The Priest's Madonna (31 page)

I waited, unsure how to respond. After a moment, I left my compartment and pulled the door of his open with a click. He sat on the narrow bench, his shoulders squeezed against either wall.

“You mustn’t say that, Bérenger. You are not lost. God is with you.”

“Ah, Marie. I am not so sure.”

He squeezed out of the confessional, past me, and began to walk slowly, mechanically, up the length of the nave. When he reached the steps that led to the altar, he knelt there and bowed his head. The candlelight pooled around him and over him, lighting the back of his head and the narrow band of skin between his hairline and his collar. His hunching shoulders, the thickness of his waist, the small spot of baldness at his crown: he had aged since Michelle and I had spent our afternoons in the meadow rhapsodizing over him. He was so much of a man then, but temptation had weakened him. I had weakened him.

When he had finished his prayer, he came to stand in front of me. I could see the whiskers at his throat like a field of razed wheat stubble. His smell rushed over me—that delicious peppery scent, tinged with incense—and I felt so tempted to cling to him, to nestle my face in his chest and feel him embrace me, that I had to step backward and fill my nostrils once more with the stale air of the church.

“I don’t know what God wants from me, Marie,” he said. His eyes darted from me to the wall to the door, as if he was afraid someone might be watching. “I pray to him but he doesn’t answer.”

“What do you want from him?” I asked.

He barked a wounded laugh. “What do I want from God? I want order. I want peace. I want him to communicate with me, to let me know that I’m doing his will, that I’m in the right. Not once in my life, not once has he deigned to grant me even a moment of his presence. Me, a priest! Not once, Marie.” He kicked one of the pews, causing it to scrape against the floor. “What have I done?” he yelled to the ceiling. “How have I offended you?”

His voice echoed against the sanctuary walls. In the silence that followed, he slid into the pew he had kicked, slumping against it. He continued, his voice quieter, resigned. “I entered the priesthood because I thought it would guarantee me a place in heaven. There would be rules to follow, a path to walk—and if I could only keep my feet on the path, I would come out all right. I have tried, Marie—God knows I have tried to honor him. There was a time when I thought I knew what he wanted. Church doctrine told me his mind. The words of the Bible informed me, indisputably, what he desired of me. The example of Jesus’ life …” He trailed off.

I slid into the pew behind him.

He began again. “But I have become infected by doubt. What do I know of God? I read the scriptures indifferently. I mouth the Mass. My heart and mind are elsewhere—on banalities, Marie. Not on God, not on God. More and more it’s the world of men I live in, Marie. I don’t know how to rise from it.”

He rested his head on the back of the pew, tipping his forehead toward me. If I had been more selfless, more ethical, I might have advised him to pray with renewed devotion, to seek counsel from the Holy Virgin Mother, to find inspiration in the saint he so loved, the Madeleine, whose passion for God had never abated, so it was said. I would have murmured some gentle words and then left him alone, to pray in peace. But I could not. His forehead—that formidable brow, so stitched with pain—rested inches from my lips. I laid my hand across it. I rubbed his temples, drawing the skin tight across his face; I dug my fingers into his thick hair and rubbed his scalp. He inhaled deeply. I leaned forward and kissed his forehead. He laced his hands behind my head and pressed me into him, then swiveled and faced me, his forehead pressed against mine. I closed my eyes. Our lips met, then lingered.

“Perhaps God intends for you to live in this world,
mon amour,
” I whispered finally, my cheek to his. “Perhaps it is through this world that God means for you to find him.”

He released me and I lifted my head, feeling disoriented, flushed with pleasure, ashamed. His eyes were still closed, his hands gripping the pew between us. He emanated such a brume of emotion that it seemed he was considering whether to assault or embrace me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wanted to comfort you.”

He waited a moment, then covered my hand with his. “Your suspicion was correct, Marie,” he said. “I’ve found the tomb.”

T
HIS IS WHAT he told me:

This past fall, when the work crew had lifted the knight’s stone in preparation to install the new pulpit, Bérenger noticed that some of the dirt had fallen away. Looking more closely, he made out a single dusty step, partially occluded. Immediately, he dismissed the crew and locked the church. That night he entered alone, armed with a lantern and a shovel. It took him several gru eling weeks of nightly digging—he had to fill a barrel many times a night and haul it out to the cemetery, where he emptied it—but eventually, step by step, he had uncovered an ancient stone staircase that led deep into the earth and ended facing a thick oaken door banded by iron, no higher than a child.

