Chapter Six
[A.D. 569]
Leaving his roomful of refractory papyrus, Fortunatus came on a cold morning after an insomniac night, to the convent garden. A moon, thin as a tide-sucked shell, was fading. So was the frost. Frills survived on cabbages and on the polls of earth-clods. Their bared fronts recalled the tonsure favoured by Celtic prelates who shaved their foreheads. Romans preferred to wear a central bald patch ringed with hair commemorative of the crown of thorns. The frost was Celtic. Fortunatus remarked on this to Agnes whom he met on her way from matins. Joking. Childishly. If one was expected to amuse—which he was: it was his function at the convent—and wished for once to keep off piety and always—my God, since hers was for God—sex, what was there left but childishness?
“Odd”, said he, going on as he had begun, “that the black night’s track should be white. Look at that frosty script. Messages? A code if we could only crack it?”
“You think”, said she, “that there are acrostics in nature like the ones you put in your poems?”
Tart! Disliked his whimsy.
“Why not?” Challenged. Surely a Ravenna scholar could dazzle a provincial nun? “If this world”, he urged argumentatively, “is—as we believe—the shadow of a more real one, mustn’t its shifts and shapes be clues to old, lost meanings? Felicities perhaps from the time before it fell? Memories of Eden?”
Agnes did not take this up. She was anxious about ink supplies for the copying room. “Mundane concerns!” She gave him a grin whose irony struck him as uncertainly directed. At herself? Him?
He wouldn’t have this. Scribes, he reminded her, were engaged in a ghostly warfare. Copying the word of God. “They preach with their fingers, speak with their hands. Their pens wound the devil with every stroke. Each word is a missile. You”, he teased, “are a general! Ink is your artillery.”
She laughed. The wind, with its multiple airy snouts, snatched at her heavy skirt, nuzzling the body underneath. He watched the bunching, recalcitrant cloth. Her hands beat at it until a gust threw a great wad of the stuff between her knees. She stumbled and he, with a laugh of pleasure, alive suddenly to the element’s complicity, caught and set her back on her feet.
“It’s like being at sea!”
Smell of hyacinths. A glassy sky had been scraped clear by this combing wind. Her habit, fluttering rakishly like ripped sails, swelled yet made her look unsteady.
“Agnes!” Her cheeks were bright with cold. Behind her, a willow’s red, tensile limb cut the air. He flung a flourish of words at her, convinced that she was sharing his excitement.
“I’m cold!” She cut through it. Her hands were clasped tightly around her chest. “What are we doing here?” She shivered. Hadn’t been listening. She looked, he saw as they moved towards shelter, as though she were calculating how much soap she should order from the serf women on the estate. She was probably doing just that. Soap, honey, wax for candles, shingles, wool … Her face had a crabbed look like a steward’s memo tablet. Fortunatus felt absurd. Honey and candles were pressing concerns. Real. He wanted to touch the solid stuff of her sleeve. Once more. His fingers tingled. Perhaps he could pretend to brush something off it?
“You were saying”, she reminded him politely, “about the Garden of Eden?” They had reached a doorway.
“Was I?” Was she remembering the kitchen-garden where he had lusted after her? Months ago. Of course not. She hadn’t noticed. Had been thinking of beans. She would imagine the Garden of Eden, he thought savagely, as laid out in bean-rows. A stupid woman. Angrily, he clutched her wrist.
“A beetle!”
Full of scallions, garlic and mustard for our first parents to season their salad with! He squeezed her wrist roughly.
“Don’t kill it!”
He removed his hand.
“They say”, she said, “that when we can make sense of every mystery, it will be the end of the world.”
“Who?”
She shrugged. “People. Some saint maybe? It could be a warning against being too clever. That was the first sin, wasn’t it? Eating the apple of knowledge?”
“A metaphor!” said Fortunatus, hating metaphors and all deviousnesses which suddenly struck him as feminine. Oh for simplicity, solid things and the white tooth’s passage through crunchy fruit. Why had he come to the garden this morning? He felt angry with Agnes.
“It’s a warning,” she was saying, “anyway. Maybe God does not want his obscurities unriddled. I mean, look at Radegunda. She’s never had a clear revelation, has she? Yet she’s in touch with God for days at a time.”
“But the Christian meaning is for everyone.”
