Mariette in Ecstasy

by Ron Hansen

  And Mariette shuts her eyes as she hears the chorus, “Qui fecit coelum et terram.”

  Mass of Saint Ischyrion, Martyr.

  Fourth Sunday of Advent.

  Exhausted, Mother Céline pushes away a dish of half-eaten food on her tray and tilts back against four pillows on her palliasse as she faintly smiles at Mariette. She says, “I have a memory of you when you were five and I was just making my profession. You and Papa visited me here and he was called away, I think, and you and I tried to pass the hour in a children’s game you made up. You told me I was a princess and had been put inside a jail that was just four walls and a locked door. And I was to try and get out. ‘I’ll scream for help,’ I said, ‘and a handsome prince will save me.’ And you said, ‘There’s no one around to hear you.’ ‘Well then,’ I said, ‘I’ll kick at the door until it breaks.’ But you said, ‘The door’s made of iron and you can pound and pound but it won’t be hurt.’ ‘I’ll look on the floor and find a key,’ I said, and you said I could indeed do that, but the key wouldn’t fit the lock. And I said, ‘You’re making this so difficult, Mariette.’ You asked if I really and truly wanted to get out, and I told you that I did. And then you said, ‘The jail has no ceiling. And you have wings. And you fly.’”

  Christmas Eve.

  Stillness. And then first rising.

  Mariette is naked. Moonlight glints along a short passage of tangled wire that is as intricate as a signature, that is taut enough to ingrain itself in the skin underneath her breasts. One upper thigh is blackly streaked with blood that is seeping from the rabbit wire that is tied just below her sex.

  She sits on the palliasse and loosens the persecutions. She uses a handkerchief to paint away the blood and the pink tracks along her skin. She stows the wires beneath her straw palliasse and gets into her habit.

  She goes out in the hallway as Sisters Marthe and Saint-Estèphe are heading toward the washroom. She puzzles over something she sees and hurries her steps.

  Sister Pauline holds her hands to her face, and farther down the hallway, Sisters Honoré and Saint-Stanislas are standing at the infirmary door, dully staring inside the room as Père Marriott sidesteps by them in a cassock and purple stole.

  Mariette hesitates.

  The sisters part so she can pass into the room, but Mariette halts and turns and scurries back to her cell.

  Sister Agnès, Sister Anne, and Sister Emmanuelle silently work on Mother Céline. Hands pursue other hands in slipping the nightgown up over her yawing head, sleeking her skin and hair with vinegar and perfume of bergamot, dressing her in a clean gray habit and black veil and winter cape. She is raised up and carried aside one step and nestled into the pinewood coffin. Sister Agnès pretties some skewed pleats and folds and then the sisters bow deeply and walk out with their hands in prayer at their chins.

  Late morning.

  Six tall candles flank the pinewood coffin as the former prioress lies feet-first before the high altar and just inside the oratory. Hothouse flowers from Ithaca have been tucked inside her folded arms.

  Sisters Catherine and Zélie are hurriedly cloaking the church in black cretonne.

  Six village women are slumped here and there in pews, whispering their rosaries for the Annette Baptiste they knew and the prioress they saw on great feasts.

  Workmen have chopped a hole in the hard earth with picks and spades and now stand in the church’s apse with their hats in their hands.

  Dr. Baptiste goes up to the oaken grille and hangs on it with all his fingers for a half hour or more.

  * * *

  IT HAS PLEASED GOD TO CALL TO HIMSELF OUR DEAR

  REVEREND MOTHER CÉLINE

  WHO DIED IN THE SERVICE OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY

  ON DECEMBER 24, 1906,

  IN THE PRIORY OF OUR LADY OF SORROWS

  IN THE 37TH YEAR OF HER AGE

  AND THE 15TH OF HER RELIGIOUS PROFESSION.

  * * *

  At the hour of Christ’s death on the cross, the oak doors of the oratory are opened and the great bell tolls as the Sisters of the Crucifixion proceed inside, their faces hidden behind sheer black veils.

