The Sorcerer's Apprentice
Page 4
The darkness and the fear of the next blow made me alert to the slightest sound; I noticed a mouse scratching near the door. Through the closed shutters we could hear leaves whispering in the garden, shaken by the wind. Was it raining, as it did every night? He was gripping the whip firmly now, very close to my legs, so he could thrash them without pity; several of the thongs, weighted with little knots, dropped to the floor, and the sound they made as they fell was like the patter of a few little cherry-stones. He shook the whip to untangle it, so that he could use it more effectively; and so that I was in no doubt of the fact, he made all the leather thongs slap against the edge of the table; I was terrified by this, although less so than the books and pens which were laid out on the table-top. He lifted the scourge; then, as I have said, I had the feeling that I was being cooked, burned, that he was eating me for his supper, that I had been set on fire. I heard the whip-lashes whistle and slap against my skin; in the darkness the strokes sometimes fell on my shoes, and that gave me respite; others, better aimed, threw me back into the fire.
He had stopped beating me. The floor felt cold beneath me. Hindered by my bonds and burned by the scourging I had received, I recovered my breath as I leaned against the chair-back. We stayed like that for a long time. He was still sitting next to me, not speaking to me, not touching me, not seeing me. One side of my waist continued to throb with heat; a blow from the leather thongs had severely grazed my skin, and in the darkness I was suffering acute discomfort which slowly lessened. He released me from my bonds and, still without putting the light on, he lay down on the blankets in one corner of the room, which served him as a bed. Straightening my clothes, I went and lay down next to him. That corner of the room formed a sort of encampment; my hands encountered rumpled blankets, clothes, a hunting knife and some shotgun cartridges in a jacket pocket. What was he thinking about as he held me in his arms? As for me, a delicious exhaustion plunged me into a doze. I was happy in that little presbytery bedroom, my happiness derived from perfect complicity with my priest, who I guessed was equally busy with his dreams. Did he love me because of that fellowship which united us without us ever having to explain ourselves? The wind was blowing through the woods; I guessed it was raining a little; the mice were running along the passageway. In the darkness he pushed me gently away and crawled across the floor to one of the corners of the room; I heard him pick up a few objects and come back, bumping against the chair. He struck a match and I saw that he had brought a bottle of rum, a little metal teapot, and a spirit lamp, which he lit. He poured some rum into the teapot, added some sugar which he took out of his pocket, then returned to me on the pile of blankets where we had lain down: the lamp’s little flame gleamed faintly; in the blackness we could not take our eyes off it. When the rum began to boil and sizzle, he leant over and threw in a lit match which went out instantly. He struck another, and a blue flame covered the surface of the rum. He pressed himself against me again and we waited. What time of night was it? I had no idea. An unquenchable tenderness for him made me squeeze his hand very tightly; he held mine hard enough to break it. I kissed his hand. The rain was taking over the garden. Swiftly pushing down the lid of the teapot he extinguished the rum, found some little glasses under the blankets, blew out the spirit lamp, and in the complete darkness held a boiling hot, sugary brew to my lips. Immediately I entered into a state of absolute wellbeing and became the loving, charming wife. That encampment of rumpled blankets took me back to the earth’s first nights, to a state of nature, to all the chaos of primordial life. With my face nestling against my priest’s fur-collared jacket, like the pelt of some beast, I felt drunk with pleasure, I felt hot. I liked this lair.
He caressed me with an exact knowledge of my flesh, with the skill of a bone-setter, not saying a word to me, for fear of drawing me out of my trance. His long hands seemed to know me perfectly; from head to toe, there was not a bone, not a muscle he did not mould with a subtlety which delighted me. He cured me of my loneliness as one cures a sprain. What gave me the most satisfaction was his knowledge of me, deep enough to give the impression that he wished to raise me to infinite, divine levels of pleasure, to hear me singing on my knees in his arms; deep enough to make it seem he had known me for all eternity.