“The part we grasp with our minds. But the soul is more private than the mind. More lonely. So is the body. You’re a poet. Can you describe pain?”
“Hot. Tremulous. Shooting jagged rays through the flesh…”
She laughed. “If I’d never felt pain I wouldn’t know what you meant! You’re reminding me. That’s all. It’s like saying something tastes ‘as sweet as honey’! But supposing someone had never tasted honey?”
“Pleasing, a shock to the taste buds.”
“That could be pepper, cinnamon, any spice at all.”
“It could be a kiss.”
“Could it?”
“Yes.”
“That’s interesting. Well. I have to go and see the steward. God be with you, Fortunatus.”
“And with you.”
*
He waited in the hope of seeing Radegunda but was told she was busy. Fridovigia brought him some oatcakes and fermented pear-juice in a blue glass flask.
“Roman‚” she said, lifting it to the light. “Imported. Like yourself. The abbess’s parents had stacks of these. They liked Roman imports of all sorts.”
She grinned. Fortunatus was aware of a thought wending its way through her talk. She was sewing, waiting for him to finish so that she could take back the glass and flask. Servants had to be devious. Maybe someone like Fridovigia had invented metaphor? Fortunatus was amused by the fancy.
Suddenly she spat furiously. She had broken her needle. “Bone!” she exclaimed, crinkling up her eyes and aiming a moistened end of thread at a new one! “We have to use bone needles like peasant women!”
“Let me.”
He handed her back the threaded needle.
“God bless your eyesight. You have a fine sense of direction. Follow your eyesight, young man!”
“I’m not so young: thirty-nine.”
“Young enough. Who’s younger around here?”
“You mean ‘In the country of blind men the one-eyed are kings’?”
“Now you’re putting words into my mouth!”
She grumbled about the needles Radegunda had issued. “Won’t let us use metal ones. We must humble our pride, she says. Well, all I can say is it’s inefficient. The same thing with food. I’m waiting to hear we’re to give up wheat and live on maslin grain and turnip pottage. Maybe the only reason we don’t is because she’s never heard of them! When the rich play at poverty it would make a cat laugh. There’s more waste here and less to show for it than in the estates of the abbess’s parents where I was brought up. The steward feathered his nest and still ran things more thriftily than here where the nuns take turns at burning the bread and turning the milk. Like little girls playing house. ‘It’s the principle that counts,’ says the foundress. Well, practice is worth a cartload of principle in my humble opinion! The joke is she’s the worst cook of all. But insists on taking her turn. ‘From humility’ if you please! Stubbornness is another word for it. It would make your heart bleed to see the nuns eating the messes she cooks up. Now Agnes is a good cook as you well know. I taught her and I learned from a great cook on her father’s estates. They had good raw materials of course. They had falconers and kept tame fowl: peacocks, pheasants, turtle-doves. Not that there’s any eating on tame turtle-doves. They pine when they’re kept in captivity. Pine away to skin and bone. I often think poor
Agnes is like a captive turtle-dove. Not that she’d ever admit it. They always live in pairs, turtle-doves. If they don’t they pine worse. And poor Agnes is lonely. Have you noticed how thin she is?”
“Are wild turtle-doves better?” Fortunatus asked.
“Well they’re fatter. There’s more meat on them. But the danger with them is you never know on what they’ve been feeding.” Fridovigia’s talk kept time with the impulsions of her thumb as it forced the blunt bone needle through the cloth then pulled it out, in again, then out. “I knew a man”, she said, “ate one that had been feeding on hellebore. Now a little of that is a good cure for mental diseases but too much can kill you. Luckily, I was there and guessed what the matter was, so I got him to vomit up his meal. There are some”, said Fridovigia, “who could do with a dose of that same hellebore. For their own mental health.” Fridovigia’s needle moved like a tooth. White and venomous, it rushed through the openwork on the edge of her cloth, weaving frothy designs, loops and little raised crosses. “And for other people’s too,” she finished and broke the thread on her teeth.
*
[A.D. 587]
Stone. Grey with silver flecks, black spottings and saffron stains. When I look long enough at my stone slit where the light falls I see every colour. There are lichenous infusions, pre-growths which, over years, may come up as moss. To a mite such moss might be a forest, so there are estates in my wall whose pores are caverns to the mites. My skin is porous too, multicoloured and grows forests of pale hair. This has paled and thickened while I have been here. The wall too is changing. Damp leaves pale pockings and dilapidates the edges. When the rays of late and early sunlight hit it, they make rainbows on its uneven surface. As my wall grows softer, I grow bonier. We are becoming more alike.
