A Saint from Texas

by Edmund White

  She knew I was a foreigner and she said (in French, loudly and slowly), “I don’t speak English.”

  I smiled and said, “But we’re speaking French.”

  She panicked and wagged her finger to mean no. “Pas d’anglais,” she said repeatedly, louder and louder. I suppose she’d never spoken French with a foreigner before, not in her village of fifty souls in the Morvan.

  Spanky came by to inspect my piglets, stared unsmilingly straight ahead with unfocused eyes when I tried to introduce her to Marguerite, informed me, as if we were alone, that the people of the Morvan were so poor that they had been wet-nursing since ancient Roman times and were good at raising cattle and foundlings (les enfants abandonnés).

  Marguerite, I think, was reassured when she heard Spanky and me speaking French (though Spanky’s clipped, nasal French sounded to her a bit “Mexican,” as she later told me). She asked Spanky where I was from and Spanky, just to be mischievous, said, “Auvergne.” Marguerite nodded sagely—she’d suspected as much; the Auvergne sounded like another country to her far from France.

  Spanky also engaged a trainer for me, male of course, un professeur du sport, who came every day to the apartment for an hour’s exercise to help me regain my figure. Addy said that we should both go on a diet and that for two weeks we’d eat nothing but cabbage soup, morning, noon, and night—as much cabbage soup as we wanted. His valet, he said, had hinted it was time. On top of that Addy took a membership at the salle de sport at the Ritz, where they had a pool in the basement. Addy could do the sidestroke. Addy’s mother explained to me more intimate, genital exercises I could do to tighten my twat for her son. Right out of a Sophoclean tragedy, I thought. I was deeply offended.

  I missed my girls from Auvergne and was still seething that they’d been dismissed without my knowledge. Addy’s mother turned on a ten-watt smile when I asked her how to contact Geneviève, and said nothing. My greatest joy was my babies, my twins, who for me had the charm of being French aristocrats and little Texans. When I was a child I’d get cranky if I went more than three hours without seeing Yvette; now my children had become my perfect companions. I could spend hours holding them and looking at them, though Marguerite was always hovering nearby in case they needed to be fed. My milk was slowly drying up and that turned me sad, as though that made me less of a mother. Sometimes I broke down and cried. Were these the postpartum blues? I knew that all my life I’d been ruled by hormones, that reputedly the female brain was different from the male, but I’d never been conscious of the obvious oppressive reality before I’d had these extreme mood swings. I found them humiliating, as if I were entirely governed by my ovaries, which could bewitch my brain into inventing sad sentiments. When I was despairing, holding my babies comforted me. I thought it was my job to comfort them, but here I was absorbing their calming beta waves.

  When I said to Addy that I hoped he was writing down all his expenses for me to go over, he exploded and said, “Talleyrand accused the English of being a nation of shopkeepers; he’d probably say Americans were stingy card sharps.” He stroked his chin. “When Napoleon asked Talleyrand what America was like, Talleyrand said, ‘The United States has thirty-two denominations, Sire, and just one recipe.’ ”

  “Unlike the French,” I said, “we actually are religious. We believe in God and Jesus.”

  Addy hooted his scoffing laugh and said, “Like your crazy sister.”

  “My crazy sister is on her way to becoming a saint. You may have had crusaders in your family, but my sister will be a consecrated saint.”

  “We have lots of saints.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Dearest Yvonne,

  You were so wise in your letter, which took five weeks to arrive here, when you urged me to join the Church officially. I’ve now done so, have been baptized anew, been catechized—and now can receive Communion every day without anyone’s permission. As you know I never was a joiner (no Girl Scouts, no glee club, no sorority) but the Church is different, since it is an extension of Our Father in Heaven, the social expression of His will on Earth. It’s a community that extends horizontally across the continents and vertically through the ages: a cross! In any event it exalts and humbles me at the same time—exalts because it teaches me how to throw off the Old Woman and how to embrace the New; humbles because I am only one of many, not like the egotistical Protestant who believes that each man is his own priest but, instead, like the obedient Catholic who is guided by the holy priesthood founded on a rock (Saint Peter).

