–May I? said Frei João Álvares, and sat down beside her on the bench, taking care not to touch her kaftan. –If you will permit me, I should like to tell you a story.
The young woman gulped back her sobs and nodded.
–Once upon a time, many years ago, there was a young man of my own order, a Knight of St. Benedict, who dedicated his life to producing illuminated copies of the Bible.
Frei João Álvares noticed that the young woman seemed to stiffen, but he went on.
–The young man became known for his skill and his holiness, and in time, when he was no longer so young, a new king was crowned who asked him to be his personal chaplain. Soon afterwards, the new chaplain visited the king’s libraries and came across a magnificent Bible produced by a group of monks in a distant Irish monastery. The chaplain was overwhelmed. He went to the king and told him he could no longer serve him. When the king asked why, the chaplain said, Because I have discovered a group of monks who are so enlightened that it is as if the Bible they produced is on fire. I must seek them out so I may learn from them. The king, as you can imagine, was most displeased, and told his chaplain that he could not refuse a royal appointment. On the contrary, your majesty, the chaplain said, I have been ordered to serve a yet greater majesty than your own, and that is a summons I dare not disobey. The king wanted to throw him into the deepest dungeon, and it was only the intervention of the master of my order that at last persuaded him otherwise. As for the chaplain, he left Portugal for Ireland that very day and was never seen again in his native land.
There was silence for a long while, except for an occasional sob from the calligrapher’s daughter. At last she said, wiping her eyes with her veil — which by now was rather soggy –Why did you tell me this story?
–Because you are like that chaplain. Worldly honours do not satisfy you. It is to the dissatisfied that God — Allah, as you know Him — calls. Perhaps He is calling you.
There was another long silence. At last Frei João Álvares said –You are perhaps thinking that it is impertinent of me to compare you to a Christian?
–No, the calligrapher’s daughter said. –I do not matter. But to compare the revelation of the Qur’an, dictated by the Angel Jibra’il himself to Muhammad…
–The Angel Gabriel also revealed the forthcoming birth of Jesus to Mary, Frei João Álvares said. –And your faith accepts Jesus as one of the Messengers of God, does it not?
The calligrapher’s daughter nodded, with some irritation. Who was this Christian to be lecturing her about the tenets of her faith?
–Perhaps, said Frei João Álvares, we are all sons and daughters of the same God, whatever name we know Him by.
–Why, said the calligrapher’s daughter wonderingly, are you not angry with us? You fought for your faith against us, and you lost. Why are you not filled with hate?
Frei João Álvares paused, as if considering his words. –Five years provides much time in which to ponder. During that time I have learned Arabic and talked with learned men. The sultan’s personal physician is a Jew. One of his most trusted advisers is a Christian. And the holiest man at court may be the slave who feeds the sultan’s peacocks. Under the skin all blood is red, is it not?
In the morning, after her prayers, the calligrapher’s daughter asked for directions to the peacocks’ enclosure. She watched as an elderly black slave unfastened the gate and entered, carrying a bucket of grain. The peahens and their chicks came scurrying, while the male followed more slowly, spreading his lordly tail. It shimmered in the sunlight, an iridescent fan of green and blue and gold that changed from moment to moment. Like a living page torn from the Hidden Book, the calligrapher’s daughter thought. Nothing, not even the Qur’an she had seen in the sultan’s library, could begin to compare with such an infinity of hues and tones and colours. The slave swept out an arm, scattering the grain, and the chicks and hens bobbed and wove and scuffled with each other in pursuit of the food.
When the bucket was empty, the slave took some chopped-up fruit from a pouch at his belt and knelt. At once the birds began pecking it out of his hands. Several of the peahens nibbled his ear or pecked at his hair, as if he were one of them. After the fruit was gone they still lingered, while the chicks darted in and out between his legs. One or two of the hens allowed him to caress them, as if they were some strange family, peafowl and human. A verse from a surah from the Qur’an — Surat Al-’An`ām, “The Cattle” — came to the mind of the calligrapher’s daughter: There is not an animal that lives on the earth, nor a flying creature on two wings, but forms part of communities like you.
