Love Letters

by Madeleine L'engle

  “But people don’t want—don’t always want to be given to. Mariana—”

  “Charlotte,” he said. “You’re Charlotte.”

  She tried to laugh. “That’s not much. To be Charlotte. Look at my father. At Violet. Patrick. All the people I’ve loved. They have so much. While I—”

  He was looking directly at her. She wanted him to reassure her. She wanted him to hold her. She wanted to cry, after this long, dry time, against his great shaggy chest, to have him wipe her eyes with the handkerchief he had spread over his knees for the dog. But he said only, “I want you to sleep now, Charlotte. I have left medication for you, and I will phone Violet this evening to see how you are. I will be by to see you tomorrow.”

  Disappointment burned in her. She turned away from him and pressed her face into the pillow. She heard his footsteps as he left the room. She jumped slightly as the cold nose of the dog touched her hand again, the beautiful silky, arrogant beast. He sat on his haunches and looked at her with canine concern. If she could cry now it would be all right. If she could put her arms around the dog and sob and let lick the salt tears away.

  There would not need to be any pretense.

  But she could not cry and the dog dropped down to the floor and plumed from the room.

  Dr. Ferreira had left

  The dog had left

  And Patrick?

  You left Patrick, didn’t you?

  Be quiet, Charlotte, you’re not the center of the universe. So what makes you think you have any right to be loved? What have you got to offer anybody anyhow? Except love? Your own undisciplined human love.

  Why does the joy of love contain so much sadness?

  We’re afraid of the sadness because it grows and spreads and becomes too terrible to be borne. And because it leads to tenderness.

  Tenderness.

  The moment of tenderness, the undoing, unbearable moment of tenderness.

  … From Violet, once, after James Clement’s death:

  Charlotte was sitting on the black sofa in the library and Violet came in, as usual unannounced. She had a key to the front door but she seldom (out of respect for Reuben and Essie) used it, only occasionally late at night when she did not want to drag the old couple downstairs. Violet had rung, then, and Charlotte, not caring to see who was at the door, had not moved from the black leather of the sofa. Reuben had climbed up the steep, dark stairs from the kitchen and opened the door to Violet, and Violet walked directly to the library, to Charlotte. She saw Charlotte sitting hunched there where James Clement had so often lain. She said nothing. She only crossed the room to Charlotte and put her hand on the girl’s head, stroking it. Just for a moment. Then she left the house, letting herself out and hurrying down the brownstone steps.

  And it was as though a world of love had exploded within Charlotte.

  It was enough. It was more than enough.

  It was Violet’s music translated into a physical gesture.

  And once from Gus. Gus was an obstetrician and gynecologist who had the office next to Patrick’s, who was their friend, and Charlotte’s doctor. A day had come when a mild discomfort had suddenly become exquisite pain and Gus himself had taken her to the hospital, had placed his hand gently, tenderly, on her belly, saying, “The pain will soon be over, love.”

  And then afterwards (it had been ectopic pregnancy, there wasn’t anything imaginary about it after all) he had stood by her bed and adjusted the needle in her arm for the I. V. and said, “You’re a good, brave kid,” and placed his hand again over the appalling soreness of her abdomen.

  It didn’t mean anything. It didn’t mean anything at all. It was simply doctor to patient. To any patient.

  So why did it mean so much?

  And if it really meant anything, if it really on occasion did mean something, if it came where there was love, could one survive the juxtaposition? Could the physical human body take the enormity of the cross of tenderness and love?

  Make me nothing, Lord, so that my pride will not get in the way of love of thee. Strip me as my cell is stripped so that my worship may be only of thee.

  If she had nothing to give Patrick

  except love

  then what did Mariana have to give Noël

  except the glamour of being a nun?

  an affair with a nun

  Yes, it was, after all, exotic

  There was that to offer, even in those wild and wicked times when the golden lamb of court and position veiled the cross and the blinding demands of the God who moved in a cloud because his brilliance was unbearable to the human eye.

