Women in the Wall (6 page)

Agnes listened. The voice was mesmeric and very convinced. It talked of love, a haven, gentleness and how Agnes needed to feel secure. The words were comforting, persuasive. “God,” said Radegunda and the word, Agnes could tell, meant something violent and personal and satisfying to Radegunda. At the same time it was very vague, a chameleon word which sometimes meant ‘me’—as in “give yourself to God, love God”—and sometimes very elusive matters indeed.

“You are beautiful, Radegunda!”

“Yes!” Radegunda touched her own body quickly, fingers light and splayed, skimming it in the same gesture which she had used on Agnes’s. “I am astonished to find my flesh still fresh. When I am not looking at it I imagine it rotting off my bones like the flesh of game which has been hung too long in kitchens. It has been too long in human embraces. When I come from the bath I am tempted to go to the stables and roll my body in the dung. Its cleanness is so illusory.”

“Radegunda, don’t be unhappy! I’ll do whatever you want.”

Radegunda touched her cheek to Agnes’s. “My doe, my frail plant! All I want”, she whispered, “is to protect you. Can you trust me?”

“Oh, yes.” Caught up now in a thrilling fellowship.

The queen stood up. Other women must be invited into it, she declared. “Think how many are sacrificed to the brutish lusts of men! You”, she promised, “will be our first abbess when we found the convent I am planning. It may not be for some years, so you will be older but still pure. You, my dove, will have made the whole sacrifice. You will have come unsullied to Christ’s love so it is only fair that on earth as in heaven your place should be above my own!”

Agnes jerked her hand from the queen’s. “I don’t want to, Radegunda. I spoke too quickly. I’m sorry.”

The queen chuckled. She lifted her face to the ceiling, flinging up her chin so that all Agnes could see from below was the white trumpet of her neck rising in the lamplight like the corolla of a St. Joseph’s lily. “You are afraid,” cried the queen. “You are beset by regrets and doubts!”

“Yes, yes I am.”

“Don’t you see?” Radegunda fixed Agnes with an ecstatic eye, “don’t you see that that proves you have chosen the noblest and bravest course? Your doubts come from the prince of this world,” said Radegunda, “the devil, Agnes. It is when he is nearest defeat that he makes his strongest assault on God’s chosen ones! You
will
have regrets, but you must
not
look behind you. What lies behind? Nature. Natural love and that, I don’t have to remind you, is cursed by the curse God put on our first parents. Sexual love is linked with death. The dying creature leaves the product of its sexual couplings to take its place and so the race is continued—but why should it be, Agnes?”

“There is … happiness, Radegunda. People are happy sometimes!”

Agnes felt the weakness of her response, feeling the words which the queen had released into the air hanging still just beyond earshot. Their energy reverberated. Their conviction. They had come at her like swarms of palpable things, like insects perhaps, projectiles or small, fierce birds. She had paid only vague attention to their meaning—familiar, heard before—but an animal pulse in her quickened to the feeling behind them registering it as sustained and hard to resist. She could sense it building up in the small room, accumulating and surging in a wave destined to carry her off. The queen was flushed. She held her body tautly as though seeking to stretch and dip into herself to find stored inner powers. Agnes felt she was being treated to a display worthy of a larger audience, as though the queen had been trying out a new persona and Agnes had happened to be there and to see. But no: it was not as deliberate as that. Radegunda was driven, illumined by forces which Agnes could only know through her and at second hand. Maybe God spoke through her?

Radegunda was speaking again but more gently now. “Let us pray for guidance, child.” She drew the girl towards a jewelled reliquary in a corner of the room.

Standing in front of it, their hands stretched forward in the old Roman way, they prayed.

[
A.D.
569]

Help!

Daniel whom the Lord saved from lions, save me! Hilary and Martin make haste to succour me. May the Cherubim, Seraphim, Thrones … No, no it’s all right. I’m awake! Intact. I think? Yes. Thank God, Hilary, etcetera.

