The Cloister

by James Carroll

  Héloïse shook her head. “No. Not now.” She, the one who knew, met his eyes. “It is the instrument of our intimacy.”

  He rose from his chair, leaned forward, and placed his mouth upon hers. Surprising herself, she brushed the tip of her tongue against his lips, which opened. At that, she pressed the bone stylus against the pivot of her thumbs, but it did not break.

  —

  EVEN IN HOLY places before the altar I carry the memory of the guilty loves I shared with you, Dear Peter…and, far from lamenting for having been seduced, I sigh for having lost them. I remember (for nothing is forgot by lovers) the time and place in which you first declared your love to me, and swore you would love me till death. Your words, your oaths, are all deeply graven in my heart.

  In the scriptorium, after that first kiss, they found themselves again and again embracing, bringing their clothed bodies together, a pair of novices whose moves were marked, soon enough, by an instinctive proficiency. Peter pressed his hands against her bosom, but, in that schoolroom, dared not unwind the back laces of her bodice, or push into the linen bands that kept her breasts high. For her part, Héloïse, acting on instincts she didn’t know she had, pressed him through his rough woolen tunic, first at his shoulders and sides, then into his lap, below his cincture. She was startled to feel him aroused and stiffening there—startled and transported. When, once, her clutching hand sensed a throbbing inside the cloth, she recognized an instance of the storied ejaculation, even as his groans announced it. She was appalled that she had herself caused this animal response, but at the same time felt a thrust of her own feelings that was not so different. She was shy with this initiation, virginal. And she was afraid. Yet she found herself rubbing him like that again, and when he reached into the underskirts at the delta of her legs and pressed, she followed him up successive hills of sensation, unsure what was happening, but giving herself to it. Only when he pressed his hand against her mouth did she realize that she, too, was making dangerous noises.

  In those first weeks, each time they arrived at the point where the only way forward was through the full stripping off of robes, skirts, and underclothing, they stopped. Rather, she stopped them—for her terror continued to outweigh the longing she was not prepared to acknowledge as lust. Only much later, in looking back, did she understand that that combination, dread and desire, defined the euphoria that had taken them captive.

  The fullness of time was bound to come, and, with the Great Compline on the Solemnity of the Annunciation, with its prostrations, litanies, and venerations of icons, it did. The ceremony was followed by the festal night-collation of wine and cakes, an exceptional revel, which they knew would send all the Cathedral fellowship into the deepest of sleeps. After the Canons, choristers, acolytes, servants, and members of Canon Fulbert’s personal household retired for the night, Héloïse and Abelard, separately, waited in their chambers, while the silence settled upon the Cloister. To that day’s lesson, in the schoolroom, Abelard had brought a pair of small candle stubs, each the exact length of the other. He’d opened his palm, so that she could see them, and she’d understood at once. She had sensed his uncertainty—his hand was tremulous—but passed it by, taking a candle stub without comment. She quenched her own uncertainty by pretending not to feel it. This deliberate setting of a plan was blatant, and part of her marveled at her readiness to embark upon it. The other part simply trembled, whether with fear or anticipation she neither knew nor cared.

  After the collation, they went to their separate quarters. Immediately after the Nunc Dimittis, the night dismissal chanted by the porter through corridors, hall, and dormitory, the Master and his pupil, before dousing their oil lamps, used them to light their small candles, and, hiding the glow, separately watched them burn to the point of extinction, which was the signal.

  They quietly left their chambers to meet in the Cloister garden, where, beside the singing fountain, they embraced and kissed. Héloïse was cloaked and veiled, but, with his hands at her face, Peter jolted back at the realization that her long brown hair was unpinned and flowing, a downpour to her shoulders, the first time he had ever seen it so. He pushed the hood of her cloak down, exposing her head. He clutched fistfuls of her hair and roughly pulled her face to his. Overcome with trepidation, she turned her head away, but nevertheless clung to him. She yielded as he led the way toward a corner of the arcade, where there was a broad bench. But the wind was howling off the river. It was too cold. Peter stopped them, held Héloïse briefly at arms’ length, then took her by the hand, saying, “Come.”

