The Priest's Madonna

by Hassinger, Amy

  “How old is he?”

  “Not that old,” she said. “Twenty-eight.”

  I was too baffled to speak. Marriage? We had always assumed we would both marry, but I had only considered it from afar, as I did the mountains on a clear day.

  “Well, what did Mother say?”

  “She said it’s a good offer. Monsieur Marcel is a lawyer, you know. He makes a good living—or will, anyway.”

  “And what about Gérard? Didn’t you—weren’t you planning to marry him?”

  “No, no. Gérard would make a poor husband. He’s already got too many girlfriends. I’d be lonesome. And besides, who wants to be a farmer’s wife? The work’s too hard.”

  “But you don’t want to marry Monsieur Marcel, do you?”

  “Well,” she hesitated. “There’s no one else in town, anyway, who earns such a good living. Except for Doctor Castanier.” She burst out laughing once again at this, and I might have joined in had I not been so shocked—the idea of marrying Dr. Castanier, whose nostrils sprouted hairs, was indeed laughable. But I was quiet. All of this was beyond my understanding.

  “The thing is,” she began again, “he plans to move. To Carcassonne. He has an offer there for a position that will earn a higher salary. And what will I do then, so far away from you and Claude and maman and papa?” She began to cry again, and this time, I put my arm around her shoulders and held her, for I knew her grief was sincere, and I saw that it would be mine as well.

  M. Marcel came that night and spoke to Father while the rest of us—excepting Bérenger, who was out—waited outside. Claude whittled while Mother, Michelle, and I sat in anxious silence on the bench by the front door. When Father came to call us back in, he laughed. “You look like you’re in line for the guillotine! This is a happy occasion!” he bellowed. “Let’s have some smiles, some joy!”

  Inside, M. Marcel sat at the dining table looking as nervous as we were. His hat was off, revealing the thinning hair at his crown. His face was kind and pleasant, though his chin was small and receded too quickly into his neck. When we entered, he stood and bowed his head solemnly, then made his way around the table to pull out Michelle’s chair. He made quite a show of it, and had we been in a different state of mind, we would surely have teased him, for he appeared so painfully earnest. But we simply took our seats. Then my father formally announced that M. Marcel had offered to take Michelle’s hand in marriage, and that he approved of the match. “You don’t know each other well yet, this is true. But this is what an engagement is for. You find out you don’t like each other, you call it off. It’s practical.”

  M. Marcel nodded seriously, his brow creased in strenuous agreement.

  “Maman and I had only met once when I proposed. And look at us—how happy we’ve been. Eh, my piglet?” (This was my father’s pet name for my mother, whose nose turned up just slightly.) They clasped hands across the table and regarded each other so amorously that I had to look away.

  He turned to Michelle, his eyes wet with affection, and, leaning forward, said, “Chérie, it is for you to decide.”

  I thought Michelle would surely burst into tears at this, for she had always been sentimental when it came to my father, whom she regarded as her savior. But she kept her wits and, turning to M. Marcel, she bowed her head and said, “I accept.”

  A few minutes later, Bérenger returned, and as he removed his hat, Claude shouted out, “Michelle’s getting married!”

  Bérenger took in the scene—all of us at the table, Michelle smiling demurely, M. Marcel sitting anxiously upright—and strode over to kiss both of them on the cheeks. “Congratulations!” he roared. “What wonderful news! Let’s drink to your health, shall we?”

  Mother got the wine and Father poured us each a full glass. Standing, he held his aloft. We all followed suit. “To Michelle and Joseph. May they live long and bear me many grandchildren.”

  “Papa!” Michelle scolded. Father laughed. M. Marcel sipped from his glass, his cheeks already rosy, his eyes shiny with glee.

  “Marie will be next!” Claude teased.

  “Yes, ma chérie,” Father added. “Who will come calling for you?”

  I stared into my wine, avoiding Bérenger’s eyes.

  “Gérard, I’ll bet,” said Claude. “He lost one sister, why not try the next?”

  “Shut up,” I said.

  “Leave the poor girl alone,” my mother said. “You’re not too far behind anyway, Claude,” she added. “A working man, you are.”

