by Edmund White
When I took my vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience I had to hand over all the money I possessed, but as you know when we turn thirty we’ll come into our full inheritance and then when Daddy dies we’ll probably inherit more. Most of the time I like or want to like being poor and am pleased I brought an important dowry to the convent, but at other times (like now) I’m frustrated I can’t hire armed guards to protect my beloved Bishop Oscar. But he argues that if Our Lord could sacrifice Himself for our redemption (“The Scandal of Redemption,” as he puts it in his memorable way), then His priests must be willing to follow His lead. I don’t know what good armed guards would really do against the rich and powerful if they’re determined to murder their enemies, but I hate not being able to defend those I love.
A good Christian wouldn’t have those she loves more or less, but if I’m honest I’d have to say I love Oscar and Mercedes more than everyone else, even you, my beloved twin. It’s so odd thinking we’re identical genetically but so different in temperament—or are we? I suspect I’m much more calculating then I admit and you’re much more ardent than you think.
Do you think we’ll die at the same moment on the same day?
Let me tell you about Mercedes. She’s always smiling, and you’d think she had a childhood as privileged as ours. In fact, however, she was so poor in the Philippines that her family couldn’t afford rice and to this day she beams with pleasure over a bowl of white rice. I keep telling her that brown rice is more nourishing and healthier but her mind is made up; she doesn’t notice all the privations of convent life as long as she can have her bowl of white rice from time to time. You may be a baronne but Mercedes believes she’s a princess with her gold-tipped black lacquer chopsticks digging into a clump of sticky rice. When she was a little girl she’d spend a dime filling up her bicycle basket with ice, head down to the port, and buy thirty or forty good-sized fish from a fisherman. Then for the next four hours she’d go from door to door selling her fish at a slight markup. The profits she’d hand over to her drunk, violent father. Her mother had an arm her father had broken so often she had it in a sling as far back as Mercy could remember. Her brother, Enrique, just two years older, died last year (they are in their forties) and for months Mercy had red eyes rather than her usual smile. He had a heart attack, and at such an early age! It seems in dealing with their sadistic father and meek mother Enrique was Mercy’s ally, if only in helping with the fish or laughing at their parents once they were out of earshot.
She’s a bit of a racist and has nothing good to say about Filipinos, who she thinks are ugly. She’s actually lovely with her honey-brown skin, her richly undulating black hair, her high, firm breasts, her perfect white teeth, her merry, dark eyes. Yes, she may be short but that only adds to her childlike vulnerability. I feel like grabbing her and waltzing her around the room. She has a horrible sense of humor and no matter how remote the allusion she’s always spotting a sexual double entendre and pointlessly laughing at her wickedness. She knows how her ribaldry irritates me and she’s constantly teasing me for my American puritanism.
Are we really puritan? How do you like off-color jokes?
She looks up to me as a higher order of being, as if I were an angel. Her adulation or respect embarrasses me. I’m constantly listing my shortcomings and sins but she takes that as only one more proof of my superiority. I’m afraid she admires me partly for my coloring, my thinness, my being soft-spoken, all of which are involuntary “virtues,” just as much a product of our upbringing as is her horrible unfunny ribaldry. She’s incapable of walking past a bowl of fruit without rearranging a banana protruding from two nested apples—and then leering and giggling.
We always eat our meals together. Though we have to eat in silence, thinking about Christ’s Passion, it’s a comfort to know she’s beside me; I can almost feel the heat coming off her smooth, chubby body or the warmth of her misplaced admiration for my worthless self. I confess every Saturday to Bishop Oscar so I can receive Communion on Sunday. At the end of one confession he said, “My daughter, may your spiritual father make one remark?”
“Of course.”
Through the grill the bishop said, “Perhaps you and Mercedes are becoming too close, intertwined. At first I thought it wasn’t my business, but your welfare is my business. Friendship, of course, is commendable, but friendship for all humanity. You must not make an idol of one individual. For instance, for a while I found myself thinking about you, your radiance, your shining face, your soft voice, your fleet, graceful way of walking. But then I recognized that I was singling you out in my thoughts and prayers, and with unremitting self-discipline I diverted my attention away from you.” (Oscar’s English is pretty literary since he reads G. K. Chesterton almost exclusively.)