  The Frenchman would have come back from his skirmish in the south, and would easily enough have found an excuse to ride by the convent, by the balcony.

  And Mariana would not have been there.

  She would have obeyed Father Duarte in this at least.

  She would have prayed. On her knees on the prie-dieu in her cell. At the altar in the chapel. She would have heard the sound of horses’ hooves, the sound of trumpets, and she would have trembled and buried her face in her hands.

  And then night.

  The convent and the garden at night, bathed in moonlight, with the shadows long and strange and disturbing, unlike the shadows cast by the living fire of the sun.

  There would have been no statue of Queen Leonora on the plaza then, because Queen Leonora was outside that time, still unborn, unthought of. But the plaza itself would have been there, and the marble benches, white in the moon. And inside, in the shelter of the cloister, inside in the walled protected gardens, moonlight would have fallen. There would have been a hot wind blowing, a dry wind from the plains, so that trees, flowers, shrubs, would move lightly in its embrace. The night would have been filled with the sounds of the tropical spring, insects, frogs, the rustle of leaves already beginning to sound dry.

  Then a new sound. A different shadow.

  Noël.

  Noël, climbing the wall, dropping lightly to the ground, standing, listening …

  … The tower clock struck the quarter hour, starting a sudden crescendo of insect music. A bird called. The Frenchman walked softly towards the moon-drenched buildings and stood in front of the balcony.

  As though responding to an act of his will a shadow moved from within the shadows, stepped out of the protection of the shadows, then drew back swiftly and was lost in darkness again.

  He called: softly: “Mariana, Mariana. I saw you step back into the shadows.… Mariana, I’ve come to you as I said I would. I want your prayers of thanksgiving for my safe return.”

  It was more than an excuse. He wanted her prayers. The dice at the playing tables must be kissed to propitiate them so that luck will not turn sour. After a battle the young warriors in their war paint must leap around the fire in a ritual dance so that the gods of victory will have their desire for human gratitude sated. So if Mariana thanked her God for his safe return he would remain invulnerable in the next battle and the next …

  The nun stepped out onto the balcony so that the moonlight clothed her. She was dressed for the night in a hooded robe of pearly white through which the lines of body and limb showed more clearly than in the darkly concealing daytime habit. She stood strung taut as a bow.

  The Frenchman spoke quickly, persuasively. “You understand why I had to come this way? Baltazar would never have brought me here with him again. I had to come to you alone. God, Mariana, you are more beautiful than moonlight on water. Mariana. I keep saying your name because when my lips touch your name they seem to be touching you. Mariana, what I feel for you can’t be wrong because it flows from me so freely, like a clear stream of water gushing out of the mountainside. Mariana … stretch out your hand to me that I may kiss it once.”

  Slowly she moved to the edge of the balcony and leaned over the ornateness of the wrought-iron railing, stretching her arms out to him. But the balcony was just too high; their outstretched fingers did not quite touch.

  He asked, his voice as soft and
strange as the moonlight, “Can’t you come down to me? Dear love, can’t you come?”

  “The door of my cell is locked.”

  “Mariana, is your heart locked to me, too?”

  Her voice was dark, as though a cloud had come over the moon. “My heart feels—so strange—it has never felt this way before.”

  “But it’s not closed to me?”

  “I think it’s—opening—for the first time. I’m afraid—”

  Gently, as to a child: “Of your heart? Or of me?”

  “Both.”

  “Not of me. Never of me. Sweet love, I want to help you, and I don’t know how. All I can do is give you myself. All of myself.”

  She breathed in, sharply, painfully. “My heart—hurts—”

  “When a door has been locked for a long time, the first turning of the key is not an easy thing.”

  “But I never knew my heart was shut!”

  Quickly he put his finger to his lips to silence her, poised himself for flight. She reached towards him again, and, as the quiet surrounding them was undisturbed by her cry, he said, whispering, “Let me come to you. Just to kiss your hand.”

