Women in the Wall

by O'Faolain, Julia

  “Did you have someone else poison them?”

  “I did not. They died of the plague. She was furious. She’d hoped I’d get it, you see. I used to find strange bits of clothing stuck under my sheet at night: rags from plaguey corpses. She had me sent to the villa at Berny where it was raging. My father consented. Poor man, he’s like an extra limb of hers. Between them they make up a human being. She’s the head, guts and liver, he’s the penis. Sorry if I’ve offended you.”

  “Do you want to be king?”

  He tried to shrug, hurt his wounded chest and grimaced. “If it comes it comes. Right now the omens point the other way.”

  “Will you fight and burn the country if you become king?”

  He laughed sourly but carefully, not disturbing his dressing. “Are you wondering whether I’m worth saving? People come to that sooner or later. I see them weighing me up. ‘What are his chances?’ they ask themselves. ‘Shall we keep in with him? How close to his father is he?’ In your case we can substitute ‘God’ for ‘father’, am I right?”

  “Oh, I intend to save you anyway. My professional pride is involved. I ran a hospital once.”

  “It’s a lucky wound isn’t it? A touch nearer the heart and I’d be dead. I suppose they think I am. Except for Bertram. I keep wondering why he saved me.”

  “You don’t believe he might have had a virtuous impulse?”

  “I believe you might. But I know Bertram. I’ve been working things out as I lie here and what I think is this: there has to be an opposing party, some group who would like to have someone—me or another—to put up against Fredegunda. So this gives me market value. Bertram can keep or kill me according to who bids highest—Fredegunda or the others. He’ll be haggling over me now with Brunhilde and Childebert and maybe with the nobles who don’t care much for our family anyway. Possibly even with Guntram, though he has nothing at stake. He has no heir of his own.”

  “You don’t believe we would kill you?”

  The young man had a crooked, mirthless smile. “You don’t have to know what you’re doing. You’ll hand me over to Bertram and he’ll do his own dirty work.”

  “I could”, Radegunda had an illumination, “tell him you were dead.”

  “And what would you do with me then?”

  “Hide you. Here. You could dress as a nun. Would you feel demeaned?”

  “To be a woman? I suppose not really. I’m not proud, you know: not of my sex or race or even stock. I’ve had no reason to be. I belong to the stepfamily. Everyone who wanted to keep in with Fredegunda treated us worse than they did the palace dogs. My two eldest brothers died in stupid wars, wars about nothing. As for being a woman—well, the toughest human being I’ve ever known was a woman: Fredegunda.”

  Radegunda looked at the weak, young face and remembered Chlodecharius, her brother. She was convinced this situation had been sent. What she meant to do with it, she did not yet know, but this would be revealed to her. The first step was clear: Bertram must be deceived. The boy’s survival would be a secret from all but Agnes and Fortunatus. She would keep him alive as she had failed to keep her brother alive, teach him and maybe one day he might be instrumental in bringing God’s rule to Gaul. It was a mad idea but surely that proved that it had come from that more receptive part of the mind to which God talked directly: the feminine part which waited, humbly and uncritically, to be fecundated by divine decisions which are unfathomable and must simply be accepted. Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it done unto me, she prayed, according to thy Word. What word though? How would she know it when it came?

  “My tutor”, said the boy, “was from the East. Very knowledgeable. He taught me some anatomy. The womb, for instance, consists of seven cells or pockets. Men are born in the three right-hand ones which are warmer, being near the liver; women are born in the colder side: the left. Hermaphrodites are born in the middle cell and they, my tutor held, though in some ways monstrosities, are in others the most perfect of humans, being conceived in the most temperate and balanced heat. The golden mien, the point of equilibrium where an object hovers so that it falls neither to right nor left is the ideal spot. Mentally, my tutor, said, we should all strive to be hermaphrodites, being neither over-choleric like men nor over-passive like women. Unfortunately, his training of me did not get far. We never reached the point of equilibrium.”

  “What happened?”