  Again, she yielded. He knew the way. His eyes were better in the darkness than hers. He led her into the gallery that brought them to the Cathedral porch, where he found the heavy door that opened into the downward spiral staircase. Their blind hands rode, as guides, on the rough stone wall as they descended into the crypt, where their eyes opened to the faintest light as they entered an eerie be-columned, low-vaulted chamber. Off the multiple stout pillars and ceiling groins, shadows bounced, thrown by the winking flame of the vigil candle that was kept burning in the distant chapel of our Lady of the Undercroft. The chapel nestled in the curved ambulatory, at the far end of the crypt, below the high altar in the apse of the Cathedral above. On the chapel walls, barely visible in the candlelight, were frescoes well known to show the great scenes of Mary—her Annunciation, Visitation, Nativity, and Assumption. Wall niches and shelves held clay vessels of sacred oil, and golden reliquaries. In the center of the chapel was an altar before which was spread, on the rough stone floor, a plush violet-hued woven fabric, a Moorish wall covering far too precious to be laid on the floor except here, in the sacred place reserved for priests and bishops. Embroidered with threads of gold and silver, the carpet was one of several that the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ had brought back from Jerusalem. It was to the luxury of that soft, knotted pile that Abelard brought Héloïse.

  What most surprised Héloïse was her own feeling of serenity. The few moments it had taken them to move from the Cloister garden, along the arcaded gallery, and down the spiraling stairs defined, for her, a great passage. True, Peter had been her guide in that climactic sojourn, but she had come to this brink of womanhood of her own will, so that she was ready for whatever was coming now. Having led her to the edge of the carpet, Peter began to pull her into his arms, but she turned away from him. She moved toward the wall, beside the sanctuary candle, which was as tall as a man, as round as a bread loaf, and giving off the sweet aroma of beeswax. Its flame danced above her, illuminating the ceiling groins, while leaving most of the chapel, with its stand of stout columns, in a web of interlocking shadows, which was all her modesty required.

  Indeed, she was plainly visible as, with her back to Peter Abelard, she began to disrobe. His eyes were upon her, transfixed, and she knew that, to him, her clothing would be a mystery shrouding the further mystery. In methodically shedding it, she was being practical, not coy, yet her moves amounted to an instinctive heightening of anticipation—hers as much as his. She stepped out of her sandals. She tossed away her hooded surcoat. She unclasped the first of her two tunics, a dark red woolen garment, sashed with a golden cord, and draping only as far as her knees. It fell to her feet, a bloodlike pool. Her unbleached undertunic had a row of buttons running from the hollow of her throat to below the flat bone at her chest, and, though Peter could not see it, her fingers trembled to unfasten them, as much because of the cold crypt as in nervousness. Foreseeing this moment, she had not swaddled her breasts with linen bands, so that when, with one brisk movement of her arms and shoulders, she shrugged the tunic off, she was all at once naked.

  She turned to face him. Later, she would wonder at the moral ease with which she so made a display of herself, yet that moment was an instance of nature’s plain goodness—her own goodness. Without breathing, she watched as Peter Abelard, with his gaze never leaving her, removed his clothing. She sensed that her own calm had cued his. Having removed his boots and stood straight agai
n, he, too, was naked then. He, too, was still. They were like a pair of pagan statues, unmoving, separated by the width of the carpet that came from Solomon’s Temple. It was as if their only purpose was to behold each other. What Héloïse saw in Peter, more clearly than before, was love.

  Which of them moved first? They would never know. They stepped forward at the same instant, and came together, flesh against flesh at last. At his touch, her skin itself snapped alive. Peter’s arms encircled her waist, his fingers cupped her buttocks, his chest pressed hard against her breasts. His lips took her lips, she took his tongue again, the rough taste of wine. He lifted her high off the floor with strength that gave her a first physically felt perception of his manly vigor. He swung her up into the cradle of his arms, his mouth never leaving hers. She clung to him. He rocked her. She floated. But then, sinking, she half fainted, suddenly at the mercy of a mystical weightlessness, only to realize that he wasn’t falling, but genuflecting, his right knee to his left heel. Leaning over, he placed her with exquisite tenderness on the soft woven fabric before the Virgin’s altar—an offering. Her gaze snagged on his tonsure, the cap of flesh that marked him for a man of Holy Orders. A vowed cleric! The word “sacrilege” leapt into her mind. To banish it, she looked away, only to find herself caught by the sight, on the near wall, of the Blessed Virgin kneeling before the angel Gabriel, and now the word was Mary’s: “Fiat”!—“Be it unto me!”