  “How can you?”

  “Easily. Let me come.”

  “But—”

  “For just a moment. For your blessing. To kiss your hand.”

  It was, as he had said, easy for him, agile and young, to climb up to the balcony, to stand beside her. Through the white gown her long limbs trembled. He took her hand and bent over it in a long kiss. Then he pushed her hood back. “Let me touch your hair—” He raised his hand to the soft, fair locks, silvered by moonlight. As his hand brushed over her hair, lightly, barely touching it, a long quiver shook her body. With the tip of one finger he stroked her cheek. “You’re trembling.” She started to draw back, but he took her hand again, pressing it to his lips. “Dear God, I love you.”

  She did not speak or move away. She stood there, her lips slightly open.

  Slowly, gently, he put his mouth to hers. Then they moved, as though in a dream, out of the moonlight and into the shadows.

  Into Mariana’s cell.

  … When she woke up the rain had stopped beating against the windows, and the sun, the first time she had seen the sun in Beja, sent its warm rays through the room.

  She yawned, stretched. The bed lamp was still on, weak against the sunlight, and she switched it off, and picked up the letters, the Portuguese nun’s letters.

  Again she opened the book at random: I gave myself to you utterly.… I gave my life to you the first moment I saw you, and it is my pleasure to sacrifice it to you.… Shouldn’t I have given you everything that was most precious to me? Shouldn’t I be glad that I did?… I love you like a lost soul, but I don’t want you to be lost, too.… What is going to become of me? What do you want me to do? I know that I’m not really ashamed, that I’d have done worse things for you, and I take a deadly pleasure in having risked my life and honour.… I feel that I haven’t loved you enough, or suffered enough for you.… I hate the sterile tranquility in which I lived before I knew you.… I gave myself to you utterly and I was in such a state that nothing could moderate my ecstasy or stop me from enjoying to the full all the fiery evidence of your passion.… I’m not in the least sorry that I adored you; I’m glad you seduced me.… Once I had begun loving you, my love became my honour and my religion.…

  She let the book fall onto the covers.

  How can she help me? How can she possibly help me?

  What does anybody really know about her?

  That she was seduced by a French soldier of fortune and enjoyed it immensely.

  That’s all anyone knows for certain, and even that’s not certain, so why do I care? Is it that I think she must have learned something about love?

  Or about God?

  God

  I would like to swear, every blasphemous word I’ve seen scrawled in subway stations, on walls, in public washrooms

  God

  (But I don’t believe in you: remember?)

  She picked up the book: Stop, Mariana! Stop wasting yourself in vain. You are searching for a love you will never see again, a lover who crossed the ocean to flee from you—

  Only it was I who crossed the ocean to flee from Patrick.

  What did she do to make him go back to France? What went wrong? Was it because the whole thing was wrong? Because she was a nun?

  Yes. That.

  It could not be more wrong.

  But it wasn’t only that.

  As Antonio had been at pains to make clear, those were other times, and the climate of thought was different, too.

  But the weather of love? Were not its storms and sunlights always the same?

  Mariana became a nun and she broke and betrayed her vows.

  And I, in my own peculiar and different way, am doing the same thing.

  I married Patrick. I made promises. But he made promises, too. As God did to Mariana.

  And as Noël must have done.

  So why did he cross the ocean to flee her?

  She cried afterwards. But did she pray? I cannot cry. I have never known how to pray. I know the words. All the words I have caught and held within my memory. They have been, somehow, like ladders made of angels. My hands have reached up and clung to the rungs so that I haven’t fallen.

  Prayers are dangerous: sometimes they get answered.

  He came.

  He came to her at night. He climbed up to the balcony. What he could do once, he must have done again. And then, before dawn, before the sound of the key, he would have to leave the cell and the balcony, to climb over the wrought-iron balcony rail, he would have to drop to the delicate pattern of mosaic.

