A Saint from Texas

by Edmund White

  By now in my sightless nocturnal wanderings I’d arrived at the promontory overlooking the olive trees gone wild. Was it my imagination or could I really hear the distant surf near Cassis? Or was it just the sudden pandemonium of the wind in the aspens (which, more poetically, were called trembles in French)? I was careful to watch my step. I could easily plunge to my death from the promontory. Which didn’t sound like such a bad idea just now.

  We returned to Paris. Victorine and Eudes remained at the château for another month before being driven to their minuscule apartment at a good address in the sixteenth arrondissement near Mme de Castiglione on the Avenue Mozart. One of the servants drove my little car back to the Avenue Foch. I traveled with the German nanny and my own maid and the children in a compartment of the train from Marseilles. Addy sat by himself in the next compartment over.

  Since our horrible argument we barely spoke. In front of other people he always referred to me as Mme la baronne. The few times he spoke directly to me he addressed me formally as vous. Usually he communicated with me through little notes he had his valet deliver to me.

  I came back to life in Paris after the torpor of the Var. Just walking down the Rue Saint Honoré, for instance, past the shops and bookstores and cafés on one side and the Louvre on the other, revived me, piqued my curiosity. I wanted to see what women were wearing, what everyone was reading, what curiosities I could find in the antique stores; I wanted to stop in my favorite café for a Mont-Blanc of squiggles of marrons glacés built up into a sweet hillock.

  I liked the way well-dressed men looked me over and smiled appreciatively. I existed in someone’s eyes, in my white Courrèges go-go boots and my very short skirt. The calfskin running up my calves felt like glove leather, snug and warm. Rain was threatening and I was walking with my furled green silk umbrella (the one with the duck head handle) as a cane, and I felt as if I were in a Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers musical. In Dallas, middle-class men didn’t dare to check me out on the street (nowhere in America except New York); they’d move in on you only when you were seated (in a hotel lobby, on a train, in a bar). But in Paris they looked you over from head to toe, even the women, maybe just to check out your boots. The men seldom said anything, though policemen and African garbagemen smiled, as did construction workers. I felt safe but noticed, which I liked. At the castle the servants knew not to gawk at the baroness, Addy was indifferent or hostile, Eudes was entering dementia, and for the townspeople I was a tourist or a summer person: a member of a different tribe.

  Although I wasn’t much for reading, certainly not in French, I enjoyed strolling past the bouquinistes, especially on the Left Bank, all the way from the Tour d’Argent to the Louvre. I picked up books at random, looked through the prints, seldom bought anything, then jumped in a cab and went to Carita to have my hair and nails done (I used a very faint pink pearlescent polish). My hair had gone from blonde to blonde streaks (I think they called it “mesh,” or mèche, since they put a skullcap on your head and used steel needles to pull strands of hair out through wide-woven holes and dyed only those strands). I liked chatting with “my” girl, Caroline from Toulouse, though she’d acquired a snooty Parisian accent, dropping syllables, rattling along, using lots of foul language, argot, and even verlan. She was the definition of chic, so I assumed her way of speaking was the current mode, just as her great straight wave of black hair falling over her face must be le dernier cri. From there I went to Givenchy to see the spring collection. Audrey Hepburn was seated on the couch beside me and we chatted in English a little bit, though we were both very serious about writing down our orders. She was so slender, her cheekbones so high, that I felt a bit of a cow beside her. Givenchy himself came out and sat in a chair beside us. He looked like the aristocrat he was with his great height, beaked nose, startlingly blue eyes, and full head of white hair. Once the défilé began he disappeared.

  The children were now speaking French better than I and would look puzzled when I made a mistake in gender. I assumed that because the word for “cloud,” nuage, ended in e it must be feminine but the children looked bewildered when I said “la nuage.” They glanced uneasily at their French nanny and Ghislaine said, “Isn’t it le nuage?” and the nanny said, “It’s impolite to correct Madame la baronne.” I laughed and said, “Not when she’s wrong.” I was so proud of my educated little children.

  Ercole sent me a friendly note asking if I wanted to start giving our musical salons again. I wrote back and said why not and invited him for tea in two days’ time. I thought it was best to stay on his good side in case he was called in during future divorce proceedings.

