Love Letters

by Madeleine L'engle

  “Yes, Father,” Dona Brites said. “I see the analogy. But she cannot start doing it herself, as you call it, until she has repented.”

  “Do you think I’m not aware of that? Do you think I’m not aware that doing it herself means doing it with her hand in the hand of God? But we cannot repent for her. We can only repent with her, and for ourselves.”

  “Yes,” the abbess said. “But I am tired. We are all tired.”

  After her French class (which had been Mariana’s) Beatriz was so tired that she remained at her desk in the damp schoolroom, ostensibly looking through papers, although actually she was not seeing the penned translations she had asked the older girls to do for her.

  “Sister.”

  She did not hear.

  “Sister. Sister Beatriz.”

  She looked up. It was Peregrina Alcoforado. Beatriz said coldly, “You are supposed to go to sewing now.”

  Peregrina stared back, equally coldly. Her voice was faintly contemptuous. “I am tired of being treated like a child. I want to talk about Mariana.”

  Beatriz shuffled her papers. “I have nothing to say.”

  “You loved her,” Peregrina persisted. “Not idiotically, like the rest of them, like—the dogs snuffling around a scent they can’t understand. You loved her enough to go on loving her now, didn’t you?”

  Beatriz looked down at her long white fingers holding Ampara’s messily penned paper. “Yes.”

  Peregrina continued, standing, her legs slightly apart, braced. “Enough not to blame her for everything that is wrong with you, yourself, the way everybody else is doing.”

  Now Beatriz looked up at the girl. Peregrina had lost weight. Her eyes were dark and smudged with fatigue. Her hair was unkempt. She looked ugly and old.

  “It’s not all her fault,” Peregrina said. “That’s nonsense. The atmosphere of an entire convent shouldn’t depend on one sister. And yet, while she’s here, at the gates or in her cell, it’s as though we had a wild beast in our midst who might break the chains at any time and kill us all.”

  “Sit down,” Beatriz said peremptorily.

  Suddenly a child again, Peregrina moved obediently to her chair and sat. “I am being driven mad. Her Grace, the sisters, everybody treats me like a child. I cannot stand Urraca or Ampara or any of them any longer. My father frightens me. When he is drunk he forgets that I am his daughter. I have to have somebody to talk to. Don’t tell me to go to my confessor. I have. Father Pessanha’s penances don’t help. I have to talk to somebody who doesn’t have to be wise, who doesn’t have to know God’s will. Do you know God’s will?”

  “No.”

  “Thank you,” Peregrina said.

  Beatriz put the papers down. There were three books on the desk and she pulled out the bottom one. Without opening it or looking at it, but with her long steady fingers holding it closely, she said, “If I have learned anything from all this sorry business it is that I can learn nothing, I can understand nothing. I had thought of God as a God of reason. My vocation was to a God of reason. I see now that I was wrong. That he is not. Why should he be?”

  “What is he, then?” Peregrina asked.

  Now Beatriz opened the book, looked silently and unhurriedly until she found the portion she wanted, then said, “St. Chrysostom,” and read, “It is an impertinence to say that He who is beyond the apprehension of even the higher Powers can be comprehended by us earthworms, or compassed and compromised by the weak forces of our understanding.”

  She looked up from the book and across the row of empty chairs to Peregrina, the picture of a meek and dutiful schoolgirl, her hands obediently folded. “You have a mind, so I think you can understand that. And then, after that, we fall into the mistake of thinking that because we cannot comprehend God we can escape him.”

  Peregrina made a grimace that might have passed for a smile. “Like my father. My poor papa who is so afraid of being laughed at. He doesn’t understand God so he doesn’t believe in him. He’s afraid God might laugh.”

  “It isn’t only your father,” Beatriz said quietly. “I’ve just begun to come up out of the destruction of faith that followed my own misconception of God. Now I know that I have no conception of God at all. All I know is that he won’t let me alone.”

