The White Garden (17 page)

Will nobody cry out? They say women have died, are dying every day — in their sleep, in this strange place — this place where the doctor is the god and king, where sleep is the queen of heaven, and the face of death has no face of love.

I cannot bring myself to hunt through books for beautiful
prayers. There are so many of them and I get a headache, and
besides every prayer seems lovelier than the one before. I cannot
possibly say them all, and I do not know which one to choose.

So I behave like children who cannot read, and I tell God very
simply what I want, and He understands.

I have a fragrant memory of something that happened a long
time ago. I had the task, every evening at ten minutes to six, of
accompanying Sister St Peter, who was very old and frail — and
difficult — to the refectory. One winter evening, very cold and
dark, I was performing this humble task when suddenly, away
in the distance, I heard the music of a small orchestra. I
pictured to myself a richly furnished and elaborately decorated
drawing room, glowing with light, and filled with young women,
fashionably dressed, and exchanging worldly compliments.

Then I looked at the poor invalid I was guiding along, and I
saw also the bare bricks of the simple cloister. The contrast
moved me deeply, and then Our Lord poured onto the cloister
that light of truth which so outshines the false glitter of earthly
pleasure.

My head aches, my heart aches, my belly screams out for rest, and I hunt with a kind of fever for help. I hunt in the eyes of people, of Teresa and Shirley and the nurses, and no words
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come to my lips. A terrible dumbness chokes me. I do not know the words. I search in the earth, in the stones of the walls for remedies. I consult my dear white stones. I seek in the pages of old books for remedies and incantations and prayers. All is dumb. All is silent.
The Imitation
. I have eaten page 106. Delicious. The taste of dust and ashes. Licorice allsorts. This book is my only source of nourishment.

‘My flesh and my heart faileth, but God is my portion forever.’

‘What is not savoury to him to whom Thou art savoury?’

Delicate flavour.

Tincture of tuberculosis, mint and meningitis. My head, my heart, my lungs — all ache and yearn for oblivion, seek the long night in the foul tunnels of hell and heaven. Teresa sits in the sunlight and reads the book her sisters sent to her. A book that came all the way from Wales. With the whales I swam with my sisters, with the seals, the angels and the whales. I have nudged sea-lions; I hope to ride an elephant. And afterwards on summer nights there were books to read. They read to me, my sisters, many books, many golden thoughts and smiling sentiments. The stories of the mists of time, the ticking of the misty clock. Turn back the hands of time; roll back the sands of time. We sat in the old brown armchair, one of my sisters or two, and they read to me the stories of red shoes and little mermaids. And I swam in the sea. Every day, that summer.

The trouble those girls had with their feet, their dancing feet in red slippers chop-chop-chopped off. Off with her feet! Their scaly shiny fishy tails cleft in two by the slash of the pain of the knife. And then when the mermaid, speechless, dumb, tried walking, her feet were as feet that moved across hot coals, feet that pattered on the points of swords upturned. She was dumb as a cucumber. The dumb mermaid and the footless maiden

— footless, footloose — they stumbled along, blind leading blind, dumb leading footless, their faces radiant with beauty, transfigured by the pain of love.

True love and charity — these have not always been easy for
me. At meditation I was for a long time always near a sister who

The Space Between the Bed and the Wall
107

never stopped fidgeting. Perhaps I was the only one who could
hear her — my ears are exceptionally sharp. My desire was
to turn and stare at her until she stopped her noise, but deep
down I knew it was better to endure it. I made no fuss at all, but
sometimes I was soaked in sweat because of the strain. At last
I tried to find some way of enduring this suffering calmly and
even joyfully. Instead of trying not to hear the noise the sister
made, I began to strive to listen to it very carefully as if it were a
first-class concert.

Another time I was in the wash-house where another sister
constantly splashed me with dirty water. Instead of drawing
back, I made such efforts to want to be showered with dirty
water that after half an hour I had genuinely taken a fancy to
being splashed.

Sometimes I do not sleep for days, and days, and days. Then I sleep and I dream, and I dream of the sleep-doctor, sandman who comes to me with his needle and ch-ch-ch and I fall asleep in the Sleeping Beauty Chamber and I dream such dreams of violation and invasion. They are not dreams. This is what is going on. The doctor of sleep is the god of dreams, the prince of nightmares, and he springs upon me, satyr to nymph, and I am helpless, sound asleep in the palace, prised apart by the sword and the serpent. The face of lust is the face of the doctor; the eyes of lust are mine. This is my strange ambivalence. Little Flower he calls me. Open up Little Flower and show your petals to the sun. The god of the sun, the flower of the wayside. I am after all only a weak and helpless child. But such is the power of weakness, such is the knowledge of ignorance, that I, Sleeping Beauty, Deep Sleeping Mermaid, I have a gorgeous power over the Doctor of Sleep. It is a strange and satisfying power.

The more he violates me, the tighter my power pulls around him. I am a net, a web, and he is a foolish elephant caught in my invisible chains. Stanger than strontium, known to be fusible at red heat. My greatest strength lies in death.
That
is the secret of my power. When I die in his arms, die beneath the weight of his body in its white coat, tweed jacket, satin vest, when I die in his embrace — ch-ch-ch — then I will be pronounced the winner,
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the princess with the golden ball, the cup, the crown. The frog will lie astonished on my pillow; and I will be triumphant in death. He takes my head between his hands and I am aflame with power. In my secret, dumb, sleeping, sly and shy and winning way, I watch the doctor. This is my Little Way of the Mute.

MY LITTLE WAY

I am a very
little
soul who can offer only
little
things to God.

This is my
Little
Way.

