Love Letters

by Madeleine L'engle

  … As Violet had left, having crossly told Charlotte to “stay in bed until João comes.”

  Charlotte slept, roused briefly, slept again. For the moment it was all she had to do. No responsibilities. No decisions to make (Had not all decisions already been made? Were they revocable?). She put her arms around one of Violet’s soft, square feather pillows, as though in this way she could hold the safety of sleep; as long as she clutched the pillow she needn’t wake up. Then, perhaps because she was holding it too tightly, sleep left her. She was wide awake, her eyes dry, the lids like sand, her mouth like the Sahara. She poured herself a glass of water from the carafe on the bed table, pressing the rim of the glass against her teeth as though to keep from crying, although in this strange desert through which she was wandering she was still far from tears.

  She had not cried for a long time.

  She had not cried since—

  Blindly she reached for the books beside her, for the letters of the Portuguese nun.

  I gave my life to you the first moment I saw you, and it is my pleasure to sacrifice it to you.

  No.

  Things aren’t the same. No two things are ever the same. So even after I take away the obvious differences I mustn’t put too much weight on the similarities.

  She wanted to leave God for man.

  But I don’t want to do that. Or the reverse, either. I don’t want to leave man for God. That would be very tidy, wouldn’t it? And much too easy. Get thee to a nunnery, Cotty. It could be done. There are convents that take widows.

  I’m not a widow.

  I’m not—

  So it couldn’t be done. They wouldn’t have me, even if I wanted to. And I don’t. I’m not that much of an idiot. I do at least know that this kind of thinking isn’t only stupid and self-deluding, it’s downright sacrilegious.

  And there’s not much point to that at this point.

  I gave my life to you the first moment I saw you, and it is my pleasure to sacrifice it to you.

  No—

  why should I not try to remember all the wonderful ways in which you showed me your love? They made me so happy that it would be ungrateful of me now if I didn’t still adore you with the same ecstasy my passion gave me when I was secure in your love—

  No—

  She turned from the first letter to the last.

  —you have finally persuaded me that you don’t love me any more, and that therefore I must no longer love you—

  —I’ve asked the Most Reverend Mother to take care of everything for me. I have always confided in her, not only about this, but about everything

  But Violet doesn’t want to know, and I don’t suppose the abbess did, if it came to that …

  The doctor knocked and came into the bedroom. He put the back of his hand against her cheek, then took her wrist in his fingers. “You still have fever, though not like last night. How are you?”

  “All right.”

  “That is no answer. Open your mouth. There is still some inflammation in your throat. Headache?”

  “Yes. But nothing like yesterday.”

  “No. You are mending. Let me listen to your chest … Yes. That, too, is better. I think we need not worry any longer about pneumonia. You are bouncing back like a ball. Now.” Methodically, deliberately, he put his stethoscope away. As he snapped his bag shut he said, “You have upset Violet. You and your Patrick.”

  “Her Patrick, too.”

  “But you came to her. Why?”

  “I needed help.”

  “From Violet?”

  She turned her face away. “It’s not as illogical as it might seem.”

  He took her hands in his, turning her towards him. “Child, I am protecting Violet and hurting you, am I not?”

  She moved her head numbly, but whether in affirmation or negation she could not have said.

  “But you shouldn’t be such a child,” he said. “You are a woman. Why is it that American women are so immature?”

  Here it came again, the generalities about Americans. She had affirmed her Americanism to Antonio; now she said, “I am not ‘an American woman.’ I am not a—a platitude. I am not a cliché. I am Charlotte Clement Napier, and if I am—backwards—it is because I am myself, and not a category.”

  To her surprise he smiled. “Bravo! Now you are being you. Do you think while you are being thus delightful, you could tell me why you came running so wildly and wilfully to Beja?”

  “For a point of reference,” she said.

  “I have heard Violet called many things, but never this. Would you care to explain?”

  She looked at him warily, but his deepset brown eyes were kind, concerned; it was simply his way of speaking. As she pondered, he pulled a small gilt chair over to the bed and lowered his bulk onto it.

  “Supposing,” she said, slowly, “you were sitting in a train standing still in a great railroad station. And supposing the train on the track next to yours began to move. It would seem to you that it was your train that was moving, and in the opposite direction. The only way you could tell about yourself, which way you were going, or even if you were going anywhere at all, would be to find a point of reference, something standing still, perhaps a person on the next platform; and in relation to this person you could judge your own direction and motion. The person standing still on the platform wouldn’t be telling you where you were going or what was happening, but without him you wouldn’t know. You don’t need to yell out the train window and ask directions. All you need to do is see your point of reference. So I wasn’t—I wasn’t going to bother Violet. No yelling out the train window. I just wanted to see her. I wasn’t going to dump everything in her lap. I didn’t want her to tell me what to do. I just thought—if I could see her and talk to her, she could be my point of reference.”

  “But why Violet, child? Violet of all people?”

  “There are reasons why she seemed the—only person.”