  I was instructed at every step by Oscar, my Swiss bishop. I almost said my “angel,” since sometimes it feels as if he really and truly has descended from above to help his weak sister Yvette. I feel his vast white wings enfolding me, his hand on my elbow as I travel through the dangerous valleys of doubt and sin. Since we were girls we were always taught to respect and defer to men, but that convention was difficult for me to obey since, in my outlandish pride, I judged most men inferior to me—less analytic, more boastful, less well read, stubborn. But Bishop Oscar truly is more intelligent than I, and wiser. He’s read most of the Greek and Roman classics, knows his Saint Thomas Aquinas by heart—and you’d be shocked how quickly he’s learned to speak, understand, and read English at my timid instruction (he has to insist I correct him, which I do now but always with tears in my eyes, as if I’m breaking a covenant or something). You’d laugh—he has a slight Texas accent! We always speak in English together; he says it’s our secret language.

  With the nuns and the children I tutor I speak Spanish, of course, and all modesty aside I’ve become quite fluent and have difficulty in understanding people only from other regions. (The Argentinians say the word for street, calle, which we pronounce as “cah-yeah,” as “cah-jay.”) This will sound like pride but the other day I had to show my American passport to someone to prove I wasn’t Colombian.

  As you warned me (indirectly), I have become overly attached to Bishop Oscar. I find everything about him adorable—the little hairs below his lower lip that his razor misses, his long but powerful hands when he works in the garden pulling weeds or training vines, the rank, doggy smell I used to complain of, his long, sunburned nose. I am especially moved by these words in The Imitation of Christ, which I read every day:

  “Love is watchful, and whilst sleeping still keepeth watch; though fatigued it is not weary, though pressed it is not forced, though alarmed it is not terrified, but like the living flame and the burning torch, it breaketh forth on high and securely triumpheth. If a man loveth, he knoweth what this voice crieth. For the ardent affection of the soul is a great clamour in the ears of God … Enlarge Thou me in love, that I may learn to taste with the innermost mouth of my heart how sweet it is to love, to be dissolved, and to swim in love … Love is swift, sincere, pious, pleasant, gentle, strong, patient, faithful, prudent, long-suffering …”

  When I read these words once to Oscar while he was decking the altar with flowers for Easter, he looked embarrassed and blushed. He recommended that I reread Cicero on friendship—a sort of love, to be sure, but less mystical, less delirious. Cicero argues that we can be friends only with virtuous men, since they would never ask us to do anything unpatriotic and at no time would we find ourselves torn between loyalty to a friend or to the state. He says that talking to a true friend is like talking to oneself—everything is understood in the intended way. Cicero reminds us that friends can grow apart, which is specially painful because of their former intimacy. It’s all rather dry except when Cicero tells us that friendship is the greatest pleasure. I think that’s what Bishop Oscar wants me to keep in mind: that friendship is the greatest earthly joy and that we can befriend only the virtuous.

  I’m now a novice in our order of nuns and since I’ve joined, Mother Superior is much kinder to me. She was always kind, in truth, though her methods were sometimes acerbic.

  Do you remember how I “saved” the life of little Hector Colimas in Austin? I always doubted that I could have actually per
formed that feat, but now they’re ascribing another miracle to me. In the local infirmary there was a young indigenous woman, a mother of three, who was diagnosed with renal cancer that had spread to her lungs. She asked me to touch her with my hands. I did so and recited a Hail Mary and two Our Fathers. It seems that two months later the doctor declared that an X-ray showed the tumor had nearly disappeared. Now when I walk through the streets with another nun on some errand, people often kneel and ask for my blessing.

  I feel like a total fraud! I’m delighted that Maria Crossifissa is recovering, but I’m embarrassed by all the fuss, especially since I’m only a novice. I was afraid some of the older nuns might be envious, though no one seems to be, thank God. On the contrary, they feel I’ve brought prestige to their convent. I quizzed the attending physician closely and asked if there were any scientific explanations for this spontaneous regression.

