by Terry Hale
‘Do not tax yourself, Father,’ Blondina interrupted.
‘Yes, yes,’ Monako replied, enlivened by the presence of the woman of Tortosa, and by the mere sound of her voice. He went on: ‘How strange! Might my head be steadied? Might my tongue be loosened by the sweetness of your words, señora? Might you take away some of my one hundred and eight years? There! I beg of you, make my beard and my hair turn black again, my dear pure señora!’
‘And would you still go back and live enclosed by four walls, to look only at a pit?’ the Spanish woman asked.
‘There!’ Monako retorted, ‘I am becoming younger! Listen. You are never to repeat what will issue from this old soul of mine, which is a little rejuvenated now, strange to say, without my being able to account for this metamorphosis. Truly, my head is stilled; look! I have ceased stammering; listen! oh my child! the body and the soul are at rest in a monastry a star of tranquillity for earthly passions and agitations. There is solitude for the most part, God unceasingly there around one, and the sky that enters through the gate of the grave; prayers and holy water as dew for the soul; one’s thoughts as family and for one’s senses the sun, the finest work to issue from the mighty and eternal hand of God! Yes, my child, we have this, and we are happy. We dream of angels and celestial graces; the nights are like a slumbering river, and we walk on the grass of the monastery, admiring its colour, intoxicated by its freshness and its fragrance; and the eyes of the true cloistered monk see in only two directions: inclined towards the earth or heavenwards – nothing that is around him.
‘What can we hear from outside, through the gates, the iron trellises, the skylights? Men’s footsteps passing; children who have crept near and who run off as if they had been burned, shouting: “Don’t go there! Look, the door is ajar! The wind will blow you inside and bang the door shut, and you will be gone; the trellis will snag on your clothes if you touch it; and if your feet step on the skylight, a monk will pull them in as ghosts do in your bed.” May God keep them and save these children whom we look upon only as flowers on which we bestow a sigh, some, because they wither, others because they grow. Does a cloistered saint sigh over anything else but flowers and children, over Heaven in other words? Yes, my child; it is God’s will that the child be his regret and flowers his love, so long as the bells are quiet, so long as the chanting monks are silent. But when the chanting monks give answer to the bells, when the cell doors open for the church to be filled with row upon row of penitents, when the air of God’s temple wafts embalming forgetfulness of over-many thoughts of the world fashioned far from sacred gatherings, then, then, in the midst of the tapers’ glow, the monk’s body ends and his soul begins, for the monk has reflected: the earth is small.’
Blondina, thus oblivious to all but Monako, this memory and truth of which he was to acquaint her, interrupted: ‘Well then! Why should I not repeat your words, Father? They contain nothing that would offend the houses of the holy orders.’
‘No, my child, thus far no,’ replied the monk; ‘but the heart of all this, the real heart which destroys what you have just heard, I shall explain to you, or try, at least. For this to tell true, you must not imagine that I judge other monks by my lights. I have seen, I have heard, and I have had no doubts. I walked those long corridors, which bear the scent of God, with the sagacity given by silence and the moon, which is an awesome meditation or else religious zeal. The latter all too seldom comes to begin with; how many saints have first been devils! I am not unware that Penitence is Sin turned hermit; in order to rebuild one must first have cast down. And so I halted on my night perambulations – from midnight until two o’clock – my eyes upon the garden, upon the spades and the crosses, and I was sad, for I loved my mother and I saw her no more; it is the rule in convents to see one’s mother no more. I bent my ears to the wind, and it returned to me lamentations of the heart from one of the cells. I went nearer and reflected: “If I pluck a secret, if I steal it rather, at least let us kneel down.” And I knelt. There is the crime indeed, is it not, and the savouring of it? No matter! I shall go on. Oh my child! I no longer left my retreat after that night on which one of my brothers spoke these muffled words within his own:
‘“I pray ceaselessly, and nothing comes to my succour; I strike myself, I fast, I weep; the flame that drove me to the monastery still consumes me; nothing ever will restore me but the funeral bier. Today I can count one more wrinkle than yesterday; so much the better! She is dead! And I too shall soon have that happiness. And she thinks she will long have tranquility alone with the worms; I too wish to be among them; I want them to make me garters and patterns on my skin. Faith! What a fine and lovely thing is faith! The more one surrenders unto it, the more one loses oneself in suffering. Of the one hundred brothers that we number, ninety are my like, and are clowns of religion. Our faith is in the cloister, our mask at large upon the streets. I challenged God to appear; I cried out: Be seen! Carry me off, if you are so powerful. Bah! You are not able to. If you existed, you would show yourself plainly now and then. And I laughed like one possessed. And I draw blood from myself every morning so that the blood might be renewed, for I believe that my reason is going. Last night I made my challenge to God again, and I saw a spider run across a relic.”’
