thyme that scented the donkeys’ steps. There was no beauty; everything was grey, rough and harsh; the pass looked as though some giant had smashed the face of the land in rage and tumbled the debris around. Josefa showed no emotion but kept her thoughts to herself; they rode in silence all the way.
When the road emerged from the narrow defile at the other end, it was already descending, and it shortly plunged into woods. Sparse woods, at first, of stunted trees, stooping beneath a wind that did not blow that day. But as they moved down the turns of the track, the woods stood upright, prospered and thickened. The sweet balm of the scented pines drifted on the air, and there were woodland flowers growing. On that further side of the mountains the land dropped steeply and abruptly into the sea, and soon the two travellers could see the water below them through the trees. Its blueness was bleached out by its sheen, and it showed like grey silk covered with tiny sequins. Gulls drifted, poised motionless on the ascending air. The road turned suddenly inland and entered a little valley, a thousand feet above the shore, a thousand feet below the crest, and Sant Clara lay in view. They were looking down on it from above and could see it in plan – a courtyard, with a cloister round it, a simple church, opening into the cloister. On one side it had edged to the brink of the drop to the shore; on the other a cluster of farm buildings and a garden stood between the nunnery and a few fields, folded into the shelter of the wooded heights. On this rainy side of the mountain, everything was verdant and dewy. The nunnery was built of gold-coloured stone and roofed in brown-earth tiles. A little cupola above the church was decorated with blue and green tiles and topped with a cross of gold. Nothing had prepared Josefa to expect beauty.
The abbess of Sant Clara, Mother Humberta, had been offered many ill-favoured girls in her time. She was always torn. Torn between rage for her master, the Lord Jesus, who was offered the second best, the leavings of the feast, those whom nobody else had a use for, instead of the fairest and brightest of the flock; and, on the other hand, pity for ugly and rejected poor girls, whose prospects in the harsh world of the island were so unpromising. She was not an islander herself, having come from France with her order, and felt free to disapprove. She looked at Taddeo with cold blue unflinching eyes that comprehended only too well.
‘She asked to come, Mother,’ he said.
The abbess turned her eyes on Josefa. Big face, big hands. Had the look on the girl’s face been docile, the abbess would have accepted her at once as a lay sister – a farm servant was needed. But she was met with an expression of such grief and rage on the child’s face as astonished her. ‘Did you?’ she asked.
‘Yes, Mother.’
‘You wish to be a nun?’
‘The world is hateful to me, Mother.’
‘That’s a possible starting point on the journey, certainly,’ said the abbess, looking balefully at Taddeo, ‘though not the best.’
‘The best is not for me, Mother,’ said Josefa, surprisingly. ‘I will gladly take any way possible.’
‘There’s a humility,’ thought the abbess, looking at her with interest. ‘Can you read and write, child?’ she asked. Taddeo said, ‘No, Mother,’ and Josefa said, ‘Yes, Mother,’ in one breath.
‘My mother taught me,’ said Josefa, looking scornfully at her father.
The abbess got up, slowly – she was an old woman now and walked on two sticks – and moved painfully to a secretaire placed on a side table. She brought a sheet of paper and a pen. ‘Show me,’ she said to Josefa. ‘Sit there and write something.’
While Josefa bent over her task, the abbess said to Taddeo, ‘We require a dowry.’
‘I cannot afford much, Mother,’ said Taddeo. ‘A few goats . . .’
‘How many is a few?’ the abbess enquired.
Taddeo meant to say five, but cringing under the remorseless gaze of the old woman’s cold blue eyes he said, ‘Ten.’
‘We don’t need goats,’ she said. ‘We need donkeys. And a donkey cart; we could do with a donkey cart.’
‘I haven’t any . . .’
‘Then sell those ten goats in the market at Sant Jeronimo, and buy a donkey and a donkey cart. Off you go now; you can leave your daughter here, and return with the dowry later.’
Josefa finished writing and put down her pen. The abbess watched. Taddeo shifted from one foot to another. He said, ‘Goodbye, then, Josefa.’
‘Goodbye Father,’ the girl said. She did not get up from her chair.
‘Show me that,’ said the abbess, pointing at the paper on the table in front of Josefa. The girl brought her the paper. In a large, clear hand she had written, ‘I believe in God the Father almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible; and in Jesus Christ, his only son, Our Lord, born of the Father before all ages; God from God, light from light, true God from true God . . .’
‘Kiss your father, Josefa,’ the abbess said. ‘It is the last time you will kiss a man as long as you live.’
8
In the cathedral precinct at Ciudad three men sat round a table in a room that opened on to a sea of roof tiles and a row of worn gargoyles with eroded grotesque faces. An odour of incense filled the room, which was above a side door into the organ loft of the cathedral nave. On the table were a bowl of figs, a bowl of almonds, a flask of wine and two glasses. One would have thought the three were friends, pleasantly talking. But the third man was Palinor.
