The Priest's Madonna

by Hassinger, Amy

  Imagine, then, my father’s unease at Bérenger’s presence in our house. Under our own roof, a cleric and a monarchist! The first night Bérenger arrived, Father eyed him suspiciously over our meal. When we had cleared our places and they were sharing a smoke, he broached the topic. “We’ve an election coming. Three months.”

  Michelle and I were sitting by the door, trying to make use of the last light leaving the summer sky. She was sewing the eyes on one of her dolls—she was quite good at making dolls from scraps of fabric, pretty pebbles, pinecones, and dried berries, anything she could find. I was knitting, but I laid my work in my lap when I heard my father’s comment.

  “Indeed,” Bérenger said.

  “Will you vote?”

  “I always vote.”

  “Mm-hmmm,” said my father. Then, impatiently, “For whom?”

  Claude was bouncing a ball in the dust outside; I motioned to him to stop. Bérenger shifted in his chair. “I know your position, monsieur,” Bérenger began, “and I respect it. I am, however, of a different mind. The Republic has done innumerable injuries to the Church, and to society, in my opinion. I can’t, in good conscience, vote to support such a government. As a priest.”

  “Ha! How about all the injury the Church has done to the Republic? To France, better yet! Where should we begin?”

  “Maybe we’d better not.”

  “Is your cause that insupportable? Not even worth an argument?” A silence. “Your Church—” my father prompted, in a threatening tone.

  “Mine, too, Edouard,” interrupted my mother. “Your children’s, too. Don’t forget.”

  “Hush,” snapped my father. “Your Church,” he began again, but faltered. He was bursting to release the floodgates of his political opinion—how the Church peddled lies in exchange for money and power—but he knew how proud my mother was to have Bérenger in our home, and how much Michelle and I admired Bérenger. If he embarked on one of his diatribes, he might succeed in out-arguing Bérenger, but he would lose our esteem. “Let’s just say,” he said, after a long moment, “that we have our quarrels.”

  “A good quarrel aids the digestion, Edouard. It’s how we stay so trim, isn’t that right?” Bérenger clapped his hand against his belly.

  My father lit another cigarette. “Is that it?” he said, finally. “I thought Isabelle had put me on a diet.”

  My mother laughed nervously. Michelle and I exchanged an astonished look. We waited for more discussion, but none came, so Michelle picked up her doll, and Claude began once again to bounce his ball. The men smoked in silence until dark, when we retired to bed and Bérenger to his candlelit reading. They did not speak of politics again until the election.

  ON BÉRENGER’S FIRST Sunday in church, the sanctuary was full. Almost the entire village came to Mass that morning—people who hadn’t attended for thirty years were there, pressed against the walls and standing in the entryway. Even my father came. Women forwent their customary cotton shifts and head-scarves for linen dresses and straw hats. Men wore jackets and clean white shirts. Shaved and scrubbed faces arrayed the pews and the back aisle of the tiny church, newly swept and dusted. The sight of so much effort, so much hope and sincerity, made me shy. I met no one’s eyes. We waited amid shifting feet and coughs for Mass to begin.

  Finally, the cantor—M. Lébadou, who was enthusiastic but always off-key—began the introit and Bérenger, dressed in a gold chasuble and bearing the censer, processed up the nave, accompanied by the Baux brothers. He beamed at the crowd, his cheeks flushed with excitement. As he approached the altar, his eyes momentarily lit on me, and I smiled despite my impulses toward discretion—he looked so joyful, so earnest, so handsome. My mother had been lamenting since his arrival how poorly attended Mass was, probably as a way of tempering his hopes. He must have known that people were there mainly to satisfy their curiosity. Still, he preached effusively that day; his voice, a rich baritone like my father’s, rang out with authority and passion. He promised his best efforts as curé for us; he dedicated himself to Rennes-le-Château as shepherd—promised to counsel us, to tend to us when we were sick in body or spirit, to lead us in the virtuous path toward God, and he charged us, for our part, to follow him as a good flock.