I smiled. I exulted. He loves me, I thought.
“Yes, Father,” I said meekly. “I will sit with a different religious at every meal.”
“That is a good beginning. And say a decade of the rosary every time you begin to think exclusively of Sister Mercedes.”
“I will obey you in all things, Father.” I tried not to sound satirical.
How strange, I thought, smiling. Poor man—he’s jealous!
When I began to avoid Mercedes I could see she was deeply hurt—proof, if that was needed, that Bishop Oscar’s observation about our being too dependent on each other was true. Mercy’s face went as white as her wimple. She rushed up to me with her usual conspiratorial smile but I brushed past her, emitting an ice-cold, unfocused smile as only we white people know how to do. She was like a trusting, tail-wagging puppy who is struck rather than stroked. I sailed past her over to a table far from our usual one, indicated I wanted to squeeze in on the refectory bench next to Sister Maria Luisa, smiled and nodded to my new neighbors without a glance back at Mercedes, though I could feel the storm cloud of anger and pain hanging over her head. It was that powerful, her dark thought transmission.
The next day I sat with other religious as a way of calming Mercy’s jealousy. I didn’t want her to think I’d abandoned her for another particular woman, but that strategy only made her wound sharper, more painful; she burst out in tears and had to leave the refectory. When I passed her in the hall later that day on the way to vespers, I grabbed her arm and whispered, “People have been disapproving of us for being such close friends. I’m pretending to be distant so that we can go to Rome together.” Her face, paralyzed with pain and disgust, quickly melted into smiles. Her eyes were red from crying and her face looked swollen, but now the sun was emerging from the storm clouds.
She isn’t subtle. Whenever she’d catch sight of me after that she’d smile and even wink, though she didn’t really know how to wink and for an instant would close both eyes. One day I was kneeling and praying to Saint Catherine at “my” altar when Mercedes was suddenly kneeling beside me, her lips frantically whispering prayers but her tiny, hot hand sliding into mine.
At that very moment I was reading and meditating on Saint Catherine’s Treatise of Discretion: “The soul cannot live without love, but always wants to love something, because she is made of love, and, by love, I created her … I will love, because the food on which I feed is love. If you will love, I will give you that which you can love.”
Instead of withdrawing my hand, which had been my first (and sinful) response, I squeezed her hand hard. Saint Catherine had given me that which I could love. I thought it was a sin to reject love in whatever form it was offered. We aren’t loved that many times in life and it may not be in the form we desire. But each time it is given it is a token of God’s love. God is a madman because he loves us so much that he sent his only son to us to save us from Adam’s sin. God is invisible but he veiled himself in flesh that you might see him. He was irrefutably human, and on the wood of the Holy Cross he was in grief and torment. Yes, he was blessed even in his torment, because his nature is also divine. In Saint Catherine’s words, God created you out of love and the only way you can thank me is by loving not me but your n
eighbor, even if he hates you. Jesus is a bridge that begins on earth and ends in Heaven; he is a bridge of pure love.
With these passages in mind, I gripped Mercy’s little hand and stroked it with my thumb. I felt waves of reciprocated love (God’s love) ripple through me. I thought, I’ll never repulse love again—not sensual love but spiritual love.
CHAPTER 14
I set out for the Var in my little powder-blue sports car with the two children bickering then sleeping for long stretches in the back seat. I drove as fast as legally possible through that cold, rainy October day. The fields had already been harvested and were gray with overturned soil. Big white clouds lined in lead, like tumbling acrobats in dirty chiffon, pursued one another across the lowering sky. I had the radio on to keep me company.
The twins got grouchy and restless. I couldn’t blame them. With some difficulty I found La Pyramide, where we had a hotel reservation. At the time it had a reputation as the best restaurant in France, but I wouldn’t subject the children to all the endless rituals of a three-star restaurant. From room service I ordered chicken breasts and peas for them, hold the fancy sauces and the mint sprigs in the peas—and flan for dessert. For myself I ordered short ribs and cabbage braised in champagne and a split of champagne and half a carafe of Bordeaux (yes, Saint-Émilion). I propped the sleepy children up in their double bed and found a children’s program on the TV. They spoke only three-word sentences, but in French, English, and German. They were sound asleep by the time the food arrived. I tucked them in and watched a movie while I ate my dinner, then collapsed the wings of the table and pushed it into the hallway. The country was so quiet only a few giggling diners broke the silence, followed by their slamming doors and the roar of an expensive motor and the racket of flying gravel.