‘I ask you, child Blondina, if I should have fled and ceased to wander in the night after this blasphemy which rang out horribly in the silence.’
‘Will you permit me two questions?’ the Spanish woman interrupted in her turn with some impatience.
Monako was extraordinarily fatigued by what he had just told her, having thus in some wise expressed everything which there could remain of life’s vigour in his age and his senses, and with his eyes sunk into his beard, he had twice to be addressed with these same words by the Tortosa woman before he answered:
‘Of course, my child, of course; four if you wish.’
‘Well, Father,’ Blondina went on, ‘first why do you call me child, and then why have you come to tell me about a spider running across a relic?’
The levity which the señora brought to the last part of her inquiry seemed to displease the monk, and he straightened up again, assuming a solemn, prophetic air. He answered nonetheless in a sensitive and sagacious manner:
‘Señora, you know the whole story of your life, except for three names: those of your father, your mother, and the one who was responsible, under orders, it is true, but who had cause to sorrow over the loss of half your sight; for the order was given by two hands: one put gold in my pocket for my religious community, the other brought a dagger to my throat. I should have cast the gold out and let the dagger in. A heart of … or rather the place of a heart in a man, your infernal father, and the timidity of a coward, in the woman who was your mother, abandoned your innocent little body to my already feeble care, but a care which still until this day has been maintained, at least morally, for it has never been allowed to stand watch but in the shadows. Yes, I am the one who wrote upon that paper, which you have doubtless lost (Blondina showed it to the monk where it lay still between her breast and the lace that covered it); yes, I am the one who placed you in the fatal sailing basket; and if the misfortune which happened to you inside it deprived me of the right to name you child Blondina, the care I have had to hold your memory in my day and night hours, in my prayers and in my pious joys, allows it back to me, I believe, my child. I have come to believe that you have made many of the wretched smile and that you still make them smile; that your fortune is shed like a fresh rain upon a hot beating sun; that there are women who give birth to their child upon swaddling clothes made ready by you; there is but your love … Muguetto …’
The words which follow came rushing from the Spanish woman’s mouth as the monk drew breath, each minute that he spoke seeming now to take a year.
‘Oh, yes!’ cried the Tortosa woman, ‘Call me child Blondina, One-Eyed Blondina if you want, whatever you wish; I shall excuse everything, I shall find everything to be well, since you know the name
of my father and my mother. Ah! They have sent you, have they not, to find me, to take me to them, for them to see me at their leisure, have they not? They have nothing to caress in their arms, no child to look upon eagerly, nothing to be their support, to send them off to sleep, to wake them up, to get them out of bed, to make them laugh, to love them! Oh, how wretched they are, and I too. Oh holy man of the monastery, you know them, do you not, my father and my mother? What happiness you have! But I too soon shall have that happiness. Are they fine, are they great, are they young, old, sick, healthy? Whatever, they are good. You were wrong to do what you did, it was bad; I forgive you; a father and a mother always have their reasons for parting from their child; you well know that the opposite is impossible, and they are coming close, now that they can, with this desire that springs from privation. It is the same with all three of us; you can see that plainly. Oh! I am so happily out of my wits that I am dancing on my chair, that I do not let you speak, that I am laughing and weeping at the same time. Oh! how I love them, oh! how I love you, oh! how I love everyone! How happy Muguetto will be! He must come at once, must he not? I shall be silent; tell me, tell me quickly, or I shall die of it. I want to know before Muguetto, I want to be the first to know; it is only right, is that not so, my good friend the monk?’