  Afterward, people seemed buoyant, chatting happily and watching the children. The Baux boys, wild once again, relieved of their ecclesiastic duties, chased after one of the dogs. Women gossiped. Men lingered and joked, standing near their families.

  Bérenger was ebullient. He knew he’d touched people. Perhaps he believed that he’d come to a faithful village, a place where the Church still held sway over the hearts of the villagers, where his word as God’s mediator would be respected and obeyed. He undertook his primary task—to transform lives into journeys, deaths into homecomings through the administration of the sacraments—with admirable zeal.

  As soon as he arrived in Rennes, he began making pastoral visits. My mother told him which families might be particularly needful—the wives who had lost husbands, the jobless men, the mourning families or those who had newly welcomed a child—and he knocked on their doors right away, without waiting for a request or an invitation. After thirty years of neglect from the previous curé, most people were surprised by Bérenger’s genuine concern for their well-being. When Mme Fauré, a thin and timid woman with nostrils that flared like a horse’s, gave birth to a baby boy, Bérenger went with my mother and me when we brought the egg, bread, and salt and spoke the traditional blessing, “Be good like the bread, full like the egg, and wise like the salt.” A few days later, at the boy’s baptism, Bérenger presented him to the congregation with such jubilation that we broke into applause. When old M. Baudot fell from his roof while trying to repair it and broke his hip, Bérenger sat with him and told him jokes, including a few that involved foolish old men who acted younger than their age. He even visited Mlle Martinez, a Spanish Gypsy who had a shack in the woods several kilometers from the village and lived off the squirrels and porcupines that wandered into her traps, as well as the grapes she stole from the neighboring vineyards. Everyone said she was crazy and not to be trusted, but Bérenger insisted that she was part of the parish and a child of God.

  People were flattered by his visits. They took an interest in Bérenger as they had never done with the previous priest, bringing him small gifts—freshly baked bread, snared partridge, truffles discovered in the woods. One of the Baux boys brought him an asp skin, spread and tacked on a board. Little Marguerite Mouisse, who lived with her shepherd father in a hut near Le Bézu, presented Bérenger with a bound bunch of dried asphodel stems. “Matches for your cigarettes,” she said in her thin voice, giving a tiny curtsy. The children especially liked him, for he led a rollicking catechism class and often rewarded those who recited the text correctly with sugared almonds or candied chestnuts. (I had the honor of helping to lead the class, so I witnessed his generosity firsthand.)

  Bérenger loved the gifts, of course, and the attention, but he cherished even more the increased assembly at church. Remarkably, several of the men who had rarely set foot in the church began to appear regularly on Sundays and even occasionally on weekday mornings. Mass became a happy, even festive occasion, and the church—though the roof still leaked onto the altar when it rained—transformed from a dungeon into something resembling a haven, mainly through the force of Bérenger’s personality. Even the old woodworm-infested confessional saw an increase in traffic. But while Mass drew newcomers of both sexes and all ages, the newly eager penitents at confession consisted almost entirely of the married women of the village, women of my mother’s age, women who desired Bérenger’s attention.

  One day, before seven o’clock Mass, I entered the church to change the holy water and was startled to see three women—Mme Montaucon, Mme Baptiste, and Mme Fauré—kneeling in the pews, evidently waiting their turn. An actual queue! For confession! The sight ruffled me; I had to quell an urge to send them all away. My mother snorted her disapprobation when s
he heard of it. But my father found it funny, and from that day on, asked Bérenger nightly how many confessions he’d heard that day. “Madame Baptiste come again today?” he’d ask. Mme Baptiste was a homely but flirtatious woman whose husband had lost his arm at the hat factory and could no longer work. He spent his days at the tavern. “One of these days she’ll offer to take your confession, now, won’t she, Monsieur le curé?”

  Bérenger laughed; he enjoyed my father and his expansive ways, despite their differences of opinion.

  The fact was that my father was jealous of Bérenger and the amount of time he spent with my mother throughout the day: the midday dinners we shared, the assistance Mother gave him before and after the Mass, the myriad little housekeeping tasks she completed for him in the church. Confession particularly bothered him—he could not stand the fact that my mother met privately with Bérenger and voluntarily told him her most intimate thoughts. “What do they tell you, anyway?” he would ask Bérenger.