  And she would lean over the balcony and whisper:

  “Noël—”

  “My love!”

  “When—”

  “What?”

  “When will you come to me again?”

  “Soon.”

  “Tomorrow night?”

  “If I can.”

  “No, no, you must promise, tomorrow night, when it is light again—”

  “Light?”

  “I’m all confused.… Days and nights are turned around for me. When you’re gone, then it’s dark and I can’t see. But when you come, then it’s light again, and my eyes are opened.… Come tomorrow night and bring me my light.”

  “My dearest heart, you must trust me.”

  “I trust you with my life.”

  “Then you must know, you must understand, I’ll come as soon as possible.”

  And where would he have been, those other nights? the nights he didn’t climb over the wall and into her cell?

  He was, after all, a soldier, a soldier of fortune. Did he, when they were apart, think of her as constantly as she of him? Did the intensity of his obsession end once his desire was fulfilled?

  One would think so, according to the letters.

  It was easy to imagine him in one of the gaming houses in Mertola or Beja, perhaps playing rouge et noir and leaning back in his chair while one of the innumerable women of the half-world bent over him, brushing her lips against his ear, so that he laughed …

  Did he laugh that way when he was with Mariana?

  And while he was laughing there in the wine-reeking, smoked-filled cellar, Mariana, perhaps, was sitting in her dark robes in the refectory, soft white shoulders covered in darkness, eating in silence with ritual gestures to ask for bread and water; Sister Beatriz at the lectern reading, voice low, dispassionate; another sister kneeling throughout the meal in penance for some offense …

  Or perhaps he was at the Alcoforado villa, drinking wine, laughing (how easily his laughter came), dancing with Ana, Mariana’s sister of the beautiful, golden, artifically arranged curls … brushing his hand for a moment against the smoothness of her shoulder.

  And Peregrina. Peregrina home again, standing at the refreshment table, babbling to a young officer and eating cake: “There’s my sister Ana over ther
e with the French soldier, Noël Saint-Leger. He comes to see us at the convent with my brother, Baltazar. That’s Baltazar now, the handsome one, with that red-haired girl. She’s a cousin of Alipio de Vasconcelos. He has a daughter who’s a nun at Nossa Senhora, but she’s cross and never lets us have any fun …”

  And Baltazar, leading his green-eyed beauty out of the great ballroom and into an unused parlor, kissing her lightly, laughingly, beginning at the fingertips and working up her arm and into the soft warmth of her neck, the laughter suddenly gone.…

  And Mariana, sitting on the browning grass in the middle of a circle of little ones, teaching them a prayer, saying the words slowly, syllable by syllable, while they repeated in chorus after her, looking at her with love and trust …

  And Noël and Baltazar in the forest hunting wild boar, Noël with a snarl of pleasure rushing after one of the spiny-backed snub-faced beasts, plunging through the underbrush …

  Worlds within worlds within worlds

  “Here’s lunch, Cotty,” Violet announced, preceding the poker-faced Julia into the room.

  “I think I was asleep again,” Charlotte said. “That’s all I seem to do, sleep. Is Dr. Ferreira doping me? I could have got up for lunch, Violet.”

  “Nonsense. João would be most displeased with me. And he’s not doping you. You had a high fever, your temperature is not yet normal, and he said that in any case you were in an appalling state of overexhaustion. No wonder you fell apart. But we’ll eat lunch together at least.”

  “And I’ll get up for dinner,” Charlotte said. “I feel much better. I can’t just stay here and sleep.”

  “Why not? Don’t make any plans before you’re ready to.”

  “I’m not making any plans. I just want to get up for dinner.”

  Julia wheeled a serving cart over to the bed, took a tray from the lower shelf, put it on Charlotte’s lap, then wheeled the cart back to Violet, who sat again on the chaise longue.

  Then they were left alone. Where was the dog? He answered Charlotte by barking out of doors.