Matrix

by Lauren Groff

  And one day when a storm threatens heavily all morning, Sister Gytha goes wild, and instead of Saint Lucy holding her eyeballs, she paints on a manuscript a tree in which the apples are neither apples nor butterflies but open female sexes. When the pressure building all afternoon ends in a wild summer storm with blustering shrieking wind and thunder and black howling skies, the mad nun goes into the sheepfolds dancing and is struck dead by lightning, a small and perfect black hole running into her skull and out her left heel.

  Marie washes this last ropy body herself. How dull the abbey will be without the mad nun, how sapped of its color and beauty. She does not sew up Gytha’s mouth. Those blue teeth she will leave bared merrily to death.

  But later, through the beauty of the funeral, the voices of her nuns, she feels restored.

  To think: All the hatred so deep inside Marie when she was young has, through the pressure of time, somehow turned to love.

  For this community is precious, there is a place here even for the maddest, for the discarded, for the difficult, in this enclosure there is love enough here even for the most unlovable of women. How short and lonely Gytha’s life would have been, an isolate lost in the cruelty of the secular world. How much less beauty she would have brought into this flawed and difficult life if she had been forced to be without her sisters who loved her.

  It is good, Marie thinks, so very good, this quiet life of women and work. She is amazed she ever resisted it so angrily.

  * * *

  —

  It is 1212. Marie is seventy-one.

  The papal interdict has hung heavy upon England for years. It torments the faithful outside the abbey.

  Her spies in the court of London report that all over Europe, parents are buying good sturdy shoes and clothing for their children, packing a little sack with sausage and hard bread and cheese, and sending their innocents off to the Holy Land on a children’s crusade. Marie imagines a rain of innocent children pouring down into Outremer, getting lost on the way and starving, being stolen and used as slaves, being drowned at sea, suffering. And at home the parents feast on their happy sacrifice, sure that by sending off their child, they have bought their seat in heaven.

  Once, she had thought a crusade the human fist of god. Now she knows it is shameful, born of arrogance and greed.

  Marie shakes, enraged. She puts the letter down and is about to remark about it to Tilde, who has gained a squint in her middle age. But a voice calls from outside and Tilde leaps up and runs to the door. Goda and Marie exchange looks. Marie is reading her letter again in silence when the door opens, and the prioress brings in by the hand an old woman.

  Tilde says, smiling with a mouth so full of teeth that Marie wonders what is wrong with her, that here, Mother, is the abbey’s newest corrodian.

  Marie studies the old woman. It is clear she is supposed to know her. Perhaps a child oblate who never took the veil, choosing marriage, and now in her age has returned. Perhaps a girl educated at the abbey, come back after a good marriage. The woman’s clothes are simple and dark but sumptuous in fabric, and the hem and bodice of her dress are embroidered finely.

  Then the woman smiles, and breathes Marie’s name, and in her wrinkles there is pressed a great handful of dimples on both cheeks. Marie stands slowly.

  It isn’t as though the age peels off this antique woman with overlarge earlobes and drooping eyelids; but that there stands in the same place as the old woman another, Marie’s own golden-haired Cecily, her first friend, all round and brusque and loving. In the same form, the girl of memory and the fleshly old woman together reach out their hands to Marie.

  Marie finds herself wordless for the first time in memory.

  Cecily says she has returned to Marie. At last. Like she promised. Three marriages, each richer than the last, but there is no more marriage in her. No children, a lot of money to give to the abbey for corrodianship. She has come back to take care of Marie.

  All this time. And yet Cecily never once wrote, Marie says at last. She thought Cecily had died.

  Cecily says well, that is entirely Marie’s fault, as the stupid girl had only ever taught her to read, not to write. She begins to cry in happiness.

  This has all been arranged with Prioress Tilde, Cecily explains. Tilde says that she has made ready the corrodian chambers for Cecily. But the old servant will never live in them; she bids her own servant instead to move her things into Marie’s abbess apartments. Marie does not forbid her. She only holds the other’s hands, laughing in wonder.

