Last Sunday, when the Knowing came, I dug up my treasure, protected in its green oilskin, and hid it in my underskirts, together with the skein of wool, then pushed up to my feet and got my stick—my feet going where they were led, and I on top of them, just tagging along, the bowl of porridge in one hand and my cane in the other, and the Good Book knocking on my knees. Me hobbling as fast as two old legs can go.
I walked down the Street of Tinsmiths. The houses there rise two and three stories high, with their upper stories hanging out over the narrow, dirt street so close that they almost blot out the sky. The ground-floor shops are open to the busy traffic of passing feet, as well as to donkeys and goats and pigs. Inside the open doors the smiths and their boys sit cross-legged, as they have for centuries, beating on big tin sheets with their hammers as they shape kettles, pots, and pans by turning the tin round and round between their bare feet. My ears hurt from the ringing hammers. Banging, trinning, a trillion hammers, pinging to no set time. And above that noise, the tinsmiths were shouting to one another or laughing at some ribald raillery over the din of hawkers selling “Milk! Good milk!” and “Apples! Fruit! Nuts!” From the second floor came the cries of women who leaned out their windows, screaming to their friends in the street below. One woman shook her carpet out the window, creating clouds of dust, and another gave a warning shout before she tipped out her chamber pot. I dodged. Swift, cunning me.
I stepped along as quickly as I could over the rough cobbles, glad to leave the noise behind. Then into the Street of Blacksmiths, with their iron forges bellowing. The men there are huge, strong, hairy creatures, black with cinders and smoke. They grinned at me too, with gaping, red, gap-toothed mouths, and two of them, pausing for a dipperful of water as I passed (the glistening sweat streaming off their bare backs), were making lewd remarks to each other about the fire in their loins and how they could enflame a femme. One howled at me to be off and made a gesture. But most of them concentrated on their iron hinges and door locks and armor plates, for I am too old and dirty and poor for men to look at anymore.
I dodged around a horse that blocked my way, his hind hoof resting in a blacksmith’s leather lap. The acrid, smoky smell of his cut hooves, together with that sweet, horsey smell of hair and manure, filled my nostrils, pleasing me. I’ve always liked that odor of hot horse hoof, of sweat and fires.
And so I proceeded through the twisting streets, past chandlers and ink-grinders and various other tradespeople, and out through the city gate to the mud-and-wattle huts that cling to the protective walls. Then I passed those too and moved on into the lower town, where the tanners have their foul-smelling cauldrons bubbling with hides.
I held my rag to my nose, gasping against the stench. The steam rose high into the brown air as the apprentice boys threw their weight against the bellows, building up the fires. Hell itself could not smell so vile or feel so hot as this hellhole of the Street of Tanners.
The muddy road was slippery with the tanners’ waste. I stumbled, almost falling in the mess.
A pack of boys came out of the alleys there, throwing stones and dancing round me, trying to knock the wooden bowl out of my hand. Like cockroaches, how do they sense I’m coming?
The boys could not hit the bowl, but I was afraid anyway, as I always am, and held it high above my head or else I cradled it under my arm, and I shouted at them to go away; didn’t they see I was only an old crazy woman, curse them all to hell?
I came to the house and stopped. It was just another wooden structure leaning up against its neighbors, with nothing to mark it as the one for me. Except that my feet and eyes stopped there. I paced back and forth, trying to move on—or better, to go back to the stable where I belonged—but my feet would not let me free. I sat down on the wooden steps in front to rest and reason with my feet.
They wouldn’t move forward, and they wouldn’t go back, so I knew that my heart was beckoning me in, but I was nervous anyway, anxious about what I’d find inside.
Then suddenly the thought—it might be Amiel Aicart inside, or Poitevin, or Hugon—and my stomach lurched.
I limped up the steps to the door, a wooden door rocking on a broken hinge. Open it, whispered my heart, and I pushed it gingerly, frightened by the awful creaking of the rusty hinge. I think I could not have entered except for the thought of the Good Men I might find inside, but that thought gave me courage, and I stepped into the dark hall with its smell of dusty abandonment. I sniffed the air. I asked if I was supposed to stay here, make a new home; the answer came back, No. That made me glad. It didn’t smell good to me, and I listened furtively to the dry sound of empty rooms.