I needed to sleep. I awoke around three in the morning, not wishing to stay with him any more, eager to go back to my own room. In the corridor, heartburn caused by the rum prompted me to go down to the kitchen and get some water. I was hungry; a curious need to loot everything in the house drove me to open the cupboards, I would have liked to steal, take, seize anything and everything. Sated with nothing but water, and with the idea that I had formed of my multiple existence, I went back to my room and fell asleep again, properly this time.
I LAY on the sea-bed and opened my eyes, delighted to see the light again. The pearly-white walls of my cold, damp, sunless little bedroom were rippled by movements of air like the shadows of waves; and this effect, together with the beautiful seashell on my bedside table, created an impression of deep, clear water. It was good to feel the sheets sliding coolly over my thighs. From the depths of this Ocean I saw the wild greenery of our bird-filled garden. Although I was no early riser, I left my bed without further ado.
If the absence of any clock or calendar had astonished me, by now I knew the house well enough to have established that there were no mirrors or looking-glasses either. Ecclesiastical modesty may banish modern comforts, but that doesn’t prevent presbyteries containing at least one looking-glass, so that you can give your hair a decent combing; here, there was nothing of the sort, nothing which would allow you to see yourself; without a calendar I lived according to the seasons, without a clock, I used the colour of the air to tell the time; and without a looking-glass I did not wash myself, simply gave my face a quick rinse, nothing more.
In the kitchen I made myself some coffee. I was alone, as usual. My priest had left at daybreak. He only said Mass here once a year, or when somebody died. He merely lived here, having chosen this residence so as to be left in peace. Nobody came up to see us and I did not complain about that. Better to feel sorry for Monseigneur, the Bishop of Périgueux and Sarlat, whose only choice for running the parishes is between old priests, holy but impotent men, and young priests who are always gadding about the countryside and making tongues wag. As for mine, I would have preferred him to feed me better; he dined in his other parishes; from time to time he did not eat for three days, apparently without ill effects, but my sixteen-year-old stomach could not get used to the regime. All he left me was enough to make a light snack: some coffee and sugar, in iron caddies above the fireplace, some bread, some biscuits; the sort of groceries an old woman might have. I didn’t complain about this poverty, because the kitchen garden saved me. In June, sweet garden peas taste exquisite with bread.
Little stone walls enclosed our large kitchen garden. This had formerly been the cemetery belonging to a little community of monks, and all you had to do was disturb the soil to unearth bones. Our vegetable garden had been invaded by a jungle of green brambles, and here and there had been haphazardly dug over by my priest; but it flourished in the sunshine. What astonished me was the strength of the plants; do the memories of holy souls please growing things; do the dead exercise some kind of spell over them? For whatever reason, everything grew better here than elsewhere, and I have never eaten better strawberries than ours, grown on skulls.
Brandishing a baguette, I walked on through the buzzing of bees. The snakes terrified me. A grass snake slid over my bare feet and disappeared among the tall grasses. The surroundings of this former religious house now belonged only to the snakes. They twined round each other and slept in the sun. The snakes killed the birds. The snakes killed the frogs and toads in the pond. The snakes writhed about and shed their skin. They proliferated in the crumbling walls, they devoured each other; they became big snakes; they were cold. Cruel eyes followed my every step. That kitchen garden both attracted and frightened me.
Seven or eight centuries were represented in the church, although the only remaining Norman parts were the walls, the floor tiles and the crypt. The carved altarpiece dated from the eighteenth century; the elegant pulpit, in pale blue and gold with wooden panels and prettily painted angels, from the seventeenth; the roofing and the nave, from the fourteenth. It was on this cross-section of time that my love depended. Indeed, I was convinced that I had lived in this land before; that in each century I saw my priest and the child again, and myself with them. My probable brushes with the Law, this bad business, happened to me in every life. I was certain I had known the child before, in the time of the kings. It was our custom to meet up again every century. This impression of something which had lasted beyond a single life, this vast sense of time, flattered my love.