I wasn’t sure. For moments there it seemed so real! Someone was shoving me into a pit of adders. I could feel the pain and when I woke up there
was
a hiss! It’s the damp wood smouldering in my fire! Cold! God, and I’ve got an ague! It’s these Gaulish winters. It was cold in my dream and it still is! The window of course. Pitted panes are so impractical in this climate. I’ll shove a cloth over it.

Dreams are omens. One should take notice. Who was shoving me into that pit? A patron? Yes, some patronly figure: impressive, faceless, long-haired. A king then? Or a woman? Who? Oh, rubbish. It was just a hodgepodge of memories turned turtle. After all, when I first came to Gaul I was often cold. I was so poor I had, as the saying goes, to put one hand in front and one behind to hide my shame. A draughty costume! Patrons clothed me then. The mind is like the water-mill the monks at St. Mary’s Outside the Walls have set up to grind their corn. It churns things about. I was probably thinking of patronage before I dropped off. Why not? I live on it—and
that
bread has choked many. To look no further, think of poor Boethius executed on his patron’s whim! I, born six years later in the same province, was brought up on the tale. Our grandchildren will be. It gives off a shock. If that could happen to a man of consular rank, what security is there for the rest of us? Hmm? Maybe there is an omen there after all?
My
patrons are less civilized than King Theodoric and wit’s a tricky commodity when patrons are barbarians. Fear the Franks, Fortunatus, even when they bear gifts. Oh, I do. I do. Ours is the age of suspicion which is probably no bad thing. Our ancestors, we are told, did not fear enough. Pleasure they lived for: sweet juice clotting on the burst plum. They even took a sick pleasure in their own end. What can all that have been like? I can’t enjoy pleasure at first hand at all. Only through books. Except for food of course—but that’s an elementary pleasure: the ABC of the flesh. A major assault on flesh’s citadel frightens me. I don’t think I’m unique. Fear
nowadays
lodges in the seat of pagan immortality: between the legs. I mean it does in men like myself, men with a sense of the past. Not in Franks who couple like aurochs, mindlessly. Do I envy them? “The rose”, says Ausonius, “lives on in the ages of her seed.” A sad, cyclic sort of immortality. As you spill your seed you spill some of yourself. You embrace death, burying yourself. “The roses at their birth consent.” To die. A freezing thought. But what Frank thinks like that or thinks at all? He just spills, tanks up, respills—and the future will indeed belong to his seed. To the seed of the worst Franks too since the best go into monasteries. God I wish I could sleep at night. There’s another animal function denied to me. Magpie mind, be quiet. It won’t. I did make love once and wish I hadn’t. Do I feel remorse or just regret? Hard to tell. I was punished so fast. God sent me a sign that this was not the path he had picked for me. Fortunatus was not meant to go gathering rosebuds while the flower and his youth were fresh. Ausonius again. He’s a bad influence. Hardly a Christian at all. If I could locate the poison he has injected into my mind, I would have it sucked out by leeches. I would have a Syrian surgeon remove it. If thine eye offend thee cut it out. Mine inner eye offends me. I am half a pagan. It comes from education which is insidious as St. Jerome knew. He loved the old books and feared them.

Sooner or later I suppose I shall take orders and be safe. Is compromise so very despicable?

I almost took them when I was twenty. Because of the girl, I didn’t. I suppose it was because of her? Or was it? I’ll have to face that memory or it will go on tormenting me all night, buzzing like a fly on the edge of my mind. All right then: I was younger than twenty, actually, eighteen and backward in worldly matters, a student at Ravenna school. Most of us were vaguely intending to be priests. It
is
the obvious career. More or less what the civil service used to be. Celibacy was just beginning to be strictly imposed on clerics and the old practice of keeping one’s wife on as housekeeper had been banned. The change-over was not smooth. A few old priests tried to cheat. There were scandals and endless talk, especially among students. Some of my comrades said it was
meaningless
to give up something without knowing what it was. One fellow called Clement, a lively, irreverent boy from Milan, said that no one had the right to dedicate an
imperfect
instrument to the service of God and better test its worthiness first. The implication was that, for all our talk, we were terrified of women. We were.

