The Priest's Madonna (24 page)

I was not surprised when, after going to the château in search of him, Mme Siau directed me to the tavern. I stood at the door, unsure whether I should knock. I had never set foot in the tavern. It was a place for men—except for Jeanne, the barmaid and wife of M. Chanson, the new owner. But it was a bright morning and the place would be at its most sedate. I hesitated outside the door, listening for any activity within, and then purposefully pressed the handle to lift the latch.

It was dark inside; only the smallest crack of daylight leaked in beneath the shutters, casting a thin line of light across several of the tables in the middle of the room. The room smelled of stale smoke, but it had been neatly arranged—chairs pushed beneath tables, glasses washed and arrayed on the shelves behind the bar, bottles lined up like obedient children. At first the place seemed empty, but a human rumbling awakened me to the presence of a man asleep on the floor beneath the bar.

It was the mayor. His vest was unbuttoned and his hat had fallen to the floor beside his head. Each reverberating inhalation sent his mustache vibrating, and when he exhaled, he emitted the scent of metabolized liquor.

I heard footsteps on the stairs, and straightened up to face M. Chanson, freshly shaven and cheerful. The Chansons were a young couple—relatives of the Ditandys, who had recently sold them the tavern. I did not know them well, though they seemed kind and well-meaning. “Oh, hello, Marie,” he said, surprise in his voice. “What can I do for you?” He followed my gaze to the floor. “Is it the mayor you’ve come to see? Well, then.” And, ignoring my protests, he straddled the mayor’s broad chest and, grunting a little, lifted him to an upright sitting position and balanced him against the bar. “Come on now, monsieur,” he said in a loud voice, gently slapping the mayor’s face with the back of his hand. “It’s morning and you’ve a lady to see you. Wake up now.”

With a snort, the mayor awoke. His eyes fell on me, as I was standing directly in his sight. He stood and nodded once to me, then turned his back to button his vest. M. Chanson handed him a glass of wine mixed with water.

“Pardon me, monsieur,” I offered, for I was embarrassed and wished I had not come. “I don’t mean to bother you.”

“No, no,” he said. “It’s all right.”

We sat at one of the tables near the door. “I’ve been missing my wife, you see,” he said, laughing awkwardly, perhaps aware of my discomfort, perhaps ashamed of the looseness of his own tongue. “A man without a wife is a sad sight indeed. I’ve no one to live for, no one to care for me.”

“You’ve the village,” I offered.

He spluttered. “The village doesn’t need me. Anyone can do what I do—sign a few papers, stamp a few letters. Chanson, you could,” he shouted, scraping his chair against the floor. “You’d be a great mayor.”

“Not like you,” Chanson said, sorting through a stack of receipts.

“Or you, Marie.” The mayor turned back to me, his chair tipping with his weight.

“No, monsieur.”

“You must think me weak. Well, you’re right. I am. I want my wife back. Why won’t she come home to me?”

“Monsieur,” I began, searching for some words of comfort.

“I’ll tell you why. She doesn’t care for people. She’s always got her head mixed up in her books. I should have known she’d never change. But I thought once she had children, she’d become, you know, more like a woman. Instead, I’ve become the woman. Crying day after day for a lover who doesn’t come.” He laughed scornfully.

“Marie came here to ask you something,” M. Chanson offered.

“It’s all right,” I said, standing up. “I can come back another time.”

“No,” said the mayor, grabbing my wrist and pulling me back down toward the table. “Sit down. Ask away. How can I be of service to you, mademoiselle?” His voice became obsequious, and he made a small bow with his head and a grand gesture with his arm, which again sent his chair off balance.

“Really,” I said, standing. “I’ll come back some other time.” I looked toward M. Chanson for help.

“I’ve only myself to blame, of course,” the mayor continued. “For following her here. I should have listened to my mother. Ha! Hear that?” He directed this last to the ceiling. “But I was young and arrogant, and she was so exotic, so beautiful—such a princess. You should have seen her in her youth, Marie.” And he closed his eyes, as if transported.

What he said took me by surprise. “What do you mean, ‘fol lowing her’ here?” I asked. “I thought she came here to stay with you and your family when her father died.”

