The Priest's Madonna (35 page)

We began to argue. I stopped accepting his gifts, insisting they were too extravagant, that he should be spending his money more wisely.

“What is the difference,” Bérenger would ask, insulted, “between enjoying the gifts of the flesh and enjoying wealth?”

“It
is
different,” I maintained. “Wealth harms. It takes from the poor, implicitly. I don’t need any more jewels. But the poor need food, shelter. Basic comforts.”

He fumed, peevish at my sermon.

“But sensual pleasure takes from no one. It is an expression of love, a basic human joy: to adore a loved one with one’s whole self, body and heart and mind.”

“It is God who should be loved that way, Marie. Jesus tells us so.”

“God, yes, but not God alone. Jesus does not prohibit us from loving one another. He commands it, in fact, does he not? To love one another as we love ourselves?”

“Yes, Marie,” he responded, his face red with aggravation. “Of course. But not carnally. Please, don’t belittle the gospel with your absurd contortionist readings.”

“That’s not what I meant. Not everyone. But surely one person, one beloved—God would not deprive us of the love, the full physical love, of that one beloved person? Why else has he made us this way? So susceptible, so needy? Why, Bérenger?”

“It’s different for me, Marie!” he would shout. “For God’s sake, I’m a priest! I took an oath. And I’ve broken it. How can he trust me any longer?”

Then later, when we had quieted, I offered: “But God forgives,
mon cher,
does he not? He understands.”

“Not me, Marie. He will never forgive me.”

I
T IS THIS confession, this terrible confession, that I hear now, his voice waking me in the night.
He will never forgive me.
That was his conviction, that he had strayed so far as to be unforgivable, that having turned away from God, God had turned away from him. This knowledge of his suffering is my roving nightmare, my cross. For I am sure of my guilt now. I strove to reason it away then, to hide behind the arrogance of my relative youth, my secular mind. But I am older now, and wiser, and I know the truth: I am as much of a thief as he was. Worse, even. For while he stole petty treasures from the dead, who had no use for them, I stole his one treasure: his righteousness, his reliance on his all-powerful God. And in its place, I offered him only the paltry comfort of my own flawed love.

Is it a characteristic of human love that we must strive to remake our beloved in our own image? Must we always destroy the one we love? For such a remaking necessarily involves destruction, just as the restoration of a building demands a partial demolition, just as the rebirth of a nation requires the violence of war. Must we lose our lives to love each other, then, just as Christ declares we must do to live in his favor? I am afraid I required from Bérenger too great a loss—in my zeal to love him I destroyed him irremediably. I recognize that such a claim is a proud one, as it assumes I held his fate in my hands. Yet I do not think it far wrong, for where else can we find the shape of our fate but in the hands of those we love?

A
FEW YEARS after the final work on the estate was completed, Bérenger received the first blow from the Church. It came in the form of a letter from the new bishop—Monseigneur Rouby, a cruel and officious man. It stated, in brief, that Bérenger was to be reassigned to the parish of Coustouges within the month. He would have to leave behind his beloved Rennes-le-Château.

Bérenger was distraught, as was I. We had not anticipated such an eventuality, though why not, I cannot guess. A priest is a soldier in the army of God, after all, and obligated to follow orders. After a flurry of letter-writing to friends asking for advice, a great deal of agonizing, and no small measure of private raging at the new bishop, Bérenger submitted his resignation. The bishop accepted it at a meeting in Carcassonne a few months later. He declared that a new priest would be installed at Rennes-le-Château that summer. He also made the official demand that Bérenger stop soliciting Masses, or risk being charged with simony.

The accusation both surprised and relieved me, for it meant that the episcopate only suspected Bérenger of criminal behavior but had not discovered his true offense. But the charge was valid. Bérenger had not fulfilled the voluminous Mass requests honor-ably; he had fallen behind, and had eventually given up even the pretense of fulfilling them. One day, as I was sorting through his accounts, I saw the proof of his guilt: a line drawn in September of 1893 across the log of Mass intentions I’d scrupulously kept. “Stopped here,” he had written, and beneath that he had crossed out the requests I’d entered by date, amount, and name. Yet he had continued to accept the honoraria for Mass intentions that he knew he would not fulfill.