  “Then you think that perhaps—”

  Beatriz nodded. “I think he won’t let Mariana alone, either.” She began looking through the book again. “We’ve all been too busy trying to understand with our minds, as though our minds were capable of—And Mariana never did this.” She read aloud again, “What do we hear from the Angels? Do they inquire and reason meticulously among themselves about God’s nature? By no means. What do they do? They praise him.”

  She shut the book. “That is what Mariana did. Her life was a song of praise. So perhaps we made the mistake of thinking that she was an angel—or at least angelic. But she is a human being, and she has spoken only with fallen angels for a long time.”

  “Do you think,” Peregrina asked, “that she will ever praise God again?”

  “Oh, yes,” Beatriz said definitely. “When she gives up worshipping man.”

  “Noël?”

  “Perhaps it was Noël at first. Now it is only herself.”

  Anything that has to do with you has completely replaced my own life.… No one should have treated me this way.… The thing that is impossible for me to bear is your indifference. I realize from your arrogant protestations of love and all the ridiculous civilities of your last letter that you’ve received all of my letters to you, and that they didn’t touch you at all. And no matter how ungracious I think you are I’m still able to be plunged into despair because I can no longer deceive myself with the hope that perhaps my letters were never delivered to you, that you never received them. I hate your truthfulness; did I ever ask you for it?… The heart makes a god of the one who wakens it.…”

  … “I made a god out of my point of reference,” Charlotte said. Julia had brought bouillon out to the garden, and she sat with the doctor, sipping the warm liquid. “The idea was all right. I just pushed it over into—a kind of sacrilege, I suppose. Wanting from people what I should want only from God.”

  “You are talking now as though you believed in him.” With his usual relish the doctor picked up the lemon slice from his soup bowl and ate it.

  “Oh, that—” she said, vaguely.

  “I think you’re missing the point,” the doctor said, stretching his big body out to the sun, “the point to your life. You condemn yourself for your love of people, even your love of Patrick. You don’t need to justify being Patrick’s wife, being a mother, as your career. It has been a true passion with you, as it is not to all women, and it is as creative a passion as Violet’s fugues, or your father’s strange and brilliant books. Or as Patrick’s surgeon’s knife. Don’t underestimate it. Don’t underestimate yourself.”

  She said in a low voice, “I hardly think that would be possible.”

  “If you want to speak foolishly I am not going to flatter you.”

  Quick to flush under reproof, she said, “It must have been hard on her, too.”

  He sighed in exasperation, “On whom?”

  “His wife.”

  “Whose wife?”

  She looked up in surprise at his not knowing. “Noël’s.”

  “I dare say it was. Although these things were looked on differently, then.”

  “Even so, it must have hurt her to read those letters.”

  “Many things hurt, Charlotte. You must stop paying so much attention to pain.”

  “How could he have let them be published? That was a vile thing to do. Even if he didn’t take them seriously, still to let them be published was unpardonable.”

  “We all do unpardonable things. Some people think they were stolen from him.”

  “How could they have been stolen?”

  The doctor smiled at her vehemence. “Just as Noël couldn’t quite keep from talking about Mariana when he was i
n Portugal, so probably, when he’d had too much to drink, he showed her letters to one or two of his friends. It wouldn’t have been difficult for someone to ‘borrow’ the letters long enough to get them copied. And once they were published they were evidently a staggering success. They were, you might say, the first best-seller.”

  “It was still unforgivable of him,” she said. She stood up and walked away from him towards the driveway. At a distance, almost hidden in the deep shadows of the poplars, she saw a figure on a bicycle. It was the child, Joaquim, whom Violet called Jacopo after Dante’s son …

  Behind the child came a truck, stirring up a cloud of dust. Had the road dried so quickly from all that rain? The child on the bicycle swerved. There was a scream of brakes.

  God.

  No!

  Not again!

  She ran gasping down the road.