  “Edouard,” my mother would scold, “he can’t repeat it. It’s confidential.”

  Bérenger, for his part, seemed not to mind my father’s prurience and even encouraged it by dropping a few tantalizing details—nothing to implicate anyone, but enough to pique my father’s interest. “I hear all kinds of things,” he’d say. “You’d be surprised, monsieur. Let us just say that some of these women have led full lives.”

  My father would throw up his hands. “I should have been a priest.”

  “God forbid,” said my mother.

  Though my father may have been jealous, he must have known that Bérenger posed no true threat. They respected each other, Bérenger and my mother. She was not like the mesdames who called themselves friends of Bérenger’s but were none. She never debased herself as they did, bringing him cake, uttering low-toned gossip in his presence in order to “apprise him of the goings-on in the parish.” Those women sought Bérenger out to sanctify their days; they baptized themselves in his attention and called their desire devotion. He scolded them only when they became too demanding. He turned Mme Baptiste away from the confessional once, when she’d come too many days in a row. “You’ve nothing to tell me, Germaine,” he said. “Go home.”

  But my mother was not like that. She truly cared for Bérenger. She was sensitive to his moods, joyful in his company. She respected his privacy and never pestered him when he was put out about something. Their friendship was based on mutual regard and affection. One had the sense that, had circumstances been different—had my mother been fifteen years younger, say, and not happily married to my father, and had Bérenger been a draftsman or a builder—they might have courted each other, might even have married. But it was a subtle affection they shared, expressed always in smiles and silent acquiescences. There was no frustrated passion, nothing like the damning blushes and freighted stares I tried so hard to disguise. It was the way my mother was with many men: easy with them, never flirtatious, but always genuine and affable.

  I admired this quality of my mother’s and wished I had been blessed with it. I tried to emulate her but Bérenger flustered me. Whenever he addressed me, I became uncharacteristically tongue-tied and studied my feet. When he was home, I barely spoke. My mother remarked on my silence on more than one occasion: “What’s the matter with you, then?” she’d say. “Did you sell your tongue to the butcher?” But I didn’t want to speak. I wanted only to watch Bérenger’s movements around the house: the cozy way he leaned against the doorjamb to chat with my mother as she cooked, how he knelt with Claude on the dusty floor to help him with his inventions.

  At seventeen, I was too old to fuss over homemade grape pickers made from cast-off wheel spokes and twine, but Bérenger did not let me remain completely aloof. He would draw me out at the dinner table, asking my opinion, calling me his petite érudite, his little scholar. Occasionally he would call me over and read to me from one of his books. “Marinette,” he would say, “Marinette. Come listen.” The Imitation of Christ was a favorite of his at the time, as were the sermons of Père Bourdaloue—reading that proclaimed the vanity of worldly pursuits and the peace obtained from spiritual ones. I would stand at his shoulder or sit on the edge of the nearby chair and watch his face as he read, observing the way he lifted his eyebrows when his glasses slipped down his nose, as if it would help to right them. He read quietly, compelling me to move close. I reveled in the fondness his nicknames implied, but also felt slighted by their diminutive effect. I did not want to be his “little” anything: I wanted to be his obsession, as he was mine.

  What confusion I endured! What a morass of conflicted feeling! I felt drawn to him as strongly as if we were bound by an invisible sash. I wanted always to be near him, to inhale his peppery scent, to watch him as he worked, the way he held his breath when he concentrated and then released it all at once, in a forceful explosion of air. I wanted only to please him. I was prepared do whatever it took to maintain and increase his regard for me, and I expended the full force of my reason and imagination striving to understand how I could best delight him. If I attended Mass regularly, if I listened attentively to his impromptu evening lessons, if I performed my duties as his assistant in catechism class, if I treated my family members with kindness, if, in short, I behaved like a perfectly devout and selfless young woman, expressing none of my own desires and living to fulfill the needs of others—his needs—then it seemed he would continue to bestow his generous affection on me. I strove to accomplish this, then, as best I could. But my piety was impure: it was desire that motivated me, desire for him, my priest.