“Good God”, we say. But is “good” good enough for God? If God is “good” and Radegunda is, are they the same?
Here in my wall, everything seems the same. The food they bring me tastes of stone. The water is stony and I too am half petrified, accepting, half dead already, like an animal in winter. I accept. I am choked with familiar thoughts, with sameness, filled up like a sewer or vault which, once filled, is level with the ground and inexistant. I want to exist. How? The bow accepts the arrow but fires it out. How? Movement of the mind is the last to stop. Stir it. How?
Live, Ingunda!
God then, let me say, is foul, unjust, evil, wrong, limited and unimaginative. There: I have denied him. Shall I be forgiven? Let repent? If he is just he will allow me to say he is unjust since in all justice the life I was loaded with was unjust. Agnes’s life was unjust. Fortunatus—I have no feelings about him. I want to turn things round but in him there is little to turn. Weighted neither on top nor bottom, like certain chess pieces, you may turn him about and he looks no different.
But God is evil, the devil good. There: I have asserted and assaulted and could believe it too. Why am I not upset? Shaken? Has God—who is good if he is at all—withdrawn all interest from me? Have I rubbed out my own self? I would have stoked a fire to flame in like Radegunda who burned with holy heat. I want my blood to drum, even madly, even unholily and with shame. I want to live. To feel, suffer, be—and I don’t. Why am I not upset, seared, terror-stricken, shamed, why? Is this my punishment? God has withdrawn himself. He denies me since I denied him. And I cannot repent or feel at all. God, let me feel, suffer as I did other times. Please, please, let me even desire strongly to do this. Oh, you are turning my mind and conscience too to stone. I shall be a stone and stonier no matter what I do. I am turning into this wall. Give me sorrow, pain. Anything.
God!
Devil!
Anyone! Someone! Interfere. Affect me. Answer. Send a sign. Anything. Send an ant or a woodlouse walking down my window-slit. Send the sound of rain. Wind. Do not leave me alone.
I am alone. A stone. Forgotten. A nothing. A vacancy. There is nothing out there.
Godevil! Devilgod! Strike. Answer! Is silence your answer?
No. It is my own silence.
Pale, pallid stone. Indifferent Ingunda. How long since I thought my last thought? Here I perch like a stuffed owl, unfit for visions even of mice. Was I wrong to choose this wall? But what is ‘wrong’?
ShitGod! Foul maker of shitpies who made me! Why? Why? I am shit made of shit by ShitGod for shit from shit for shit everlasting since all ends in shit the source and end of all.
I want to repent! I want to believe. Feel. Live. Pray even?
My nose is my only live organ. Everything smells. I cannot eat or very little but all night and day I smell. Smells of hell. We know smells of shit and sulphur come from hell.
Base nose! I shall break it. Against this wall.
I would still smell. The hellsmell is in me.
Save me. Anyone.
If only I could wash. Or burn. Or die.
I’ll bash my nose against the wall. Oh God. Oh God. Oh God. It hurts. It hurts. Hurts. Hurt.
But at least I feel again. At least that. Oh God, the hurt!
*
[A.D. 569]
Venantius Honorius Clementianus Fortunatus had formally begun his Life of Radegunda and was visiting the convent every day. As often as not, the foundress was unavailable but convent gossip was, if anything, a better source than she was. Sitting in the leafless rose-bower—it was spring—he wore a grey fur wrap, took notes and kept an eye on the nuns’ comings and goings.
“Psst!” he called to a novice who was emerging from the tower where Radegunda was in retreat. “Anything new?”
The novice jumped. Startled. Outsiders were not allowed within the convent precincts. Fortunatus had a dispensation granted him by several bishops and by the two kings who had a claim on Poitiers. These two, Sigibert and Chilperic, who would willingly have murdered each other—and were to die murdered by persons unknown—were united in their regard for the poet. For them his verse incarnated the last glory of Roman culture: an elusive form of loot which they paid for in solid coin and sundry privileges.
“Well,” he asked, “has she eaten today?”