When I opened my eyes next there was daylight and the twins were wide awake and looking at me apprehensively. They were reassured when I sat up and smiled but Ghislaine pointed to my face and started to cry. I went to the mirror and saw a big black circle on my right cheek. Oh, I’d fallen asleep on the chocolate mint they’d placed on my pillow. I washed it off and turned and said, “See, Mommy is all right.” I hated that moronic way of referring to myself in the third person. By this time the twins were jumping on their bed. I ordered some poached eggs and cereal and toast for the room. The children were so overexcited that I had trouble getting them dressed. Foulques’s little white shoe refused to go on. I’d broken out in a sweat and was still in the terry-cloth robe I’d found in the closet.
At last we were back on the road. The children were in the back seat. They each wanted to pee but I had no idea where to take them. They were whining, close to crying, and so was I. Then I saw a big filling station across the highway. It was clean inside and I brought Foulques with Ghislaine and me into the ladies’ room and found an empty stall. I had to hold Foulques up under the arms since he was so little. Endless whimpering and irritation. I filled the gas tank. I would never travel alone with the children again.
Luckily, bladders empty, stomachs full, they fell asleep. Three hours later we were crossing Provence and into the Var. After another two hours they were sniffling with hunger again and muttering, “Potty.” “We’re almost there,” I said bravely, though I’d gotten lost and we were in ghastly Draguignan.
Finally we pulled into Tourtour, so named for its two towers (one belonging to the Grimaldi family). It’s a small village with a large, sloping town square, surrounded by several art galleries showing impastoed horrors of olive trees and lavender and hosting three spawling bistros complete with Japanese lanterns and wobbly metal chairs teetering on cobblestones.
We drove past the town walls, down a one-lane road with several twists and turns under a dark canopy of leaves, and finally through the open gates to the estate. The herbaceous borders were outlined in tiny white Christmas lights. An odd lapse in taste, I thought, though pretty. The château, Quercy, with its dark towers, loomed up before us. “We’re here,” I said, and looked through the rearview mirror at the twins’ sullen, suspicious faces.
The children seemed exhausted. I was exhausted. And a little apprehensive. My in-laws, who were sweet but forbidding, would be at the castle, and Addy, whom I hadn’t seen in three months—would he expect us to make love?—I didn’t think I could bear it. I was still feeling betrayed by Helen and Ercole, though I had to admit that with them I’d discovered how wonderful sex could be. The idea of returning to my marital duties seemed even more unpleasant. And sex of any sort struck me as merely annoying now.
Where was everyone? It was late in the afternoon—in fact the dull, soft-voiced, leaden chapel bell was ringing four—but after I crossed the absurd drawbridge on its prerusted chains that Addy had devised and entered the great reception room (which was so cold I shivered) with both children in tow until Ghislaine demanded maddeningly to be carried, I found no one. Had they gone off to see the sights? Where were the servants? I was so longing to hand the children over to someone, but now it seemed I would have no rest.
I could hear voices in the kitchens. I called out, and the voices abruptly ceased. Then I could hear rapid steps and the fat cook with the sweet face, whose Provençal accent I could barely understand, came running through the mammoth stone doors, her forearms white with flour. “Oh, Madame la baronne! We were expecting you this morning. The family has gone sightseeing. They will be back soon.” Then she shouted down the hallway, “Philippe, venez vite!” And suddenly a nice lanky young man in livery but with his sleeves rolled up to reveal his strong, thin, unpleasantly hairy forearms was swooping down to pick up Foulques. “Mathilde, venez vite!” he called out. Another servant, a young woman in a long apron, as long as her hemline, came trotting out and with just a shy, murmured greeting took the wriggling, impossible Ghislaine out of my arms. The children looked bewildered by all these new people and the unexpected activity. Ghislaine for once didn’t cry but stretched her arms out toward me. I said to her, kissing her, “This is Mathilde. She’s a friend.”