“Shall we organize a trial?” Clement proposed one evening. “I think in all honesty you owe it to God and yourselves to find out more about yourselves. The
priesthood
is for men sound of wind and limb—so what about that limb? The most important of all. I can promise you that trying it on a woman is not at all the same thing as auto-stimulation!” No castrate, he reminded us, could be a cleric.

This dig was offensive to those of us who came from genuinely religious homes and were struggling with the uncertain leanings of our flesh. Someone asked him did he receive money for drumming up business for local pimps. He wasn’t in the least upset.

“What’s it to you?” he asked. “Were you thinking of offering your sister?”

There was a fight. I moved away but Clement’s
suggestion
kept echoing in my head. I am a man whose impulses get filtered through the mind and can there develop a dangerous strain. I fantasize, I debate. In the moral maze which I construct over weeks of dither, my original appetite battens like the Minotaur, takes on quirks and intensity until finally it threatens to burst out with the urgency of a primeval need. In this case it did. I went to a brothel.

I knew where the brothels were. Everyone does. They are tolerated, even approved by the Church since, like sewers, they concentrate the filth and make it easier to keep the rest of the city clean. If there were no sewers our streets would be smeared with excrement. If there were no brothels, decent women would be in constant danger of being assaulted by sex-starved soldiers and other riffraff.

So in I went. I asked for a girl and she took me past a curtain to a cubicle almost entirely occupied by a bed. She was wearing some loose garment which she simply pulled open. I fancied she was looking at me with the same expression that Clement had: mocking me. Even her nipples looked like pursed mouths and mocked me. My senses were in a turmoil. I could hardly see. My ears were drumming and the humours were storming through my body. I grabbed her to me—and realized that for almost the first time in days I was not erect. She coaxed me back to the required state by various loathsome arts. I didn’t loathe them then but their images return to shame me. I coupled with her. I slaked my lust. I—yes, I was so enthralled by her, so in
thrall
, that I was talking to her, promising to come again and ask for her by name, I was even—was I?—yes, I was actually quoting a poem to her by Sidonius or someone when the screaming began. It was horrifying. It reminded me of the screams of a butchered pig and seemed to come from the next cubicle. Actually, it was three rooms off. The girl jumped up.

“Oh God,” she said. What did
she
know of God? I was offended at her using his name. “Oh God, she’s dying. It’s Celia.” She pulled on her garment as fast as she had whipped it off. “Wait,” she told me and left.

I had no intention of waiting. Nausea was already rising in me.
Post
coitum
, etc. and, besides, that screaming reminded one harrowingly of the human condition and the fact that we are all dust. I had been embracing dust, lavishing sentiment on it. I wanted to get home and wash.

I had just managed to find my clothes—the girl had undressed me, throwing them in various directions—and was on the point of leaving when she came back, pushing the curtain aside and caught me by the arm.

“She’s dying. Do you know anything of medicine? You’re a student, you must! Come.”

“I’m a …” I wanted to say “a student of theology”, but the ridiculousness, the blasphemy of such an avowal in such a place restrained me. “I know nothing about medicine. Let me go.”

But she took no notice. “Well, someone has to help,” she said. “The midwife’s drunk. Out cold and the physician won’t come. Oh holy angels, help her! She’s having an abortion but it’s gone wrong!”

I slapped the girl’s mouth. “Blasphemy!” I shouted.

The girl touched her mouth in surprise. It was bruised. She was, I noticed now, only about fourteen: a child.

“You’re asking the holy angels”, I explained, for she clearly didn’t understand, “to help you commit a sin.”

