Women in the Wall (10 page)

“Well,” he asked, “has she eaten today?”

“No.” The novice, a girl from northern Gaul, stared at him with excitement. “Nor moved,” she told him. “She’s standing as stiff as an icicle in front of her relics. Like this!” The girl held up her hands, palms forward in a gesture Fortunatus remembered once seeing a caged mouse assume to signify its submission to a stronger one.

The girl bent towards Fortunatus. “I touched her”, she confided, “and her flesh was. cold as ice. She didn’t budge!”

“I see. What about her eyes?”

“Fixed,” said the girl. “Wide open and fixed. She never blinks.”

Fortunatus fixed his own eyes sharply on the novice, “You’re not just saying this, are you?”

The girl looked so shocked that he saw she was not.

“All right,” he waved her away. “I mustn’t keep you from your holy occupations, Sister.”

It was disappointing to have to rely on the testimony of someone so simple. Radegunda was in rapture. In that tower, so close to where he sat that he could have thrown a stone inside, a woman was in union with God. The ecstasy she was experiencing, her love-transaction with the Great Lover, was the most thrilling mystery of all existence. Thinking of it excited the poet physically. He felt a compelling urge to participate in the power which must, he felt sure, be emanating from the nun at this moment. Grace: he saw it in terms of heat, energy, an enhancing and elevation of the spirit. Of the senses even. His fingers tingled as he wrote his notes: “As Danae received Zeus in a shower of sunlight, so Radegunda was receiving Christ.” No. He ran his pen through that. Pagan imagery! Dangerous. Especially here in Gaul where paganism died hard and many, after hearing the Christian mass in the morning, crept off by twilight to worship at some old pagan shrine. Besides, the Christian was a more ethical experience. The enraptured saint’s will was absorbed into the divine one. Radegunda became one with God.

The poet felt suddenly bereft.

If Radegunda’s “I” became absorbed, then how could one reach her? The fire and ecstasy were exclusive and excluding. He felt a sensation of cold, shivered, sneezed and pulled his fur cloak about him. Letting his pen drop, he began, in some depression, to grapple with this paradox: what fascinated him in Radegunda was her rapture, but the rapture obliterated her individuality, the self with which a human could connect. Fortunatus had for some time enjoyed a strong, he would have said “spiritual” relationship with the nun, anyway a friendship, but, at this moment, the moment when he most wanted her, she was beyond his reach.

Despondently, he picked up his pen and began to write about grace, the spiritual fund amassed by exceptional members of the Christian community, yet available to all. He threw down his pen. He didn’t want the grace available to all. He wanted … With revulsion, Fortunatus realized that his feeling for Radegunda at this moment was lust. The images before his inner eyes were unmistakable. He shook his head violently from side to side, denying those images, blurring, mixing and inducing an anaesthetizing, optical haze.

Radegunda, he remembered with distaste, was fifty, badly worn by a life of penance, not in the least attractive. Unseemliness aside, the idea was sacrilegious…. He shook his head faster and faster until thought was drowned in a wave of giddiness, nausea and incipient pain.

*

“I …” thought Agnes guiltily. “Ego …”

It was a forbidden vocable. Her “I” should long ago have been merged and lost in God. The brief character should have been erased by her monastic vow, leaving her as blank as a fresh page or her own white habit. There were no mirrors in the convent but the other sisters showed her how she looked: a five-foot, shapeless bundle of pale wool, waiting for God to put his character on her. Receptive. She hoped.

Meanwhile there were things to be done.

Radegunda was in retreat: Lent. She had been in her cell now for three weeks. Besides, she left decisions anyway to Agnes. Radegunda could not escape prestige. People came from distant provinces to touch objects previously touched by her. The gardeners did a roaring trade. Patients afflicted by nervous disorders waited around the convent walls until they caught a glimpse of her. Then frequently had fits. In the course of these they yelled that the saint’s glance had exorcised and forced demons to depart from inside them. Invariably, the debouching spirits put on a last performance, uttering obscenities and contorting the host bodies in lascivious spasms. Local people enjoyed this and were hoping that their saint might yet compete with St. Martin whose body had been treacherously stolen from them by the men of Tours more than a century earlier. His tomb attracted gifts and pilgrims from all over Christendom and had contributed maddeningly to the prosperity of the rival city. St. Martin’s prestige had even won the citizens of Tours a royal tax exemption.