  When she reached the truck Joaquim was untangling himself from the fallen bicycle. The truck had stopped safely behind him. Blood was trickling down his leg from a long scratch. Otherwise he was unhurt.

  “You idiot!” she screamed at him through the blinded fury of her pounding heartbeats. “You could have been killed! You ought not to be allowed out this way if you can’t be more careful!” She went on shouting at him as he stood there, straightening out the handlebars of his bicycle and looking at her in a completely uncomprehending way.

  She could not stop. The little boy stood and stared. The truck driver honked at them and Joaquim pulled his bicycle over to the side of the road, so that the truck, with a load of earthen wine bottles, could drive on up to the house.

  She was unaware that she was crying until she was caught and held from behind. She turned around and pressed her face against the rough tweed of the doctor’s vest. The sobs shook her so that if he had not held her with the strength of his great arms it seemed that she would have been torn apart. He spoke over her head to the little boy, who wheeled his bicycle down the road to the house in a subdued manner. When the tears had abated somewhat the doctor led her back to the garden.

  “It’s all right, Charlotte. It is all right. Let it go. Don’t try to hold it back.”

  But she could not have held back.

  At last the sobbing spent itself. She lay back in one of Violet’s garden chairs, breathing deeply, slowly.

  He sat down across from her. “Charlotte.”

  “You could call me Cotty if you felt like it,” she said. “Violet does. Joaquim—it made me—” She paused, swallowed. “Joaquim—”

  “It’s all right, Cotty. I understand.”

  “Dr. Ferreira, I’m pregnant.”

  He looked at her quietly, without surprise. “Yes. I suspected that you might be.”

  “How? I didn’t say anything, did I?”

  “No. I’m a doctor, Cotty. And you have a rather extraordinary way of telling people things without words. It is very good, that you will have another baby. Violet will be very happy.”

  But it was not Violet’s happiness that was at stake here. There was something else. She had to take it out and look at it now. It had to be faced.

  “I’m glad someone will be happy,” she said.

  “Are you not? And isn’t Patrick?”

  “We ought to be, oughtn’t we?”

  Now, Charlotte: Now. Look at it with open eyes. You can’t go running across oceans indefinitely. There are not that many oceans.

  She picked up her bouillon cup and drained it compulsively. Without thinking, as she always handed her cherries to Patrick, she took her lemon slice from her cup and handed it to the doctor. “I will have the baby,” she said, “but I will not go back to Patrick.”

  Chewing the lemon, he asked, “Is the choice up to you? Do you have a right to make it?”

  “Don’t I?”

  When she had told Patrick about the baby, he had looked at her coldly and said, “By whom?”

  “But he didn’t mean it,” the doctor said.

  “Patrick is not in the habit of saying things he doesn’t mean.”

  The doctor took her hands in the gentle strength of his grasp. “Then why did he say it?”

  “Because I am a fool.”

  “Are you telling me that he had cause?”

  “No. It is Patrick’s child.”

  The doctor’s grip tightened. “Then it was an unpardonable thing to say.”

  She shook her head. “No. No. It’s not that easy.” Her voice shook. She looked at him, opening her eyes wide to stop fresh tears. When she was back in control she said, “I’ve kept wanting someone else to do it for me. And no one can. To restore a right relationship between Patrick and me. I’ve wanted someone to make it easy for me. For me. And I’ve done the unpardonable, too. I told Gus what Patrick said. I wanted Gus to think Patrick was terrible. And he did. He said it was unforgivable. So I went back to the apartment and packed and then I flew to Lisbon. That night. Because Patrick had done something unforgivable. But it doesn’t mean anything, forgiveness. I don’t understand it. It doesn’t even enter into it. The pardonable things: forgiveness doesn’t even come into those, they’re so easy. And the unpardonable things: forgiveness can’t come into them, can it? So it isn’t forgiveness that’s the problem, ever, is it?”

  “What is, then, Cotty?”