  When he came by on that Wednesday afternoon he kissed me on both cheeks in a perfunctory way and excitedly launched into praise of a new young composer. “He’s called Jean Barraqué and André Hodeir—you remember the critic André?—claims his is the finest piano sonata since Beethoven, though no one’s heard it. Jean is the lover of both Michel Foucault and of Boulez, and it seems they’re all big, big drinkers. But Jean is the real thing. If we can get him it will be a scoop.” He said “scoop” in English, which I thought was endearing.

  Being a woman, I couldn’t resist asking him how Helen was.

  “She’s eager to see you,” Ercole said. “She misses you and says it was all just a misunderstanding.”

  “What kind of misunderstanding?” I asked implacably.

  “She certainly wasn’t rejecting you.”

  “Are you still sleeping with her?”

  “We’re getting married.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Dearest Yvonne,

  I’m here in Rome with my beloved Mercedes and our student Pablo. We’re so excited to be in the city of so many relics of Saint Catherine of Siena. Her body (or most of it) is under the altar of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, a church built over an ancient temple to Minerva. You might remember it as the one that has a Bernini elephant supporting an obelisk out front. We’re staying, Mercedes and I, in a Roman convent that owns Saint Catherine’s left hand, Monastero della Madonna del Rosario at Monte Mario. Her head is in Siena, which is rather far away, and we probably won’t get there to see it. We have been to a church where she is supposed to have died or made her “transit.”

  Of course, the whole city is filled with sacred sites—the Holy Stairs, which Christ ascended the day he died and which we climbed on our knees, all twenty-eight marble steps, earning ourselves a plenary indulgence. The Vatican, where the Holy Father lives; Saint Peter’s Basilica, where Saint Peter himself is buried; Santa Maria Maggiore, where miraculous snow fell—and so on. I could mention the prison on the Capitoline Hill where Peter was held before he was crucified upside down, or the Basilica that commemorates Saint Lawrence’s martyrdom when he was roasted on a grill, or Sant’Agnese in Agone, which displays the skull of Saint Agnes (Iñez in Spanish), a twelve-year-old girl who was martyred in the third century A.D. for refusing to marry. She is the patron saint of virgins and gardeners and was beheaded.

  But everything in Rome reminds one of our Catholic past or the ancient pagan past. In normal streets with stoplights and shop windows suddenly the founding church of the Jesuits rears up or the Pantheon, like dinosaurs in Japanese movies invading slick, modern Tokyo. All of Rome smells like wet clay—remember when we would leave globs of wet gray clay we were modeling under moist cloths in shop and the whole room would smell like a flooded riverbank?

  We’re guests in a cloistered order but we get out and about, as busy as Saint Teresa of Ávila. Don’t imagine we’re just visiting morbid holy relics; we walked up all those steps today to visit the Capitoline Museum and saw The Dying Gaul and Antinous and huge marble feet from ancient Roman statues and the shocking “religious” paintings of Caravaggio, which I treasure because they show the average, poor people of his epoch, not just the gentry. Tomorrow we’ll be visiting the ancient forum and the Colosseum (of course, for a Christian the Colosseum is also a church where so many early believers became martyrs and died).
Almost every church attracts us. Our favorite so far is Santi Quattro Coronati, where the nuns belong to a silent order and educate the deaf.

  Mercedes is the most wonderful companion. Everything makes us laugh and I feel like a teenager all over again. I suppose we’re not very decorous, bobbing around town like penguins in our black-and-white habits, usually doubled over with laughter. We laugh at each other’s silly wisecracks; I hope people don’t think we’re laughing at them! Of course, we try to keep our eyes lowered (“custody of the gaze”), but when we do look up we’re always awed by how elegantly dressed the men and women are. Everyone here is beautiful! Even the waiter in a simple trattoria will look like a god. What’s especially reassuring is that Rome is filled with religious—nuns and priests of every country, size, age, color, and order.