  “Fredegunda thought he was a sorcerer. She was afraid he was making me too clever and besides she doesn’t like foreigners. When my father put his eye on and another part of him in a slave girl with whom he had been recently presented, she decided this must be the result of sorcery and my tutor must be the sorcerer. The slave was Eastern like him and that was enough for Fredegunda. She had my tutor castrated with live coals and then strangled. I apologize for the grossness of the tale.”

  “God rest his soul,” said Radegunda. “He must have been an admirable man and his theory bears out my own: the ideal human being is sexless. Now you have had some training in striving to conform to the ideal. If we keep you here and dress you as a nun, the experiment can be continued. We shall see if we can breed masculine faults out of you without breeding feminine ones in. You might be the saving of Gaul. You must”, she fixed him with fiercely focusing blue eyes, “swear to me that you will neither reveal nor attempt to make use of your masculine attributes while you are here. If you do, I shall be obliged to get rid of you at once.”

  “Whereupon Bertram or Fredegunda will get me. Obviously”, said the boy, “I am in your power.”

  “I need more than your passive agreement. I need your active collaboration.”

  “You have it,” said Clovis. “I swear by the True Cross.”

  “Nor”, Radegunda warned him, “may you reveal your presence here to your sister or anyone else.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Swear.”

  “I swear.”

  *

  [A.D. 587]

  I have been asleep again or in a faint. The two are more and more similar now. I thought I smelled resin a while ago and heard armed men moving in the cloister. One rattled his scramasax in the slit of my wall. Franks. They were shouting in some patois I hardly understood, shouting—God forgive me, I thought I heard: “Where is the abbess, the old she-fox. We’ll run her to earth yet and cut off her brush!” Surely that was a demon? Yet it might not be. Sanctuaries have been violated and profaned before now. Silence. Where are they? Gone? But the convent is large. Sounds carry badly through these thick walls. I hear nothing. My mind is plagued by ignoble thoughts. Agnes … God, may not mortification of the mind find grace in your eyes? My mind is a sewer. Cloacal. The sewer smell is the devil’s. Many saints have recognized him by his sulphurous exhalations. But he has penetrated into my mind! God is this your will for me?

  There have been anchoresses who were visited in their solitude by celestial visions. Some—our chaplain told us—were visited by their Heavenly Spouse who shone so brightly that the cells and dark places where they were immured were lit up as though by noonday sunlight. His light penetrated their flesh. I never dared and do not now dare to long for such visitations. I do not complain of my own baseness. I never thought to be a saint. I chose the wall willingly.

  The lewd fancies are coming back. My visions come surely from hell. They buzz and torment me like summer flies. Those men … laughed. Their weapons clinked on my wall. They shouted and I thought I understood that they were threatening to strip the clothes off the abbess’s back and take their pleasure from her front and rear. One yelled—I heard him distinctly: “The old sow must be fifty! A fifty-year-old virgin is tough as an old thorn bush. Best use your scramasax if you don’t want to skin your prick!”

  Did I hear that? The words echo in my skull. My mind is as filthy as the vault I live in. I try to fix it on holy things but it slips as my feet do in the muck.

  My God, let me be mad. I consent to be mad, damned even, rather than that these men should truly exist
.

  Where did I get such foulness? I always knew foul words, being brought up by serfs who lived, through no fault of theirs, much like their own animals. When they took me in the convent, they taught me new things but could not efface the old. I could never be like the girls who came from villas and palaces. Yet I too had good blood. I knew this but was used to the poor people who had brought me up. When I left them I cried. I clung to my foster-mother and for a long time regretted her. I could not get used to the silence of the convent. I hated sleeping alone. I used to cry for Merofled, Theudebert and their small brother, Marileif. I cried when I remembered how the four of us would snuggle together to keep warm and how, when the really cold times came, we would go into the animals’ stall and sleep between two cows. The heat of those big creatures seemed the most consoling thing in the world and even the smell of cow-dung seemed sweet.