“No.” The novice, a girl from northern Gaul, stared at him with excitement. “Nor moved,” she told him. “She’s standing as stiff as an icicle in front of her relics. Like this!” The girl held up her hands, palms forward in a gesture Fortunatus remembered once seeing a caged mouse assume to signify its submission to a stronger one.
The girl bent towards Fortunatus. “I touched her”, she confided, “and her flesh was. cold as ice. She didn’t budge!”
“I see. What about her eyes?”
“Fixed,” said the girl. “Wide open and fixed. She never blinks.”
Fortunatus fixed his own eyes sharply on the novice, “You’re not just saying this, are you?”
The girl looked so shocked that he saw she was not.
“All right,” he waved her away. “I mustn’t keep you from your holy occupations, Sister.”
It was disappointing to have to rely on the testimony of someone so simple. Radegunda was in rapture. In that tower, so close to where he sat that he could have thrown a stone inside, a woman was in union with God. The ecstasy she was experiencing, her love-transaction with the Great Lover, was the most thrilling mystery of all existence. Thinking of it excited the poet physically. He felt a compelling urge to participate in the power which must, he felt sure, be emanating from the nun at this moment. Grace: he saw it in terms of heat, energy, an enhancing and elevation of the spirit. Of the senses even. His fingers tingled as he wrote his notes: “As Danae received Zeus in a shower of sunlight, so Radegunda was receiving Christ.” No. He ran his pen through that. Pagan imagery! Dangerous. Especially here in Gaul where paganism died hard and many, after hearing the Christian mass in the morning, crept off by twilight to worship at some old pagan shrine. Besides, the Christian was a more ethical experience. The enraptured saint’s will was absorbed into the divine one. Radegunda became one with God.
The poet felt suddenly bereft.
&nb
sp; If Radegunda’s “I” became absorbed, then how could one reach her? The fire and ecstasy were exclusive and excluding. He felt a sensation of cold, shivered, sneezed and pulled his fur cloak about him. Letting his pen drop, he began, in some depression, to grapple with this paradox: what fascinated him in Radegunda was her rapture, but the rapture obliterated her individuality, the self with which a human could connect. Fortunatus had for some time enjoyed a strong, he would have said “spiritual” relationship with the nun, anyway a friendship, but, at this moment, the moment when he most wanted her, she was beyond his reach.
Despondently, he picked up his pen and began to write about grace, the spiritual fund amassed by exceptional members of the Christian community, yet available to all. He threw down his pen. He didn’t want the grace available to all. He wanted … With revulsion, Fortunatus realized that his feeling for Radegunda at this moment was lust. The images before his inner eyes were unmistakable. He shook his head violently from side to side, denying those images, blurring, mixing and inducing an anaesthetizing, optical haze.
Radegunda, he remembered with distaste, was fifty, badly worn by a life of penance, not in the least attractive. Unseemliness aside, the idea was sacrilegious…. He shook his head faster and faster until thought was drowned in a wave of giddiness, nausea and incipient pain.
*
“I …” thought Agnes guiltily. “Ego …”
It was a forbidden vocable. Her “I” should long ago have been merged and lost in God. The brief character should have been erased by her monastic vow, leaving her as blank as a fresh page or her own white habit. There were no mirrors in the convent but the other sisters showed her how she looked: a five-foot, shapeless bundle of pale wool, waiting for God to put his character on her. Receptive. She hoped.
Meanwhile there were things to be done.
Radegunda was in retreat: Lent. She had been in her cell now for three weeks. Besides, she left decisions anyway to Agnes. Radegunda could not escape prestige. People came from distant provinces to touch objects previously touched by her. The gardeners did a roaring trade. Patients afflicted by nervous disorders waited around the convent walls until they caught a glimpse of her. Then frequently had fits. In the course of these they yelled that the saint’s glance had exorcised and forced demons to depart from inside them. Invariably, the debouching spirits put on a last performance, uttering obscenities and contorting the host bodies in lascivious spasms. Local people enjoyed this and were hoping that their saint might yet compete with St. Martin whose body had been treacherously stolen from them by the men of Tours more than a century earlier. His tomb attracted gifts and pilgrims from all over Christendom and had contributed maddeningly to the prosperity of the rival city. St. Martin’s prestige had even won the citizens of Tours a royal tax exemption.
Women in the Wall Page 9