At last the slave rose, picked up the empty bucket, and passed again through the gate, fastening it behind him. The calligrapher’s daughter hurried over to him. What must it be like, to be in the presence of a page written by Allah Himself? She blurted out her question, but the slave, instead of speaking, opened his mouth and pointed inside.
He had no tongue.
The calligrapher’s daughter was horrified. Had he been deliberately mutilated when he was captured? Then how had he and the Christian friar conversed? The slave bowed low, turned, and disappeared into the servants’ quarters of the palace. The calligrapher’s daughter watched him go and then knelt in the dust beside the enclosure, her fingers gripping the palisades.
That evening the calligrapher’s daughter wrote a letter to the sultan. This time the pen flowed like breath across the paper, and each letter seemed to rise up of its own accord. Your majesty, the calligrapher’s daughter wrote, I have the answer you sought to your question. Look to your slave, the one who feeds the royal peacocks. For did not the Prophet, peace be upon him, say, All creatures are the family of Allah, and He loves the most those who are the most beneficent to His family? Compared to this slave, all the Qur’ans in the world pale into insignificance, including mine. Therefore, your majesty, I beseech you to allow me to return to my home and my family, where I will practise my art with the humility I have learned.
It is not recorded whether the request of the calligrapher’s daughter was granted by the sultan, nor whether Frei João Álvares ever returned to his own country. But it is known that many more Qur’ans flowed from her pen, and each of them glowed with such fire that a new name was bestowed upon her — the Illumined One.
THE MASTER OF SALT
They were white-robed, the monks, and they worked the white salt on the green island bordered by the white foam of the Atlantic. That was how Brother Gérard knew their toils were holy and divinely ordered, and how blessed he was to find himself among them, even though he himself was a lay brother only and his robe matched the dark earth under his sandals. He served the white crystals that lay gleaming in the salt pans under the summer sun, and the crystals in turn served the white monks, who foreswore salt themselves but sold it to the noble houses of Europe so that it might sustain the monastery. The abbot himself had explained to Brother Gérard how the white of the salt matched the white of the lily that was said to have bloomed in the Virgin’s hands as a foretelling of the Christ Child to come.
Brother Gérard tried to remember this on those days of heavy rain when the dykes turned to mud and he sank, slowly, toward hell. Also on winter days when he raked the bottom of the pans clean, spattering himself with clay. Mud and clay were also holy, as creations of the Lord, and as necessary to the flourishing of the salt as the sun was, though Brother Gérard couldn’t help regretting the Lord’s choice of materials on the days when he was knee-deep in the stuff. Such criticism of the divine order led him to confession, where on muddy knees, cold and trembling, he acknowledged yet again his sin of foolish thought and his offence against Holy Scripture. Brother Firmín, who came from Andalusia, said loudly and often — though never in the hearing of the abbot — that he didn’t see why the Heavenly Father, ¡Dios me perdone!, couldn’t have situated the salt in some more agreeable climate where they might bake their bones after a day’s work.
Brother Gérard had come to the monastery as a
boy of twelve, soon after Abbot Isaac had taken up his post on this tiny island ten miles from the shores of France. Banished, so people said, from the abbey of Stella near the city of Poitiers because of a dispute with his superiors. On the contrary, said others, he had chosen isolation in order to expunge some unnamed sin through hard work and privation. From stars to salt, in any event — or mud, depending on how you looked at it. What was not in question was that Abbot Isaac believed in hard work and drove no one harder than himself. A strange man, Abbot Isaac. First of all was the fact of his being from the strange land of England, though admittedly he had studied in Paris and become a white monk at the mother house of Cîteaux. He spoke a pinched adenoidal Latin, quite incomprehensible to the lay brothers, but when agitated reverted to his native tongue. In this language, apparently, it was acceptable to curse the Lord (according to Brother Marrec, who had been a Breton fisherman before joining the order and knew a little English). When the abbot of Cluny informed Abbot Isaac that it was improper for tonsured monks to begrime their hands and their habits with rustic labours, Abbot Isaac shouted (though whether as salutation or profanity no one knew) –Christ! Christ Himself was not above dirtying his hands in order to save us! Christ Himself is the Gardener of our souls! Have you no humility?
