What is there to do to silence her except to kiss her, to let her cling to him?
“I’m afraid because you’re leaving … I’m afraid you may be caught … I’m afraid we may be discovered.”
“Let’s exchange tokens,” he said, smiling at her as though at a small child. “I want you to remember only the joy of our love and forget your silly fears.”
She apologized softly. “I’m sorry.”
“What are you going to give me?”
“Noël, a nun … a nun in our convent has no personal belongings …”
He reached into the deep pocket of her night robe. “Here. I’ll take your handkerchief to the wars with me as a good knight should.”
“Yes …”
“And I’ll give you this holy medal my mother gave me when I left France on my first campaign.” He took it off his neck and started to put it about hers.
“But she gave you this medal for your safety! You mustn’t part with it!”
He brushed away her hands and clasped the chain about her neck. “Love, travels and battles are the ordinary way of my life. My mother’s prayers won’t leave me with the medal. Whereas you are starting on the first journey of your life.”
Mariana closed her hands about the medal, the medal that was warm from the beating of his heart. “Journey? But I can’t go with you! God knows I wish I could.”
“No, my sweet girl. You are starting on your journey into the seas of love, and it’s a dangerous voyage for you. You need all the safety I can give you.” He held her close, as close as the medal had lain on his chest. Then, with a final kiss, he left the cell, the balcony, the enclosure of the convent walls.
Within the enclosure of the confessional she stood. She did not kneel. She would not look at the grief in Father Duarte’s face. She did not heed either his words or his silence. She said, “If you cannot absolve me then you cannot allow me to receive the sacraments.”
“And if you do not, if I forbid you—and this is what excommunication means, Mariana, you know this—then what will it mean to your Sisters?”
She was rigid as an iron bar. “They have nothing to do with it.”
“They have everything to do with it. You are a member of a community and you cannot sin in isolation. If I withhold the sacrament from you it would be a matter of great concern and confusion to them. You assure me that they know nothing. I, too, am interested in protecting their innocence. I cannot have your blind wilfulness causing them pain. Therefore I am not going to excommunicate you.”
“But if I receive unabsolved then I am committing mortal sin.”
“Child. Child, you have involved yourself in sin to such depths that anything you do now only compounds it. Whatever you do. Whether you receive or do not receive. And what you do now in regard to the sacrament affects your Sisters more than it does you.”
“But I will not—”
He lashed out at her. “What you will or do not will does not affect the sacraments nor the presence of our Lord in them. For your Sisters sake I order you to communicate. Perhaps the virtue in the sacrament itself will be able to do for you what neither I nor any other human being at this point can hope to do.”
… “As your bones are the essential structure upon which your flesh is hung, so the Sacraments are the essential structure which holds your life together,” Sister Mary Michael said. “But it must be true Sacrament, not superstition. To cross yourself can be a tangible affirmation of your faith. But it can also be a superstitious and meaningless gesture against a vague and misunderstood evil.” The nun leaned her elbows on her desk, looking across it at Charlotte who had stayed after school. “One’s sacramental reflexes must be sternly conditioned and disciplined, Cotty. It makes no difference that you have not a religious vocation. Or that something seems inordinately to have upset you. But you are seventeen now, and next year you will be away from us, and you must know now that the truth of a sacrament is absolute, so that even if its tangible aspects are denied you—I am aware that you seldom find it possible to go to mass during the holidays—they are still there to sustain you. This is true, you will find as you grow up and marry and have children, not only of the Sacraments of the church but those of daily living, in the relationship of father and daughter, husband and wife, friend and friend, for these are all logical offspring of the basic sacrament, as, in a family, grace before meals, and then the grace of meals together, or the act of love between man and wife that springs from the sacrament of marriage …
… You are receiving the Sacrament and yet you are denying it. I think that now I will have to deny it to you, Charlotte, and perhaps once you have pushed through the pain and loneliness of the loss you will find that this denial, this doing without, will affirm and make clear, rather than negate or obscure, the essential nature of what has been withdrawn.”
“You don’t understand,” Mariana said. “For me he is all the sacrament I need. He is—he is the archangel Michael, he is—”
… “But he’s her lover,” Antonio said in surprise.
Violet was walking the length of the long hall. The harpsichord was at the far end, as distant from the group of chairs around the great fireplace as though in a concert hall. Joaquim was curled up on a huge white fur rug in front of the fire, sound asleep, his guitar beside him.
“You’re mad,” Charlotte said. She was enraged. Her cheeks burned with more than the fever that had returned with evening, though not as fiercely as the night before. Violet had not in the end allowed her to come down to dinner, but afterwards, when Antonio and Joaquim came with their guitars, she had come down to lie on the sofa, wrapped in a soft rug very different from the doctor’s moth-eaten one.
“But why? Why should they not be lovers?”
“Violet and Dr. Ferreira!”
“Yes. Of course. Everybody knows this.”
“The things that ‘everybody knows’ are frequently not so.”
“But why should it not be so?”
