Was she well?
No, she was very well. Please, Daniel.
* * *
—
In Auxerre, outside the train station, I waited on a bench by a telephone booth, for whom I didn’t know. Someone would find me, Miriam had said. Something would happen. How strange to be a stranger in a strange city, waiting to be recognized by another stranger. I had arrived in Paris a stranger. Over the year of my fellowship, I had continued a stranger, making few friends, even up to the day of my departure. But something had happened. Just as I was preparing to leave, a young woman, for reasons of her own, had taken me for her friend and lover. A girl from a provincial town. A singer, her voice bodiless, weightless, her body for my body less a thing than a force, whether smiling at me over her coffee cup or astride my hips or arched beneath me, her upper lip beaded with sweat, her mouth tasting of salt and cigarettes, her cunt of seawater.
She had fixed me in the steady level of her gaze. She had called me her friend, as though mon ami were the name by which I am known to the angels. She had guided my tongue, my lips, toward rudimentary competence in her language. And through this, word by word, she came into focus, as though her level gaze had somehow steadied mine as well, imbued it with a clarity that in turn flowed outward everywhere like daylight. Paris had altered imperceptibly from the place of my foreign sojourn, the place I would visit and leave, to the place where we simply were. Entirely by accident, I had met a foreign girl in a foreign town. She had healed me by feeding me, bit by bit, the mysteries of her language, of her body, as one might feed an invalid, adapting me to the strange taste, acquainting me with the knowledge that I was, at the center of my being, not only a stranger, not only a foreigner, but a guest—invited, welcomed, received. The words of Herbert’s poem repeated themselves to me:
Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack’d anything.
“A guest,” I answer’d, “worthy to be here”;
Love said, “You shall be he.”
“I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.”
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
“Who made the eyes but I?”
I would like to believe, Father, that those were my thoughts as I waited at the Gare d’Auxerre for someone to recognize me, but they could not have been. They are my thoughts now, thoughts I would dispatch if I could to that young American doctor marooned on his bench—a warning, an antidote, a last-minute reprieve—the pay phone before him jolting awake with a jangle of bells.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Monsieur? he said for the second time and, again, Monsieur? The speaker was a young man, weedily bearded, long hair restrained by a cyclist’s cap. Vous êtes le Docteur Abend?
I was.
“Très bien! Me, I’m called Jean-Marie,” he said, lifting my bag. “I will bring you to the community.”
* * *
—
The community seemed not to have a name. Jean-Marie, as his Renault camionnette coughed its way out of Auxerre, referred to it only as the community—la communauté—as did (I would shortly learn) anyone who worked there or lived nearby. I have often wondered what name they settled on, though, of course, it may never have had a name. Maybe nothing came of it. Maybe it folded. Maybe it didn’t even last the year. Though the monastery at Leuvray was one of its primary sponsors, the monastery newsletters make no mention of it. I have never tried to find out more.
In any event, Father, it was from this place that Miriam had called me, not from the monastery at Leuvray, where she had first said she would be spending the week. When I asked her where she had gone, she said only, “You will see, mon ami. It will just be for a few days.”
* * *
—
The community (Jean-Marie explained) had been conceived as an extension of the monastery. A local aristocrat, a count, had deeded the order an old mill on a tributary of the Yonne. The mill had fallen into disuse in recent decades but had been in operation as late as the 1930s. Private donations and government funds had been secured to repair and restore as much of the original machinery as could be salvaged. A small co-op was established. Other buildings from the former mill had been leased at favorable rates to a stonecutter, a cabinetmaker, and a sawyer. A potter, a Scotsman named McGarvy or MacGarry, had occupied another of the agglomerated buildings, where he manufactured floor and roof tiles using traditional techniques. The cooperative hoped eventually to rely more on the income from beekeeping, the cultivation of vegetables, and a small herd of Charolais cattle, along with some sheep. The plan, in short, had been to reproduce in microcosm the industries that constituted the local economy of small rural communities before the Third Republic, a period when moderate industrialization had lifted such communities from misery but before rural populations had collapsed in the wake of unchecked urbanization and the devastation of the great wars.
Jean-Marie explained how the order envisioned an expansion of its ministry to include the small farmers of the region and to offer a retreat site less imposing and “hyper-catholique” than the monastery and basilica at Leuvray. The plan was to staff the operation with a small group of lay brothers and sisters, either single or married, affiliated with the order but governed autonomously, on the model of earlier Christian collectives. As the Leuvray church was several kilometers away, the order had built a small chapel alongside the river.
So Jean-Marie had instructed me as we clattered along. He had asked me if I minded leaning just “un petit peu” to the left during our drive, so that a bundle of copper and PVC pipe might be permitted to extend from the bed of the camionnette, over my shoulder and out the side window. This arrangement required that I incline my head and upper body toward Jean-Marie as if I were straining to listen, a posture, I feared, that only egged him on.
“T’es le copain de Miriam?” he asked.