  “I’ll never get married. Who needs a wife? She’ll only take my money.”

  “Oh, now,” my mother said.

  As they bantered, I stole a glance at Bérenger. To my surprise, I found him watching me with a startling intensity, as if he were trying to discern my thoughts. I flushed; he looked away.

  From that point on, Gérard stopped coming and instead, every evening after supper, M. Marcel would knock gently on the door. Michelle would sit with him at the table while Mother and I cleaned up after dinner, taking care not to make too much noise so we could listen. They did not talk of anything interesting. M. Marcel told Michelle of his work, peppering his conversation with apologies for its tedium—the bulk of his job was devoted to writing up contracts between business partners. Michelle told him of her pleasures—sitting on the hillside with me in the afternoons, making dolls. She had gotten quite good at it and had been thinking about trying to sell some at market. M. Marcel encouraged her and suggested that when they moved to Carcassonne, she could even set up a shop, if she liked, to sell dolls to children. Whatever she liked, he said. He repeated this often.

  Claude’s tactlessness aside, it was natural that both my mother and I would begin to wonder about my own prospects for marriage, now that Michelle was accounted for. Mother was discreet—she never pressured me, and I was grateful for it. Though I was not as striking as Michelle, I was passably pretty—I owned a full figure and plump lips, though I was cursed with Father’s thicket of a brow. We both expected that I would eventually find a husband, though I knew no one, save Bérenger, with whom I could envision a future. I spoke occasionally of finding someone as nice and gentle as M. Marcel (whom we now called Joseph), but with perhaps more of a chin. Mother nodded, humoring me. We both knew I had little desire to find anyone at the time, though only I knew why.

  Seven Devils

  The first rose in her as bubbles in a broth, exploding into hilarity in the midst of prayer or the nightly blessings of the bread and wine. The second devil poured itself into her heart as an inattentive vintner pours wine into a wineskin, filling it until it stretches thin. Possessed by this devil, the sight of a child with its mother or a suckling calf made her feel as if she had been filled to bursting; she ached, became dizzy, wept inconsolably. The third came on her as a fit, causing her limbs to thrash and her head to roll. Under the sway of this devil, she had once swept her arms across a jeweler’s table, scattering amulets of lapis lazuli, beaded anklets, pendants of hammered gold under the feet of the crowd. The fourth leapt from her lips as fiery language, rough words that scandalized her mother and sisters. This devil possessed her as she strolled by the booths displaying spices, fragrances and incense, dates, wine, oil, calves and lambs. She tried to clamp her lips tight, but she couldn’t keep the forbidden language from spilling out. “Leper! Leper! May God plague you with pustules!” The village had declared her a menace and forbade her from attending the market.

  The fifth devil sat by her bedside after dark, humming insistently and whispering unintelligible syllables in her ear, robbing her of sleep. The sixth took hold of her hands when she was alone and passed them through her loosening hair and over her breasts and her thighs, making the blood rise in her face and her breath come quickly in her throat. And the seventh—the seventh was the worst of all, for the seventh was always with her. It cowered in her heart and while she moved about her house weaving, baking, studying the Law with her father, dining, bathing—constantly whispering Torah to her
self, verse after verse—it threatened her; at any moment it could rise and stretch and occupy her whole being, causing her blood to chill and her body to slow until all she could do was curl herself into a fist, immobilized by fear. She whispered God’s word to keep the devils at bay.

  These were the seven reasons why Miryam, at the age of nineteen, was still unmarried and why she sought the healer from Natzaret. It was dawn: she walked alone along the shore, avoiding the roads where she could easily be stopped by Herod’s soldiers. Gulls flew over the lake, diving for fish. Her sisters would be waking now, running to tell their mother about her empty bed, and she wondered whether her mother might secretly welcome her disappearance. But she kept on, stopping from time to time to shake a pebble from her sandal. Soon she came to a place where the sloping bank began to level out. She climbed a small rise and leaned against a cypress tree to rest. Fields of whitening wheat extended before her, rippling in the wind that came off the water. A few workers were scattered across the fields, their head coverings bobbing above the plants. She believed that the man and his followers would be camping somewhere here, on the Plain of Gennesaret—it was flat and there were many grassy clearings that would offer excellent ground for camping—but she did not see them as she surveyed the expanse before her.