I climbed up the staircase inside the bell tower, a winding spiral set into the very heart of the walls. Softly I pressed my lips to the stone where the seasons’ dampness lingered, along with something at once icy-cold and burning-hot, the heat of summer, the winter freeze, the weight of the earth and the sky. I had told him of my plan to meet him here; what wouldn’t I have given to hear his light footsteps on the flagstones? But I heard nothing beyond the very particular silence of the church, which no woman parishioner ever entered.
He had his own unique way of appearing: often, indeed, he allowed me simply to guess at his presence. Soundlessly he was there, a few steps away from me; turning round, I saw him smiling at me. He enjoyed surprising me like this. It was his way of telling me: See how cunning I am; and also a way of reassuring me about the consequences of this affair by reminding me, each time we met, that he was still very clever.
I climbed a little higher, and, through an opening in the wall, I glimpsed the beautiful Sarladais in the blue of summer. By pressing my face hard against the stonework I could make out one side of the village, fifty metres below me, the houses roofed with lauzes, flat stones laid one on top of the other; and I could see a loop of the Vézère. From the staircase in the bell tower I commanded only a small section of the countryside, but it was beautiful and vast enough to hold my gaze indefinitely. I could see for a long way and the hills went on and on until they reached the woods, on which the summer heat weighed heavy.
At the edge of the river, so deep and green under the rocky cliffs, a fisherman was holding his line; another and his boat and their shadow were drifting slowly downstream. I had an almost vertical view of the Sarladais, which gave me a feeling of vertigo; almost on the vertical too were the village and the river, and a few cultivated fields. The only thing I saw normally was the horizon, the vast, seemingly empty horizon.
The Sarladais, also called Black Périgord because of its thick growth of small, dark oak and walnut trees, is a partially deserted land, planted here and there with fields of maize and wheat, and narrow tobacco plantations. It is a wild land and, for he who knows how to see, a land of spirits. A land of sorcerers. Templars, barons, priests, peasants, all practised the art to a greater or lesser degree, and the green and black Sarladais countryside, still echoing to primeval cries, retains a little of the souls of all those who were once magicians.
I loved this land where I had lived for four or five hundred years, this land of ghosts, of cool caves and woods. I loved the summer which made me giddy with delight, I loved the sound the insects made, the way the crows wheeled in the skies overhead. I closed my eyes, then opened them again; once again I saw the beautiful Sarladais with its haystacks, its carts and its islands; the Vézère was still flowing along under rocky cliffs; the birds were gliding, the fisherman was casting his line, another man or the same.
I left the loophole, returned to the nave and sat down in one of the choir stalls.
Around the middle of the day, what better thing can you do than mull over your own passions? The innocence of the morning is no more than a memory, the heat stirs the blood. If I cross-examined myself, the strongest passion which burned in me seemed to be the attraction I felt for the power of growing things. Now, in early July, the plants’ exuberance and insane proliferation appealed to me. Seeing the grass and the trees pleased and delighted me. Even in the stillness of the church the memory of them disturbed me. The more I lived at one remove from my own century, the more I found that I was unusually sensitive to the summer, which made me drunk with happiness and which found powerful resonances in my flesh. The thickness of the foliage, the inextricable tangling of grasses and brambles frightened me, so much so that I experienced a kind of delicious terror. Like the snakes, the trees and leaves fascinated me; I lived in a state of magic, and the beauty of the growing plants captivated me.
As for the child, I loved him with all the strength of summer. My whole being reached out to him. Like the light of noon which makes you close your eyes, the love which I felt for him blinded me and concealed the dangers I was running in wanting to see him again. A magical spell united us; it separated us from other men and it protected us from the distressing consequences of that love. The child sensed it; was it me he loved, or did he love that immunity, that spell, more than me? Whichever was the case, he had confessed nothing, we could see each other again here. Less good fortune would have seemed to me to indicate less love, and I would have withdrawn from the liaison, not through cowardice, but because I would have believed that a power had been broken.