The boy Gérard was apprenticed to the abbey’s lay brothers as a saunier, a salt worker. From Brother Michel and Brother Hervé and Brother Clément he learned how to draw the seawater through the narrow canals into the evaporating basins, and then through even narrower channels into the shallowest basins of all, where the summer sun dried the salt. He learned that a storm with heavy rain might damage the salt crop with too much fresh water, while too much sun would dry out the crystals and render them unusable. He learned the use of the rouable for removing the soft mud and algae from the bottom of the salt pans in winter, and the simoussi for raking the coarse grey salt from the pans in summer. But it was ten years before he was allowed to touch the souvron, the long-handled trapezoidal board used by the master sauniers for lifting the pure top layer, the delicate pinkish-white fleur de sel that smelled like violets. Of the half-dozen master sauniers he was most in awe of Brother Thibault, himself a white monk and the abbey’s choirmaster. Brother Thibault was old and thin and stooped, yet no one produced better saltflower, and it was said that he sang to his salt to produce its glistening crystals.
Gérard cautiously tried this himself when no one was looking, inexperienced though he still was with the souvron. Alas, his singing had no such effect. He was only a lay brother, after all, a peasant boy from his tiny village a mile or two from the abbey. Like the other brothers he sang behind the high screen that separated them, in church as in life, from the white monks — separate refectories and dormitories, separate passages and hallways, even separate latrines. Only at harvest, when all hands were needed in the salt pans to gather in the crop, did he mingle with them.
–You look tired, mon fils, his mother said one October evening. It was a grey day, colder and rainier than usual, and he’d almost fallen asleep over his soup. At fourteen he still went home every day, as he would until he made his vows, if he chose, at eighteen. Perhaps, though, he wasn’t fitted? The cellarer, Brother Albéric, had spoken harshly to him that afternoon when he’d stumbled and a section of dyke wall had fallen away. Afterwards, rebuilding the wall, he shed unmanly tears, for which he chastised himself. He would pray to the familiar blue statue of Our Lady in his own parish church, whose own son, after all, must sometimes have spilt the nails in his father’s carpentry shop.
–Don’t send Jean-Marie to the salt, he said suddenly. Jean-Marie, twelve next month, was to join him in the salt pans, which had supported them all since their father’s death from the scrofula. But Jean-Marie was a frail boy; he wouldn’t flourish. –Find something else for him to do. Please, Maman.
–Your sister’s been offered a place at the seigneur’s when she turns eleven, his mother said, bringing him a mug of warmed cider. Another year, then; Élisabeth had just turned ten. One less mouth to feed. Then there would only be the two youngest, Mathieu and Anne, at home.
He himself was already promised; that he understood. First as the family’s breadwinner, and second as their offering to God, their amulet against further illness or loss. Or rather, God Himself had chosen him for this humble task and had provided this means of sustenance. He could have been sent to the abbey’s pigsty, the brewery, the granary; instead, in the summer breezes, he was surrounded by the smell of violets, that humble three-leaved flower of the trinity that the Virgin herself had loved.
At fifteen, unexpectedly, he fell in love. The girl, a neighbour’s daughter with a long brown plait and a toss of freckles across her nose, turned suddenly, at fourteen, into a woman. She pretended not to notice him anymore, crossing her father’s yard with the milk pail, but one evening she followed him down to the shore where he stood among the rock pools watching the stints and sanderlings. A few evenings later, when he asked, she went with him. He told her of his feelings and she dipped her chin, which he took as a yes. A few months later she was affianced to the son of the wealthiest farmer in the district.
Again he wept unmanly tears into his pillow. The rejection was a call to vocation, a reminder about his future. He would not marry. He would hold his future nieces and nephews on his knee, on those rare feast days when he was permitted visits home, but otherwise he belonged to the Church.
At eighteen he became a novice, learning by heart the four prayers that the brothers recited in silence during their labours: the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, the Miserere, the Ave Maria. He slept now in the dormitory, in the narrow bed that would be his for the rest of his life. A year later, in the abbey’s chapel, he made his vows in front of all the monks, white and brown. He was grateful, when his mother died nine months afterwards, that she had lived to witness his commitment to God. At her funeral the knot of villagers outside the parish church parted to let him through, a tall bearded young man in a frayed brown robe.
