Love Letters

by Madeleine L'engle

  … if you’re not angry with my father, or if you’ll make your anger cease, I’ll—dear Lord, what can I do, because I’m already promised to you! He blasphemes, but he doesn’t mean anything by it. You know that. He is so much in the world that he forgets whose business it is he ought to be about. But it’s only because he wants Portugal free from Spain. When I’m grown up I’ll know more. Now I only know what I’m told.… Is this lack of humility, to think I’ll know more, myself? I don’t think I understand about humility. This afternoon Mother Escolastica said that humility is the secret of power. How can that be? It can’t be the secret of the kind of power my father wants. She told us that is is very difficult to learn humility. If we think we’re humble we probably aren’t. She asked us, Do you want to be humble, or do you want to be considered humble? I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it very much. Mother Escolastica says I’m old enough now to start thinking. I cannot stay a child forever.

  On her knees she slept.

  There were happier times.

  … When her father was half dead with unhappiness then she was half dead, too. But when he was happy it was with a kind of happiness that most people could never dream of knowing and that spread out in rippling circles until Charlotte was caught in the joy. There was one night when they rode the Métro all night. And one time, during a vacation in the house on Seventy-fourth Street when they sat in the library after Aunt Ada had gone to bed and her father read to her, things that excited him, and they excited Charlotte, too, and he was so happy when he found out that she was truly aflame that he ended up leaving the floor spread with open books and going into the drawing room where they played (of all things) Chaminade’s Scarf Dance as a duet, and then Charlotte danced to it in her bare feet, waving her father’s woolen muffler about, and then they sang The British Grenadiers at the top of their lungs and waked up Reuben and Essie who came down in their nightclothes to see what was wrong, and after just the smallest time of scolding and trying to send Charlotte and her father to bed they began to sing, too. Essie raised up her voice alone and sang He Shall Feed His Flock, and then Reuben went down to the kitchen to make hot chocolate, and Charlotte sat in Essie’s lap, as though she were four instead of fourteen, and Essie sang lullabies.…

  Soaring, bird-high happiness.

  It was worth everything.

  It was before and after. It was evermore and evermore.

  There was rain on her face.

  Where had the sun gone? The marble of the bench was cold and damp. The white walls of the convent became streaked with grey as the rain started to fall more heavily. There was nothing for her to do except go back to the pensão and wait there until lunch.

  She sat again on the edge of the bed and opened the French book, the Lettres d’une Réligieuse Portugaise.

  … it was from this very balcony that I first saw you ride by and could not help noticing you, and I was standing on the balcony on the fatal day when I first felt the stirrings of my unhappy passion. It seemed to me that you were trying to please me, even though you didn’t know me. I was sure that you had noticed me particularly among all the other nuns. I took a secret interest in everything you did, and I was sure that you knew about it, and that you were as aware of me as I was of you …

  How could Charlotte have thought that this was about Christ? What she had read the night before had perhaps been more ambiguous.

  Who was he, this man who could turn a nun from the most sacred of vows?

  Charlotte flipped the pages, skimming, unable to concentrate enough to read slowly or consecutively.… I despise myself when I realize what has happened to me: I’ve lost my reputation and angered my father and broken the rules of the convent, and I’ve earned only ingratitude from you, which is the worst misfortune of all … She turned the pages, shivering. A French officer was kind enough to talk to me about you for three hours this morning. He told me that now the peace with France has been concluded. If this is true, couldn’t you come to me, and take me back to France with you?…

  —What would a French soldier have been doing in Beja, Portugal, three hundred years ago? If you go back and read the preface you could probably find out …

  But she sat there, the book open on her lap, not reading, not thinking, because what was there for her to learn in these strange letters from a Portuguese nun? what was there in them that might explain something to Charlotte about Patrick? Or even about love, for it did not seem that this nun knew much about love …

  When she went down to lunch Charlotte learned the Frenchman’s name: Noël Bouton Saint-Leger, Count of Saint-Leger, later to become the Marquis of Chamilly and Marshal of France. And she learned what he was doing in Portugal.