Then I crept slowly up the steps to the second floor, managing the cane and bowl in one hand and holding the railing with the other. It was so dark I could hardly see, and the stairs so steep, almost a ladder indeed, that I had to stop, gasping, my goodness, short of breath. I remembered my Lady Esclarmonde shooing me up the stairway at Montségur that day—and I, a maid, flying up the steps by threes.
I was always running back then; they couldn’t stop me. Diana, goddess of the moon. Even later, when I was married and riding on the stag or boar hunts, I rode astride, like a man. I could shoot a bow, train a hawk. Now I can barely pull the stairs.
At the top I heard a whimper. I stopped, frightened, and then I stood trembling, listening, hoping (oh, praise God!) it would be them! So I pushed forward, feeling with one hand along the rotting wooden wall and wishing for a window in this narrow corridor.
I came to another door, sagging like the front door on its hinge. I pushed it open.
“Who’s there?” I called.
The stench hit me first. It took all my courage to move into the bedroom against the smell of urine and feces and death. From the light of the narrow window I could make out a tousled form on the filthy bed. Gingerly I approached. No perfecti here. Only an old woman, at the point of death.
Involuntarily, I stepped back. I didn’t know what to do. Even in the dim light I could see her face was covered with boils and the scabs of half-healed pustules—signs I’d seen before. I knew that pus filled her groin and the nodes under her armpits. She tugged pathetically at the air with little birdlike gestures. Clawing for my hand, writhing on the straw mattress, which was vile with her urine and the release of her bowels. She smelled.
“Con—” she croaked. She could hardly speak. “Conso—”
Ah, I knew what she wanted to say, and pulled my hand from hers.
“Consola—”
-mentum. I knew that word.
I crept back from the pallet and sat on the floor, resting my shoulders against the bare wood of the hut. A cold wind blew through the cracks, chilling my neck and shoulders, and I drew my cloak tighter, praying for guidance, because I am not a perfecta. I needed one myself. Hadn’t I been looking for Amiel and the others all these months? And what if I caught this woman’s plague?
“Oh, Lord, dear beloved Christ—” I prayed.
And then I felt the Presence there. My heart leapt up with joy. My Beloved was back, and you can say it’s my imagination, but I know when it comes and when it leaves, and my Friend had just returned. Now I’d know what to do.
But I sat with my back to the wall and rested my head on my knees, praying helplessly not to do what I was being told. One more sin on my soul. Because I don’t like that cup; let it pass from my lips. I refuse. But you can’t refuse, it seems.
After a time, I pulled heavily to my feet. I cradled the head and shoulders of the poor woman on the bed and wiped her face and hands with my dirty rag, which was all I had, and then I fed her slowly from my cold porridge, which the good mistress had provided for me to give to her. She took a few mouthfuls and seemed to rest easier.
I carried the bowl downstairs and out to the fountain. That’s a long way. It took a while to make my way back with the bowl washed out and clean water in it, but I climbed the steps again and even found a scrap of not-too-dirty linen in one of the rooms, which I
used to wash her hands and face.
I tried to talk to her.
But mostly what I did was sit with my back to the wall, just waiting. When it grew dark, I fell asleep.
I woke up with a jerk. The room was filled with light, and before me stood a form all made of light, an angel, probably, beckoning with her luminous hand. She smiled at me so lovingly that I felt the warmth go through to every part, and all I could do was to look back, loving her. The white light was so intense, the bliss so ravishing, that I had no power or even need to form my questions into words.