  Mercedes is always in a good mood, which makes me feel churlish at times. I don’t think she’s ever been on vacation before. She’s so grateful, so appreciative! Poor thing, she’s always worked so hard, and even in the convent they think it’s normal to ask her to clean out the toilets, whereas I’m given more ladylike chores, like planning out the menus. At first she treated me like a lady of a race apart, but now she teases me all the time, usually with raunchy jokes. You ask how a Filipina ended up in Colombia? I think she was living in Medellin already as a housekeeper when she joined holy orders. They have so few jobs in their own country. We’re very close. It’s strange—we have nothing in common. Class, education, family background, life experiences, language. Everything is different. It’s a tribute to her sweetness and her deep humanity that we’ve become such friends! Of course, we have our belief in Jesus Christ in common. And in love!

  As Saint Catherine said, “I wish for no other thing than love, for in the love of Me is fulfilled and completed the love of the neighbor.” Just as I love Our Lord and weep constantly contemplating his sufferings on the Cross, in the same way I love Mercedes for her purity, her kindness, her compassion, her generous nature. Although she and I have “nothing” in common, we share the greatest thing: love.

  Tomorrow we will have an audience with the Holy Father (along with fifty other nuns), and we are so excited I doubt we will sleep a wink tonight. The pope is a very kindly and humble man who has given his papal tiara, diamond ring, and cross to charity; he has abandoned all ecclesiastical pomp. Apparently he knows a lot about Vatican politics, which can be thorny, since he worked in the Curia for fifteen years. Like all the recent popes (except John XXIII) Pope Paul VI is an aristocrat. He has traveled to five continents—he’s called the Pilgrim Pope. Paolo Sesto always looks melancholy—they call him Paolo Mesto (“sad”). Some awful Frenchman, Roger Peyrefitte, claims that the pope is homosexual and that his lover is a handsome actor. Of course, that’s a sacrilegious calumny, since every priest is celibate, but I must admit that even if it were true, it wouldn’t shock me. The poor pontiff is in such bad health, he is so old and solitary in his august position, how can we begrudge him a little pleasure? Many times he has threatened to retire, but as he says, “Kings abdicate but popes never do.” Loving Mercedes has made me more tolerant of every form of love—Saint Catherine understood: I will love, because the food I feed on is love.

  We’ve checked on little Pablo, who seems very happy with his new Franciscan “uncles.” They all speak Spanish to him and those who can’t converse with him in Latin (Pablo is a star Latin student and can even translate right off a Spanish newspaper into Latin). The monks seem very happy to have recruited him, such a pretty, intelligent, pliable boy.

  We stood in front of the Fountain of Trevi for ten minutes. Even in that canyon of buildings there was quite a breeze and we were soon soaked, the cold spray in our faces.

  As you know, Mercedes and I are coming to Paris next Saturday for a week before returning to Bogotá and eventually Jericó. We will be staying with the nuns at Sacré-Coeur; let’s say we’ll meet in front of the church (in Montmartre, right?) exactly at noon on Monday. I will try to phone you Sunday afternoon to see if that plan will work for you. Of course, we don’t want to be any bother. But I’m dying to meet my niece and nephew. And I’m sure you will like Mercedes. She’s adorable and even speaks a few words of English.

  I have to warn you. Daddy and Bobbie Jean are coming, too. They’ll be staying at the Ritz but I’m sure they’ll want to see us constantly. They’ll never come to Colombia, which they’ve decided is too dangerous. Daddy says he wants to discuss something serious with us. Wonder what it could be.

  CHAPTER 16

  I can remember when I first saw Yvette in Paris. There she was standing with another nun in front of Sacré-Coeur. Her face looked so small and pale inside her black robes. And lined—I wondered if I had aged in the same way. But she broke out in a big smile and she was waving as I climbed the last steps to meet her. The other nun—small and brown with a punched-in nose—was also waving and giggling and jumping up and down with glee. I’d noticed before that nuns were either cruel and whiskered or moon-faced and childish, as if their “vocation” made them either mean eunuchs or gleeful infants. I guess I preferred the infant kind. Yvette and I embraced and squealed like sorority girls, which seemed to startle the other nun; I kept holding Yvette out at arm’s length: “Let me just look at you! You look wonderful, honey,” I lied. I’m not sure I would have recognized her in a crowd.