  The doctor and Antonio were sitting together at the doctor’s table, their plates pushed aside, a bottle of Mateus between them, fighting a battle on the tablecloth. Like little boys with their toy soldiers, Charlotte thought. Like my father with his drinking companions, male and female, in hotels all over the world, marking tablecloths with burnt matches or fork tines which made as much of a mess as if he’d gone ahead and used a pencil.

  She ate her soup and listened to Antonio and the doctor. The two men were using small pieces of bread for soldiers, and after a while Antonio, openly acknowledging his audience, began to explain what they were doing.

  “I sometimes get impatient with Dr. Ferreira’s mathematical insistence on historical accuracy,” he added. “He allows me no poetic license.”

  “Scratch a Portuguese and you find a poet. We have them on every street corner. We need good teachers far more.” But the doctor’s voice was affectionate.

  “We’re fighting a battle,” Antonio said, “not personal, not present, you understand, but a reenactment of a battle three hundred years ago. Dr. Ferreira knows more about military tactics, ancient and modern, than any man in Portugal. So he teaches me this way. We have a system. It is something like chess. This battle, our battle today, is an imaginary one, but it is also one which actually took place although there is no historical record of it. It was not just a battle, it is the specific battle after which the triumphant Portuguese soldiers marched through Beja and Soror Mariana saw, for the first time, the French soldier, Noël Saint-Leger, to whom she later wrote the famous letters.”

  The doctor, sitting back tolerantly, toyed with his pipe. Antonio, empty-fingered, flexible hands illustrating his words, talked on, his dark eyes focused partly on Charlotte, partly on the world of his words. “It was a battle fought with a kind of guerilla warfare, because, although John of Braganza was already on the throne in Lisbon, the southern provinces had not yet thrown off the yoke of Spain and were still fighting for freedom. They were led by a German general, Schomberg, an excellent soldier.”

  This seemed odd to Charlotte, but she did not ask for an explanation, fearing that Antonio would give her too complete a one.

  “His army was made up largely of mercenaries,” Antonio continued, “Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Englishmen, all of whom were helping the Portuguese patriots. The oppressing Spaniards were led by Don Juan of Austria.”

  —Not the Don Juan, Charlotte thought vaguely,—couldn’t be, wrong century. But some Don Juan.

  “Picture it, Mrs. Napier. They must have made a blare of color against the rocky hills with all the different national costumes. It would have been easy enough for one of the mercenaries on either side to get confused about who he was fighting.”

  She looked at the doctor, who was placidly eating, occasionally giving a shrewd look at Antonio. Once his eyes rested on Charlotte, kindly, without curiosity.

  There were foot soldiers and cavalry, Antonio explained, and of course Noël Saint-Leger rode on a coal-black charger. He had a sense of the dramatic in war as in love. There were cannoniers and harbusquiers and oxcarts with food and ammunition; there were water carts filled with the same red earthenware wine and water jugs which Charlotte must have seen on the drive down from Lisbon and which during Soror Mariana’s day had alrea
dy been in use for centuries; wine at that time was cheaper than water, Antonio informed her. There were flags, tents, bugles, banners: Antonio painted the picture for Charlotte, waving his hands as though holding a brush.

  The doctor wiped up the last of his gravy with a piece of bread, then pushed his plate aside again, and sat back benevolently, his gravy-spotted napkin still tucked in his collar. After a while he began moving his breadcrumb soldiers, pulling Antonio back into the game, playing with cool deliberation. He was manipulating the Spanish soldiers, and Antonio, struggling with the Portuguese, was no match for him.

  “But you forget that Schomberg’s troops won this battle!” Antonio expostulated, and scattered the breadcrumbs with his hand like a thwarted child.

  The doctor reached out and rearranged them. “They had to work for it, Tonio. It was not given to them. Come, now. What’s your next move?”

