The Priest's Madonna (7 page)

These were the seven reasons why Miryam, at the age of nineteen, was still unmarried and why she sought the healer from Natzaret. It was dawn: she walked alone along the shore, avoiding the roads where she could easily be stopped by Herod’s soldiers. Gulls flew over the lake, diving for fish. Her sisters would be waking now, running to tell their mother about her empty bed, and she wondered whether her mother might secretly welcome her disappearance. But she kept on, stopping from time to time to shake a pebble from her sandal. Soon she came to a place where the sloping bank began to level out. She climbed a small rise and leaned against a cypress tree to rest. Fields of whitening wheat extended before her, rippling in the wind that came off the water. A few workers were scattered across the fields, their head coverings bobbing above the plants. She believed that the man and his followers would be camping somewhere here, on the Plain of Gennesaret—it was flat and there were many grassy clearings that would offer excellent ground for camping—but she did not see them as she surveyed the expanse before her.

The heat of the day was beginning to rise, and she removed the shawl that covered her head and shoulders and laid it on the ground, letting the air cool her face and neck. She could feel the devil within her stirring—she did not want it to wake, and she thought that if she closed her eyes and tried to make herself peaceful, it might doze again. She sat in the shade of the tree and tucked her feet beneath her. Leaning back, she closed her eyes and tried to will the sleep that had eluded her the previous night to overtake her now. But the devil was not so easily dissuaded. Before long, it had stretched itself to standing within her and was now looking out through her eyes and re-creating the view she had previously seen as benign: now the wheat plants that had been rippling so gently in the breeze appeared to her as thousands of spears piercing the breast of the great sighing beast that was the land; now the white heads of the workers as they dipped amid the plants were the pale bellies of gigantic spiders, coming toward her on long lascivious legs; now the sheltering tree she leaned against had become the body of a serpent, rigid and poised to strike. She scuttled away from it and rolled into a ball like a mealworm, covering her head with her arms. “So the people of Yisrael,” she whispered, “set out from Rameses, and encamped at Succoth. And they set out from Succoth and encamped at Etham, which is on the edge of the wilderness.”

Time passed. She felt a light touch on her spine and when she lifted her head, he was there, kneeling beside her. He was very thin—his cheeks hung from the bones beneath his eyes, and his mouth seemed too large for his fragile face. “Miryam,” he said gently. She got quickly to her feet and pulled the cloth back over her head. He remained where he was, looking up at her like a child gazing at his mother. “Here you are,” he whispered, as if it was he who had been seeking her.

O
NE AFTERNOON, AFTER the heat of the summer had passed, I happened to be upstairs fluffing the featherbed when I heard the front door open and the swish of Bérenger’s cassock as he entered the house. “Isabelle?” he called out. I held my breath, then answered.

“She’s gone to the butcher’s, Monsieur
le curé,
” I said as I descended the ladder to the lower room. “She’ll be back shortly.”

“Oh, Marinette,” he said. He laughed, as if surprised to see me, then waved an envelope in the air. “The most wonderful thing. I’ve just received a letter from—” He stopped to laugh once more, in disbelief. “You won’t believe me.”

“Who?” I asked, intrigued.

“The Archduke of Austria.” He enunciated the title emphatically, with evident pleasure. “He’s written to inquire about our church.”

“What for?” I asked.

“It’s incredible, really. He wants to send us some money for its restoration. It appears his sister is the Reverend Mother Josephine, abbess at the convent in Prouilles. I’d no idea she was a Hapsburg,” he added. “In any case, he says she’s often spoken to him about our beautiful village and our poor dilapidated church, and he has grown fond of it through her stories. He asked if we’re still in need of funds.”

“Really?” I said. “What luck.”

“A blessing, Marie. A gift from God. Praise his holy name.”

“Amen,” I added. We stood in awkward silence, aware of the faintly illicit flavor of the moment: he had taken me into his confidence. He looked around once more, as if he expected my mother to appear from behind the sideboard. Anxious to maintain his attention, I asked, “And how will you respond, Monsieur
le curé
?”