But the proudest moment of his life came when he was chosen, three years after his vows, to be apprenticed to Brother Thibault himself. No lay brother had ever been apprenticed to a white monk before. Brother Thibault was crumbling like the salt itself, yet he refused to leave his saltflower. If God permitted, he told Gérard, he would die in the salt pans with the smell of the fleur de sel in his nostrils. Meanwhile he would teach the raw young peasant with the flair for the souvron how to rely on smell and texture alone to determine the quality, since none of the monks had so much as tasted the crop for which they were famous.
It was a year or two later when Brother Thibault whispered to Gérard the secret of his salt. He had, apparently, received unearthly assistance. One summer, many years before, the Virgin herself had visited him, wrapped in her blue cloak, her face obscured by radiance. He’d been young then, not much older than Gérard. She had moved toward him along the dykes, her feet barely touching the ground, her hands lifted in benediction. Overcome by terror and incredulity, he told no one. The following summer she came again, this time with her mother, the blessed St. Anne, and wiped his brow with her sleeve. He must have fainted, because he came to with his fellow monks standing over him, urging him to rise. Publicly, he blamed the fainting spell on the heat, but ever since, his salt had been the whitest and most perfumed in the region. The king himself was rumoured to insist on Brother Thibault’s salt at his table, and the small pottery jars that bore Brother Thibault’s signature were said to fetch extraordinary prices in Genoa and Saxony.
These stories brought their own terrors to Brother Gérard. How, once Brother Thibault had departed this earthly life, was he to maintain the quality of the crop? If the salt’s unique characteristics depended on heavenly assistance, how was he, a mere lay brother, to obtain it? He redoubled the fervency and frequency of his prayers. A visit from Our Lady would be at a time and place not of his choosing, but he made it plain that, if she should deign to honour him in such a way, he would keep
her statue in the parish church permanently lit with candles. He would also — how, he didn’t know — make a pilgrimage to the cathedral dedicated to her in Paris, and would undertake any other arduous practices she might require. When his sister Élisabeth, now married, bore a daughter, he wrote to ask if she would name the child Violette, after the Virgin’s favourite flower.
At the monastery, time stood still. Or rather, time moved in a circle under the dome of heaven, through the round of the year. For Brother Gérard, time moved through the seasons of the salt, marked by more or less mud, more or less rain or sun or wind. One year a heavy snowfall, never before seen in the region, meant they could not clean the pans in time for spring, and the salt crop was much reduced. Another year a fire destroyed many of the barns and outbuildings, and Brother Gérard found himself working with the carpenters and other lay brothers, under the supervision of Brother Albéric, in the rebuilding. The abbot had decreed this reassignment of duties as a mortification, on the grounds that the monks must have so displeased the Lord that He had sent a fire to consume part of their possessions. Something to do with the hotter passions, such as lust or anger, the abbot implied. Brother Gérard went twice to confession that week, remembering how he had glanced longingly at a woman walking past on the road from the village, and how he had raised his voice impatiently with Brother Clotaire, a man as strong and dimwitted as an ox.
It did not occur to him to question the idea of communal guilt. Once, the bread being made a little less coarse than usual, the abbot placed the whole community under penance to atone for the fault of the baker.
Word came, from a pair of mendicant monks, that a force of thirteen thousand troops on their way to the crusades had helped the Portuguese army to drive the Moors out of Lisbon. Many in the abbey fell to their knees and gave thanks to God for rescuing a Christian kingdom from the infidels. But Abbot Isaac, that Sunday, gave a sermon not merely strange, but — to some at least — diabolical. He spoke against the forcing of unbelievers to embrace Christian beliefs at the point of a sword, and of the lack of Christian martyrdom for those who killed and pillaged. What belief could occur under such circumstances? Would Christ Himself, given his gentleness and patience, have behaved in such a manner? And why, then, should the enemy not say –Do to the church as the church has done?
Hour of the Crab Page 17