  I’d never been this close to Sacré-Coeur. I didn’t like it, with all these creepy Arab thieves wandering around, smoking reefers, staring at women and men alike, frightening the Christians. And the church itself was appalling, with its pseudo-Oriental domes, its cold slabs of stones, the whole thing built to express France’s penance and loss of self-esteem after its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the horrors of the Commune, a starving population under siege eating the animals in the zoo, the first real Communist experiment. The whole country felt abandoned by God and put up this tasteless monstrosity to win back God’s favor, as if he were a cigar-smoking, philistine bounder of the period. Of course, the French had been defeated under Napoleon, too, but at least it was a glorious defeat, whereas Napoleon III was a coward incapable of making a decision and the Second Empire was the overconfident low point in French culture, with the can-can and whores a-go-go.

  I’d dressed very soberly for the occasion in a gray, pleated skirt and a tailored blue wool suit jacket with power shoulder pads and braided frogs up the front, no jewelry, a simple cloche with a gray feather, just one. Polished black spool heel shoes, dark bazille stockings, a simple handbag of sumptuous black glove leather with a gold fastener (I hoped it wouldn’t attract the thieves). I didn’t mind looking rich but I was trying for the rich matron look, nothing flashy.

  My sister the nun.

  “Let’s walk down the hill to the Abbesses metro stop where I left the car.” I suddenly feared an impropriety and I said, “You’re allowed to walk, aren’t you? You can spend the day with me, can’t you? Yvette, Mercedes … Do you have new nun names now?”

  “Yes, as long as we’re back here for vespers,” Yvette said. “In the early evening,” she explained. “Yes, I have a new name, Mary Catherine. Mary because all the nuns in my order are called Maria Something. Catherine after Saint Catherine of Siena. Mercedes is Maria Immacolada. But call us by our baptismal names. I think the conference of bishops going on now is going to rule that all the new nuns should keep their baptismal names.”

  “How interesting. I’ve heard that they’re saying Mass now in the country’s language, Spanish, French …” I tried to make it sound jaunty in case I was saying something controversial.

  We were going through a little square where Japanese tourists were all dutifully eating their onion soup. Some of them were fearfully approaching the artists’ easels propped up here and there displaying paintings of the Moulin Rouge windmill or of the bulbous towers of Sacré-Coeur; all the paintings looked mass-produced by palette knives slapping down gooey impasto strokes. The painters themselves had berets and pencil-thin mustaches
and blue smocks and were holding palettes and brushes; most of them were smoking. But I thought, I’m no one to laugh, walking with my nun-freaks.

  It was getting cold and the wind was swirling through the nuns’ habits. I wondered what they wore underneath, a thought that made me tremble. I could picture only horrible wool panties, gray, heavily wired, and white ankle socks and industrial bras, cruelly wired as well. And yet they were almost giddy with happiness. They seemed startled to discover my “car” was a limousine with a driver. My guests settled in with their voluminous skirts and I dashed around to the other side to get in; I felt as if I were out with my great-aunts. Jean-Pierre, our driver, looked suitably impressed. He wasn’t his usual wry, jokey self.

  I sat next to Yvette and lifted the cross around her waist for a second; it was very heavy. I couldn’t imagine lugging that around all day. As we drove through the city I tried to point out all the sights—the Louvre, the American embassy, the Champs-Élysées, the Arc de Triomphe—and then we were gliding down the Avenue Foch and Jean-Pierre was holding the door open. There was my favorite prostitute, Cybille, standing in my doorway out of the cold, wearing a very short gold lamé skirt and a monkey-fur chubby. Rather ostentatiously (considering my companions) I said hello to her and wished her happy hunting. She thanked me and bowed her head to the religious and even sketched in the sign of the cross, which looked absurd given the amount of makeup blazoned across her face. My nuns whispered, “Hola!”

  I asked the butler to light the fire in the small sitting room and bring us a copious tray of varied crustless sandwiches. And tell the fraulein to bring in the children. We settled in on the little blue love seats next to the fire in the small salon and were soon given hot cups of fragrant black tea. Mercedes took three sugars, Yvette and I none. I asked Mercedes how she liked Rome. Yvette translated and Mercedes clapped and bounced in place as a response. I thought how ill-favored she was, though obviously Yvette was smitten with her. Maybe she was a cute little package under all that mournful wrapping.