Was Jean-Marie asking if I was Miriam’s friend or her boyfriend? “Yes,” I said.
“Donc, t’as de la chance, alors.”
He had declared me lucky. Not knowing what to say in reply, I said nothing.
* * *
—
Fields of oats. Fields of rapeseed. We had passed through a region of smaller, newer houses, into a rolling countryside pieced from expanses of greenish grain spreading on either side. In time these swelling distances contracted and the terrain, paned now by hedgerows into small and irregular pastures, disclosed here a troop of whitish cows and calves, there a bull, immense and solitary, an alp of brawn. In other pastures tidy cylinders of hay dotted the stubble, each pinning to the ground a lozenge of eastward-tending shadow. As the inclines grew more pronounced and frequent, the hedgerows expanded at intervals to small patches of woodland. Soon long kilometers of road passed canopied beneath roofs of vaulted branches. On either side the forest appeared to have been stripped of all underbrush. Filled with blue-green shadow and columned by tree trunks or intermittent shafts of sunlight, the woods seemed an undersea garden of towering kelps and coral-heads.
After cresting a ridge, the road stepped in switchbacks down a series of terraced slopes. Eventually it leveled and wound its way alongside a narrow river, so that the canopy of trees made a single bower for river and road together. In the spaces where sunlight broke through, the shallows of the riverbed shone clear and stony except where tresses of weed trailed out downstream. Abruptly the river opened to a broad pond, on the far bank of which ranged a line of low stone buildings, steep-gabled, roofed in what must have been tile but looked instead like slopes of moss.
“Voilà,” said Jean-Marie, turning his truck over a single-lane bridge toward the buildings,
“we’re here.”
* * *
—
I got out of the car and Jean-Marie drove off in a cloud of diesel exhaust, leaving me alone. The moss-furred tiles on one of the roofs had been removed and four workers in blue coveralls were replacing them with newer, more regular tiles. I had no idea where to go. Should I ask the roofers? What would I ask them? Pardon me, messieurs, but can you tell me where my copine is? By the way, does copine mean friend or girlfriend?
I was about to enter a building at random when I saw that Miriam was already walking toward me, her bare feet silent on the gravel, her gait hesitant and unsteady across the sharp stones.
She looked smaller than I’d remembered, her skin a darker bronze, and when she lifted herself on tiptoes to kiss me, I saw for the first time a constellation of freckles faint on the bridge of her nose. Taking my hand with a smile though saying nothing, Miriam led me past the largest structure in the line of conjoined buildings, the old mill itself, toward a separate structure, a stone barn converted into a house, with new-glazed dormers set in the roof.
Inside, once my eyes adjusted to the dimness, I saw that the first floor had been opened out to make an enormous kitchen. Modern stainless stoves and sinks lined two walls, while the original hearth, broad and shallow, dominated a third. An immense smoke-blackened beam served as the mantelpiece. The hearth itself was empty, swept bare of both ember and ash, though behind the grate a sooty outline stood out as though some fire had taken care to leave a record of itself, printing its image in negative on the brick. A trestle table stood on the other side of the room, flanked by benches, separated from the kitchen by a flight of stairs newly constructed and as yet without paint, nailheads bright in the raw lumber. These steps Miriam mounted, and I followed her up into a long hallway running the length of the building, air close with odors of paint and turpentine. On either side of the corridor, between expanses of fresh drywall, doorframes opened on small rooms, each unoccupied and furnished with nothing more than a single bedstead and mattress.
Miriam led me to the room on the end where she was staying, slightly larger than the others, two single beds instead of one, each neatly made up and separated by a desk and a single lamp. From a nail in a doorjamb hung a shirt of hers I recognized; a crucifix hung from a nail above her bed.
“At last you are here,” she said.
“And where is that?” When I spoke, my voice, too loud, reverberated from the bare walls.
With a smile shy or frail, she said, “I was lonely without you.”
“I would be lonely too, in a place like this.”
“With you I am able to think.”
“Think what?”
“Eh bien, if I knew that…,” she began, the smile still fragile, but then she was kissing me again, unbuttoning my shirt, easing the tine of my belt buckle from its belt hole. “You don’t mind me dirty?” she asked, but it wasn’t a question.
* * *
—
Afterward we lay side by side, naked on the narrow bed. The view from the bed foreshortened the crucifix nailed above us to a cubist abstraction of wood, gill-sharp ribs, feet.
“You do not mind staying here with me?” she said, turning to face me and lowering her voice to a whisper.
“Are you worried the crucifix will hear?”
“You think He hasn’t heard it all before?”
“Was sex from behind mentioned in the Rule of St. Benedict?”
No, she said, but the room had been envisioned for couples. The hope was that the community would attract single people and couples alike.
“The community,” I said.
“A religious community, yes,” she went on. But a lay community, women and men alike. There would be the possibility of minor vows, but nothing would be required. People could come for a summer, a season, a year. Abruptly I was aware of the difference between this place and the first monastery Miriam had brought me to. There, the bare spaces, the silence, seemed to form an eddy outside of time. Here, however, the ambition of the community seemed nothing more than to give itself over to time, the hours, the seasons, the years, the unhurried, unstoppable clock of the earth.