All this and more was reported to Agnes by Fridovigia who had steadfastly refused to leave her and equally steadfastly refused to become a nun. She survived as a sort of convent hanger-on, a position which would have violated the Rule’s prohibition of servants if Fridovigia had been even minimally efficient. As she was not, she could be regarded as a charity-case or Agnes’s private gadfly sent by God to temper her as he no doubt sent the epileptics and hysterics to temper Radegunda.

“I can’t listen now,” said Agnes. “I have to see how the bath-house is coming along. I want the masons out of there by Easter. And the altar-cloths should be laundered carefully. That gilt embroidery is delicate. Then there’s the blessed bread to be baked. Why don’t you go and weigh the flour, Fridovigia? If there isn’t enough someone will have to grind more.”

Fridovigia paid no attention. Head on one side, she was staring ironically at Agnes. “You remind me of your mother,” she said. “Just the same at your age, she was. Anxious. A bit fussy. Even to the way you fiddle with your key!
She
was a good manager. I daresay there was as much going on in your father’s villa as there is in this convent! She knew how to enjoy herself too. The banquets they used to have … She always presided. She wasn’t a prude. Mind you she was a fine-looking woman in her day. If you wore a little make-up you might look like her. Oh, I know it’s against your Rule, but it would tone down your cheeks. They’re too bright. Many’s the beauty came out of a pot of ceruse! And if you only wore something better than this!” The nurse plucked contemptuously at Agnes’s lumpy skirt. “Your mother’s clothes were made of Byzantine stuffs. Well, they say you can dress a
broomstick
to look like a queen and
I
say the opposite’s just as true. But then, I suppose, why should you bother? Here! But still when I think of all the gentlemen who used to admire her … All that liveliness, laughter, music, parties…” Fridovigia’s eyes glazed. The past she was remembering might have been her own. Had become her own. “Then to think of her leaving no son, no heir, nothing…” She let her hands fall in despondency. “I’d look for the bright side,” she said, “only I’d be hard put where to look.”

“Will you remember my message about the flour?”

“There was a Roman gentleman”, said the nurse unheedingly, “who was mad about her when she was the age you are now! He was some sort of a big noise, a high official or something. From Rome. He used to play music to her and send her poems. A black-eyed gentleman. Always joking. A funny thing but do you know who reminds me of him?”

“No,” said Agnes. “I do not and I have work to do.” She walked off quickly towards the bath-house but Fridovigia followed her, panting a little.

“Let me tell you something …” she began.

“Please,” said Agnes, unable to keep the annoyance out of her voice, “don’t keep on about my mother.”

“I wasn’t going to,” Fridovigia said huffily. “I was going to tell you of something I saw this morning on my way here. In town. Can’t you walk a bit more slowly,” she complained. “Anyone would think you were running from a bull!” Agnes slowed down. Fridovigia sighed. “I’m not getting younger and neither are you. Do you realize you’ll soon be thirty? What was I saying? Oh yes: a terrible thing. I passed the basilica on my way over this morning and there were
three
babies on the steps. In this weather! Can you imagine? The deacon was just opening the church door and there they were. One was dead: blue with cold! How do the women do it, I ask you? It must have been there for hours. Of course they abondon them while it’s still dark for fear of being seen. With the hunger that’s around, nobody’s going to bring them up. Only the Church—but what kind of a future is that for a child? The Church …”

Agnes began walking quickly again. The old woman got on her nerves. Her monologues all tended obscurely in the same direction. Obstinate, insinuating, rarely speaking directly enough to risk contradiction, Fridovigia gnawed at the thread of Agnes’s life. Love and disapproval seeped from her. She was all self-abnegation in a bad cause: that of winning Agnes back from Radegunda’s influence. Years of defeat had taught her nothing. Humbly she lurked, congratulating herself silently, and sometimes not so silently, on not speaking her mind, yet spoke it by her sheer presence. Her figure in a room or at the turn of a corridor was an interrogation mark, a lament, a bleak, beseeching shadow which suffered and challenged the usefulness of convents, proclaimed her disappointment in Agnes, her foster child, and in her own son, a bad hat, who hung round Poitiers getting into fights and disgracing her; proclaimed her dependency, her utter incapacity to live for herself, her claims on Agnes. She hovered now while Agnes spoke to the masons about finishing the bath-house, then followed her into the sacristy and back to the laundry-house.