  … Violet had come to the United States for a series of concerts and Patrick had brought her to the house on Seventy-fourth Street.

  And the house came alive again. James Clement came alive again. The small, vital, unfrozen core expanded, and he lay no longer on the black leather couch, gone off into some dark state of nonbeing.

  And Patrick: long before he came back to Charlotte to take her out to dinner and ask to bring Violet to see James Clement, he had learned about martinis.

  And Charlotte: if the cherry in the martini had saved her virtue it was Violet (not Patrick) who broke through the sheer glass wall of her innocence. There is more to the adult world than the correct making of martinis.

  It was during her spring vacation from college and she was spending the evening with Sister Mary Michael; she always went to see Sister Mary Michael during vacations. Sister had been talking to her about the attitude of young people in schools and colleges towards morality, about their refusal to be responsible to love.

  “I can’t reach the students,” Sister Mary Michael said despairingly. “The Reverend Mother wants me to talk to them and they put up great blocks of interference because—oh, I see all the reasons why. But I must go on trying and praying for grace and I must not forget that to think that chastity and sex are opposites is a blind mistake. A wife refusing her husband relations because she is angry or wants her own way about something is being just as unchaste as a prostitute, because she is equally prostituting the meaning of love. In the same way a prude rejecting sex as being vile is being unchaste. But this all must be seen in a Christian framework, Cotty. There are no new morals. There never has been. There never will be.” And then, as Charlotte was saying goodbye, “Thanks for listening to me sounding off, Cotty. Thanks for understanding. God bless you.”

  Charlotte walked home, asking herself, “But did I—do I understand?”

  She climbed the brownstone steps and let herself in. The library was dark; only the night light was on in the hall. She went upstairs and there was a light coming from under her fath
er’s door. She tapped and entered, and there was Violet, wearing enormous, hornrimmed spectacles, sitting up in bed reading the newspaper.

  She knew only that where her father had been dead he was now alive.

  She knew only that Reuben and Essie, paragons of rectitude, worshipped Violet.

  At first she had thought that of course they would get married, because wasn’t that what one did? But the only marriage that was talked about was hers and Patrick’s.

  She came home from an evening at Patrick’s apartment and, as she turned her key and pushed open the door, she heard a cry and Violet came running down the stairs, loose robe flying, eyes wild. “The doctor, quickly, call him, Cotty—”

  There had been life in the house and now there was death. Charlotte and Violet had stood by James Clement’s bed waiting for the doctor during those brief moments of unspeakable pain. It was over before the doctor rang the doorbell. It was Charlotte and Violet who had shared it.

  … She could not tell Dr. Ferreira.

  “It was just—there are reasons why she seemed the only person.”

  He pressed her hand. His voice was gentle. “It is a dangerous thing to have a living person as a point of reference.”

  She spoke over an edge of desperation. “Why?”

  “A living person is usually found to be moving, too. You can’t ever expect living people to be predictable, and if your point of reference starts moving, and in an unexpected direction, then where are you?”

  She closed her eyes. “What about a dead person?”

  “That sounds rather macabre. How dead?”

  “Oh—about three hundred years.”

  He smiled. “Sister Mariana?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have to have somebody?”

  “Yes. At this point, yes. Yes. I do.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m lonely. Abysmally, unutterably lonely.”

  He spread out his great, gentle hands (far too gentle for a keyboard, a harpsichord) in a gesture of half-amused exasperation. “But my poor Charlotte, loneliness is the natural state of humankind. It is what distinguishes man from beast. An animal can be solitary and live, but in loneliness it dies. But we: we live in loneliness. There is nothing else.”

  Behind his beard, below his mop of bear-brown-grey hair, his mouth and eyes were bleak with pain. Charlotte, unwilling to add to his hurt but unable to contain herself, turned her eyes away from his and let her gaze rest on the black band circling his unpressed sleeve, and asked, “Were you lonely when—your wife was alive?”

  A feeling of tension came into the room, but his voice, as always, was courteous, controlled. “It was easier to bear. That’s all.”

  “Then—” she said eagerly, “then maybe that’s what I mean. It’s—I can’t bear the loneliness right now. I’m torn in two by it.”

  He covered her hand with his. The nails were ridged, a little horny, cut short, immaculately clean. The touch of skin felt warm and vital. “But nobody can bear it for you,” he told her. “Even when you love, and are loved, you have to bear it yourself.”

  “But when you’re loved it’s easier. You said it yourself.”

  “Charlotte. Dear Charlotte. Yes. In a sense you’re right. But easiness has never been a criterion of value.”

  Now she could not restrain herself. She sat upright. “So, because it makes things easier, you’re devaluing love?”

  He brought both hands down in a definite gesture on his knees. “Not in the least. Its value is so high that it cannot be estimated. And there is nothing easy about it.”

  “But you just said—”

  “No, Charlotte. You said.”

  … “Then you think—you think I don’t really love the Frenchman?”

  “My child, you will have to answer that question yourself.”

  “It would be so terribly wrong to love him?”