  Tilde tells the other nuns sternly, to forestall gossip, that the new corrodian and Marie were raised as sisters. She says it also to stop the discomfort that has risen in herself.

  And for these good last months, Marie has Cecily to warm her bones in bed again.

  8.

  The swiftest of my visions came to me, Marie writes in her book. Of the gifts of vision that the Virgin bestowed on me, it was the nineteenth and the sweetest because I understood when receiving it that it would be the last.

  For I have lived seventy-some years, and am become old, and am as an ancient tree in the orchard whose gnarled trunk pushes out buds and flowers in the spring but all the sweetness of the sap is concentrated in its scarce fruit in the fall.

  We were gathered in our prayers in the chapel when the vision came. My nuns were singing Psalm Eight . . . the moon and the stars, which thou hast founded . . . when between the saying of one word and the saying of the next the strange fire touched my skin and before my eyes fell a vision of the beginning of the world.

  As this vision was of the radiant immensity of God brooding over the dark face of the waters, a great hen.

  And from this brooding there fell the shining eggs of creation. And the eggs cracked and out of the shells there spilled what had been held inside each. And in the first was light split into day and into night, and from the second came the skies. And from the third came the ground and the seas and the fruit of the land. From the fourth came the sun and the moon and the stars, and from the fifth all the beasts of air and water. From the sixth there came all the beasts of the land as well as our first parents.

  But the tiny bodies of the first humans lay still upon the ground as though dolls made of mud until the wings of God stirred up a wind that blew over the new land and sea and forests; and this great wind breathed life into the bodies and they stirred and sat and looked about them.

  For this was the Holy Spirit, which is like a midwife who kisses the birth from a babe’s mouth and frees the babe to breathing.

  God laid the goodness into the world with her eggs.

  God’s Holy Spirit fills us with her breath and makes us live.

  And out of the vision, I returned to my body even as my mouth was forming the next word of the psalm.

  Beside me the beeswax tapers all at once flickered and extinguished themselves with the breath of the Holy Spirit and it was as confirmation of the truth of what I saw.

  And plunged in darkness I spoke to my daughters of the beauty of this world, which I saw that I would soon leave.

  And I knew also that this would be the last of my visions. I feel them all gone. For I am all poured out like water. And all my bones are out of joint. And my heart has turned to wax; it has melted within me.

  * * *

  —

  Marie is seventy-two. The fight in her released itself after Eleanor and then Wulfhild died. What is left is a growing dread of those who live beyond the abbey, their badness, their ignorance of god.

  She is weary. Between her breasts, she feels an egg slowly hardening. Her mother too had been given this egg; and her mother’s mother as well. She remembers how gray her mother’s flesh had become in dying, her great bulk whittling to bone.

  Prioress Tilde scurries and manages; she will be a good abbess. Uninspired, perhaps, but Marie feels reasonably certain that she will keep what M
arie fought for all these long decades on this damp dirty island, in this strange abbey that she has built around her as a shell, a cathedral, a home.

  * * *

  —

  Marie and Cecily sit together in the abbess’s antechamber, the window open to the chill April wind. A fine white lock escaped from Cecily’s headcloths lifts and falls; her hands slowly pull out of nothing a Tree of Life in gold thread. For a long while, Cecily has been telling a story, but Marie has not been listening, consumed by the hopes for the ginger patch planted in a warm and shady bowl near the birches, by the green insect the size of a fingerbone preening its little face with its hands on the sill, by how the voices of the novices learning the Guidonian hand in the orchard down the hill are weaving fantastically through the rough warm warp of Cecily’s story. But now Cecily has worked herself almost to the glorious catharsis of weeping, and Marie snaps to, listens backward to hear the story Cecily has told up to this point. It is an ancient one, which Cecily’s own mother the cook loved to tell when she pared apples with her quick flashing little knife; it is about a fine lady so beautiful, with such luminous eyes, that everyone who saw her fell in love with her. The lady was given no peace, day or night, she was hunted when she went hunting, followed where she walked, chased when she rode, sung to at night so she had no sleep and her handmaidens had to sleep with daggers to hand to keep those with evil thoughts from stealing into her bedchamber. At last, driven out of her own mind, she went to her window to where the lutes and flutes played invisibly in the garden below and, in the light of a torch, plucked her own eyes out of her skull, shouting that if they wanted her eyes so very much, they could have them. And she threw her bloodied eyes down upon them.