Neither did she answer me in words, but filled my mind with knowledge so that without a care I approached the bed. The beautiful being came too, surrounding us in light. The dying woman was awake, eyes glittering feverishly, though I don’t know if she could see the luminous beautiful form that directed me to place my hands upon her head. I could feel the heat pouring off my hands. Not for a moment did I think about the plague, for the bed was no longer a pallet of dirty straw but was shining with its own cool, glowing light. My hands rested on the woman’s head, and I could see how the life-force that surrounds the physical body was irregular and shattered, and how dark spots had formed where the disease was worst. Slowly the woman relaxed under my tingling hands. Her eyes closed.
I didn’t give the consolamentum properly. I’ve been present at this ceremony and know how it should be done. First the perfectus asks if the believer comes willingly and by her own volition to accept this spiritual gift. This is important, for the person asking to take the consolamentum must be willing thereafter to observe the customs of abstinentia, and from that time forth she may eat no meat or eggs or cheese or any other food derived from the copulation of animals, and she (or he, or course) must promise to live thereafter in chastity and celibacy and to follow all our Cathar rules and to pray the Lord’s Prayer at all times ceaselessly. The proper consolamentum is performed with the Good Book and legitimate rituals and prayers.
But this woman on the bed was dying, and I felt disoriented by—no, absorbed in—the juice that poured out into her from my shining hands. The intention was pure. But I could not remember the exact order of the ritual. In my garbled state I even forgot about my treasure wrapped in its oilskin at my knee. Instead I made up rites.
I found a little block of wood in the corner, and I blessed that wood, as being a piece of living wood, the same substance on which our Lord had died. Assisted by the light, I said the whole Lord’s Prayer over it and sprinkled it with the light of my hands and the stardust of my heart, until it became the Holy Book. Inside that wood was writ all the history of our world and our creation, impregnated in its blocken memory.
“Good Christian,” I said, placing the good wood against the Eye of Wisdom at her brow. “May God and all those present and far away forgive you all offenses you have committed knowingly and unknowingly, and may you be cleansed, absolved, and pure.”
Oops. I’d forgotten she was supposed to ask for the forgiveness first, and only then could the absolution be given; and I should have asked her to name the mistakes for which she prayed forgiveness. She is supposed to be conscious and aware, rich in her intent. And the intent is this: to cleanse the thoughts of her heart by the inspiration of Christ’s Holy Spirit, that she may fully love and magnify the name of God. But now she was clawing at my hand, and her thick tongue continued to mumble her desire for the consolamentum. I got even more flustered then. So I said the Lord’s Prayer to her, giving her the prayer that I myself was allowed to take and that I knew, God knows, after all these years, and thought our Lord would not mind a layman giving comfort to a dying woman, with a block of wood in place of Scripture on her brow.
“This is the prayer that Christ Jesus brought into the world,” I said, “and taught to the Friends of God. You are never to take a bite of food without first repeating this prayer.” And then I repeated the rest of the Cathar directions—about celibacy and purity of soul, about having a socia, or fellow-believer, for her lifelong companion and never going anywhere except in pairs, about the vows of poverty and owning no possessions that might interrupt her concentration on the presence of God, for where our thoughts are, there will be our heart. Then I gave her the four directions of the Way. From henceforth, with this ceremony, she would vow
Never to tell a lie.
Never to take the life of any living being—not even a fly or a mosquito, which might have been our mother in another life.
Never to take what isn’t freely given—which is to say, never to steal, not so much as an idea or another person’s dream.
Never to indulge in wrong sexual practices (as I have done so often, God forgive me, please).
Never to swear an oath or take the name of our Lord God in vain, for is it not said in Saint Matthew, Swear not at all; neither by heaven, for it is God’s throne; nor by the earth, for it is His footstool…. But let your words only be Yes, yes, and No, no; for anything further comes of evil?
And then I ended the ritual with the pardon: “And we pray God grant you His forgiveness.” After that I stayed with her for some time, my hands on her head, praying with all the love in my heart for the joy of this woman and the journey she was about to take beyond the stars. I prayed that she be liberated from the pain of her body and never need to return to the suffering of this life, but go into the Light.