  He said, with a certain tremulous deference, that Maria had had a large kidney cancer with metastases to the lungs. After the kidney with the cancer was removed because the patient was in pain and had blood in her urine, the metastases in the lungs also disappeared, perhaps due to a boost in the immune system—or to a miracle. I smiled and said, “I would bet on the immune system.” He added, “It might come back. X-rays aren’t all that accurate.”

  “Let’s pray she stays healthy.” And so far she has. The people who ask for my blessing call me Mother Yvette, which sounds silly since we’re still in our twenties (though I do have a certain maternal width of the hips, probably from our starchy diet). I intend to fast, not to be thin but as penance for my many sins.

  But speaking of sins, look how selfish I am! I’ve asked you nothing about your husband or your glamorous Parisian life. Isn’t it odd how we’re twins and one of us is becoming a nun and the other has become a French baroness? It’s as if, discontent with our dull, empty past lives, we’ve run in opposite directions—you toward whatever is best in this vale of tears, the bounty and excitement of Paris, and I toward a nearly unnoticed rebirth in God’s love in a remote Colombian village. In Catholic terms you are the best of the “Old” Woman and I’m the worst of the “New,” i.e., reborn in Christ.

  Not a day goes by that I’m not besieged with doubt. If you think of it, everything the Christian believes is preposterous. The Virgin Birth. A human God. Miracles. A new religion or a reform movement in Judaism? A man who dies for our sins—what does that even mean? The Resurrection after three days in a shroud in a tomb. And on and on … Not to mention the uncomfortable parallels with other Middle Eastern religions (but here I’m not too strong in my learning)—the virgin birth connected with Astarte, the resurrection of Osiris, the expectation of the Hebrew Messiah, miracles galore in every desert faith … Of course, no sooner do such thoughts occur to me than I hear the Devil chuckling somewhere nearby. He even tried to mislead Our Lord.

  It’s not that it’s easier or more peaceful to be a believer. I’m not a Christian because it’s more comfortable. I’m a Christian because I believe. Simply believe. Just as we know the air is to breathe, food is to nourish, and water to drink, in the same way I have an instinctual appetite for God, a need to fill myself with His love (or wrath, even His silence). Just as I think, therefore I am, in the same way I am, therefore I believe. God’s love is an act of generosity on a scale as large as the universe, just as our love for Him is a tiny, fragile act of generosity. Cicero writes: “We don’t practice generosity in order to secure gratitude, nor do we invest our gifts in the hope of a favorable return. Rather, it is nature that inclines us toward generosity. Just so, we don’t seek friendship with an expectation of gain, but regard the feeling of love as its own reward.”

  My friendship with Oscar feels like a Ciceronian if not Catholic ideal. I’ve taught him English and he’s taught me to live in the shadow of the Cross, to strive to be the least of all and the servant of everyone. In the Cross is peace and perfection and freedom from torment; in the Cross is the desire to be despised by all. I want to be meek in the face of universal scorn, to be “counted as a fool for Christ,” as The Imitation puts it. I want to hate my soul in this world that I might keep it in the next. I know I am a stranger to other human beings but a kinsman and friend unto God.

  Have you had children yet? Is your marriage sacrosanct and fruitful? I hate that the mails are so slow.

  Daddy is very suspicious of Bishop Oscar, as if (in Daddy’s words) he wants to cheat me out of my fortune and hand it over to the pontiff “so the pope can buy another uranium crown” (he means the platinum crown that the pope has sold to help the poor). He thinks the religion is all “a bunch of hooey” designed to hoodwink the credulous and pacify the poor (not Daddy’s words, but you get the gist). He thinks the Latin and the bells and incense and hocus-pocus of the wine and bread are meant to stupefy the masses; he claims when he and Bobbie Jean cruised up the Nile he visited some of those ancient Egyptian temples and said in the innermost interiors were holy altars cast in shadows and sacred pools stocked with crocodiles. “It’s all a bunch of hooey, sweetie, not God, not Jesus, but all these pagan gewgaws. The Old Catholics are no better than the pharaohs. They just have holy water rather than tubs of crocodiles.”

  I’m going to be ordained as a nun next spring if you and your husband want to come. I know I wasn’t present for your wedding, so I certainly wouldn’t mind it if you couldn’t. Resentment isn’t my strong suit, and I’m all about forgiveness. Daddy and Bobbie Jean will be present (he’s still against the Church) but I’d feel somehow safer if you were here, too. I hope Daddy doesn’t treat us to an outburst.