“Why, I’ll let him know that we would be indebted to him for his generosity, that we are undertaking the necessary steps to perform a renovation …” He looked pointedly at me. “In fact, Marie, do you have a moment? I would like to answer him immediately, and your handwriting is so well proportioned.”

We walked over to the presbytery, where he shouldered open the door. The interior air, though still reeking of mildew, had improved since he’d set up his rudimentary office. He had swept the stone floor clean and pushed all the debris—the rotting chairs and boards, the loose bricks—into the next room, leaving a salvaged chair and a trestle table, his desk. The afternoon sun cast an elongated grid of light on the dusty floor.

I sat at the desk. He leaned over me to lift several sheets of stationery from a corner pile, then handed me a pen from his breast pocket. It warmed my palm.

“Rennes-le-Château, the eighteenth of September, 1885,” he began. I wrote, struggling to form my best letters. It was a highly formal message, the language invariably deferential to the status of his addressee. Bérenger invoked the humble position of our village and church, and our great fortune at having captured the archduke’s attention. He dictated in a labored fashion, often stopping and asking me to read back what he’d said, so that by the time we had finished, the stationery was littered with irregular lines and blacked out phrases. I read out the final version.

“What do you think, Marie?” he asked when I’d finished. “Does it sound well to you?”

“Fit for a prince,” I declared. “I’ll recopy it.”

Bérenger nodded, though his expression was distracted and anxious. “Listen, Marie. I’ve been thinking—I’d like you to keep the news of this letter to yourself for the time being.”

I hesitated only briefly before answering, “Certainly, monsieur.” But I wondered why he wanted to keep the archduke’s offer a secret. It appeared as though he had just lit upon a thought that made him wary, though what it might have been I couldn’t have guessed.

He bowed his head. “Thank you, Marinette. And thank you for your help.” He leaned over me to see the letter once again, his shoulders shading my hands.

I took a clean sheet from the pile and began to recopy.

He hovered only a moment more and then began to pace about the room like a restless mule in a stall. Though I kept my eyes on the page in front of me, I could feel him watching me as I wrote, and I could not help but wonder what he saw. I finally met his gaze with my own.

“Tell me, Marinette,” he said. “Why is it that I haven’t yet seen you at confession? Are you that free of sin? As much an angel as you seem?”

The question surprised me. I blushed to the roots of my hair and studied the page once more.

“I’m teasing you,” he added, as a sort of apology. But I could not help but feel chided.

When I had finished the closing line of the letter—which Bérenger had dictated as “Your servant in Christ”—and he had signed the letter with his own perfectly measured hand, he set out immediately for Couiza where he might find the postmaster. That evening, as Mother and I prepared the supper, I wished I had asked Bérenger whether I might at least share the news with her, as it appeared he had intended for her to hear it first. But I kept silent.

B
ÉRENGER WAS RIGHT, of course: I had been avoiding confession. I feared the intimacy of it, feared it would be too provocative, that my feelings for him would be evident in my voice and my demeanor. Though, to be sure, I was not yet exactly certain what my feelings for him were. I knew they involved want: I wanted his attention, his affection, his presence. I could not admit, even to myself, that I wanted his touch—it was too awful, too sinful a thought. But I felt it when I stood by him, when I leaned over him to serve him his plate—the need came over me like a sudden hunger, so powerful that it stole the strength from my muscles and made me fear I might collapse at his feet. His physicality overwhelmed me—his robust figure, his dark complexion, his impetuous grin. But it was his gaze that captivated me. I could not turn away from it. It seemed to simultaneously ask and tell me who I was. No other man in Rennes-le-Château shared that intensity, that seriousness of purpose. No one looked at me as he did.

To please him, I felt I should confess. I reflected on what I had done that I might be able to reveal to him—what sin I could admit to that would convince him I was making a sincere act of contrition. I could disclose my envy for Michelle and her upcoming wedding, divulge the fact of my laziness, tell him of angry words I had spoken to my brother. All of these I could confess sincerely, for I was sorry for them, and absolution would help ease my mind. But they were evasions, I knew. There was one item—other than my unmentionable lust, of course—that was potentially more serious, more dire as far as the state of my soul was concerned. And that was the education I’d been receiving in secret from Mme Laporte.