  How could I talk about this to anyone at the convent? The abbess used to try and comfort me. Sometimes she asked was I lonely and why? But what could I say? I said nothing. I must have seemed like a half-wit or as if the rough-coated, silent animals had passed a little of their nature on to me. Well, I was suckled by cow’s milk when everyone else is suckled by a woman’s. That must have had some effect. The other novices sometimes cried too when they came first. They used to talk about the luxuries they missed. How could I say that what I missed was sleeping with cows and on straw? I lived for the days when I was allowed to take food from the convent kitchens and visit my foster-family.

  Then, with the years, I grew used to the convent. I changed so much that my foster-sisters and I began to feel shy with each other. None of us could help it. We’d grown different. They were working on the land and had grown and developed, while I was still a shrimp. At the age of twelve they looked like women and used to tease the men by tying their skirts high around their waists and letting them see their thighs when they were weeding or gathering in crops. I still came to see them and brought them food but by now it was the food and not myself that interested them. I would sit watching while they ate what I’d brought and they would talk and mention secrets they couldn’t tell me because I was a nun. Once or twice my foster-mother gave a kind of chuckle and threw me an odd look saying that nuns were not so different from other Christians as people thought. “Even abbesses,” said she. Her husband had died and her tongue grown bitter. Once when I mentioned something our chaplain had said, she exclaimed: “Ha, there’s a good one, the fox preaching to the hens!” She often made disparaging remarks about the convent, but then she made them about everything and everyone.

  No!

  I won’t. Won’t think. Not now. My mind escapes, like a ball bounced out of its cup, dangling on its string, swinging. My periods of blackness are more frequent now. My thoughts flow off like escaping sheep, turning, escaping under fences, sliding back along old tracks. An anchoress may slip into lunacy with the speed of a lost animal losing its footing in a bog. Sometimes I have felt the threat encircle me and the soft mud of madness rising round me. Sometimes I have been tempted to let it come.

  Chapter Fourteen

  [A.D. 584]

  Chrodechilde and Basina were winding wool.

  “Hold your arms out stiff,” said Chrodechilde, “it tangles if you don’t.”

  “My muscles are sore.”

  “Offer it up.” Chrodechilde imitated Agnes’s voice. “You like our lady abbess, don’t you?”

  “She’s all right.”

  “She’s up to something. You wouldn’t notice but there’s something going on. A change. A whiff of fishiness in the air.” Chrodechilde wrinkled her freckled nose then laid a finger along one side of it. “I can tell, but shan’t. You’re not to be trusted.”

  “Me? Oh Chrodechilde, what can you mean? Tell me.”

  “Arms stiff. No. I’m not sure anyway. Only on the scent. I may tell you when I find out what I find out—then again I may not.” Chrodechilde pulled several rounds of wool from Basina’s wrists. “It’s cold,” she shivered. “This convent is always cold. They should light more fires. At night my feet are perished. I have two new chilblains.” Again she imitated Agnes’s voice: “Offer it up, dear!” Then, in her own: “If you come to bed with me tonight, I may tell you something.”

  “It’s against the rules.”

  “Rules!”

  Chrodechilde suddenly began to spin on her heel, whirling faster and faster so that the wool she was holding wound round her as she turned. Basina, her two hands stiff out before her as though in the stocks, had to start running round her to keep the wool from breaking as it pulled off her wrists, got caught, tautened and drew the skein into a tangle.

  “Stop, Chrodechilde, stop!”

  Chrodechilde stood still laughing and Basina proceeded round her more slowly now twenty, twenty-five, thirty times, trying to gather the wool back on to the skein which held her arms as though handcuffed so that she could only grasp the thread of wool with the tip of her fingers.

  “Now why did you do that?” she grumbled furiously, the tears starting from her eyes.

  “To see what you’d do. You could have dropped the skein. It would have made far less mess. But you’re such a timid little sheep, playing by rules and you see where it gets you. I shan’t tell you anything.”

  “I’ll come to your bed tonight.”

  “Who wants you?”

  Chrodechilde, whom Basina had now freed like an unwound spool, dropped the ball of wool she had been holding and left the room.

  *

  Maroveus held up a goblet of wine and observed a transparency within a transparency: the glass was milky, the wine pale gold. New vintage: the colour of morning light or the last blanched leaves on October vines. A little young yet but a good year.