The door had not wanted to budge—he had used one of the smaller flagstones from the floor as a makeshift battering ram—and when finally it did open, it made such a scream he thought it would wake the entire village. He waited in anxious misery for several minutes, the circle of light from his lantern revealing nothing but a stone floor beneath the open door. Finally, after he was satisfied no one had heard, he ventured forward, stooping to fit beneath the lintel. Once inside the room, his lantern glowed more brightly, bouncing off the walls of hewn stone, and he saw that he was inside a crypt containing numerous coffins of differing shapes and sizes.

Here he paused.

“And so? What else?” I prompted.

“Nothing,” he said. “I’ve found nothing more.”

“Nothing? No evidence of the book?” I asked.

“I haven’t gone any farther in,” he said. “I can’t bring myself to. I go down there nightly, ready to step inside, but I haven’t the courage.”

“But why didn’t you tell me,
mon cher
? Why have you been so secretive?”

He sighed. “I have only been trying to protect you. I didn’t trust that Austrian. I thought perhaps he’d gotten me mixed up in something larger and more sinister than I was aware of. I didn’t want to involve you further.”

I walked to the pulpit and fiddled with the fence surrounding it. We would need a lantern. I looked toward the pew I had been sitting in, realizing I’d lost track of mine. “Have we a light?” I asked.

Bérenger stood, taking a long moment to realign the pew he’d kicked before following me up the aisle of the nave. He walked just beyond the pulpit to the wall, where he removed a candle from the sconce, then handed it to me. “Marie,” he began. Then, in a rush, he seized me by the waist and fastened his mouth on mine with such transcendental recklessness! I have heard it said that a kiss can take the breath away, but that is not precisely what I felt. It would be more accurate to say that it was as if I was momentarily freed from my breath, from its perpetual tidal impulse. My body was the breathing thing, the feeling thing, the thing that nuzzled and kissed and gazed and kissed again, seeking his lips like a newborn seeks the teat. And yes, I was my body, breathing, feeling pleasure, but I was simultaneously
not
it, outside sensation, soaring above it. I felt as if he had kissed away my self—all my eccentricities, anxieties, obsessions, all the patterns of mind that circumscribed my identity—so that I was free momentarily to join the larger Self that is existence, that is the breath that enlivens all the earth. An illusion, perhaps, and certainly fleeting, for I never again felt the same, even after years of kisses—but sweet, so very sweet.

We clung together by the pulpit for a long time, kissing, gazing, whispering endearments. Some time later—minutes, probably, though it might have been hours—we parted, aware of the task that yet lay ahead.

Bérenger opened the fence with a key. The three planks beneath the pulpit were still there, startlingly vulnerable. Anyone who had the idea to lift one of them would see the staircase and naturally be curious as to what it led to. But the pulpit, large as it was, had the effect of overpowering the space around it so that the planks and the fence appeared inconsequential.

Guarding the flame with my hand, I watched Bérenger lift the planks and set them aside. There it was, just as he had said: a stone staircase, very steep and uneven. He took the candle from me, kissed me once more, and started down. I followed, wishing I had another light. The steps were narrow and my feet unsteady.

It grew colder as we descended. I was astonished at how deep we had to go before we reached the entrance. Bérenger had only dug a narrow passageway, just wide enough for himself, so his body blocked even the dim light of the candle. I balanced myself by holding on to the walls. The soil was cold, and clods of it came loose beneath my touch. I looked back from where we’d come and saw only darkness—the opening was no longer visible. Panic rose in my throat. But Bérenger continued to descend and I made myself follow him, despite the frantic fluttering of my heart.

Once in the crypt, however, my fear gave way to fascination. The candle illuminated dozens of coffins of all different sizes, some stacked atop each other. Some were humble pine boxes, others were mahogany or chestnut and ornately carved with fleurs-de-lys, vines, crosses, or rose blossoms. One coffin was metal—lead, perhaps—while two others appeared to be more ancient, as they were made of stone and very large, perhaps meant to accommodate several bodies. I took the candle from Bérenger and, walking the length of the crypt, was astonished to find that it extended into another room, just as large, this one filled only with several of the larger stone sarcophagi. At the end of this room was an archway, beyond which descended yet another set of stairs just as steep as the first. “Have you been down here?” I asked. He stood a few feet behind me, in the dark center of the room.