  Antonio looked sulky for a moment, as though he would refuse to play, then, glancing at Charlotte under his silky lashes, he set his men up. “All right. We’re at the top of the hill, here. We’ve appropriated this house. There’s a cemetery behind the house and its white wall is battered from yesterday’s fighting, but it still affords excellent cover. The stream is here, so we have water. There are cypress trees in the cemetery. Eucalyptus trees. Cork trees. So we have shade and protection for the wounded.”

  He turned again to Charlotte. “At night they’d be roasting kids out in the open, turning them on the spit, and there would be camp followers and dogs and color and noise and sturm und drang.” He gave her a sidelong glance to make sure she appreciate his multilinguism. “There was one battle described in an English history of Portugal that was won by our side because our men wanted to take the yellow coats from Don Juan’s guards. Sometimes this kind of thing can be a more useful motivation than honor and nobility. Then—I don’t know which of the forays it was—but anyhow things weren’t going well for the Spanish and one of the officers rode at Baltazar Alcoforado—he was Soror Mariana’s brother, and Noël Saint-Leger’s friend—in a fury, knocked Baltazar off his horse and would have run him through if Noël hadn’t come along and knocked the Spanish officer off his horse, and run him through. Of course this is partly speculation. I don’t know if that’s how they became friends, or if Noël saved Baltazar’s life because he already was his friend. Most of it is conjecture. Dr. Ferreira knows more than I do.”

  The doctor shrugged. “It is not that I know more. It is only that I am more dispassionate.”

  The waiter took away Charlotte’s fish. “Please tell him,” Charlotte said, “that soup and fish is already more than I am accustomed to eating for lunch. If it would not hurt his feelings I should like just to go up to my room and rest, and I’ll let him know about dinner after I’ve spoken to my mother-in-law.”

  She felt the doctor’s shrewd brown eyes on her. Perhaps his concern was, as he said, dispassionate. It was also, at this moment, comforting. He said only, “You should be careful not to take cold. This is inclement weather. We are not used to such extremes of cold.”

  Antonio looked at Charlotte in distress. “But I’ve made arrangements to take you through the museum this afternoon—”

  She had completely forgotten, but she said, “Yes. Thank you very much. I only want to rest for half an hour.”

  Antonio’s face radiated relief, far too great relief; he was indeed an actor. “I will be waiting, then.”

  “Not half an hour,” the doctor said. “An hour. Mrs. Napier is tired.”

  “Yes,” Charlotte said. “Thank you. An hour, then.” She left them to their battle.

  The “inclement weather” permeated the walls of the pensão, filled the small space of her room. There was nothing to do except get back into bed. She lay there, wrapped in her fur coat and weighted down by the mound of blankets. She stared up at the mottled ceiling; its sickly splotches made her shudder, and she picked up the book of letters again, though her hands, outside the covers, were quickly cold.

  You knew you weren’t going to be in Portugal forever, so why did you take me, only to make me so desperately unhappy? I’m sure you could have found another woman in our country who would have been more beautiful and with whom you could have found just as much pleasure, since pleasure was all you were looking for, someone who would have loved you while she was with you, but who would have been able to forget you quickly, someone you could have left without cruelty, without betrayal. You’ve acted more like a conquering hero than …

  Charlotte sighed, let the book drop, drew her cold hands under the covers. She closed her eyes, but though the glass of wine she had had with lunch made her lids heavy and her mind fuzzy, she could not sleep. She thought of the two men, the old bear and the young black panther—yes, that was what Tonio was like—reenacting battles as her father had done. Those hotel dining-room games had always seemed distant and unreal to her, far removed from life; however, as she lay there, the minor skirmish which had so animated Antonio seemed closer to her than the playing out of attacks and retreats through which her father had actually lived. Perhaps it was because she could not visualize his battlegrounds, whereas she had only that morning walked along the streets through which Noël and Baltazar had ridden.