Madame was the most abstemious person I had yet met. Certainly she was much more so than Bérenger, who savored his food, wine, and smoke. She seemed to exist almost completely in her mind. Her large head virtually teetered on her neck like an overripe fruit, while her body was waif-like, insubstantial. She never sounded a footfall when she walked; rather she seemed—as she had that strange misty morning—to hover just above the ground, floating her way up the stairs and across the hall to her library. The cook, Mme Siau, had taken to bringing treats—almond cake or orange biscuits—when I came, but Mme Laporte never ate them. Occasionally, she sipped coffee, which she took black, but I never saw a morsel of food pass her lips. It seemed that she was nourished, instead, by her own imagination.

It was this imagination of hers, her ability to speak of the distant past as if she’d witnessed it, that I relished. I listened eagerly to her tales of the Cathars, who lived six centuries before I was born and practiced their heretical religion on our little hilltop just as they did throughout the region.

The Cathars ate no meat, eggs, or cheese—no food that came from flesh, for they believed that flesh had been created by the devil, whom they knew as
Rex Mundi,
the king of the world. It was
Rex Mundi
who had moved upon the face of the waters and sculpted an Adam from dust. The true God reigned solely in the heavens, having nothing to do with the earthly creation. “Have you ever wondered, Marie,” Madame asked me one afternoon, “how a good God could have created the guillotine?” The Cathar God, she said, was pure perfection, and as such, could not have made our world. Only the souls of men housed a spark of divinity. These souls traveled from body to body, life to life, over time, until they attained perfection and could finally join with God in the heavens. This was accomplished by renouncing the material world through the sacrament of the
consolamentum,
a spiritual baptism that had to be received before death in order to achieve salvation.

“So many of the peasants of that time,” she recounted, “ate only two meals a day of porridge and weak ale and wore their tunics until they became rags on their backs. They spent their days threshing the grain on fields they didn’t own, weaving endless skeins of flax and wool into cloth. Of this meager income, the Church demanded ten percent. And for what? To pay for the ermine-trimmed albs, the satin miters, and the golden staffs of the bishops, to fund their feasts of wild boar, goose, and hare, their debauched nights with well-kept concubines. The
perfecti
”—these were Cathar monks who traveled through the countryside, fasting and preaching like Jesus’ own apostles—“simply appeared holier than the so-called holy men of the Catholic Church. You can imagine the appeal.”

That the God of Genesis, the God who had created man, should be thought of as the devil was a great heresy in the eyes of the Catholic Church. But an even greater heresy was the Cathar disdain for the cross. For they believed that Christ did not die on the cross. They believed, in fact, that he didn’t die—because he had not truly lived. Being perfect as his Father, Christ could not have taken on the imperfections of human flesh. His appearance on earth in human form was a semblance, a divine optical illusion. Cathar theology rendered the Church’s central symbol—ritually kissed by the priest at the beginning of each Mass, piously traced by congregants over their own hearts—meaningless.

During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, this region, our region—from the Pyrenees, along the Mediterranean all the way to the Rhône, and as far west as Toulouse—graciously hosted this burgeoning religion. Nobles protected its practitioners; many nobles practiced the religion themselves. As it gained power, it threatened the Church, which responded by launching the brutal Albigensian crusade.

In her accounts of the crusade, Mme Laporte dwelt on the gris liest details, describing the butchering of torsos, the mass inciner ations of bodies—hundreds at a time. She told of the massacre of seven thousand at Béziers, Cathars and Catholics alike, spurred on by the Abbot of Cîteaux, who commanded the balking soldiers to “kill them all. God will know his own.” She described the flight of hundreds of Cathars to seek refuge in mountaintop fortresses like Montségur or Peyrepertuse. There they faced sieges that, if they didn’t bring immediate death by a blow to the head from a catapulted stone or an arrow lodged in the heart, threatened a more protracted one by dysentery, starvation, or dehydration. “Death by dehydration can occur within just three days,” she told me with her usual impassive expression. “You go mad, you know. Raving mad.”