“Let me carry those.” She tried to take the piles of embroidered sacred cloths from Agnes’s arms.

“No,” said Agnes, not wanting Fridovigia to feel useful. Recognizing her own meanness, she stopped. “All right then, take the top ones.” She tilted the pile of cloths towards the old woman whose reactions were too slow. A heavy gold altar-cloth fell to the ground and the nurse, in her nervousness, trod on it. “What a fool you are!” said Agnes irritably. “Why do you hang round me? You’re not fit to be in a convent. Pick it up and put it back, then go away, will you. Go away.”

The old woman obeyed in hurried silence and had pattered down the corridor and clicked the outer door behind her before Agnes’s temper had abated enough to call her back. Anger and shame were still struggling in her when she reached the laundry-rooms where the sisters who should have been on duty were nowhere to be seen.

Dropping the pile of cloths into a coffer, she ran back after her old nurse, but when she reached the garden the woman had disappeared. Just as well maybe. Agnes might have wounded her again by her apologies. She was not yet controlled enough for gentleness. Her mind and temperament felt like one of the hair shirts which
Radegunda
wore constantly next her skin. Agnes seemed to have an internal one: all the parts of her sensibility rubbed abrasively against one another. “I am a bad nun, a bad abbess,” she thought, “a bad Christian, I … There is too much ‘I’ in me.” She found the nuns who should have been in the laundry, scolded them and sent them back there and set off for the kitchens which were in a separate building. “It’s the spring,” she thought. “It annoys me.”

In the bakehouse she found two slatternly young novices mixing the dough for the blessed bread with great raw hands garnished with black-rimmed nails. By now her indignation was worn out and it was in the gentlest of voices that she told them to go off and wash. Left alone, she began to shape the dough. The mound of it was bigger than herself, for the convent alone would have two hundred communicants at Easter and the church of St. Mary Outside the Walls probably more. Calm, she told herself, calm, and gave herself up to the soothing mechanical task which might have been hers if she had not been abbess. So many “if”s. Her mind spiralled after them. Firmly, she brought it back to the immediacy of dough. Oh the relief of what was purely physical! She liked the elastic quality of the damp dough, enjoyed
pummelling
and slapping it down, feeling it yield then slowly swell back, arching into the palms of her hands and
nuzzling
upwards through the slits in her fingers. She scraped her hands clean with a wooden spatula, dipped them into the flour bin, then plunged them once more into the mixture. A minute later they had got a cramp from the effort and she had to rest them. Fluttering her fingers and pulling at her knuckles, she moved for a moment to the back window.

Fortunatus was outside and, thinking she had fluttered at him, waved back. Agnes made a sedate gesture. Could she, he mimed the question, come out? No. He mimed resignation and went back to his writing. He was sitting in an arbour. Roses. But they had not yet bloomed and the grey stringy vines sifted pale sunlight on to his head. The tufts of his eyebrows cast shadows around his eyes which gleamed occasionally like water deep in a well. Black eyes—who had been talking about black eyes?

The two young nuns came back with scrubbed hands and Agnes left them to finish working the dough. She went for a moment to the convent chapel to pray. Terce. Sun poured through stained-glass windows making
coloured
tesselations on the floor: red and blue. Pray for the blue-faced baby that died. What use? It had surely been unbaptized. Hell’s limbic border for it: a neutral,
unrealizing
place. The Church would keep and bring up the live ones as Church serfs. They would be exempt from military service. But might die before experiencing that unique advantage. Have mercy on them, oh Lord. Preserve them from starvation and avoidable disasters: tumours, fevers and malignant growths, from yaws and leprosy, gangrene, rot, abscesses, plagues and slow material decay. Agnes had worked with Radegunda at her hospital at Aties and her alms-house at Saix: well-run places where fresh linen was given out twice a week, baths scheduled in rotation, wholesome food laid on trestle tables and dispensed by Radegunda herself who took joy in this, in washing the filthiest inmates and in kissing lepers’ sores.