  Wearing a hooded black cope over his vestments, Père Marriott haltingly walks from the sacristy with a book in his hands, genuflects to Christ in the tabernacle, and blesses the whole priory of sisters behind the grille. He then reads: “‘Come to our sister’s assistance, you saints of God. Come forth to meet her, you angels of the Lord; receive her soul and offer it in the sight of the most High.’”

  Mother Saint-Raphaël stands at the head of the coffin and settles her hands upon it. “May Christ who has called you, Sister Céline, now receive His handmaid, and may all the angels lead you to Abraham’s bosom.”

  The Sisters of the Crucifixion respond, “Receive her soul and offer it in the sight of the Most High.”

  Mother Saint-Raphaël retreats from the coffin as the six externs approach it in half-steps. “Eternal rest grant to our sister, O Lord.”

  “And let perpetual light shine upon her.”

  After the Requiem Mass and just before sundown, the former prioress is taken past the old printery and the green ice of the marsh to the Order’s cemetery. Hard sleet hisses against the trees. The eastern skies are as black as charred wood.

  Dr. Baptiste and a handful of villagers trudge up a hillside behind the sisters and kneel with them as Père Marriott completes the interment prayers and blesses the pinewood coffin with holy water. Half the priory is openly weeping and half are staring wonderingly at Mariette as she kneels and prays as if in a trance.

  Mother Saint-Raphaël hands Sister Aimée the book of rituals and the infirmarian tonelessly reads, “‘Grant, O Lord, we beseech You, that while we lament the departure from this life of our sister, we may recall that we shall all follow her one day. Give us grace to prepare for that final hour with a devout and holy life, and teach us to watch and pray that when Your summons comes we may go forth to meet our bridegroom and enter with Him into life everlasting.”

  And then, as four workmen spade hardened earth onto the box, Mother Saint-Raphaël heads a solemn procession back to the oratory for Vespers and the chant of the psalms.

  And there is Christmas Mass at midnight. And going to the haustus room for ginger cookies and sham champagne, and giving Sister Philomène an English lip salve Mariette has made from sweet oil and the attar of roses. And Mother Saint-Raphaël gives Mariette a sympathy card with an inscription from the Beatitudes: “Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.” And then all go to their cells.

  Henri Marriott seeks a kind of sustenance in prayer and kneels for an hour on the hard cold penance of the sacristy floor. And when he gets up, he peers through the grille and sees Mariette in the night of the oratory, intently staring at the crucifix above the high altar, her hands spread wide as if she were nailed just as Christ was. He puts on his biretta and overcoat and half genuflects with difficulty and goes back to the priest’s house.

  Blood scribbles down her wrists and ankles and scrawls like red handwriting on the floor.

  Part 3

  Moonlessness. Starlessness.

  Matins and Lauds of Our Lady’s Office. And then silence.

  Harried snow. Creaking trees.

  Chill winds flute through the chimney flues. Kitchen smoke flails in the air.

  Empty fields shine like white satin sheets.

  Hard gusts zing against an iron shovel.

  The blood-red leaf of a poison sumac is freed and scutters up against the shiplap on the old printery.

  Second rising.

  Windowpanes yelp with hard polish and four or five sisters peer outside.

  Sister Pauline hovers over a flittering matchstick as she hustles down the darkened hallway, feeding the blue and yellow flame to the hallway’s high, jarred candles.

  Sisters Ange and Sabine and Saint-Stanislas huddle between horses in the stall, heating their hands on the horse flanks.

  Sister Geneviève pours
hot water into a great tin washing bowl and Sister Monique holds her face inside a pale blossom of steam.

  Henri Marriott is hunched at the kitchen table in the priest’s house, in round spectacles that shine like half-dollars, hunting letters on his great black typewriter’s keyboard. Each word clacks as loudly as handled dishware but underneath he hears the house door creak wide. “Hello?” he calls, and with difficulty turns around in his chair.