Bérenger did stop soliciting requests when commanded to by the bishop. But one or two of his advertisements, by some oversight, continued to run in the Catholic papers, and they quickly came to the attention of the bishop. He submitted his charge and the ordeal began.

The villagers, bless them, were loyal to Bérenger despite everything. The municipal council—headed now by Joseph, who had become mayor—wrote a letter to the bishop declaring that no one but Bérenger himself would be allowed to live in the presbytery. When the new priest arrived, he stayed with a family in Espéraza, and hiked up the hill every morning for Mass. Most of the villagers boycotted his Masses, going instead to Bérenger’s unofficial ones, which he conducted on the veranda of the villa. (One notable exception was Mme Flèche, who was so old by that time that she may not even have noticed the change.) Bérenger was touched and surprised by their loyalty, for there had been not a few among them who had grown angry at his decadence.

But as the trial stretched out over years, Bérenger grew unwell and seemed unable to offer any evidence to defend himself against the Church’s accusations. The villagers grew less forgiving, less loyal. Some began attending Mass in Couiza; others stopped attending altogether.

Bérenger declared the Church’s accusation ludicrous. He claimed that the amount of Mass requests he would have had to receive in order to fund his building projects would have been outrageously high. Pressed to provide an accounting of the origin of his wealth, he used his old excuse: gifts given by anonymous donors, names he could not reveal without compromising their trust in him or even, in some cases, their well-being. This, needless to say, did not satisfy the diocese.

Bérenger hired a lawyer, a M. Baguet, whose overconfident manner indicated to me his probable incompetence from the first. But Bérenger insisted on his trustworthiness. M. Baguet was a former priest himself; Bérenger had known him in seminary. M. Baguet claimed to have important connections in Rome, and he advised Bérenger to ignore the summonses of the episcopate while he himself traveled—racking up astounding expenses—to appeal directly to the Vatican. Summons after summons appeared, and as Bérenger ignored every one, the bishop finally suspended him indefinitely, until he could repay the money he had supposedly embezzled. As far as I know, M. Baguet enjoyed an extended Roman holiday before disappearing altogether.

It was not long before the debts Bérenger had accrued began to increase, and the money that had once been so abundant grew scarce. When he finally died, some eight years after he was first accused, he was broken both in bank and in spirit, for he had long since given up any attempt to be in communion with the God he had once been so intent on loving. He continued to follow the forms of his faith: saying his rosary, occasionally even performing the entire Mass, and though he could not legally administer communion once suspended, he took it daily (as did my mother and I). But his heart had grown hard, and his faith perfunctory.

He grew weak and fell ill, hounded by a persistent cough, and we could find no relief for him. Dr. Castanier diagnosed exhaustion. I tried to reenact the miraculous cure that saved my father so many years earlier—I prayed to my
santon
regularly and visited the meadow at night, watching for that silently soaring owl. The year before his death, when he was sixty-four years old, I took Bérenger on the train to Lourdes, a two-day journey. I held him by the arm as he bathed in the healing waters. But his health only continued to decline.

On the evening of January 21, 1917, after he had been in bed for a solid month, Bérenger told me to send for Abbé Combes, his friend from Rennes-les-Bains. A few hours later, the curé took Bérenger’s final confession while Mother, Father, and I waited in the kitchen. When the priest came downstairs, he fixed a condemning stare on me and said portentously, “God save the poor soul.” Bérenger died at dawn.

Inside, there is half-darkness, like the gray pallor of early dawn. She sits just beyond the mouth of the cave, on the mediating moment between light and dark, between the grotto’s mouth, where the midmorning sunlight reaches and illuminates the glinting mica in the walls and the small mineral iridescences, and the dark, narrowing tunnel. Here, in her place, this pallor is perpetual, as if the walls collect daylight and radiate it once the sun goes down. It is damp where she is—the clay floor, the silty walls, the toothed ceiling: wet earth hardening into hanging spears. The smell in the cave is wet and green, the smell of new life converging on death, for as soon as the moss grows, it rots. The wind speaks at the mouth of the cave: moaning, whistling, gusting. There is a constant dripping. She knows its rhythm, has memorized it like Torah, its steady incantation, its half-dashed hope and dogged persistence. The water is like her: it longs to be delivered up, at peace and still, instead of caught in the perpetual cycle of union and dispersal, of motion, continual motion. Sometimes she hears or sees animals at the entrance to the cave: squirrels and birds, most often; foxes and bears on occasion. Once, a wild boar snuffled in and fixed its eyes on hers. The hairs on his snout twitched. She was glad and tried to discern what sort of creature it was that had come to give her the gift of death, but the boar turned and snuffled away.