Mathilde frowned and said, “Oh, you speak to her in English,” as if that represented a real problem.
“We speak to them in both languages,” I said in my accented French. “They’re twenty-two months old now and can say two- or three-word sentences in French and English. And in German.”
“I don’t know English.”
“All you need to know,” I said with a smile, “is that ‘uppy’ means she wants to be carried.”
“I must remember that:‘uppy.’ ”
“She’ll make it clear enough. I think they both need a diaper change.”
Whispering “uppy” to herself, Mathilde hurried off up the very grand marble staircase, followed by Foulques and Philippe. Another servant, her hair all matted on one side from an afternoon nap, rushed in to nod her head at me in acknowledgment of my exalted status. She led me to my room, showed me the toilet, the cunningly concealed closet, and a second later a teenage boy had retrieved my luggage from the boot and rested it on a portable rack. He murmured something about “baroness” as well.
In an instant they were gone, after the young woman had showed me the velvet rope to pull for service. I couldn’t wait to be alone. I kicked off my shoes and lay on my great canopied double bed with the green velvet bedspread, mon lit d’apparat. It smelled like glue (cow’s bones?), probably from the velvet appliqués. The cook, now free of flour but panting from the stairs, let herself in with a silver tray and a pot of tea and two plain cookies dusted in powdered sugar. I touched them—they were still warm. I smiled my thanks—I felt so feeble. The cook, with her big, comic features like a clown’s, puckered her huge lips and held her forefinger to them and tiptoed out in an exaggerated way.
I ate the cookies (almond) and drank half a cup of the Lapsang tea. When I woke up again, there was Addy with a stranger, a tall, fat woman who was so white that the tiny moles sprayed across her neck looked as if they’d been inked in. He said, as I oriented myself as to where I was, “Sleeping in
the daytime?” I wondered why he was speaking English, which he usually avoided; it must have had something to do with the big woman, who was wrapped in a dress of white gauze. Even he must have thought that sounded like a strangely cold greeting, so he added, “Welcome home, darling.”
“The driving really took it out of me. In fact, I dreamed I was still driving.” I smiled at the pale lady, who smiled back. She had unusually small bad teeth.
“This is Foxy Mecklenburg, my cousin from Bavaria, a very distinguished music critic and academic. She arrived just after you. My wife, Von Courcy.”
Von, I thought! I knew Addy thought Yvonne was common. Did he think “Von” sounded aristocratic? German? Was Von a polite hommage to the French particule?
“I told you you shouldn’t drive all the way,” Addy added. “Remember France is as big as Texas.”
Foxy laughed, revealing her small bad teeth again. “Texas? Have you ever been to Texas?”
“No. You?”
“I went to Dallas to hear Lauritz Melchior.”
“And how was it?”
“I loved it. Yippee-ay-oh,” she sang out in a high, quavering voice. “Texas, not Melchior,” she clarified.
“Let me show you how I’ve restored things. Foxy spent summers here as a child. Maybe, Von, you’ll join us.”
“Gladly,” I said, “if we can stop off and see the children.”
“Yes, I’m sure they’ll like the nursery. It’s been beautifully restored.”
“Children don’t register beauty.”
“Mine will, surely.”
Foxy patted him on the hand, somewhat condescendingly, I thought, as if to soothe a wounded vanity.
Addy led us through the huge castle, all four floors of it. There are only so many ways of saying “ooh” and “ah” and “très beau,” especially if you’re not encouraged to ask questions or make comments, least of all to relate all this beauty to your own inferior, miserable experience. Being just a rubber stamp of approval is tiring, even humiliating, but I remembered that Addy’s main point of pride was his taste and his greatest talent, the knack for “arranging things.” We mere mortals (or, worse, Texans) could buy beautiful things if properly guided, but the one task we couldn’t do, it seems, is gracefully compose them or idiomatically arrange them. Barbarous as we were, we just didn’t know what to do with our baubles and gewgaws once we owned them.