  Mariette is there, just inside the door, holding a hand in a hand like a pink teacup and saucer. She falteringly walks toward him and he sees she has no sandals on.

  Each foot is torn with injury. Each leaves a red print of blood on the floor.

  —I have no memories of that.

  —Were you in ecstasy?

  —Is it for me to say?

  —Please tell us what you remember.

  —Midnight Mass. And praying, in the oratory.

  —And after that?

  —Just being in the infirmary.

  —While you were being examined.

  —Yes; then.

  —When you came to me, have you heard what you said?

  She holds out her blood-painted hands like a present and she smiles crazily as she says, “Oh, look at what Jesus has done to me!”

  Reverend Mother Saint-Raphaël hammers her walking cane on the floor planks as she hurries down the hallway ahead of Père Marriott who is still in his soot-black wool coat and biretta, an extreme unction kit in his hand.

  Four novices and three sisters are jammed at the infirmary door, whispering hearsay as they peek inside. Sister Hermance turns and hints with a cough and the sisters at the doorway shamefully part for the new prioress. She worriedly pauses until their priest has caught up and then she precedes him inside the room, patting her fingertips onto the holy water sponge and making the sign of the cross.

  Sister Saint-Denis is high up on a sill, hanging gray privacy blankets over the tall and brilliant windows. With Mariette is Sister Aimée. She has taken off the postulant’s black headscarf and habit and underthings and is folding them carefully inside white butcher’s paper and tying it up with yarn.

  The postulant herself is in a white bathrobe and sitting up against four pillows because she gasps for breath if she is flat on her back. Eyes shining with tenderness, hoarsely and hushfully speaking half-sentences, Mariette stares up into nothingness like a teenaged girl newly intrigued with herself, or as if she has finally heard her heart and is being haunted by it. Windings of torn cloth hide palms that are weakly turned up in her lap, a gray blanket tents her feet, and a hand towel is twisted over her brow. Sister Saint-Denis has undone Mariette’s dark brown hair so that it is troublingly disordered against the white pillowcase, but her skin is as radiant and pink with health as if she’d just strolled in from a skate.

  Mother Saint-Raphaël asks, “Is she in pain?”

  “Especially in her hands,” Sister Aimée says. “The holes are hideous.”

  “And her side, too?”

  “Everything,” Sister Aimée says.

  “Is it possible she’s done this to herself?”

  Sister Aimée simply folds a hand towel beside a pillow and pretends she hasn’t heard.

  Speaking as she would to a child, the prioress harshly asks the postulant, “Listen to me, Mariette. Is this a true experience? Have you helped it in any way?”

  Mariette says nothing.

  “She’s in a trance,” Sister Aimée says.

  Père Marriott takes a six-foot purple stole from his extreme unction kit and kisses it while softly reciting the Latin prayer that one day God will be pleased to clothe him in the blessed immortality forfeited by humanity’s first parents. Yoking his neck with the stole, he turns and hesitates with embarrassment before saying to the prioress, “We will have to look at her wounds.”

  Mother Saint-Raphaël swings toward Sister Saint-Denis as she is getting down from the sill, and she urges her to please bring the stool over for their priest and then go. Sister Saint-Denis humbly obeys but beams at Mariette from the hallway as she shuts the door.

  Hunching down on the stool next to the postulant, Père Marriott tilts his ear to hear her whispering sentences he cannot understand. And then he dourly nods to Sister Aimée, who unties the white bathrobe and undoors the left half and turns up a hand towel that is just below Mariette’s full left breast.

  She is bleeding enough that Sister Aimée has to touch the wound again with the hand towel for the priest to see a hand-width laceration between the fifth and sixth ribs.

  “Is it deep?” the priest asks.

  “Christ’s was deeper,” Sister Aimée says.

  “We shall not draw comparisons, please,” Mother Saint-Raphaël corrects. She is standing behind them, her hands in her sleeves, and honoring their rule for custody of the eyes by holding her stare on the floor.

