by Nancy Young
As Lorraine disappeared into the bedroom just inside the front door, Bernard placed his case on the lightly stained pine flooring of the foyer, and then settled himself upon a somewhat frayed chaise longue embroidered with a lavender-flowered chinoiserie pattern. Beside the divan on a lamp table a mélange of trinkets he well-remembered was displayed: a macramé bracelet festooned with brass finger cymbals, a sterling silver box with several small toe rings, a collection of brass camels, and a miniature hookah. A photograph of her parents standing in front of the old tool shop was propped up against the lamp behind the bric-a-brac collection.
“You know, Berne,” she called out from the other room, “I only received your letter announcing your plans to visit this very morning. It arrived as I was preparing to...” then she remembered that he would not have heard a word of it. She returned to the lounge room and found him stretched out on the chaise. “Would you like to freshen up … ?” she trailed off as she noticed that his eyes were closed, the look on his face as if he had finally arrived home after an arduous journey. She walked quietly across the room to the chaise and sat down on the edge of it at his feet. He opened his eyes and their emerald moonshine made her feel suddenly overcome with light-headedness. The snowflake cap was now removed and her hair fell in luxuriant waves to her shoulders. Without the wool overcoat he saw that she was dressed in a ribbed carmine sweater dress whose shawl collar revealed a lovely white neck and the familiar gold cross at the end of its delicate chain. He breathed in quickly and smiled, yearning to kiss the soft smooth skin on that neck.
“Berne,” she said slowly with a slightly remorseful look on her face. “I have something I must tell you.” He looked at her questioningly, his smile momentarily faltering.
No … wait, he replied, gesturing simultaneously with the palm of his hand. I have something I want to give you, he whispered. He rose out of the chaise to retrieve the case and returned to unbuckle the two leather straps encircling it. Lorraine sat still, following his movement with her eyes and head but not moving her body. She feared that he would have gifts that she could not reciprocate as his arrival was a surprise of only the past few hours.
He opened the case with the lid facing her so she could not see the contents. He hesitated for a moment, his hand poised above the case; then he drew out a small paper-wrapped box and closed the case. As she took it in her hand and carefully removed the wrapping, her face was appreciative but he could sense a fleeting reticence, as if the gift might represent something too much to accept. Her smile immediately brightened as the wooden lid with the intertwining vines presented itself.
“It’s beautiful,” she exclaimed. “Thank you, Berne. Your gifts are always so precious.”
Open it, he said, gesturing for her to take off the lid. She admired the detailing and its confident bold design, fingering it delicately and not hurrying to open the box. She followed one of the vines with her index finger and traced its path around the lid, underneath another vine and back to its origin. Carefully she prised the lid off the box and pulled out the small piece of writing inside it.
Awake my love do not forsake
Songs my muse she cannot make
These dreams of you I mistake
For bitter winter trials partake
Days emerge from battle right
O divine fire once so bright
Lead me to her with your light
Beauteous visions of the night
“Did you write this?” she asked after reading it twice, more surprised by the language than by the message it held. She raised her eyes to look at him and found him nodding his head slowly. Then, without letting her say another word, he opened the case once again and withdrew the guitar. He held it to her and she took it reluctantly but could not conceal the delight in her eyes at seeing the exquisitely crafted instrument again.
“You have been learning to play it, haven’t you?” she asked with genuine curiosity. She saw him shaking his head and smiling as if he was offering her his greatest possession, which he was. It dawned on her slowly that he was giving her the fine hand-constructed guitar and her heart leapt into her throat; a desperate sob came to her lips.
“But no, Berne, you must not give this to me,” she cried out loud. “I don’t deserve it. No. No. I can’t take it. It’s too … too precious.”
She stood up abruptly and handed the instrument back to him, his face a question mark and his flashing eyes beginning to shimmer with emotion. But you are more precious, they said. Barely able to face his questioning face, her eyes fixed themselves to a dark knot on the pine plank of the floor as she drew up her courage to speak the words she had meant to tell him weeks before.