Facially, I looked a little like him. This resemblance inclined me to see him as an immediately desirable being. We shared the same body heat, and that made me feel love for him. This facial and bodily resemblance intensified my feelings for him, my desire to make him mine, or at least to be loved by him. The way I handled him was calculated to give him pleasure exactly as he wanted it, so that through my actions he would instantly recognise me as an exact mirror of himself, only more skilful. I loved him because I did not know exactly who I was, and consequently nearness and resemblance immediately made me seek out myself. I had reached the point of believing that there is no love except in so far as one’s unconscious strives to find itself in others, believing that there is no love except in delicious error.
Each day I passed the time as I wished. They say that idleness is the mother of all vices. Anyhow, I went back to the presbytery, around noon to judge from the height of the sun. I was thirsty so I drank some cold coffee diluted with water. I opened a drawer, took out a blue booklet of Job brand, non-adhesive cigarette papers, and went up to the tobacco drying room. Sitting on the bare floor, with my back up against a white wall, I reached into my pocket and took out my little store of tobacco, tightly twisted into a handkerchief. I rolled myself cigarettes which I smoked in that storeroom, which was so steeped in the scent of dried plants that it gave me a headache.
A heavy silenc
e followed the sounds of morning. This was the sad stillness characteristic of the middle of the day, when the snakes and the shadows have disappeared. No more bird calls, just an impression of blinding light and immobility. The summer heat in that bedroom, the small amount of hard light which filtered in through the drawn shutters, and the violent smell of rotting tobacco made me want to stretch out on the floor and sleep until evening. But I managed to stay awake, for the ceiling beams, the wooden laths, and the flaking plaster which revealed the layer of clay and straw beneath, formed a curious abstract picture which I could not take my eyes off; I found beauty in those layers of dried earth, plaster and wood, which smelt good impregnated with the scent of tobacco; I found sweetness too, and a kind of tenderness in that work of oblivion, degradation, chance, the changing seasons, several centuries of abandonment, an expanse of time as vast as my own.
I went into the next bedroom where, as you know, my priest had created several patterns representing suns, circles and eyes, through a skilful arrangement of corn cobs. I would have asked him the reason for this fine, patient work, if we hadn’t agreed not to talk about anything serious. That man dared not confess anything, or admit anything serious; he left the moment I ventured to speak frankly. He kept silent about the bizarre tastes I knew he had, tastes which were incompatible with the dignity of his office, though he showed no desire to change either his office or his errant ways. If I had dared to kick over the beautiful arrangement of corn cobs, he would not have reprimanded me, he would not have explained anything, but I would have found the door to the drying room closed and firmly locked. The good side of this decision to keep silent was that we could abandon ourselves entirely to our passions, without feeling constrained to consider them honestly, or debate them between ourselves. Similarly, I had difficulty in carrying on any kind of lengthy conversation with the child, because of the difference in our ages, which led effectively to profound silence; this difficulty disturbed me to the point of extreme pleasure and made me more attached to him with each day that passed. The distance which we had agreed to maintain between us was something which my priest desired because of a remnant of decency, a taste for secret things to which I was less attached than he, for I considered it perfectly possible to put everything down in writing. He showed that he was still a peasant through his determination to shy away from too much responsibility, and his opinion that silence covers everything, that it absolves everything, that the only irremediable thing is something that is written down; like the child who believed that impunity absolves everything, whereas on the contrary I would have liked to put everything down on paper, with the ulterior motive that writing justifies everything. So, for some time now, my priest had given up reading books; he regarded them with horror as though he could detect in my calm gaze an aptitude for the remembrance which he feared, too much joy to forget anything, and a taste for writing about it. He now read only works on sailing, whose straightforwardness he found reassuring; he never opened anything serious; he hid the penholders, he put water in the ink, through tight-fistedness, and through a desire for illegibility and transparency; he claimed that his only interests were vast sea-voyages, and the islands.