  Père Marriott asks, “Sister Aimée. Would you be kind enough to describe the injuries?”

  She states, “We see she has a jagged wound just above the fifth costal cartilage. I haven’t measured it but I’d estimate it to be four inches long and a quarter-inch deep, just past the subcutaneous tissue, but she imagines she feels it interfering whenever she inhales. She’s bleeding, but not inordinately, hardly three ounces so far. We see some peculiarities here, too. We’d expect to see reddening, erosion, or an inflammatory reaction in the zone of skin around the tear. We don’t.”

  “And why is that?”

  “I have no idea.”

  The priest returns the hand towel and hides Mariette’s nakedness. And then, having for the first time felt her heat, he looks up at Sister Aimée with horror and surprise and again puts his hand to the white bathrobe and then to the postulant’s neck. “She’s so hot!”

  “She has a temperature. We’d expect that.”

  “Have you taken her pulse, Sister?”

  “Erratic. We counted one hundred eighty beats per minute at one time, a hundred and ten the next, and then as slow as sixty. Even dreaming could do that, though.”

  “She’s in no danger then?”

  “She’s excited, that’s all.” She draws away the gray blanket and gingerly begins unbandaging the postulant’s feet and hands.

  —You were aware of us then.

  —I heard Sister Aimée. And it hurt when you touched his wounds.

  —His.

  —Embodied by me, but not mine.

  Each is slightly greater than the size of a penny or just about the injury a timber spike would make if hammered hard and cleanly into human flesh. Each is approximately in the same place, just inside the first bone of the hand and angling down through the furrow in the palm to a slight gap where the first finger joins the wrist. Each foot wound is between the first and second metatarsal and through the high dorsal ridge to the instep, as if Mariette’s knees had been brought up and her soles held flush to a flat surface before spikes had been pounded through each foot.

  Weeping from the holes is a pinkish serum and blood that the priest channels into a phial until he has half an inch. He puts it into his cassock pocket, then firmly presses the skin around Mariette’s hand wounds while peering up at the postulant to see if she’ll wince at the pain. She gives no sign that he’s even there.

  “She’s bleeding so little, really,” Père Marriott says. “Don’t you find that odd?”

  “I have no training for this,” Sister Aimée says. And when she sees him still looking at her, she tries, “In India, I hear, there are some people who can stop their bleeding just by thinking about it.” She opens a wooden case of medicines and asks, “Shall I dress her wounds?”

  Wiping his reddened fingertips with his handkerchief, the old priest thinks about their options and says experimentally, “Yes, do.”

  But when Sister Aimée squeezes a zinc ointment onto the postulant’s hand, she hears Mariette scream with such horror and pain that she withholds the medicine and looks for further information from their priest. “Shall we let her be?” she asks.r />
  “We seem to have no choice,” he says, and withdraws his head from under his stole.

  Mother Saint-Raphaël is facing an instrument tray and faintly ticking the chrome-bright points of the forceps and scissors there as she thinks. And when she turns to instruct the infirmarian she is again fierce and formidable, saying Sister Aimée is to stay with the postulant until they pray Nones; she’ll assign other sisters to be with Mariette from then on. When Mariette is herself again, she may join the sisters in their refectory and choir, but she shall be accompanied wherever else she goes. And no one is to speak or write of this to those outside the priory. She tells Sister Aimée, “We do this, we keep watch, for Mariette’s own protection. She is weak now. She is in distress. And she has hurt herself; just that.”

  Sister Agnès talks about Mariette to Sister Ange across the high-railed fence of the horse paddock. She hears the Angelus bell begin ringing but the extern just keeps talking over the campanile’s noise.

  Sister Saint-Denis, Honoré, Saint-Estèphe, and Monique have been in high temper about the postulant while polishing the chapter room’s dark wooden pieces with flaxseed oil and red flannel. Hearing the Angelus bell too late, Sister Saint-Denis hurriedly crosses herself, and there is a flint of hurt in her eye as she offers, “The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary.”