  The heat of the day was beginning to rise, and she removed the shawl that covered her head and shoulders and laid it on the ground, letting the air cool her face and neck. She could feel the devil within her stirring—she did not want it to wake, and she thought that if she closed her eyes and tried to make herself peaceful, it might doze again. She sat in the shade of the tree and tucked her feet beneath her. Leaning back, she closed her eyes and tried to will the sleep that had eluded her the previous night to overtake her now. But the devil was not so easily dissuaded. Before long, it had stretched itself to standing within her and was now looking out through her eyes and re-creating the view she had previously seen as benign: now the wheat plants that had been rippling so gently in the breeze appeared to her as thousands of spears piercing the breast of the great sighing beast that was the land; now the white heads of the workers as they dipped amid the plants were the pale bellies of gigantic spiders, coming toward her on long lascivious legs; now the sheltering tree she leaned against had become the body of a serpent, rigid and poised to strike. She scuttled away from it and rolled into a ball like a mealworm, covering her head with her arms. “So the people of Yisrael,” she whispered, “set out from Rameses, and encamped at Succoth. And they set out from Succoth and encamped at Etham, which is on the edge of the wilderness.”

  Time passed. She felt a light touch on her spine and when she lifted her head, he was there, kneeling beside her. He was very thin—his cheeks hung from the bones beneath his eyes, and his mouth seemed too large for his fragile face. “Miryam,” he said gently. She got quickly to her feet and pulled the cloth back over her head. He remained where he was, looking up at her like a child gazing at his mother. “Here you are,” he whispered, as if it was he who had been seeking her.

  Chapter Three

  ONE AFTERNOON, AFTER the heat of the summer had passed, I happened to be upstairs fluffing the featherbed when I heard the front door open and the swish of Bérenger’s cassock as he entered the house. “Isabelle?” he called out. I held my breath, then answered.

  “She’s gone to the butcher’s, Monsieur le curé,” I said as I descended the ladder to the lower room. “She’ll be back shortly.”

  “Oh, Marinette,” he said. He laughed, as if surprised to see me, then waved an envelope in the air. “The most wonderful thing. I’ve just received a letter from—” He stopped to laugh once more, in disbelief. “You won’t believe me.”

  “Who?” I asked, intrigued.

  “The Archduke of Austria.” He enunciated the title emphatically, with evident pleasure. “He’s written to inquire about our church.”

  “What for?” I asked.

  “It’s incredible, really. He wants to send us some money for its restoration. It appears his sister is the Reverend Mother Josephine, abbess at the convent in Prouilles. I’d no idea she was a Hapsburg,” he added. “In any case, he says she’s often spoken to him about our beautiful village and our poor dilapidated church, and he has grown fond of it through her stories. He asked if we’re still in need of funds.”

  “Really?” I said. “What luck.”

  “A blessing, Marie. A gift from God. Praise his holy name.”

  “Amen,” I added. We stood in awkward silence, aware of the faintly illicit flavor of the moment: he had taken me into his confidence. He looked around once more, as if he expected my mother to appear from behind the sideboard. Anxious to maintain his attention, I asked, “And how will you respond, Monsieur le curé?”

  “Why, I’ll let him know that we would be indebted to him for his generosity, that we are undertaking the necessary steps to perform a renovation …” He looked pointedly at me. “In fact, Marie, do you have a moment? I would like to answer him immediately, and your handwriting is so well proportioned.”

  We walked over to the presbytery, where he shouldered open the door. The interior air, though still reeking of mildew, had improved since he’d set up his rudimentary office. He had swept the stone floor clean and pushed all the debris—the rotting chairs and boards, the loose bricks—into the next room, leaving a salvaged chair and a trestle table, his desk. The afternoon sun cast an elongated grid of light on the dusty floor.

  I sat at the desk. He leaned over me to lift several sheets of stationery from a corner pile, then handed me a pen from his breast pocket. It warmed my palm.