  But Marie hisses before Cecily can finish and allow herself her fully gluttonous weeping, and says she had always thought this story very wondrous stupid, that in the story if the lady is beautiful she is punished for it, when, in life, it is far more true that if a lady is made unbeautiful she is the one who is punished.

  And Cecily, irritated, says sharply that Marie herself knows better, that Marie had never been thought beautiful, but instead of being punished for her ugliness, she has been made great, here she sits now the holiest of holy women in the island, venerated and beloved, baroness to the crown, owner of more land than the vast majority of nobles here and certainly the richest abbess north of Fontevraud. That had Marie been beautiful or even just as ugly as she was but bearing a soft and mild femininity, she would have been married off, she would likely be long dead of childbirth and all that would be left of her in the world would be some daughter, a minor noble, so busy she’d hardly remember the lines of her mother’s face. In fact, Cecily says, it was Marie’s unbeauty that was the making of her.

  Marie looks at Cecily with some heat. She wants to wrestle her like they wrestled when they were children, to pull her hair and twist the skin of her arms and hips until it bursts out in purple plums, to bite. She says, low and sharp, that Cecily is mistaken. No one but Marie has ever made Marie.

  Now Cecily laughs with scorn and says oh sure, she is self-made! Like a worm birthed out of nothing but mud. No. Since she had been a seed in her mother’s womb Marie had been molded by others, her mother, her ferocious aunts, her books, her money; that the queen had more hand in making Marie by sending her to the abbey than she had in making herself. She was given everything, not least a great blessing of ugliness, and she would repeat that Marie would right now be dust and rot with the grubs crawling through her rib cage if she hadn’t been so lucky to be born so ugly.

  The wind flicks and flicks Cecily’s white lock against the dark wool of her headcloth. Her cheeks are flushed, she is a girl again, frank and blunt. But now over her face there slides a confusion and she says with alarm that it couldn’t be true that Marie’s eyes have grown teary; she has said nothing so severe as to make such a venerable ancient abbess cry, has she?

  And Marie says in a distant voice, blinking back the wet in her eyes, that she never realized Cecily thought her so revolting as all that.

  Cecily goes painfully down on her creaking knees before Marie and takes her hands and brings them up to her lips, and says Marie may have some accidental royal blood in her veins, but the rest of her is entirely old fool. For when it comes to strength and goodness and brilliance and gentleness and grandeur of spirit so vast that it takes one’s breath away, beauty is nothing, beauty is a mote to a mountain, beauty is a mere straw alight beside a barn on fire.

  Marie tells her to get up, what an old bumpkin she is. But her face is red and she can hardly suppress her smile. And Cecily, who has always spoken truth when she sees it, looks up at the face with its whiskers and wrinkles and those sharp shining brown eyes, and knows she has soothed Marie’s pride all the way to her internal light. She has a lot more sharp things she could say. But, out of love, Cecily holds her tongue.

  * * *

  —

  Now the abbess has begun to sleep a great deal. She sits in the sun beside Wevua, who is astonishingly still alive though surely she must be over a hundred years old. In Wevua’s mouth, language is gone; she grunts and makes faces, like the monkeys Marie saw a life ago in the court of Westminster.

  Soon Marie is too weak to be brought outside, and she lies in her bed and tries to pray with each heartbeat.

  When she is not sleeping, but pretending to sleep so that she can be left in silence, she thinks of her life.