  On her back, arching up, she opened her legs for him, and, with his muscled naked torso, he slid between them, a river vessel into its slip. Clamping his waist with her knees, she joined her ankles. Somehow, so it seemed, they both knew just what to do—until they didn’t.

  With his groin, he pushed at her groin. He grew rough, sawing back and forth. The grip of her legs slipped, and she rewound them. He startled her with a foul grunt—the animal again. He had tried to enter her, but she was certain that he had failed. He pulled his face back to look in hers, and when she sought the caress of his eyes, what she found instead was the twisted expression of a stranger.

  “Oh,” he said, “Oh!”—an ugly, guttural sound, but she recognized a plea. Reaching down to him, she found a way to help, and he began to push her along the carpet. An excruciating pain sliced through her. For an instant, she felt herself pulling away in her mind with a feeling of disgust, for he did seem an animal. She tossed her face aside, rejecting his mouth. But then pain gave way to an expansive wave of tingling as, well inside her now, he found his rhythm. She found hers. She looked at him, and he was looking back at her. The stranger was gone. This was Peter, her dear Peter.

  Later, they lay together, with Abelard leaning up against the cold marble of the altar, and Héloïse leaning against him. They were covered only with his ample cloak, a cleric’s cope. The candle-thrown shadows danced around the vaulted crypt. “ ‘Quod factum est, in ipso vita erat,’ ” he said. “We have it from the Gospel of John.” Abelard had only to whisper now, so close were his lips to her ear. “ ‘Whatever was made, there was God’s life in it.’ ”

  “It says not ‘God’s,’ ” she replied. “Where in that text find you ‘God’s’?”

  “That is the meaning of ‘life,’ dear one,” he replied. “Wherever there is life, there is God. ‘I am come that you may have life, and have it more abundantly.’ And when have we had life if not here? In this?” His hand, beneath the cloak, was cupping her breast.

  “I need not God to know life’s abundance,” she said, “or to love it.”

  “But life here points to life there. And so with love. Our love is a sacrament of God’s presence. Therefore, not profane.”

  “You muster an argument against yourself, brother, not me.” She laughed. Having been slightly embarrassed at the discovery of their sexual competency, she was embarrassed now at his urge to sacralize it. “What need have we of the sacrament here?” she asked. “Isn’t the love enough?” Under the cloak, his hand was moving toward her waist.

  “But, surely, dear one…” He hesitated.

  She sensed the return of his interest.

  He continued, “…our presence here, in the Virgin’s sanctuary, requires a rebuttal to that long history of denial. To all who would take offense, I simply want to say, God takes no offense.”

  “God’s offense?” To her astonishment then, she realized that offending God had yet to cross her mind. She was satiated. What had God to do with this? Years later, looking back, she would express this sensation of pure carnality—carnality’s purity—with robust language, an affirmation that would strike some as liberating and others as lewd. But not now. She was shy still—yet a stranger in the realm of lost virginity. Her happiness was full enough to include the necessary pang of sadness; her womanliness enough to include how she was still a girl. The moment was enough.

  He was missing her mood. He shrugged. “I only mean to say that the Church made a terrible mistake in opposing the physical and the spiritual…body and soul….We reverse that mistake, you and I. This is…” His hand now was between her legs. His breath caught. “…the sanctification…of desire.”

  As she moved her mouth toward his, she said, “Perhaps so, dear Peter. But also…this is just a kiss—a wanton kiss.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  After their arrest, Rachel Vedette defined her father’s survival as her only purpose, and came to understand that if she did not succeed in getting him through whatever befell them, then he would never not be the ghost at her elbow, the opaque figure blocking light, a permanent companion; pure shadow. And it came to be so.