He opened his eyes again, and studied me quizzically. “No,” he said slowly, as if thinking it through. “My family is from Couiza.”

“And isn’t Mme Laporte your cousin?”

His eyes opened wider. “Who told you that?”

“She did.”

He regarded me once more and then burst out laughing, slapping his hands on his thighs. “Ha! You’re joking. I like a woman who can joke.”

I glanced at M. Chanson, who raised his eyebrows at me and shrugged.

“Yes,” I said, affecting a generous smile, and sat down again at the table. “I do like to joke.”

Over the next hour, Mayor Laporte told me his version of the story of his marriage to Mme Laporte. Granted, he was still drunk and most likely prone to exaggeration, but the details he provided gave me much to wonder about. Madame, he told me—or Simone, as he called her—had come to Couiza all the way from Paris with no one but a maid when she was twenty-five. They arrived in a horse and carriage, stopping in the village square, and when Simone descended, she drew the eyes of every man in the square. Her height, her severe beauty, her evident wealth and air of calm intelligence fascinated everyone. He had been playing
boules
in the square with a bunch of friends, but they stopped their game and watched the coachman approach them. He asked if anyone might serve as a guide to take the lady and her maid up to Rennes-le-Château. Philippe won the small skirmish that broke out, and moments later found himself loading luggage onto a mule and leading the small procession toward the hill.

As they walked, Philippe managed to learn that Simone had come to inspect the château, which had just been put up for sale. Simone was a distant relative of the Berthelot family—the family that had owned and managed the affairs of Rennes-le-Château and the surrounding area for centuries until the death of the woman who was long thought to be the last in the line, Anne Marie de Berthelot. Upon her death, the castle was sold to a family from Toulouse who came only infrequently.

“That Anne Marie was crazy,” said the mayor. “Just like her mother before her. Of course, there was reason for the mother to be mad, poor woman—she’d lost her son and heir when he was eight. She died just before the Revolution. They said she used to disappear for days at a time, and then reappear in the church graveyard with dirt in her hair and beneath her fingernails. You’ll have heard of her, of course,” he added. “Or seen her gravestone in the churchyard at any rate.” I thought of the woman Bérenger had described—the lady of the village, sadly unhinged.

Simone’s family, the mayor continued, had been estranged from the Berthelots since Simone’s grandfather, the cousin of Anne Marie, had converted to Judaism. He had fallen in love with a peddler’s daughter and, as she would not leave her family to marry him, he decided to leave his. His conversion—let alone his marriage—was unheard of at the time, and his family could not accept it. They had cut him off from his inheritance. He and his bride moved to Lyon. There he began experimenting with silkworm cultivation and eventually grew a prosperous business, which made him wealthy, independent of his aristocratic family. He and his wife had many children, including Simone’s father. Simone, the sole descendant now of this branch of the Berthelots, had nursed a fascination with her Christian relatives, and when she read that the château at Rennes was again up for sale, she had been compelled to come and see it.

The residents of Rennes came out of doors to greet Philippe, Simone, and her maid as they walked the narrow footpaths through the town, leaving the mule to graze on the hillside. (So different from how we were greeted when we first arrived! I could not tell whether this was the truth or an embellishment of Philippe’s.) Philippe felt like a lord as he escorted her through the village, showing her the castle and the grounds, the decaying church and cemetery, and the breathtaking views. He knew the village, having discovered it as a young boy exploring the hills, and felt possessive of its rare beauty and proud to share it with a woman as rare and beautiful as Simone.

Simone fell in love with the village and the castle, despite its decrepit state, and signed the papers then and there with a wild excitement in her eyes. Both Philippe and the villagers fell in love with her. The previous owners of the château had not been well-liked—they had let the castle fall into even greater disrepair—and the villagers looked forward to having a maiden of noble birth among them. Only a few whispered that welcoming a Jew to the castle was like giving the devil an open invitation.

Philippe asked her to marry him that night as they descended from the village, and Simone, perhaps intoxicated by the beauty of the place and the recklessness of the purchase she had made, perhaps truly in love, agreed. When they told their families, they were horrified, for the religious question could not be overlooked. But the couple would not be deterred, and so the marriage went forward, and Philippe and Simone moved into the château together, estranged from their families but giddy with the glory of their futures together. Philippe gained a wife richer and more beautiful than he could have imagined, and the village had a new lord and lady, their own royal family to celebrate and envy.