  “Rennes-le-Château, the eighteenth of September, 1885,” he began. I wrote, struggling to form my best letters. It was a highly formal message, the language invariably deferential to the status of his addressee. Bérenger invoked the humble position of our village and church, and our great fortune at having captured the archduke’s attention. He dictated in a labored fashion, often stopping and asking me to read back what he’d said, so that by the time we had finished, the stationery was littered with irregular lines and blacked out phrases. I read out the final version.

  “What do you think, Marie?” he asked when I’d finished. “Does it sound well to you?”

  “Fit for a prince,” I declared. “I’ll recopy it.”

  Bérenger nodded, though his expression was distracted and anxious. “Listen, Marie. I’ve been thinking—I’d like you to keep the news of this letter to yourself for the time being.”

  I hesitated only briefly before answering, “Certainly, monsieur.” But I wondered why he wanted to keep the archduke’s offer a secret. It appeared as though he had just lit upon a thought that made him wary, though what it might have been I couldn’t have guessed.

  He bowed his head. “Thank you, Marinette. And thank you for your help.” He leaned over me to see the letter once again, his shoulders shading my hands.

  I took a clean sheet from the pile and began to recopy.

  He hovered only a moment more and then began to pace about the room like a restless mule in a stall. Though I kept my eyes on the page in front of me, I could feel him watching me as I wrote, and I could not help but wonder what he saw. I finally met his gaze with my own.

  “Tell me, Marinette,” he said. “Why is it that I haven’t yet seen you at confession? Are you that free of sin? As much an angel as you seem?”

  The question surprised me. I blushed to the roots of my hair and studied the page once more.

  “I’m teasing you,” he added, as a sort of apology. But I could not help but feel chided.

  When I had finished the closing line of the letter—which Bérenger had dictated as “Your servant in Christ”—and he had signed the letter with his own perfectly measured hand, he set out immediately for Couiza where he might find the postmaster. That evening, as Mother and I prepared the supper, I wished I had asked Bérenger whether I might at least share the news with her, as it appeared he had intended fo
r her to hear it first. But I kept silent.

  BÉRENGER WAS RIGHT, of course: I had been avoiding confession. I feared the intimacy of it, feared it would be too provocative, that my feelings for him would be evident in my voice and my demeanor. Though, to be sure, I was not yet exactly certain what my feelings for him were. I knew they involved want: I wanted his attention, his affection, his presence. I could not admit, even to myself, that I wanted his touch—it was too awful, too sinful a thought. But I felt it when I stood by him, when I leaned over him to serve him his plate—the need came over me like a sudden hunger, so powerful that it stole the strength from my muscles and made me fear I might collapse at his feet. His physicality overwhelmed me—his robust figure, his dark complexion, his impetuous grin. But it was his gaze that captivated me. I could not turn away from it. It seemed to simultaneously ask and tell me who I was. No other man in Rennes-le-Château shared that intensity, that seriousness of purpose. No one looked at me as he did.

  To please him, I felt I should confess. I reflected on what I had done that I might be able to reveal to him—what sin I could admit to that would convince him I was making a sincere act of contrition. I could disclose my envy for Michelle and her upcoming wedding, divulge the fact of my laziness, tell him of angry words I had spoken to my brother. All of these I could confess sincerely, for I was sorry for them, and absolution would help ease my mind. But they were evasions, I knew. There was one item—other than my unmentionable lust, of course—that was potentially more serious, more dire as far as the state of my soul was concerned. And that was the education I’d been receiving in secret from Mme Laporte.

  Madame was the most abstemious person I had yet met. Certainly she was much more so than Bérenger, who savored his food, wine, and smoke. She seemed to exist almost completely in her mind. Her large head virtually teetered on her neck like an overripe fruit, while her body was waif-like, insubstantial. She never sounded a footfall when she walked; rather she seemed—as she had that strange misty morning—to hover just above the ground, floating her way up the stairs and across the hall to her library. The cook, Mme Siau, had taken to bringing treats—almond cake or orange biscuits—when I came, but Mme Laporte never ate them. Occasionally, she sipped coffee, which she took black, but I never saw a morsel of food pass her lips. It seemed that she was nourished, instead, by her own imagination.