“I can’t, Berne … I … I … just can’t,” she began, stammering. “I have to tell you something important, but I know it is going to hurt you,” she continued, sighing heavily. “I’m getting married, Berne. Tomorrow, actually … I am flying to Paris tomorrow. We will be married in four weeks.” At first he thought he misread her lips.
“Married?” He spoke to her slow sorrowful nod.
“Getting married,” she repeated. The words punctured like an awl, his resistance a slab of timber solid and true, but eventually it pierced through, leaving a clean round hole where his heart still throbbed. The fierceness of emotion left him bereft of logic. It stunned him — her ability to keep up intimate relations with him while she was already engaged to another man. Was it anger at this betrayal? Or was it remorse for having waited too long, too long to renew his love? In his cabin she had promised him nothing. Their naked bodies intertwined like the vines imbued in his rosette box, feeling as if they had been born that way. But the question was never asked whether her heart was also entwined with his. Or whether another in the city held it hostage, while she retreated to the countryside for some sort of refuge?
“Paris? Who is this lucky man?” he whispered, speaking as if he didn’t believe his own words. Paris? Placing the guitar on the divan where the warmth of her body still radiated, his hands rose mortified over his face so she could not see the anguish. She stood before him limp with regret, vacillating between the urge to take him in her arms and a need to flee, to run away and hide her guilty heart. In her bedroom the cases with her wedding trousseau lay ready. His unexpected letter announced his 6:30 pm train arrival. For much of the afternoon she had wandered in a daze, packing the last items into her traveling case without conviction. Is it a sign? Why has he come just today, on the eve of my departure? Her marriage was in less than a month’s time and all at once the doubts drifted to the surface like fish unwell. Could she see him for a last time and not feel the contradiction of her situation, or damage his trust with her infidelity?
At his cabin on Lac Aylmer, the ruggedness of that wild country set her free. His love was like the clear glacial lake that surrounded them; in his impassioned embrace every nerve and follicle on her body was alive. But in the calm of his presence she was relaxed and feminine, a drifting yacht completing a tranquil summer scene, or a feline luxuriating on the lap of a man who was not her master. She had no need to craft words carefully or make intelligent statements about politics or the recent new world order. They were no defense against his unforced charms anyway.
But now he sat in her divan with his hands covering his anguish, annihilated by her betrayal. More accustomed to his placid affection and peaceful admiration, this new emotionalism left her alarmed and ashamed; it was beyond her understanding, but still she castigated herself for her unfair assumption that his tranquil bearing was equal to an unflappable emotional resilience. Perhaps it was a reflection of her own lack of moral rectitude, or was it her need to fly beyond the bounds of her impending marriage? A cultured and cosmopolitan life in Paris was all she ever aspired to; from meager beginnings as a shop-keeper’s daughter in a small timber town in the wilds of the Eastern Townships, she was willing — no, looking gladly forw
ard — to delay her further studies and career in order to become a diplomat’s wife. She had already acquired, since her small-town years in St.-Gérard, a refined taste for red wine and dinner parties, and traded her rustic winter parkas for the cashmere and wool of a city dweller. Gone were the days of listening to monotonous tales of salmon fishing and moose-hunts, and of minding her father’s dismal little tool shop on Friday afternoons and holidays.
“His name is Joël de Vogel-Larochette. He was a LL.M. student,” she began, continuing after a small pause. “His father is the cultural attaché to Canada … from Paris.” Despite her misgivings for having played too freely with his heart, there was no question in her mind that she would proceed with her plans regardless of the sad state of their affairs in her small apartment. Retreating to the kitchen, she returned a moment later with two glasses ready with her mild offerings of red wine to rally against his disappointment. Placing them on the table, she folded her arms and body around her distraught lover in a firm embrace that made him recoil at first, and then submit with a resignation that told her he was a good man. Apologies were whispered passionately into his ear, which he may or may not have heard, but St.-Gérard would never replace Paris, Copenhagen, or St. Petersburg — all the places that she would grace in her future as a part of a diplomatic pair.