One wash day, as I was cheerfully being showered with
dirty water, Mother Agnes of Jesus came out and took me aside
to read me a letter from a young seminarian. He said in the
letter that he had prayed to our mother, St Teresa, and she
had inspired him to ask for a sister who would devote herself
specially to his salvation, and to the salvation of the souls
in his care. I was the one chosen to be the sister of the future
missionary. My happiness was boundless! That St Teresa should
send me my first brother, when for so long I had cherished
the wish for a brother who was a priest. My own brothers
died when they were very young, but here was God answering
my prayer.

‘I am God, and I am fucking a saint,’ he said to me one afternoon in the Sleeping Beauty Chamber. ‘What do you think of that, then?’ So I said I thought it was nice and he laughed like anything.

One day at dawn I dreamt I was in the corridor, walking alone
with Reverend Mother. Suddenly I saw three Carmelite nuns
wearing their mantles and long veils, and I knew they were from
heaven. I thought how happy I would be to see the face of one of
them. As if my wish had been heard, the tallest of them walked
towards me. I knelt. She lifted her veil and covered us both with
it, and I looked into her face and recognised Mother Anne of Jesus, founder of Carmel in France. Her face shone with a beauty
not of this earth; no ray of light came from it, and yet, in spite
of the thick veil, which covered us both, I saw her whole face
lit with a soft and gentle glow. She caressed me, and, moved by
her love, I ventured to say: ‘I implore you, Mother, to tell me if
God is going to leave me on earth for long. Will He come for me
soon?’ She gave me a tender smile and she said: ‘Yes, soon …

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soon. I promise you.’ I went on to say: ’Tell me also, Mother, if
God is pleased with me. Does He want anything from me beyond
my poor little desires and longings?’

As I spoke her face shone with a new splendour, and her gaze
grew even more tender. She said: ‘God asks nothing more from
you. He is pleased, very pleased.’ Her voice was so very sweet
and gentle and wise. She took my head between her hands. I
was aflame with joy.

When I woke from this dream I believed I knew, really knew,
that heaven exists, and that souls dwell there who love me and
look down on me as their child.

My angels carry me across the water, and they explain to me that heaven exists in the bliss of the hammock of their arms, in the nothing of the air, in the knowledge of the light. I have eaten of the book and I am weightless, borne along by angels in vestments with Japanese wings. We soar and we sing and our hymns are the hymns of the sun and the moon and the stars.

The face of love is the face of the death of angels. The ears of the angels can hear the sounds that I, mute and musical, whisper to the stars.

I offer my neck to the sword of the executioner, fling wide my legs to take him into my power.

I long to be a martyr. From my childhood I have dreamt of martyrdom, and it is a dream which has grown more and more real
in my little cell. I want to be scourged and crucified; I want to be
flayed, flung into boiling oil. I long to be ground by the teeth of
wild beasts, to offer my neck to the sword of the executioner. I
long, like Joan of Arc, to burn at the stake.

I am ground by the teeth of savage beasts, wild creatures gnaw me from within. I believe I am starving to death, and I live in a haze of ecstasy where my angels take me by the arms and the legs and skim across the water. Away. But wild animals such as I have never seen have gripped my heart and sunk their fangs into my soul. In a strange way this is beautiful. In my weakness

My Little Way

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I am a victim of bright love and lust and sweetest death. In my place as a victim, I have power over all things. Wheeee!

Is there anywhere in the world a tinier, weaker soul than mine?

How brightly the beacon of love burns — and I know how to
reach it, and how to make its flames my own.

I am only a weak and helpless child, and yet it is my very
weakness which has made me daring enough to offer myself to
Jesus as a victim of his love. In order for love to be fully satisfied
it must descend to nothingness and transform that nothingness
into living fire.

I will show my love by scattering flowers. I will sweetly sing
my hymn of love, even if I have to gather my roses from the
midst of thorns — the longer and sharper the thorns, the sweeter
my singing will be.

I am a silent nightingale, singing the sweetest song of all.

I am numb, and yet I feel everything. Starving, I am filled with fruits and nectars. I am dumb. Silence is a melody played in the heart. The thorn in my flesh can make me sing. Sleep little lady, says the doctor, and ch-ch-ch he pushes the needle in and I fall into a half sleep, a greenish slimy twilight and he parts my naked legs and ch-ch-ch he goes again inside me. And I sing a little, I make some singing sounds for him, for his pleasure, but I do not mean it. Moaning and laughing and singing inside my pearly skin. My song is mournful, and my heart is black.

You never did see such blackness, like velvet only blacker, like down the deepest coalmine. Yeah.

Sometimes I wonder what use Jesus will have for my songs.

Shall I die of grief at being so helpless?

I will spend my heaven doing good on earth. I will follow my
Little Way for all eternity, and in the gardens of paradise I will
gather roses; I will scatter the petals from on high, my gifts to
all those souls I love on earth. A rain of roses will descend upon
the world after I am gone.

In the gardens of paradise I will gather roses, and a rain of
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roses will fall on every sleepyhead. Wake up, wake up, you sleepyhead. When the red, red robin goes bob bob bobbin along, along. There’ll be no more sobbin when he starts throbbin his old sweet song. Wind the bobbin, the bob bob bobbin and pull, pull, pull the thread. Pull it tight, pull it taut. Taut as a tortoise tight in his shell. If the thread begins to unwind, you must wind it twice around the bobbin and pull it taut. Wind clockwise, clockwise in the silver mirror. And the time of vibration of a pendulum depends entirely on the length of the thread. So wind up the bobbin, roll out the barrel. And wind the thread twice around the neck and pull it taut. And a rain of red red robin roses will fall in a shower on the earth after I am gone.