‘It makes a great deal of difference,’ Beneditx said to him, ‘whether you call yourself unbeliever or atheist. An unbeliever, one who is simply uncertain whether there be a God or no, is in principle convincible; one more day’s experience, one better argument encountered, may overpower his doubt and bring him down on the side of belief. If my friend were an unbeliever, I would both argue with him and pray for him, and though he were to continue long in his state of doubt, I would remember, in hope, that to doubt something is to admit its possibility.’
‘I am not in principle convincible,’ said Palinor. ‘I do not doubt.’
‘You do not r
ecognize yourself in my definition of an unbeliever? Then let us try the definition of an atheist. There might be two kinds. An atheist might be one who is against God; who knowing his existence has willingly enlisted in the service of the devil and acts to thwart whatever seems to him to be God’s will . . .’
‘That sounds to me more like a form of madness than the position in a disputation of a reasonable man,’ said Palinor.
‘I have known it,’ said Severo. ‘It was long ago, and I was newly in office here. And it did not occur to me at the time that the man was mad, though perhaps it should have. He had murdered a child, and he raged and cursed God, and uttered dreadful blasphemies all the way to the gallows.’
Severo spoke softly, concealing his consternation at Palinor. What had he expected the atheist to be like? Not like this, certainly. Brought to a private chamber to pursue his appeal, finding Severo seated with Beneditx, instead of standing, rigid with apprehension, just inside the door, he had advanced immediately to the table and confidently awaited the invitation to sit down. Severo noticed that there was no third plate on the table with a twinge of inappropriate embarrassment, as though Palinor had been an invited guest.
‘I am not a murderer,’ said Palinor. ‘And I do not see how I could blaspheme, exactly, though I can curse mildly in my native tongue. As for being against God, that would simply be a negative state of belief, I think. Offer me your other kind of atheist.’
Severo, while carefully peeling a fig, was closely observing the man. He addressed himself courteously to Beneditx, but with some just discernible difference of manner he made clear that he knew where worldly authority lay.
‘The other kind of atheist would be one who has convinced himself by false reasoning that there is no God.’
‘That would come nearer,’ said Palinor. ‘What is the difference in the treatment you accord these different kinds?’
Beneditx was appalled. It had not occurred to him that the stranger, offered the familiar distinction between unbeliever and atheist, could possibly answer as atheist. Nobody in Beneditx’s long experience of disputation had ever done so before. He caught Severo’s eye.
‘Tell us about Aclar,’ said Severo, interrupting.
‘Gladly,’ Palinor said. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘How is it governed?’
‘It has a council, chosen by lot from the adult citizenry.’
‘You told the Consistory Court that there were many religions in Aclar, and all were permitted. Does that not lead to faction and disorder? To insubordination among the commonalty?’
‘Occasionally. But I think . . . of course, I have not been at liberty to wander freely in Grandinsula and observe your ways here, but I think religion is much less important among us. We hold it to be a private matter.’
‘So how, in Aclar, is an atheist dealt with?’
‘Not dealt with at all, unless he breaks the law. As far as I know, atheists are no more likely to be thieves or drunkards than believers are.’
‘Surely an atheist, moved neither by hope of heaven nor fear of hell, would feel free to defy laws and run amok?’
‘No doubt for a believer, desire to please God is a strong motive,’ said Palinor. ‘But a rational man may have sufficient reasons in this world to concede the necessity for laws and the benefits of obeying them. I think for most people in Aclar, a desire to stand well in the eyes of the neighbours is reason enough.’
‘So an atheist is allowed to proselytize and overthrow the belief of others?’
‘If he wishes. I don’t think it happens much. In private conversation, perhaps. I am by now more than a little curious to know what happens to atheists of each kind on Grandinsula.’
‘We burn them,’ said Beneditx.
Palinor flinched visibly. ‘I suggest that it would be less trouble to let me leave. Since I came here only by accident.’
‘There is no such thing as an accident,’ said Severo.
‘Are you saying that nothing is ever lost? That jars are never broken without malice? That neither friend nor stranger is ever met by chance upon the road? That I must deliberately have thrown myself into the sea?’
‘You are seeing accident in terms of human purposes,’ said Beneditx. ‘But we mean that there are no accidents in the mind of God. Before all ages and until the end of time he purposes all things. Nothing befalls outside his providence, and all that is, is as he wills it. What seems chance to us serves him. You fell into the sea and are delivered into our charge for a reason, friend. The most likely reason is that we should enlighten your darkness, and convince you that there exists your God and your Redeemer.’