Over time, the enthusiasm waned—both Philippe’s and the village’s. Simone held herself aloof and provided no children, and her eccentricities—her excessive fondness for books and her refusal to believe in any kind of superstition, Jewish, Christian, or otherwise—only cemented the anti-Semitic views of some and the anti-aristocratic views of others. Philippe grew lonely without the company of his friends and family. Simone closed herself in her library for nights on end. Unlike the villagers, he knew the reason for their lack of children: his wife insisted on keeping her own bedroom, and slept there on certain days of the month, refusing to succumb to his entreaties. (He told me this shamelessly.) Over time, she slept there more and more, until what had been their shared bedroom became his alone.

His story finished, I thanked him and stood to take my leave, my nerves humming with excitement. I had much to think over.

But the mayor stopped me. “You came to ask me something?”

The prospect of riffling through a heap of dusty village records seemed beside the point now. “That’s all right, monsieur. I just came to find out how Madame was faring. Please send her my regards.”

“Better you send her mine, Marie. She always liked you.”

I left, feeling sorry for the mayor’s pain but also thrilled by what I’d learned. Were the two madwomen one and the same? Could I take the mayor’s story as a corroboration of the one Bérenger had told me? Was the mayor telling the truth? Given some adjustments for exaggeration and self-pity—I was not, for example, willing to cast aspersions on Madame for refusing her husband children, nor could I think of her as cold—I was inclined to believe him. His story made greater sense than what Madame had told me. If, as she had said, she had moved to Rennes-le-Château to stay with Philippe’s family, why was there no trace of them in the village? And what accounted for Madame’s distinct air of aristocracy, if not that she had come from wealth?

The greater question, then, one that bewildered me for months afterward, was why she had lied.

On the road they met a woman walking alone. When she saw Yeshua, she strode purposefully toward him. Kefa and Yochanan moved as if to protect him from an assault, but Yeshua touched their shoulders and they stood aside. “Marta,” he said, bowing his head.

“Rabbi.” Marta bowed her head as well, but when she lifted it, her eyes flared. “Why did you not come?”

“Here I am,” Yeshua said.

“You knew he was sick, and you didn’t come. Now he’s dead. Elazar is dead. Our hearts are broken. We thought you would come.”

Yehudah stepped forward. “How could he have known? We’ve been traveling since Shabbat.”

“Shh, Yehudah,” Yeshua said. “I knew.”

Marta jerked her chin skyward. “How could you let him die?”

“And how many other people died on the same day as your Elazar?” retorted Yehudah. “How many others are suffering? Why should you receive special treatment?”

“Yehudah,” said Yeshua, shaking his head. “You are too full of anger.” Then, turning to Marta, he said, “Listen. Elazar will rise again.”

Marta met Yeshua’s eyes. “You’ll bring him back to us?” she asked.

“Where is he buried?”

She pointed to a distant hill, its face spotted by several tomb-rocks, all shining a bright painted white against the tawny soil.

“Go get your sister and bring her here. We’ll go see him together.”

Marta left, walking briskly toward the village.

The men dispersed. Some gathered beneath a plane tree; others jogged downhill in search of a brook to quench their thirst. The women—Miryam, Shoshannah, Yochanah, and Shlomit—sat together a short distance from the plane tree. They were wary, perched on the grass like alert cats.

“Who was that?” asked Yochanah.

They turned to Shoshannah, their oracle. She memorized names and relationships, stored information like grain. “The sister of Yeshua’s wife,” she said, as she twisted a blade of grass around a fingertip. “She had two sisters—the other is also called Miryam.” She smiled shyly at Miryam of Magdala. “Elazar was their brother. When Yeshua’s wife died, everyone thought he would marry Miryam. She’s younger and very beautiful.”

Yochanah glanced at Miryam of Magdala, pity in her eyes. “Where do you hear these things?” she asked Shoshannah, trying on a bit of indignation for Miryam’s sake.

“I spoke with Yeshua’s mother.” Shoshannah, too, eyed Miryam nervously, as if she was afraid she might burst into a jealous rage.