  ONE DAY, ABOUT a month after Bérenger had come, I was walking by the presbytery when I heard his voice floating through an open window. He had been away visiting his family, and so I was surprised to hear him, having been unaware of his return.

  “She calls it upon herself,” he insisted. “She provokes him.”

  “He has no cause to react that way, provocation or no,” my mother responded.

  “No. But she knows what a volcano he is, and still she taunts him.”

  “Was she hurt?” Mother asked.

  “A dislocated shoulder. Some bruises.”

  “Poor woman.”

  Bérenger sighed.

  Hearing a shuffling near the door, I ran off toward the grassy hill, where I would be out of sight. He had been talking of his mother, I was sure, and her suffering in the face of his father’s violent rages. What pain! And how brave Bérenger was, to have to endure such a father, such a family. He became suddenly twice as enigmatic, and thereby twice as attractive. I told Michelle what I’d heard, and she nodded wisely, as if she might have guessed it herself. “It must be why he doesn’t sleep much,” she said. “He probably has bad dreams.”

  I spent my free moments over the next few days lingering about the presbytery, hoping to overhear more snatches of conversation. I longed to learn as much I could about Bérenger. Where did he go on his daily walks, for example, when he sometimes disappeared for hours at a time? What had he thought of Carcassonne, where he’d been at seminary? What was it like growing up under the supervision of such a brutal man? But I heard nothing more. Bérenger came upon me unexpectedly one day as I loitered beneath his window, and though he greeted me warmly and indicated no sign of suspicion or irritation, I was mortified. The last thing I wanted was to annoy him. I had to find other occupations.

  Michelle and I had recently become interested in Mme Laporte, the mayor’s wife, who lived in the château. She was as tall and slim as a cypress, and carried herself with an unusually aristocratic air. She wore high-necked blouses decorated with an amber butterfly brooch, and her shoes were fine leather rather than wooden sabots. Yet even though she held herself apart from the other women, they respected her. They addressed her in the marketplace, nodded to her at the grocer’s, and generally seemed to accept her as one of their own.

  Of course, the fact that her husband was the mayor helped. He was a portly, well-liked, jovial man who spent evenings chattin
g with the men outside the tabac, and had been known to offer his help during the grape harvest, in exchange for one or two bottles of the vintage. I had never met a more incongruous couple. The mayor went out of his way to earn the affection of his citizens; Mme Laporte was indifferent to public opinion. The mayor spoke in a broad, boisterous voice, peppering his speech with guffaws and expansive gestures; Mme Laporte spoke softly, barely above a whisper, and I had never seen her smile.

  One morning I happened to wake early and, meaning to get a head start on the day’s work, I dressed and set out for the water pump. A fog had overtaken the village, obscuring my vision of all but my immediate surroundings. The whole village seemed to be asleep still: light shone through the slats of one or two shutters, but most were dark. I felt powerful, waking so early, and I imagined myself to be a kind of benevolent guardian fairy, walking the streets at dawn to ensure that all was secure. The square was empty, the château nothing but a white shroud. All I could see was the low stone wall. Just above it hovered what appeared to be a human form—a back and shoulders and a head. This was a true fairy, I feared, or worse, a ghost. I froze.

  As the filmy shape did not move, I began to wonder if the fog had not deceived me. I stepped forward, the fog thinned, and the misty figure developed more definite proportions: white-clothed bony shoulders and arms; coarse, unbound hair. It was not hovering above the wall, but sitting on it, straight-backed. I halted once more, aware now that it was no fairy at all, but only Mme Laporte, dressed in her nightclothes, staring into the fog. She must have sensed my presence, for she turned to face me. Her expression betrayed no emotion, only calm interest. We regarded each other for what seemed an unbearably long moment, but before I could think of what to say, she stood down, bowed her head solemnly, and then walked into the mist toward the château.