  She’d failed him; no, worse. Horrors followed for her, but nothing to compare to his loss. A barred door swung closed on the deepest part of herself, which isolated her, but protected her, too—if a wall of numbness can be called protection. Eventually, she knew that, unlike her father, she would live, but she also knew that she would not live long enough to see that barred door open, ever. Survival, too, would be imprisonment.

  Her father’s evanescent presence had come to form the core of her condition: him, with his yarmulke, his pipe, his bowl-stained fingers, his glinting spectacles, his shirt lifted above a pinch of flesh at his waist, his benign expression of gratitude, his mute refusal to look at her at the end. He inhabited her.

  Here he was on the tattered daybed in her fifth-floor walk-up room in Hoboken, New Jersey; beside her on the seat in the bus coming through the Lincoln Tunnel; at the next strap on the A Train; at her elbow on the path through Fort Tryon Park; on the stone bench in the Chapter House of the Cloister from La Chapelle-sur-Loire. What fellow commuters and museum co-workers, what ladies in from Westchester, even what lilting chants and luminous tapestries Rachel Vedette found herself surrounded with every day—it all registered only at the glinting surface. The presences of persons and things were chimerical compared with his. In the greatest part of herself, she was simply never not back there, with his head hazily on her shoulder; and therefore never not back even further, to the time that had given him hope—the time of the Latin letters she carried, tokens of remembered hope.

  By the end of July, two weeks after the initial arrests, about five thousand Jews of Paris had been transported from the Vél’ d’Hiv to someplace less than an hour’s ride, in traffic, from central Paris. In that transit, in the dark of the shrouded military truck, Rachel had paid attention, counting the stops and starts, trying to sense where they were being taken. She willfully clamped down on any other sensation so she could stay alert and cling fiercely, all the while, to her father’s arm with one hand and to her suitcase with the other. When the truck halted at last and the canvas was thrown back, Rachel saw that their truck was one of dozens lined up in the center of a vast horseshoe-shaped housing complex made of huge, linked concrete buildings the shape of tissue boxes. Judging from haphazard scaffolding, flapping canvas, and boarded windows here and there, the multistory apartments and commercial structures were unfinished, but legions of bundle-bearing Jews were being herded out of the trucks, l
ined up, and directed into one block or another. French policemen were again the enforcers, and, again, men in dark civilian suits were supervising. Germans.

  Rachel, assessing quickly, saw that the males among the prisoners, from her truck and others, were being channeled in one direction, while women, children, and elders were being driven in another. With alarm, she saw that girls and young women were being singled out, and corralled. All across the yard, inside an enormous ring of barbed wire, orders were being barked loudly, more by the Germans than by the Frenchmen. The ugly language hung in the air, along with the noise of truck engines, the clatter of pushcarts, and bursts of static from ill-functioning loudspeakers. Helping her father down from the truck, Rachel was unable to prevent him from stumbling again. This time, his yarmulke fell from his head. Before she could retrieve it, a gendarme stepped quickly forward to bring his stout polished boot down on the circle of cloth, crushing it. Rachel fixed him with her stare, and waited for his eyes to find hers. Her contempt outweighed his. He was barely older than she. His loutish smile faded, and, despite himself, he stepped back. Saul bent over to pick up the skullcap, muttering as he did, “Kiddush Hashem.”

  Once, her father would have had no need of reinforcement against such a crude fool. Saul Vedette’s resolve had not faded, but the strength needed to act upon it had drained almost entirely away. Rachel pressed forward to confront the gendarme. “Thank you, sir, for giving us the occasion to bless God’s name.”

  In the face of her ferocious expression, the flic blushed, which passed, in that circumstance, for an unwilled apology. He pointed the way toward the muster point where prisoners were being sorted, and Rachel, holding her father’s arm, pushed into a knot of old women. As Rachel hoped, they registered as a group more by age than gender, and so her father blended in as just another elder, and he was not taken off with the other men. Soon they found themselves in a halting procession—more like circus animals than vested clerics or marching soldiers—that took them ultimately, two and three at a time, through the narrow door of a seven-story apartment building, into a stairwell where the dusky air, shut off from daylight, was moist with heat. They climbed to the third level, followed a dark corridor, and filed into a large, open room, well lit by windows, crowded with double- and triple-stacked bunks, and divided by two aisles.