  Before the triumphal march they might have assembled in the Square of the Dove so that anyone standing in her pensão window could look down on them as Mariana, standing on the terrace-balcony of the convent must have looked, laughing and clapping with the other nuns, cheering and waving as the procession wound its way up the hill to the convent

  … first the foot soldiers and then the cavalry, led by a Portuguese major, Alipio de Vasconcelos, father of Sister Joaquina, the nun who as a novice had slapped Sister Mariana.…

  At the rear of the procession were Noël Saint-Leger and Baltazar. Alcoforado, side by side as usual, Baltazar on his white charger, Noël on the black (a deliberate piece of drama on the part of the two flamboyant young men). The parade wound all the way uphill, over the many-arched Roman bridges beneath which women were doing laundry in the gently flowing water and spreading the clean linen on the banks to dry. Among them were lay sisters from the Convent of Nossa Senhora da Conceição, and all stood to cheer, waving their wash like flags, and soldiers cheering back, blowing kisses indiscriminately to shawled girls and dark-habited nuns.

  (Women had washed in this way in the river when the Romans built the bridge. Charlotte had seen them in the January cold when she drove to Beja.)

  The procession moved across the bridge, in through the gates of the city, clattering over the cobblestones of the street: donkeys, mules, horses, braying, whinnying, dropping steaming loads of manure. In the doorways, to get the breeze and yet remain in the shade, to remove themselves from the overlavish embrace of the sun, sat burned-out old women making lace, which they waved at the soldiers, cackling approval.

  As the procession reached the square a group of boys and girls was waiting to start a dance of welcome around a maypole that was carried by the biggest of the boys. They wove the ribbons in and out with delicate intricacy, punctuating the rhythm with castanet-like clapping. Some of the soldiers joined in the dance, the procession was slowed down, and Alipio de Vasconcelos cantered up, waving a careless whip and shouting angry commands until the untidy line started moving again. The dancers skipped alongside, children ran up and down, assorted mongrels yapped and barked, and a bewildered rooster flapped his wings and let out a crow that ended in a defeated squawk.

  As the procession approached the convent the men could see the dark habits of the nuns and the bright clothes of the children as they stood pressed against the elaborately wrought-iron balustrade on the balcony. The sun beat against the white walls, was reflected in a scorching glare, was held, quivering, on the red tiled roofs. The sisters hovered behind the children, quieting the little ones who were jumping up and down and screaming with excitement as the blare of trumpets came closer. Almost all of them there on the balcony, children and sisters alike,
had relatives among the soldiers, and the nuns were almost as open in their joy as the children, especially when they caught sight of someone they knew.

  Near Mariana stood Joaquina, watching the parade with intensity. Her face, always white with a smattering of freckles that betrayed the fact that the hair under her wimple must be red, was even paler than usual. As she saw a fox-faced man with red beard and mustaches, wearing an ornate officer’s uniform, she cried out joyously, “Papa!”

  Alipio de Vasconcelos looked around indifferently, not stopping to try to find her among the nuns, took a pinch of snuff, and rode on. Directly behind him an officer waved and called to a little shriveled nun who was old enough to be his grandmother, “Mother Escolastica! Here! Look here!” He waved exuberantly and the old woman jumped and clapped her hands like a child.

  Sister Joaquina turned her shocked, hurt face away from the others, closing her eyes for a moment as though against the sun. One of the children near her squealed. She snapped, “Be quiet, Dolores,” and slapped the fat little girl’s hand. The child burst into startled and noisy sobs, and Joaquina withdrew against the wall, her face stiffening with resentment as she watched the joy of reunion from which she had been excluded. The child’s eyes reflected Joaquina’s own hurt as she moved away and stood nearer Mariana and Peregrina.

  At the end of the procession the two young men rode on their black and white chargers. Peregrina, pressed against the balcony rail, cried out, “Baltazar!” and the young man reined up, laughing and pointing the child out to his companion. Then he saw Mariana, standing just behind the little girl, calling at him, laughing, half crying, and he took his plumed hat and waved it at her in an extravagant gesture of greeting.

  Mariana waved back, her face vivid with joy, and it was in this moment of illumination that the Frenchman first saw her. He, too, rose in his stirrups, took off his hat with a sweeping gesture, and bowed.