And Blondina was biting and kissing Monako’s robe.
Troubled and fatigued, stunned and dismayed, overwhelmed by the madness in the Spanish woman’s speech, with his head shaking, the monk began again to stammer out some quite unintelligible words which, issuing from a calmer mind, would have signified that the two magnificently arrayed dead in the church that afternoon were the father and the mother of Blondina, separated and reunited there by chance. But the Tortosa woman was left stupefied because now Monako was dead …
When the Spanish woman rallied and regained the power of thought, she cried out to her servants: ‘Don’t wait here! Run, go now, and return with Muguetto. You must not all go, for I am afraid of this corpse. Oh, how frightening a dead person is! What if he were to come back to life! No, not that, leave me, all of you, I want no one now. What did I mean? I fear nothing now, not at all, I am old, but desperate. I would truly like him to come back. Father, Father, are you really dead? No, no, it cannot be; it is that your great age overwhelms you for now. God in heaven, I am left alone! What am I going to do? Dead! Dead! Can it really be true? Dead before I know the name of my father and my mother! Oh, come back, speak to me do not turn so cold! take a little of this water there, on your hands, your temples! Oh, this is dreadful! No life, no warmth; his lids drop back upon his eyes as I lift them my water flask cannot part his lips. Poor beard, poor man, poor monk! It is over! Over! But I shall never grow used to this notion while I remain ignorant of that sweet thing he was about to tell me, that thing that I awaited, my mouth open and my heart racing. Death came in and made the horrible mistake of taking the secret instead of taking me; at least it would have remained with Muguetto. So close to heaven and then to touch only the dream! Nothing will fulfil what the monk wanted to say! Nothing will take pity on a wretched girl of twenty-seven years who has not yet seen her father and her mother, and who has almost always felt when close to her lover that someone was missing to give her support! Monako, wake up, Monako! God in heaven, a miracle! Two names, two days held to my mother’s breast, and then, for ever after burning in the fire, alive!’
Upon the last of these words, all of them spoken with consuming fire, behind the body of Monako a door was opened and there appeared Sangouligo, the young gentleman to whom Muguetto had explained how to wreak vengeance.
Almost prostrate on the wooden floor beside the monk in whom she fervently desired to find some remaining breath of life, the Tortosa woman rose with a shiver as Sangouligo entered. Despite her turmoil, her despair and near madness, she immediately recalled that she had laughed at him and at his mother, who had had a fit of dizziness, at a ball given by the duchess Florea, and that at the ball he had proclaimed through clenched teeth: ‘This woman has only one eye and I shall tear it from her.’
‘What business have you here, sir, at this hour of the night,’ asked Blondina however, ‘and without your being announced?’
‘It was not possible; you forget, it seems, madam, that there is no one in your house but myself, a woman and this.’
And Sangouligo touched Monako with his cane, like a demon tormenting with an iron pitchfork.
‘I heard, I know what has just happened,’ he went on; ‘I paid a bribe. I saw the monk, I arrived almost at the same time. One thing only held me back, and you have removed that obstacle by sending off all your servants; there’s not one of them left and they have a long way to go, to the house of handsome Muguetto. But let us be in no hurry, and he will find me here, I hope.’
‘Ah! you are the serpent who hissed upon his head,’ the Spanish woman interjected quickly without thinking.