“Paris … St. Petersburg.” He felt and understood the words from her lips; they were the signposts of her broader humanity, her destiny in a world far beyond his humble and meager life. She had always soared high above the mountainous cedars and colossal firs of their hometown like a graceful peregrine in full flight, brown and white feathers spreading like a Spanish fantail in the sky’s invisible thermal, as precious and stately as the jewels on a mullah’s crown. Her gypsy heart would soon fade into the past and in its place would grow a diamond-hard aristocratic core.
Bernard was lost. He felt a strange coldness in his feet and at his center, while his hands and face seemed to burn. Without thought he reached to the table and brought the wine glass to his lips, tipping its entire contents down his throat in a single toss. The warm dry liquid scorched and soothed his esophagus simultaneously; then the heat spread through his body. It calmed him but did not take away the sting in his heart.
“Please take it with you,” he voiced, indicating the guitar with his outstretched arm. The contrite young woman was also at a loss for what to do. She gulped her wine and then joined the guitar on the divan, placing it on her lap as she sat down beside him. She held it close to her body and he watched her stroke it, wishing, not for the first time, that the guitar body was his own body, and that the sounds it now made were the clear true tones of his own voice.
Bernard sat lost in his own agony. Oh, to be gifted at this moment with the ability to speak out strongly against her mistaken notion that his lack of wealth or future was an obstacle to their happiness, to supplicate a change of mind, to turn her own decision to leave against her. He was more certain than ever before that she was born to be with him, to bear his children, to grow like the reeds on the lake around his home into beautiful lily-flowers in their ripe old age. But the words were stuck like honeycombs inside the hive, his thoughts buzzing frenetically, maddeningly around in his crowded head, their fulminated heaviness like nails in his coffin.
A slow sad tune of a medieval lament found life from the picking of her thin fingers, accompanying the softly uttered words memorized from the handwritten poem encased in the wooden box on a small piece of paper. His tears of frustration were too much for her to bear. She stopped playing and held him again, his strong body leaning into her as his quivering lips sought hers. With his broken heart in her hands, she led him to the bedroom, the array of bags creating a complex obstacle course for their empassioned tango to the bed. Giving himself up entirely to his ache at first, the heat of his anger and defeat eventually crept into his heart and consumed him. He let the dying embers of his love flare, and if he could enter her heart through his forceful thrusts he would try. Their moans were like the ravenous resuscitation of a once choked fire and when it reached its climactic conclusion they both were swelled with tears of ecstasy and emotional depletion.
When he awoke long after the dawn, she was already gone. Staggering like an injured beast into the living room he saw that she had taken the guitar with her. The wooden rosette box, however, was on the lamp table beside the divan. He opened the box and found inside her note along with a key. She wrote,
Although my body belongs not to you
Know that my heart will always be true.
Je t’aime, mon amour,
Je t’aime beaucoup …
L.
From the great height of the bay windows in the small apartment, he leaned frigid against the glass and wretchedly observed, now in the cold bright light of day, the imposing edifice of Le Château Frontenac as it loomed in the far distance. Below it the gritty ancient masonry walls of the old fortress tumbled. The excruciating wounds of his unrequited love burned. They fissured his heart more than the unforgiving drudge of his ascent into the breathlessly steep and thorn-brambled mountains during his delivery of the tree. Neither the relentless unforgiving forest nor the wild furrowing rapids were a match for Venus’s spiteful whip. She’s gone. Lorraine, she is gone. Forever — out of my life. He longed to touch her skin again and the ache for her clutched at his chest and burned like an ampoule of fire flung at him from a lowly place, the place where he had lost his soul and all of his bearings. All directions now led to a desolate end, without her. He smelled the faintest trace of her lilac scent in the small piece of paper he held to his face. It made his heart drop like a crumpled carcass into the base of his stomach.