  Your loving twin,

  Yvette

  No, I thought, my marriage isn’t sacrosanct but it has been fruitful. After I regained my figure and did all the exercises for my vaginal muscles, Adhéaume slept with me once after two bottles of vintage champagne of a strangely yellow color and a dinner of caviar, chopped egg yolks, and sour cream served on still-warm and peeled new potatoes. We didn’t stuff ourselves. Addy gave me a lovely diamond bracelet—more a cuff of diamonds than a bracelet. He accompanied me to my room with his arm around my waist. For the few days before that I’d found a sealed letter from him beneath the bud vase on the tea tray after my afternoon nap. He wrote that he was too “shy” to say out loud the outrageously pornographic things he was imagining doing to me, but he could spell it all out on the page. A prolonged anal kiss was the least of his fantasies, the only one I’ll confide. Before our caviar and champagne supper I’d taken extra care to wash thoroughly down there.

  But once we were in bed he wasn’t nearly as daring in reality as he was in his epistolary ravings. He fucked me in the missionary position. When he pulled out, he said, “I couldn’t feel that much.”

  I said drily, “That wasn’t entirely my fault. Roger wasn’t fully at attention.”

  He stormed out to his own room, wrapping his sky-blue monogrammed robe about him.

  After that he left me alone. No more letters. No more jewelry. No more amorous attentions. Just as well. The letters had embarrassed me, the jewelry I’d paid for, and the lovemaking had left me indifferent, voire irritated. Did he think twins were enough to make me his forever?

  I reveled in my babies, especially since I didn’t have to feed them, change them, or “put them down” (the awful American expression that is also used for shooting lame horses). They were brought in in their matching lace dresses for an hour each morning to giggle through peekaboo games and to grip my index finger, to smile with a senile old man’s vagueness, to make preverbal babbling sounds, and suddenly to turn red like peppers on vitamins or apoplectic psychotics and scream. Instead of lithium the wet nurse fed them milk with her back slightly turned to me to conceal the awful mammalian reality. My own breasts, though slowly shrinking, were still bigger than usual. One time Addy touched one breast while I was dressing, made a lapping sound, and said “mnam-mnam,” which is their “yum-yum.” I wasn’t really offended, but I thought that’s how humorousl
y/unconsciously he thought of me, as a nourishing ruminant.

  My babies were my refuge. They looked at me and even smiled. I was convinced that I could already see that Ghislaine was rebellious and Foulques sweetly compliant. I asked Marguerite if she could detect these differences but my interrogation rattled her—and she merely shrugged. When I tried to pursue this line of questioning, her attention withdrew like a frightened turtle’s head. Unlike my darling Auvergnates, she was stupid. Unimaginative. Half-dead with normality.

  Addy invited an attractive couple to dinner, Georges and Sally du Pic. He was young and skinny and not too clean, though in a nice suit slightly too big on him. I wondered if it was one of Addy’s old suits, the ones he contemptuously called store-bought. It was cashmere, which meant it didn’t hold its shape too well and it was too warm for the surprisingly hot June night. Sally was even younger and had yellow hair and black roots. She had on a stylish dress, the sort you could buy cheap at Le Mouton à Cinq Pattes after the designer label had been torn off (dégriffée). I wondered where Adhéaume had found them. Sally was American and he obviously thought she would please me; don’t get me wrong, I’m really not a snob, but they weren’t our sort. Addy always says innocence bores him, that the loss of innocence is a major American theme and makes our movies and novels so dull. “If you’re innocent,” he says, “get deflowered in the first chapter and get on with it.”

  But Sally and Georges were a little too deflowered; they were wilting and had lost their petals. They were so pale and thin. They smelled slightly like a washcloth that had been left in the heat to mildew. I wondered if they were heroin addicts, gamblers, prisoners, thieves. Sally kept swiping calculating glances at my diamond cuff. Finally I touched it and said, “It’s a pity they’re not real”; after that Sally stopped looking at it.