‘Like you, whose poison was poured upon our people, you know where. Poison in Blondina! I had imagined that hair of sweet gold was a certain sign of kindness and tolerance; to be cut when the need arose to tie the wickedness of a tongue, and that above all a woman, especially one outside the limits of convention and morality, was a confessor who forgave sins with virtually no penance. And I defended you despite my hatred of Muguetto; and I would say “she loves, she is free, and her money counts not a jot;” and I admired you, I even would shout: “she is beautiful!” at the risk of being mocked myself by people who would only wink in answer; how well you deserve that, like the others, I should have left you in the turbulence of being found wanting in that often hazy and thoughtless way provoked by a pirouette or a plump leg! How I ought to have muttered and then laughed as I looked at the mother of some girl other than you! These words make you turn pale and fall into a chair; so much the better, it is the start of my satisfaction. What is your business? you ask me. Frankly, I am not entirely sure; we shall see. Why, you will add, come here to reproach me for some ballroom chatter, ephemeral and dead the morning after? I shall answer you that I do not forgive when someone has mocked either me or my family. There is something that makes my life stop until I am revenged. This is bad. I advise no one to follow my example; I am not a Muguetto. Do not imagine I am taking advantage because you are alone with a dead man; no, I shall wait for your lover. I shall not run away. A dead man! How strange these ballroom jests recalled in the presence of a monk’s dead body. This is solemnity; perhaps over-much, compared with none at all. So I am a long aimless arrow lost in the clouds. So! my mother would frighten the birds if they painted her on a garden wall. So! my mother gives fresh meaning to a word such as weirdness. And what of yours? Who is to know what became of her. My mother! Laughing at my mother! Wait, I’m going to sit down just like you, señora, only I choose to do so; nothing else compels me. I do not turn pale, I do not stagger upon the naming of those women to whom God gave us, with his blessing.’
‘In their names and in the name of heaven, take pity and show mercy!’ exclaimed the Spanish woman, attempting to flee.
‘No, bastard that you are, you must remain! And I am generous with you; there is no one to hear how I treat you.’
‘Be truly good, señor Sangouligo! Oh! this is enough, you will surely agree with me that this is enough as answer to a trifle which I cursed as soon as I had uttered it? What! is this the reason that your face convulses, that your gestures threaten, that your eyes stare so! Is this the reason that you bribed servants and followed a monk who was coming to see me! And why did you follow him?’
‘Perhaps I shall tell you,’ Sangouligo broke in, not calmed, but ever more excited.
‘What! is it indeed for this,’ the Tortosa woman persisted, ‘that you do not take pity upon an unhappy woman who begs forgiveness with all her heart, and whom you cruelly crush so that you are like a misfortune that has settled upon her, that has her in its thrall and makes all argument impossible! I implore you, desist, leave! He too implores you, the old man lying cold here; see his
hands are at prayer. Your mother! Ah, that is over, I shall never mock her again; I swear it by Muguetto. Mercy! Your mother! And mine. Oh! what would I not give just to know her name, the one she was baptised with! Oh! I fear so, señor! What is it in your mind to do? Tell me!’
‘I!’ retorted Sangouligo, suddenly altering his tone, ‘I? Nothing bad; on the contrary, I am satisfied, pleased with you.’
Blondina, her thoughts so pure, failed to see the mask that a fiendish thought had cast upon the gentleman, and the latter continued with the confidence of a man besmirched with others’ crimes, a man made wicked only by this circumstance of his mother: ‘My character is a strange one, do you not avow, señora? Raging and sweet almost in the same instant. Señora, I take it upon myself that I was carried away so brutally. Why this coarse peremptoriness of mine? But the devil I had in my body has taken to his heels as fast as he had taken hold of it; happily, I have slipped through his fingers. I owe to you his flight and my freedom; I thank you! You were very frightened, were you not? Be reassured, there is no more danger. Peace! Peace! I shall be first to sign the treaty, then you; you will see later. What, señora, you are a woman and you did not guess that my complaints were but a pretext! When I told you just now that I defended you, do not put this down to charity. I also told you that I esteemed you to be beautiful; can one face the fire of mockeries when one does not feel in oneself another, stronger fire? Be no longer deceived, señora; love, and jealousy – which is death – have led me here; love, that key which opens Heaven and Hell. Oh! do not tremble, neither for yourself, nor even for your lover; I do not hate him. Perhaps you do not understand that; but be apprised that I am in the grip of a kind of holiness. My blood is purer because you exist. I shall pray better now, and you will live even more sweetly. Yes, I am leaving, for little time is left before Muguetto comes; he must not find me here. I shall never return; I shall never speak to you again, never in my life; I shall ask of you nothing, not even a look when I pass close by you. I shall always love you as if you were in heaven. Oh, señora, yes, I love you enough to wear my fingers out on stone that I might carve your name.’