But as well tell that to a calf or a puppy dog. The girl crouched and began to embrace my knees. She was
whimpering
. I pulled her up. “Please,” she was begging
hysterically
, “
please
help my sister.” She had managed to pull me down a corridor and now pointed to a curtain like the one in front of her own cubicle. The screams were coming from behind it. I pulled it aside and was faced by the open mouth of a woman’s matrix. For a moment I had the delusion that
it
was screaming at me. Then I saw the rest of the body and its head. The face was pale, straining and wet with sweat. The mouth was gagged but the gag had come loose and the screams were coming past it with the regularity of a baby’s. A pot of herbs were placed on a brazier and the steam from it had filled the room and begun to condense and rain down in drops from the ceiling. The smell of mallows and fenugreek was
overpowering
. The girl’s ankles had been strapped to her thighs and a stout cloth passed across her chest and under her arms to bind her firmly to the bed. Bundles of faggots had been placed under the bedposts.

The first girl—I had not actually learned her name—said “The abortion’s gone wrong. There’s an impediment. It won’t come. Help me shake her. Take hold of the foot of the bed and I’ll take the top.”

She bent down and actually managed to raise the bed on which her sister was strapped. She was strong. Probably when she wasn’t working as a whore she had to do heavy jobs. Most of those girls are slaves. I stared at her.

“Help me!”

“Are you sure this is the thing to do?”

“Yes. They gave her sneezing powders and that didn’t work. Then they tried fomentations. Then they shook the bed. Now we must try again.”

Mechanically—my mind was stunned—I did what she said. We raised the bed several times and brought it down sharply. The faggots broke its fall. We did this about eight or ten times. Suddenly the sick girl gave a nerve-shattering shriek and fell silent. Her sister ran round the bed. I didn’t look at what she was doing. She was in my line of vision and anyway I was suffering from nausea. I was suffering too from shame for, after all, what I had been doing not ten minutes before might well, in a few months’ time, produce just such another scene as this one. I began to imagine I had been responsible for what was happening to Celia. The two girls fused in my mind and when the girl—my girl—stepped away from the bed holding a basin full of blood I fainted.

When I recovered I was in another room. A man was holding some sort of acid to my nose. He turned out to be the brothel-keeper, a Greek and very anxious that I should not report what I had seen. It was not, he assured me, illegal—a lie—but would not be good for business either. I could have my money back and was welcome to come again any time I liked. He apologized for the incident. But why mention it to anyone? People came here for a bit of fun, after all, not for …

“What happened to the girl?” I asked.

“Oh, she’s all right. They’re both all right. They’ll be dancing tomorrow. We can’t allow them to have babies, naturally. We’re quite used to this sort of thing. She’s had the best of care. The midwife had just stepped out for a minute but she’s back now. Everything is all right. Really. Would you like a glass of honeyed wine?”

I refused with courtesy. Curtly, however, and left.
He
was being coherent. For what had I come to his place if not in search of women and wine? How could I blame him? That God blamed
me
was clear from what I had found there, and from the memories which haunt me and won’t be conjured away. They have kept me from sleeping again with women, contaminating their beauty for me with an awareness of what lies beneath the thin white veil of their skin.

A week later I picked a fight with Clement and gave him a knocking about. He must have wondered why. It was unworthy and ineffective. A persistent disquiet has stayed with me since and I cannot diagnose it. Almost as though I could not accept the human condition—which is in itself an act of blasphemy. We are fallen and imperfect. That’s dogma. Our society, it follows, must be imperfect too. God’s kingdom is not of this world.

And Ausonius’s roses? Did he know what the birth and death he so blithely invoked smell like? That smell of blood, mallows and fenugreek is in my nostrils now. Well, perhaps I lack liver.

Cold again. Poke up the fire. If only I were at Gogo’s villa now or at Duke Lupus’s where the heat is diffuse, unlike my fire which burns my knees while my backside freezes. Those Gallo-Romans know how to live! I couldn’t believe it when I came on my first Gallo-Roman villa. Even now something weeps in me when I see one of those porticoed façades. How long can they last? Yet the owners go on playing chess and backgammon and laying out lawns and pruning vines. Just as though this were still the Roman diocese of Gaul. I suppose there is something a touch deliberate, theatrical even about Lupus’s ease. He gives me too many presents for one thing. His grandfather would not have extended such a welcome to poets. There were more around.