Indeed, I could not remove my hands. I loved her beyond comprehension. In that moment I was composed of love. I had no physical body, but only the sense of being in the Light, and of the Way; and for the first time I knew what the Lady Esclarmonde had been telling me all those years ago: how we are formed of spirit, our bodies are filled with the Christhood Light, the dove. When I opened my eyes, I could see light streaming from my hands and radiating off my skin, the shining beams of love, and light was filling the beautiful old dying woman before me on the bed.
She was no longer sick and hideous. I closed my eyes, the better to see her there.
“Thank you,” she whispered. She reached up to touch my hand.
“You are forgiven,” I whispered. “Now may you forgive all those who have offended you knowingly or unknowingly by thought, word, and deed.”
I cannot say how long it lasted—a minute, an hour, a movement of the sun across a hayfield—but gradually the interior singing stopped, and slowly my spirit sank back into my body, and the Light withdrew some of its great power from me, leaving me still flaring with fire but back in my own trembling body once again. After a time I took my hands from the woman’s head. The room was so dark that I could hardly see.
That’s how I gave the consolamentum.
At first pearl light, when the shapes in the room emerged gray against the darkness, I saw that the old woman had died. I was glad for her. Her mouth had fallen open. Maybe it was a scream or maybe the leftover shout of joy that flickered at her mouth.
I laid her hands in prayer across her chest. She was significantly smaller without her spirit in her body, but I was still filled with the Light of the Holy Spirit and with joy.
When I stepped from the bed, I found in the pocket at my knee the forbidden Book that I should have used. By then it was too late. I was annoyed with myself—and with that annoyance, I felt the first fading of my inner Light. I wondered if the consolamentum had been pure. If intention alone was enough.
I crept from the room before anyone could find me. The early sunlight sparkled on the rain-washed streets, making the stones glitter and flash like jewels. I wanted to laugh. Rain! I’d never heard it, that’s how absorbed I’d been in the Light. I hurried along the rough wet cobblestones to the village square, to the fountain. I felt weak. My knees kept giving way. All the way home my Inner Judge, the prosecutor, alternated with my joy, though for a long time I paid him no attention, being still absorbed in Light. Gradually, though, his words began to sink in. Who did I think I was (he scolded) to give that holy rite? To absolve the woman’s sins? I was hardly even a Christian, much less a Good Christian. Like Esclarmond
e. Like Bertrand Marty. Like Guilhabert de Castres. What would they have said? Yet here I was, still burning with the Holy Spirit, shining with the Light.
I smiled, remembering my instructions to the dying woman about the abstinences—no greedy eating of meat or eggs—when, after all, she’d never eat again. No lies or false reports. No acts of sexual perversion, passion, and lust that might harm another person. Then I started to laugh aloud into the clear blue air, and the pigeons all rose up in a flurry of white wings, like angels. I turned round and round with them, arms lifted to fly into the sky. I stood on tiptoes twisting with their flight. Then I fell flat in the mud and picked myself up quickly, embarrassed lest anyone had seen me, arms flapping and sleeves waving, crazy Jeanne.
To make up for my exhibition, I sat demurely at the edge of the fountain under a plane tree, its bark as etiolated as a leper’s shedding skin, and I pulled out the mistress’s wool and started my spinning, singing under my breath and laughing aloud every now and again at the pleasure I’d just had. No one had ever told me how much fun it was to be perfected. My knee didn’t ache, and indeed I’d forgotten all my woes. The best-kept secret: getting old. Don’t tell the foolish girls.
The sun moved higher overhead, and my Inner Judge began to rail at me again about the sins on my black soul, and soon I wasn’t laughing anymore: there were so many sins. I had little enough food, it’s true, but whenever I got a piece of meat I ate it greedily. “I’m not perfected,” I defended myself, and anyway, Bishop Guilhabert himself relieved the perfecti of all dietary principles. He ordered them to stop fasting and to eat meat; they would need their strength, he said, to survive. Moreover, their extended fasts and adherence to a holy diet gave the enemy the noose to hang them with—like the believer who was burnt at the stake because he wouldn’t kill a hen.
The Treasure of Montsegur Page 5