  She spoke with great formality. “I have never in the Mosaic sense of the word been unfaithful to Patrick. I have never legally committed adultery. But in Jesus’ sense of the word I have been unfaithful over and over again. This is worse—I do know this—than the casual adultery that has become almost accepted among most of the people we know. I wanted to sleep with Gus when I couldn’t get near Patrick. And with other men, too. I was filled with feelings of—isn’t the word concupiscence? As for Patrick, I don’t know. I didn’t even ask myself what he’d done or hadn’t done or with whom. When the relationship between two people is broken as ours was broken, the outward act of infidelity is only the smallest part of it.”

  Her voice trembled again, and she raised the empty bouillon cup to her lips. Putting it back on the cracked green paint of the garden table, she said, “Yes, it was unpardonable. But we all do things that are unpardonable. Over and over again.” She turned away from him, looking down at the fresh grass.

  In an even, emotionless voice she told him about how the child she was now carrying had been conceived.

  She had gone to the ballet with Gus, all Tchaikovsky, so that she felt drowned in the lushness of the music, in velvet and gold, in the unsubstantial dream of gauze tutus, in the vacant passion in the eyes of the ballerinas. Afterwards Gus took her over to Beekman Place where he had just bought an apartment.

  “I want you to see it, Charlotte, to grace it with your presence.”

  They were walking across town and as he spoke she tripped and only his steadying arm kept her from falling. She laughed. “If it’s grace you’re looking for—”

  “The place is full of fresh paint,” he said, keepng his arm around her, “and emptiness. I don’t move in until next week. And I want to see you in the rooms so that I will know where things need to go. You will walk through rooms that are unfilled, unfulfilled, and your presence will bring them to life.”

  They turned into the building and she gave him a startled glance. He laughed angrily. “Doesn’t sound like rough Gus, does it? Didn’t know I was a poet, did you? I used to write reams of poetry when I was in college. I used to—” He snapped his jaw shut and they rode up in the elevator in silence.

  He opened the door to the apartment and the odor of paint was almost suffocating. He strode across the large, empty living room and opened one of the windows that looked out over the river, and a gust of damp air came in. She followed him as he began moving back and forth between living room and aseptic kitchen, bringing in first a red and white checked tablecloth which he spread carefully in the exact center of the bare, polished floor, then a bottle of wine, glasses, a breadboard, a long loaf of French bread, and a chunk of cheese. He sat down and held out
his hand to pull Charlotte to the floor beside him. Raising one eyebrow as though to denigrate himself he said, “‘A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou Singing beside me in the wilderness.’ It is a wilderness, Charlotte. You are all that makes it bearable for me.”

  “You’re nice, Gus,” she said softly, embarrassed, “to build me up this way.”

  “I don’t build you up. Why does Patrick tear you down?”

  “He doesn’t.”

  “He does, and he always has. I’ve watched him do it, and I’ve watched your terrible efforts to please him. You hop and dance to his bidding like a little dog going through all its tricks so that its master won’t whip it. You cringe like a beaten puppy.”

  She turned away, staring down at the checked tablecloth on the floor. “That’s not true! Patrick doesn’t—” She reached for the bread and broke it.

  Gus took a piece from her, turned it in his strong and tender hands. “To break bread with you, Charlotte, is an act of such intimacy—”

  “Don’t,” she said. “I’d better go, Gus. This isn’t a good idea.”

  “It’s the best idea I ever had,” he said. “And you’re not going yet. Not until—” He poured the wine, handed her a glass, then sat looking at her over the rim of his, motionless, silent. She held her fingers about her glass to steady them. “Drink,” Gus said. She raised her glass and drank. “Drink it all,” he commanded, and she drained the glass. He refilled it. “It is time,” he said, “that you stop subordinating yourself to other people. You’ve always done it. First your father. I’ll accept it that he was a misunderstood genius, but he devoured you.”