“Why did you ask me here?”
“You are angry,” she said.
A shame washed over me. Miriam, evidently injured, had begun to dress. “I wanted to come,” I said, trying to make good. “And here—look—I finished my notes on the Herbert poems.” I removed the notebook from my bag and set it down on the desk. She sat beside me and took the notebook onto her lap.
“It is finished? Already?”
“I wanted to give it to you when you got back to Paris, over champagne and a chicken.”
“But we could still have champagne with a chicken….”
“I drank the bottle of champagne.”
“Et le poulet?”
“When you didn’t show up, he drank the second bottle and I released him.”
“Ah, he was a drunkard—like you,” she said. I heard a wounded note lingering in her voice, but she took my face in her hands and said, “Thank you.”
“For being a drunkard?”
“No,” she said, her seriousness alone conveying reproach. “Daniel. I thank you. I thank you coming here for me. And,” she added, pressing the notebook to her chest, “for writing this for me.”
* * *
—
Side by side at the counter, Miriam and I scrubbed the potatoes in a mud-clouded tub, then dropped them into a bucket of clear water. There were beans to be snapped, the table set, and a loud bell rung to call the workers in from field or mill. At dinner, there was hardly any conversation at the long table, not, it seemed to me, by monastic protocol but simply out of awkwardness. Jean-Marie had returned from wherever he had gone with his carload of pipes. He sat down beside a young auburn-haired woman Miriam had been working with in the garden. Jean-Marie undertook to engage her in small talk, but the woman appeared to ignore him. The roofers from the mill, men from Auxerre who had been invited to stay for dinner, made a couple of remarks about the dry weather, about the effect of moss on older tiles, then fell into silence themselves. Miriam kept her hand on my knee. I kept waiting for someone to pour more wine.
* * *
—
How many days was I there? A few? Several? We would wake early to help prepare breakfast for the workers, for the monks and nuns who would be on site that day, and for any other visitors. Mornings Miriam worked in the garden with the auburn-headed woman; for my part I was content to take over cleaning duties in the house. It was cooler inside, and when I was finished I could retreat upstairs to the Bernanos novel I’d found. Furthermore, after lunch and dinner, nothing prevented me from polishing off what wine remained in carafes and glasses. I did not know why I was here, but my impatience with what felt like aimlessness yielded to an odd sense of acceptance, less the sense of having accepted something than of having been accepted: I could stay as long as I liked.
* * *
—
My second day at the community, a meeting had been scheduled with the prior of the monastery at Leuvray, several of the monastics, and a young couple who had just spent three years in Burkina Faso. The woman had given birth in Africa, and because there had been concerns about the baby’s health, they were contemplating a return to France, where they would take up residence with the community. Motoring into the court in an ancient Morris, the count himself arrived, the benefactor who had deeded the property in the first place. A small, round man in a Tyrolean hunting jacket, he addressed me in colloquial English perfected (he explained) in Alberta, where he had ranched cattle for a decade.
“New York?” he said to me, dumping sugar into his coffee until it flowed like syrup from his spoon. “I prefer Texas. The really big spaces!” His Americanized accent glowed like Technicolor. “Have you visited the King Ranch?…Never? Whe
n I arrived, the foreman who met me at the airstrip was wearing a pistol! A real Colt revolver!”
* * *
—
“You have joined the community here?” the husband from Burkina Faso had asked. (Through the window behind him, I could see the auburn-headed young woman from the day before. She had not gathered with the others for coffee but had set to work tying the tendrils of a vine to a trellis.)
I repeated that I lived in New York.
“Ah! Perhaps the order has a similar community in America?”
Perhaps it did. I said I had never heard of the order before I’d met Miriam.
“En principe—in principle it is a beautiful idea,” he said, “but to convince people to pool resources, to take on each other’s problems, that’s quite a different matter, no?”
After lunch, Miriam, the auburn-headed woman, and the others gathered in an adjoining room. What were they discussing? Operating budgets? Schemes of governance? From my post in the kitchen, from time to time I heard the baby squall, then smack wetly as the mother affixed it once more to her breast.
The meeting concluded, the count puttered off in his Morris. The Burkina Faso couple conversed with auburn-head, who held the baby against her shoulder.
* * *
—
Sunday, the parish priest, a chain-smoking Belgian called Père Albert, arrived on a motor scooter and everyone gathered for Mass in the chapel. The windows had been opened, so an intermittent breeze ruffled the altar cloth, weighed down only by an earthenware cup and dish. The rusticity of the vessels, set off against the new cinder block of the chapel, vaunted (I thought) an ostentatious simplicity, no less falsifying than opulence or pomposity would have been. The wife and husband from Burkina Faso each read from the Bible, and Père Albert coughed and mumbled his way through the invocation and prayers.
The Waters & the Wild Page 16