  Some of it returns so vivid it is nearly a vision. Cecily, so young in the fields the days they fled the estate in Le Maine to Rouen, a sudden rainstorm, drops thick as spit, the horses urged to a trot as the rain came down hard, a field with hayricks, a tunnel into the dry interior of the haystack, where the girls squirmed out of their soaked clothing and pulled the woolen blanket over themselves, laughing at the closeness of the other body and the way their limbs knocked as they moved and the sound of the rain and the thick sweetness of hayscent. They lay back, pressed close for warmth, and Marie felt Cecily’s heart beating along the length of her, the pulse in her temple where it rested on Marie’s arm, and her smell was strong, the soap of lemon balm and lavender at the heart of her braid, skin with honey and wild onions and leaf rot in it. They had always rubbed together through their clothes, but they had never been naked like this; they would never have dared. Cecily blinked and her eyelashes brushed Marie’s arm. Marie held herself still, counting to a hundred. At a hundred, she would either move away or kiss Cecily. But at twenty-one, Cecily turned her head and pressed her lips to Marie’s throat and Marie lifted her hand and touched Cecily’s face, found her lips with her fingers, and there was no one there to see or stop them, no need for the breathless pulling away as the stable door cracked to sunlight and a silhouette was framed against the sky, nobody here below on the earth knew where they were, and shy and slow, Cecily’s cold hand touching the inside of her knee, trailing up the long shank to the innermost part of her thighs. Let her left hand be under Marie’s head, her right hand embrace her. And under her mouth Cecily smiled, Cecily’s hand circled but didn’t touch Marie where she wanted to be touched, she moved it beyond to the hipbone and the small curve of belly and the ribs and the nipples and at last she relented, slid her hand down again and put it very gentle against the center of Marie, where Marie had never before dared to ask Cecily to touch, and the wall that bound Marie tight inside herself began to fall, she slid out of her own mind, she sank into the rings of pleasure expanding from the center of her, culmination of all the moments in the henhouse, in the stables, the furtive kisses, the wrestling in the river as the small fish nibbled their ankles; and at last she lost the ability to think, there was joy coursing through her, the ecstasy of living within a body that held such riches in it, within the astonishing material world so overfull with beauty. All night, until the day breathed forth its wonder.

  Even now a small echo of pleasure rings in the flesh of the sick body.

  But not al
l is so good. There is also pain. Pain like being gnawed or bitten by small invisible beasts, foxes or weasels.

  And in this pain there return to her those months after she had come to the abbey, when it was as though she were an apostate angel thrown from the light of heaven to the darkness of hell.

  She remembers over and over a night soon after she took the abbey in hand when she woke to restlessness and went out into the thick starless black. A calf had been separated from its mother that day. Both heifer and calf had lowed all afternoon and into the night, had lowed enough to put some tenderer nuns off their feed. When Marie had gently remonstrated, Goda had snapped that separating the cow and calf was necessary unless the nuns didn’t want their milk and butter. Marie went silent because she loved her milk and butter, and because she felt personally aggrieved that milk and butter seemed well worth the beasts’ suffering. The cow had quieted at dusk, but now Marie’s step must have awoken her from her sleep, and looking all around her she searched for her calf again but could not find it near her, and the cow started up again with her lowing, which, from near the beast’s body, sounded to Marie so full of anguish that she felt tears flush into her eyes. The cow’s suffering was immense and powerful, a wave, and in it the suffering that Marie herself felt was swept away. She went into the paddock and found the mother, and touched her on the flank for comfort. But the cow shuffled her body so her head was facing Marie, and she tucked her broad rough crown against Marie’s chest and stomach, and Marie put her arms around the heavy jaw, feeling the mother’s grief for her lost calf rushing through her, and like this she lost the outlines of herself in the suffering of the other. And later, as the bells for Matins sounded in the dark and she walked back in the darkness as though blind, she wondered if in fact this had been the closest she had been to god—not in fact invisible parent, not sun warming the earth and coaxing the seeds from the soil—but the nothing at the center of the self. Not the Word, because speaking the Word limits the greatness of the infinite; but the silence beyond the Word in which there lives infinity.