The old Citadel stationed resolutely beyond the fortified walls beckoned for him, the prisoner, to conjure up with his shattered spirit invisible yet familiar armor around his heart. The achingly beautiful scenery enveloped by the blue-gray serenity of the wide and mighty St.-Laurent began to reach him. It made him understand why she needed to conquer the vast exterior world. From this vantage point she must have felt at once sequestered in the tantalizing lap of ultimate luxury and barricaded on the fringe of an old crumbling garrison. To remain in the grip of a tepid or crippling past was no way to live.
A seagull made an arc across the clouded sky, circling the turret-like wings of the Citadel in search of a landing point, or perhaps its mate? None presented itself. The bird not content to search in vain, opened is beak wide and made a heart-wrenching screech and continued on, disappearing beyond the battlements, perhaps toward the cannons of Artillery Park inside the St.-Jean Gate of the old city, searching for a more formidable foe. He could not deny her a cosmopolitan life, so what was it he thought he could offer her? He could not even hear the cry of the gull in its wretched search.
With Lorraine’s words locked inside the timber box, Bernard deposited the relic of his love into the inner pocket of his winter parka and faced the bleak city streets where his aloneness felt heavier than the leaden letter upon his chest. He spun down into the brutal place that was the darkness of his soul and from there descended the slick, foot-worn stone steps of the oldest man-made stairs on that continent and paced the cobblestones hour upon hour, as if his life depended on it. Only for a moment did he contemplate the fall from a great height that a misstep would offer, the thought blurring even as it came to him. He scrambled like a hunted animal for an eternity, beating his heart into submission. Beyond the fortifications he reached the boardwalk along the cliff below the walls of the Citadel, his pace quickening, and then it broke him into a sprint. The paving and his rough boots ruined his feet and ankles but that was small torture. His was a dark, closed dungeon of a world where only physical, bodily pain was an emollient to his aching heart.
4
Adrienne (Reillanne), 1859–1869
The austere and imposing gates of the Chartreuse Notre-Dame swung open momentarily to allow a y
oung woman followed by her hesitant father to surreptitiously enter one morning in the spring of 1859. The eremitic convent on the outskirts of Reillanne in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence was reticent by all accounts, and obscured on all fronts. In a thicket of trees, a meadowlark warbled out of turn in the quietude of the encircling pines, which otherwise blanketed the convent in perpetual silence. The farmstead on the outskirts of Forcalquier where the girl of thirteen managed to grow up in the company of only a father and a twin brother lay not more than a five-hour carriage ride from the alpine base of the Lubéron.
For three years the headstrong girl persevered in her demands of her father to allow her to join the Carthusian Order of the Sisters of Notre-Dame. Adrienne Sébastiani desired to become a novitiate like other young girls wished to find a husband. Her father’s resistance did nothing to break her resolve. Constant prayer, she assured him, lectio divina — the daily reading of the Scriptures — and the absolution of solitude and simplicity in a cloistered existence were her true calling. When her mind was made up no entreaties, not even a herd of the wild horses, could change her course. Nor did the pleas of her twin brother, Jacob, for whom she was always the protector. Even though they were identical in age, they were opposite in demeanor. While Jacob was given to flights of fancy and his head was perpetually in the clouds and mist, Adrienne seemed as grounded as a flightless bird.
But no one truly knew what storms raged underneath her placid heart. She began her vow of silence well before her father finally granted her wish. To be admitted into the gates of Chartreuse Notre-Dame was not an easy thing; she had secretly written beseeching letters to the Sisters a full two years before this occasion and began her ritual silence nearly a fortnight before this. Those gates were shut tightly on the arrival of the father and daughter, but the large bell perched atop the iron palings rang out boisterously at Adrienne’s insistence, and summoned Sister Teresa forthwith from her morning prayers. Father and daughter were greeted by a young nun not much older than the girl herself, and motioned silently to follow her along the long path which meandered through a perfected garden which led to the convent itself. Sister Teresa was a “converse sister” and her responsibility was to greet visitors at the gates when the infrequent non-convent resident called. Without a word Sister Teresa led them to a small chamber within the convent where visitors were met, then turned and left them to return to her prayers.