  “Love, the kind of love I have been trying to show you, can never be wrong because it is always an expression of God’s will. And, since God has led you to a vocation, how can this—infatuation with a Frenchman you hardly know be anything but counter to his will?”

  It was hot in the confessional. Father Duarte’s beard was damp with sweat. Mariana’s hands were moist as she pressed them together. “I’m so lonely, Father. All of a sudden I’m so terribly lonely—”

  “Because you are turning away from God and that, Mariana, is the ultimate loneliness.”

  “Father, help me—”

  “My child, if only I knew how—”

  She left the stifling confines of the confessional. There were others waiting. They would be wondering why she had taken so long. She knelt at the altar rail, stretching her arms out and up towards the statue of the virgin.

  “Dear my Lady—sweet my queen—help me—”

  She said the prayers of her penance not once, but three times, then moved stiffly, blindly, out of the chapel, along the covered walk, out the arch that led to the rose garden, past the kitchen gardens, to a small herb garden at the back of the convent, and sank down onto a marble bench, plucking at her rosary. In the center of the garden was a little stone fountain, a purely secular fountain, a little grey dolphin spraying out a cool shower. The garden smelled of thyme and rosemary. Against the lichened stone of the fountain Sister Isabella, whose nose was as keen as her eyes were weak, had planted mint and violas, hen-and-chickens and chervil. There was a homely safety to the place. The young nun began to breathe more quietly, her fingers moved less restlessly over the rosary. Then both breath and fingers stopped as a shadow fell across her hands.

  It was, as she had known it would be, the Frenchman.

  “No.”

  “Sister—”

  She rose, clutching the beads. “No.”

  He stood there above her, the sun flashing its brilliance against his buttons. His face was tanned and healthy, the scar hardly visible as the shadows of the playing water splashed across his face. His eyes were warmly brown, his full lips quirked up at the corners.…

  —St. Michael

  He said, “I must speak to you.”

  St. Michael had a sword and flamed with passion, but there was no place for passion in the quietness of Sister Isabella’s herb garden.

  The rosary snapped under her tense fingers and the beads spilled onto the grass. “It is not allowed.”

  Rosary. Rosemary. The two together by the fountain. The rose of Mary. It stood, Sister Isabella said, for fidelity, for constancy.

  He knelt on one knee to pick up the beads, to drop them into her lap. “Sister, I have noticed that the other nuns receive soldiers.”

  “If you will come to the locutario—”

  “Damn the locutario.”

  But he came.

  … Dr. Ferreira held the book of letters lightly, slapping it against the palm of his hand, looking thoughtfully down at Charlotte and chewing on his straggly mustache. “Be careful with these letters, child. They are hardly history. And even history as we know it is nothing but the opinion of a few people, the very few people among all the billions of people in the world who have bothered to write down a record of what they think happened. Even the most objective of historians is ultimately subjective, even if only in what, out of countless scraps of knowledge, he selects.”

  “So how can anybody ever know?” Charlotte asked. “How can anybody ever know what really did happen? If I don’t know what is happening with me, how can I possibly hope to know what happened with Mariana and Noël?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “So that perhaps—just perhaps—I can know what is happening with myself.”

  “With yourself alone?”

  She shook her head impatiently. “It’s never anybody’s self alone, is it?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m glad you remember that.”

  She looked down at the broad gold of the wedding band on her finger. “It would be rather difficult to forget.”

  So might Mariana have looked at her
own hand: she might have stood there in the locutario, holding the grille, so that Noël could see the gold wedding band on her hand, the band of the bride of Christ.

  It would have been impossible in the locutario

  impossible

  So, then, to the end of the convent grounds, furthest from the complex of white buildings, at the secluded corner by the lily pond, he would have come again.

  And she, too.

  She would have come there.

  God. I did not come here of my own volition. Whose, then? You will have to help me. I do not understand. I do not understand anything.

  … “I used to think about God all the time.” Her voice was low, on one tone, as though the sunlight flashing against his buttons had hypnotized her. “Everywhere I turned he was in my thoughts. I was so close to him that it seemed to me that when I touched the bench where the sun had warmed it I could feel the touch of his hand.”

  It was the Frenchman’s hand that moved against the bright surface of the bench, lightly touching the edge of her habit. “And now?”

  She looked into the lily pond. There was no salt in the water, but it was not clear. A green summer scum was beginning to creep over the surface. “And now when I start to think about God I find that I’m thinking about you. When I look at the clean white marble of the bench I remember that you sat there, and the sun glinted against your hair, and the plume in your hat moved in the wind from the plains.”

  With one finger he stroked the dark material of her habit. “And this troubles you?”

  She looked up at him with a painful honesty, then lowered her eyes, so that the brightness of the gold within them was shadowed. “Yes. I was always happy when I thought about God.”

  “You’re not happy when you think about me?”

  She looked at her hands that lay in her lap, hands that were seldom dropped in idleness against the dark fabric of her habit. The sun gave the tangle of her lashes a burnished glint. “I didn’t know what happiness was until I thought about you.”