“Because they’re too old.”—Because it would be wrong, it would be a sin, new sin compounding the old sin. Because she was my father’s mistress. Yes, in Beja that would be the word. She belonged to my father. She left her own husband. But she didn’t leave him for father—That was years and years—And she left Patrick when he was a baby. If she has to, she will leave anybody. So why should I expect her to stay with a memory? Even the memory of James Clement?
“This is the first American thing you have said. We do not consider people too old for love. We do not approve of—what I believe you call planned obsolescence. We are not refrigerators to be replaced in ten years. That is a cold concept. We are warm-blooded and our blood does not turn cold when we have acquired experience. We find knowledge not dull but desirable.”
“That’s not what I mean,” she said.
“But you are shocked. Why are you shocked? Is it that we have a different feeling about these things here than in America? Is it that you consider this kind of an affair to be sinful?”
Sin was not what she wanted to think about. Why did it keep coming up? It was, in any case, impossible for her to think of sin in connection with Violet. Violet was a point of reference, and a point of reference cannot, of its essence, sin. Therefore Violet could not sin. Therefore what was not sin for Violet might perfectly well be mortal sin for Charlotte. No, sin was out of style.
—But I have always had my own style, she thought with unconscious arrogance.
She looked rather wildly round the room. On a table between two windows was a photograph in a silver frame.
It was Andrew.
No black and white photograph could really look like Andrew because it could not show his extraordinary coloring. He had Charlotte’s lemon-colored hair and Patrick’s Celtic blue eyes with the great dark lashes. The black of the lashes and the paleness of the hair were in beautiful apposition. Nor could any photograph catch the moving joy of the smile that lit the entire face so that there was no contradiction between dark and ligh
t. Nor could it catch the vividness of Andrew’s conversation that followed her about as she worked in the kitchen, as she ran the vacuum: holding the handle of the vacuum—he called it helping—he had said one day, “The wind was blowing hard this morning and I decided the wind was God blowing. God blows all over everywhere, all over the earth, and all over the whole world, and all over the earth planets. Mummie, why does gravelty keep us down. What is gravelty?”
Gravelty was not keeping Charlotte down or even keeping her in orbit. She was blown out with the cold wind.
Antonio’s eyes followed hers to the picture. “It is a beautiful child,” he said. “Is it perhaps an early picture of your husband?”
“No, my son. Be quiet. Violet—”
The first clear notes from the harpsichord rang through the room. Violet sat upright, her fingers moving in the strong and simple structure of one of Bach’s Two Part Inventions, her horn-rimmed spectacles making her look more than ever like an owl. Was it precisely Violet’s discipline that allowed such a sense of passion to enflesh the bones of the music? Charlotte had struggled with this particular Two Part Invention as a schoolgirl: could it have been the same music?
(“But you must listen, Charlotte,” Sister Thomas More had told her, coming into the room where Charlotte was practicing. “In a Two Part Invention it is not just a monotonous repetition of a single theme. Bach is saying something, something important, and he is saying this one important thing in two clear and separate ways, and you must keep them clear and separate, at the same time that you must make us know that they are uttering the same cry. And with Bach, dear child, it is always a cry of affirmation, of passionate affirmation.”)
—If Violet has a lover, if Violet truly has a lover, if any one of her affairs is completely monogamous, it is her affair with Johann Sebastian …
Antonio leaned closer to Charlotte, whispering through the form of the music, “I wish you would let me help you. I could, you know.”
She whispered back, “You already have. Thank you.”
“You know that’s not what I mean. You do owe some things to yourself, you know. It hurts me that there is this strange, longing sense of unfulfillment in you …”
(“All this emphasis on fulfilling ourselves,” Sister Mary Michael had said to Charlotte, “is backwards. We do not fulfill ourselves. We open ourselves up so that we may be filled.”)
“… I could help you realize what you really are. You don’t know how remarkable a person you are. I have never met anyone like you. Please—”
“Hush. Don’t talk while Violet’s playing.” She leaned back and closed her eyes until the last notes died into silence.
Violet raised her hands from the keyboard. “Now Tonio and Joaquim will play it on their guitars.”
The little boy picked up his guitar, shifting his unchildlike attention from listening to playing. “The Bach, Jacopo,” Violet called from the end of the long room. “The one with the two voices calling back and forth to each other.”
The music came sweet, a little shrill, from the two guitars, the round treble Portuguese guitar in Joaquim’s grubby hands (Violet had made him wash, but the dirt was permanently ground in), the conventional, larger Spanish guitar in Antonio’s slender fingers. The combination of the two instruments had a strange poignancy, and it was this, together with the look of concentration on Joaquim’s child’s face that almost undid Charlotte, the look, and the way the boy’s long lashes smudged his dark eyes in the same way that …
With a look of concentration as stern as Joaquim’s she turned towards the picture in the silver frame, towards the little boy caught there in that one arrested moment of time, Andrew safely there in the silver frame between the two long windows, Andrew invulnerable there, time stopped, arrested, defeated.