Noises, voices resound within her, chasing away silence. The thuds of the stones against the disciple Stephen’s skull, and the sickening slump of his body when he fell. Miryam of Beit Aniyah’s wails when Elazar died a second time, and no Yeshua there to revive him. Her daughter’s cries at birth—rapid and shuddering—and then Miryam’s own cries when they were parted in this new land, when she doubled over with grief, unable to watch her child being carried off on the back of a donkey, despite her knowledge that it was for the girl’s safety. She hears the brusque and brutish voices of the Roman agents who pursued them from their arrival in Gaul and the rapid muffled beating of her daughter’s heart as they hid in caves, in bread ovens, beneath floorboards, all to avoid the terrible clutch of the Gallic governor, a bloodthirsty man who had imperial orders to exile or kill any Christians he found. She hears her daughter’s mature voice, imagined, perhaps, but joyful and at peace, calling to her from that distant haven on a remote hillside, singing her name like a blessing. She sings back, a returned prayer for her continued peace and happiness. She hears, too, the voices of the people she met in this new land: the wonder of those who heard her stories and her proclamation of the peace of God’s kingdom without scorn, and the scorn of those who listened without wonder. Always, she hears Yeshua’s voice, variously exultant or angry, as before the crowds, joyful, as at a shared meal, fatigued and gentle and full of grief, as when alone with her.

She forgets what time is. She is skinny, and recognizes in herself, as she did in Yeshua, a body given up to spirit, for she cares now only about prayer, about communion with the divine. Eating, drinking, urinating, defecating, sleeping—these are all vulgar necessities, pleasurable in their own way, but ultimately elements of death. She eats berries and chews on leaves or sticks; she drinks from the stream that runs downhill a few paces from the grotto. Sometimes, she imagines she is once again in Palestine—that arid, tawny land, that place of sun-baked rock and unexpected lakes. She sees once more the blinding beauty of the Temple—now, she understands, razed to the ground. She remembers the droop of the branches of the fig trees, the luxuriant fruit. The golden hills, spotted with the whitewashed tomb-rocks. The thick forests on the way to Yerushalayim. And Magdala in the Galil, with its moody sea: its blue serenity and its thunderous, ship-devouring waves.

Mostly, though, she is within the tunnel of earth that has become her home, this dripping grotto, this half-lighted dwelling.

His name pools like oil on her tongue, and she pours it from her lips like oil. She envisions him, skybound and bound within her, his great heart united now with hers, beating within the shell of her body. Repeating his name, she knows how her body falls away each moment, flaking like stone from a mountainside. Repeating his name, she feels how her skin encloses a tunnel to her heart, where he is, where he beats. She repeats his name and feels her body flake like rock in wind and rain and feels her heart beating steadily and greatly as his did when he lived and does now, in hers. She repeats his name and knows how her heart also is a tunnel, a thing enclosing space, a space as vast as heaven and as tiny as the seed of a pomegranate, a space that admits nothing but his name, which she repeats, as a beating of a heart in her mouth, as oil pouring out: Yeshua, Yeshua, Yeshua.

I
T HAS BEEN eight years since Bérenger’s death. My mother and father and I still live in the presbytery. My father is blind now; my mother spends her days tending to him, shuffling downstairs to assemble his lunch on a tray, climbing up to read to him while he eats, napping beside him in bed in the afternoon. I tend to the both of them. I rise early with the cock to feed the chickens and the rabbits and milk the goat. I knead the dough for the bread, and while it rises I make the coffee and serve the breakfast. We eat upstairs together, in the bedroom. When we finish, I wash up and put the beans on to boil. In summer, I weed and water the garden, harvest my vegetables, launder the linens and hang them out to dry; in winter, I kill a rabbit, drain it over the basin in the kitchen, scrub the washroom floor, make an errand to the grocer’s or the tailor’s. I still dust and sweep the church, polish the candlesticks, the paten and the chalice, and refresh the holy water stoup, though no one will come to bless it. I work in silence, my companions my animals—the rabbits, chickens, and goat.