  “What are you after?” he asked and sipped and closed his eyes the better to savour the liquid’s passage first to the front of his mouth where his tongue dipped, bright as a blackbird, in the delicious bath then, after a swift bilateral swish into the puffed cheek-hollows, down the reaches of his throat. The successive sensations recalled the movement of a hand drawn across a harp: the acute, almost painful pleasure of the high notes yielding to gradual relief as the sound broadened. The wine was from his own vineyards. One day it might be a match for imports from Italy. If so, the merit would be partly his. There would be something of himself in the liquid he had laboured to produce: an anonymous aroma which posterity—his kind of posterity—would recognize. Would it? The vineyards might be burnt again as they had been in an invasion some years back. He opened his eyes and took another less pleasurable sup.

  “What is it you want?” he asked.

  He stared at the puffy-faced poetaster who hung round the nuns of Holy Cross and had finally become a priest a few years ago. Why? He was thick with royalty. Probably he’d been promised a benefice. Maybe Maroveus’s own? Well, Maroveus was not about to die to convenience him. If the poet had been on fire, Maroveus doubted if he’d have pissed on him to put it out. The fellow had come here with a lot of talk about Church unity and gabble about politics. Some convent intrigue too. Those nuns at Holy Cross seemed to have finally got their fingers burnt. Something about King Chilperic’s daughter having become a novice and his now wanting her out again to marry the King of Spain’s son.

  “Nothing to do with me!” said Maroveus. “I mind my own onions. I have no jurisdiction over Holy Cross! Let the nuns fry in their own fat.”

  The poetaster looked sly. Talked about how Chilperic had no heir and how the province might before long be fought over like a bone. It had happened before. Burned vineyards. Yes. Disagreeable prospect. Maroveus couldn’t see for the life of him what that had to do though with King Chilperic’s daughter. Obviously some secret the poet thought he might know. He was being sounded.

  “If there should be an invasion of Poitiers …” The poet spread hands soft and white as raw dough. Maroveus observed them with dislike.

  “What? Why should there be another invasion?”

&n
bsp; “My lord,” the poet told him, “there is an army on the march and headed this way. I’ve had news from Tours.”

  “What do you mean ‘on the march’? Whose army? Why? How far have they got?”

  “It’s King Chilperic’s led by Duke Desiderius. There has been looting and destruction of property.”

  The bishop sighed. “There always is. But we’re loyal to Chilperic. He knows that. He’ll respect the city.”

  “Some say he’s heard a rumour that the men of Poitiers were negotiating to hand it over to King Guntram. There is also a … possibility that Chilperic may be intending to revenge himself on the convent which refused to give up his daughter.”

  “Daughter? Daughter? Nobody ever yet fought a battle over a daughter. If it were a son were hiding there, now, I might understand your fear, especially as Chilperic, since the death of his sons, has no heir. But as he hasn’t he hasn’t. Why are you so peaky looking? Can’t you hold your wine, man? I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me. If there’s an army coming, let it come. I’ll deal with it. I’ve done it more times than you’ve said mass. I only hope my vineyards don’t get burned or trampled before they get here. I’ll put on my vestments and wait for their messengers in the basilica. If the worst comes to the worst I’ll break up a gold chalice and pay them off—throw a sprat to save a salmon. You go and tell your nuns to sing psalms and stop bothering their holy heads about politics. Tell them to pray for me.” Maroveus bowed Fortunatus out. “Oh, and thank you”, he called after him with some reluctance, “for letting me know the news. If you’re as well in with heaven as you are with the courts of Gaul, you need have no worries.”

  *

  Chrodechilde’s jaw was remarkably undershot. It extended like a drawer packed with teeth which seemed to nibble the air with sharp hunger. A dormitory of novices were watching it do this in silhouette against a combustive sky. She turned from a window through which she had been watching houses burning on a distant part of the convent estate. It was cold. On the low vaults of the ceiling, shadows stooped like mewed-up hawks. The flame from the single lamp was warped and the smell unpleasant. Wicks and oil were short. They had to come from the port of Marseilles and roads from there had been impassible for months: the war. But now the war was here.