‘I should have swum the other way,’ said Palinor.
High Mass intervened to postpone further conversation. But Severo could only with difficulty bend his thoughts to attend to his duty. Weaving and doubling like a hare pursued by hunters, overleaping obstacles . . . swiftly, from every point to which he directed them, his thoughts returned to Palinor. Many years since, during the reign of Severo’s father, Severo had been sent on a foreign mission. First to Rome, of course, and then to the Low Countries. If, during the yearning plaintive notes of the Kyrie, he kept seeing in his mind’s eye the narrow, bronze-brown hook-nosed visage of the atheist, the dark beard and tender mouth, the fingernails paler than the skin of the broad hands, the calm and alert demeanour of the man, well, it was an ordinary thing to find the concern of the hour before the service lingering and impinging on prayer. But why, when the great choir from the gallery began full-voiced upon the Gloria, should Severo be wandering along a waterside, on a land so lush, so fully watered that the grass seemed burning green, so flat that the magnificent sweep of the sky above seemed curved, like an overturned dish, since it could not otherwise touch the horizons of the vast level land, flat as a marble floor and veined with brimming courses of standing waters? If they flowed, it was not visible to the eyes. Great brown-sailed barges moved solemnly through the fields; and though he had been walking away from the city for several hours, it lay behind him in full view: churches, windmills, walls, the distance visible only in its diminished size, the time needed to retrace his steps inestimable. It should have been dark, he remembered, but the light lingered, and lingered in a prolonged soft and declining radiance; the sun set behind him, and yet the darkness did not come. When he re-entered the city, there were children playing along the street, along the banks of the canal, under the dusky trees, below the windows just now being lit by indoor candles, and there was light enough to follow the trajectory of their soaring ball.
Uninvited, his mind returned to him the feeling he had then experienced. Not pleasure – something far sharper and more challenging – joy, rather. And not in the least any wish that anything about this remote and astonishing land might be shared by his own island, for it was the difference in and for itself that so struck him. How the loss of familiarity in everything had woken him up and sharpened his senses! It had been like taking off one’s outer garments in a cold wind and being immersed in the sting of chill air over the entire surface of one’s skin. How intensely he had lived his few weeks in the northern summer! How vividly, how acutely sensible had the qualities of the island appeared to him, seen in contrast for the first few weeks after his return! Dulled again only too soon – the world not known because too well known. But while it had lasted how vivid had been his joy in strangeness!
He had been shown a curious thing, while he stayed in Utrecht. They were hanging a new peal of bells in the Ouderkerk; the old ones, dismounted, were slung from beams in the bell-tower, waiting for the rigging of ropes and pulleys to lower them safely to the square. The clerk of the works took him to the top of the tower to see the new peal, and showed him how if you struck the new tenor bell smartly with a piece of wood and then quenched the chime at once with the damper, you heard the old one, unmoving, still as death, giving voice, very faintly, a just discernible deep resonance on the quiet air. ‘Touch it,’ the clerk had said. Severo had
reached out and touched the dull bronze of the dusty bell and felt it tingle at his fingertips.
By the time the service moved to its magnificent climax, while the choir sang the Sanctus, Severo had realized the meaning of his rebellious and drifting thoughts. Talking to the atheist had offered to his intellect, what the Low Country had offered to his senses – the exhilaration of strangeness. He was hungry for more; he wanted to walk in that chill and unsheltered country. Something in his soul was ringing with an answering resonance to a note struck by Palinor. He was tingling with gladness at what should have appalled him – that such a thing as an atheist could exist. He knew no name for such a feeling. He would not have called it love.
‘Well?’ Severo asked Beneditx. ‘What do you think? He is a conundrum, isn’t he? Counsel me.’
‘A difficulty, certainly. What puzzles you about him?’
‘Now you have seen him, do you still say he cannot be in good faith?’
‘I did not need to see him to know that. However plausible he is, the truth is that he was born like everyone else with knowledge of God. One has to ask what he has done with it.’
‘It does not come with baptism?’
‘No. Baptism confers grace, and dispels sin. We are talking now of neither grace nor sin, but knowledge.’
‘But, Beneditx, on the face of it, the intellect depends on the senses for the origin of knowledge, and knowledge gathered from sensible things cannot lead the human intellect to the point of seeing the divine substance . . . A babe hasn’t the means . . .’
‘You speak of evening knowledge – knowledge of things as they are and have been in the visible world. I speak of morning knowledge – knowledge of things as they were created, things as they are meant to be. The knowledge of angels is of both these kinds at once, but in mankind there is a difference. Inborn knowledge of God is morning knowledge.’
‘So you would say that even that poor creature locked up in the yard there, knows of God?’
Knowledge of Angels Page 7