She did not hear Antonio and Joaquim playing Violet’s arrangement of the Two Part Invention, the theme moving back and forth from guitar to guitar, from the low voice to the high, questioning, answering, moving in time, in space; but when it was over she applauded, and Antonio and Joaquim bowed, first to Violet, then to Charlotte, as though to a large audience.
“We should play some Fado for you,” Antonio said.
She brought herself back into time, to winter in Beja, to Violet’s villa, and asked with formal courtesy, “What is Fado?”
“A special kind of Portuguese—I don’t know—Dame Violet, what would you call it. Folk song? Ballad?”
“I would call it only Fado,” Violet said. “It is always full of saudade. And don’t ask us to translate that for you, Charlotte, because it is a Portuguese word which is utterly untranslatable. It means, in part, passion, unrequited love, nostalgia, tristesse, but none of these or even all of them gives you a really adequate idea. Only the music itself can do that. One of your own songs, please, Tonio.”
Antonio nodded submissively, but Charlotte suspected that he was delighted at being asked to show off. Joaquim yawned, looking younger than he was, looking not more than five, a wide, pink, kitten’s yawn, then shook the tangled dark hair out of his eyes.
“Jacopo doesn’t like Fado,” Violet said.
“This one,” Antonio announced, “is, of course, a love song, specifically for Mariana.” He spoke briefly to Joaquim in Portuguese, and the little boy struck a series of minor chords. “I have translated this into both French and English—German is not good for Fado—and though I shall sing you the English version I think I am coming to prefer the French.”
His tenor voice was amazingly simple, clear and rather light. Charlotte leaned back, looking at Violet who still sat upright on the bench at the harpsichord, listening with the usual severe consideration she gave to music that was not her own.
If I could know
If I could tell
How love can grow
And thrive in hell,
How heaven is caught
And held in sin
And a soul that fell
Has God within
I’d turn back time.
Enact again
A heavenly crime
Paid for in pain.
“But it’s beautiful!” Charlotte cried. “It’s lovely, Tonio!”
Antonio shrugged. “It’s not much. Remember, Dr. Ferreira says there’s a poet on every street corner. I’m just on one corner.”
Why had that stuck so in Antonio’s craw?
“Play it again, please do,” Charlotte urged.
… a heavenly crime.
Paid for in pain.
She must have paid for it, Sister Mariana. The payment would have started long before she knew of it. It would have started the moment she replaced God with Noël, but, more tangibly, it would have started the moment the affair stopped being private, the moment that the watching nun saw Noël climb up to the balcony, the moment his friends realized that his visits to the convent were not the innocent times he tried to make them believe.
Was it simply that they knew him too well? That what had broken Mariana’s life in two had not basically changed the Frenchman at all? That he was still one of them, hunting, drinking, going to the wine cellars in Mertola and Beja, where he would have, in the end, been unable to refrain from boasting …
“How could they ever have thought it could be kept secret?” Antonio asked as Joaquim curled up once again on the rug, though still holding his guitar in readiness, and Violet walked the length of the room to sit across from Charlotte. “I don’t imagine he really wanted to.”
Violet drawled, leaning down and touching Joaquim’s tangle of curls. “Yes, it would have been quite something to brag about. Give him a bit too much wine, a few friends wanting to know why he was always riding off in the direction of Beja, and I imagine it would have leaked out.”
“What is there,” Antonio asked, “about a nun? Charl—Mrs. Napier has somewhat the same quality.”
She cut him off sharply. “You make generalities about my being an American, you make generalities about my having been in convent schools. That
’s not how you write poetry. Poetry comes from particulars.”
“I’m quite aware of that,” Antonio flashed back, “and sometimes from seeing in a particular something particular that nobody else sees.” Then he turned from anger to his quick, confident smile. “And of course that’s when the trouble would have come. When this very particular romance began to leak out. If one of the sisters at one of your convents had an affair with a soldier, do you think she could keep it a secret for long?”
“You keep saying how different things were then,” Charlotte said. “It’s not the kind of thing that happens in convents today.”
“But a group of people living together—any group of people—doesn’t change that much. Don’t you think it would have leaked out in Mariana’s convent?”
“Yes,” Charlotte agreed. “I suppose it would have, sooner or later.”
Antonio held out a match for Violet’s cigarette. “They’d have tried to hush it up, of course, to convince people nothing was happening, that it was just the usual unfounded gossip. But certainly sooner or later someone would have enjoyed making Baltazar suspicious. And then I see him as a clever one, that Noël Saint-Leger. I can just hear him pouring it on Baltazar.”
Antonio’s voice became smooth, frighteningly plausible. “As for my physical pleasures, dear Baltazar, I find they are sufficiently satisfied by the more acceptable local means. Even if your aunt’s convent weren’t different from the picture we’ve been given of Portuguese convents, I could hardly afford to get involved with a Portuguese noblewoman, nun or no. You ought to know that. I have my career ahead of me and you must be aware that I have no intention of jeopardizing it. I believe you told me—or your father may have—that your sister is being trained to become next abbess. She undoubtedly has the same sense of family obligation that I do.”
The Love Letters Page 24