“No,” he said. “I hadn’t gone beyond that first room.”

I followed the steps carefully, though they were easier to pass than the first flight, being wider and uncovered by dirt. At their base was another archway, which opened into a third room with walls of packed dirt. This room appeared to be the more ancient. There was only one roughly cut stone casket, placed against the wall. Behind it, extending along the length of the wall, was an enormous pile of bones, neatly stacked. Skulls, forearms, thigh and shinbones, collarbones and broad-winged pelvises lay one atop the other, fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle. Some had spilled onto the floor; it was littered with finger bones and vertebrae as well as many unidentifiable chips and slivers that might just as well have been oddly shaped rocks. A fully intact skeleton still lay on a ledge in the far corner of the room, a corroded iron blade by its side.

“God save us,” whispered Bérenger.

The room ended in a landslide of earth and rubble. I picked at the crusted hill, wondering if it might be blocking Madame’s famous passageway.

“It’s a catacomb, Marie,” Bérenger said behind me. “A catacomb beneath our church.”

“Incredible,” I said.

We did not proceed any further that night. It was late—or early rather, almost dawn. We had only a few hours before Christmas morning Mass, before the church would once again be full of people. We needed time to think about what we might be entering into, for we were partners now.

C
HRISTMAS DAY PASSED happily—Père Noël brought us each a few gifts, and we spent the day feasting on the leftovers from the previous night and playing with Pichon as he toddled about. My thoughts returned continually to the previous night, to the catacomb, the book of visions, and to the passageway that I thought might lie beyond that avalanche of dirt. Most of all to the pleasure of our kisses. In the daylight, it all seemed too fanciful to be real. I waited impatiently for the night.

I may have forgotten my anger at Bérenger, but Madame’s agony still weighed on me. I itched to tell her about the catacomb, but I restrained myself, thinking of how my sketch of the knight’s stone had so distressed her. I thought I should at least wait until I could explore the crypt more thoroughly, until I found the coffin of Jeanne Catherine’s son and the book, until I could dig a short way through the wall of dirt and discern whether it did indeed obscure the tunnel Madame had long sought.

What a strange story it all was! I sympathized with Jeanne Catherine. I don’t know whether it was my renewed belief in the miraculous or simply my longing for some experience beyond my own, but I was willing to accept the legitimacy of her visions even before I had set eyes on them. It was tempting, of course, to entertain such a thought—that a woman who lived in our village might have been an unrecognized saint. Why shouldn’t Marie Madeleine have visited her? Hadn’t Our Lady herself appeared to Sainte Bernadette at her grotto in Lourdes just a few decades earlier, calling herself the Immaculate Conception and directing Bernadette to the source of the healing spring beneath the earth? If the Church could approve of Sainte Bernadette and her visions of the Holy Virgin, why not Jeanne Catherine and her visions of the Madeleine?

The answer to that was simple, of course: Jeanne Catherine’s visions would never be approved because they opposed Church doctrine. The notion of Jesus fathering a child, the idea that he might have loved a woman with spirit
and
body—these ideas were much too dangerous, much too blasphemous to be aired. But why? My own protests came one after the next. What was so unholy about the body? Didn’t God create us this way, in his image, replete with desire and flaws? I thought of Pichon at his birth: the filmy fingernails, the tiny arcing lips. How could we call his genesis an evil act? Must holiness imply stoicism, the absence of pleasure? God, forming Adam: Mustn’t he have enjoyed it, shaping his limbs from the wet clay?

My thoughts strayed again to Bérenger. His confession had not entirely surprised me. I had suspected that his virulent defense of Church doctrine stemmed not from true zeal but from fear. His words on doctrinal matters so often rang false, revealing a desperation only partially disguised by his bluster. He feared that any tug at the loose threads of belief would lead to a tangled, unsalvageable skein. His fear was not unfounded, of course: I knew that from the unraveling, and now the tentative rewinding, of my own faith. But I hadn’t thought his faith to be so close to fraying. Nor had I guessed how deeply it, too, made him suffer.