Love Letters

by Madeleine L'engle

  She responded with obedience but little conviction. “Yes, Father.”

  Father Duarte, with a look of pain, raised his hand and murmured the words of the absolution. Joaquina, crossing herself, rose from her knees, pushed aside the heavy drapery that closed the confessional, and went into the chapel. Mariana, next in turn, brushed by Joaquina without seeing her. Joaquina jerked rigidly, trying to control her anger and resentment, staring until Mariana had pushed through the curtain and into the box.

  Mariana knelt, her head raised unseeingly. She did not make the sign of the cross. She did not speak. On his side of the division Father Duarte sat, waiting, his head bowed onto his big, gentle hands.

  At last he broke the silence. “You still do not feel that you can make your confession?”

  She shrugged. “What’s the use, since you won’t give me absolution?”

  “You still persist in continuing your sin?”

  She did not meet his eyes. “I cannot feel that it is a sin. I have tried, and no sense of sin touches me.”

  “This is blind pride, Mariana.”

  For a moment her look flickered towards his. “I didn’t think one could be blind and honest at the same time.”

  He sighed, the sound gusty and unexpected after their hushed voices. “I don’t think you are being honest, either with yourself or with me.”

  “If I’m being honest with Noël, that’s enough.”

  “Are you?” She did not answer. “And what about her Reverence and your Sisters?”

  Now she looked directly at him, challenging, “Would you want me to tell them?”

  For a moment he put his head in his hands. “My child, I cannot reach you.”

  Mariana spoke with a flash of her old, spontaneous kindness. “Oh, Father, please don’t be distressed on my account. If you could only understand how happy I am then you’d know that such joy has no room for sin. You’d have to know.” She turned away from his loving, anguished face. “Father, do you think Heloise’s love for Abelard was a sin?”

  “Heloise and Abelard,” he said softly. “Paolo and Francesca. Tristan and Isolde. Is that it?”

  “You say it yourself.”

  “You really see no difference?”

  “Only in my greater unworthiness.”

  His voice was harsh and grating, as though the words cost him a tremendous physical effort. “Forgive me if I hurt you. My poor child, how can it be the same when the love is only on your side?”

  “Only on my—”

  “For him it is purely carnal, the coition of two bodies with no communion of soul. It is a denial of all sacrament.”

  “No!” Her cry rang loudly through the chapel.

  The heads of the waiting, praying nuns were raised in shock and curiosity. For a moment Joaquina actually turned her head and stared at the closed confession box. Then, as no further sound came forth, beyond the usual low murmur in which individual words were inaudible, the dark heads bowed again.

  Father Duarte pressed ruthlessly. “It couldn’t have destroyed you so utterly otherwise.”

  She looked at her hands, at the gold wedding band that was not Noël’s. “Oh, Father, I hoped you’d understand, you of all people.… Father, can’t you believe that it does have meaning?”

  His voice was the barest whisper. “Love always has meaning. But sometimes only God knows what it is.”

  … “God knows you’ve told me nothing,” Violet said. “I know and love you enough to think that there is something to tell.”

  “Yes, I’m sorry to be so stupid about it.”

  “All I can say, then, until you see fit to tell me—and I am not a priest, Charlotte, I cannot absolve either you or Patrick, you are under no compulsion to tell me, and your coming to Portugal in this abrupt manner is really no more irrational than Patrick’s transatlantic phone calls—all I can say is that if you truly love Patrick then it doesn’t matter what he has or hasn’t done.”

  Charlotte looked down at her hands lying loosely on the bedclothes. “But everything matters, Violet.”

  “But not to your marriage.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Even if Patrick has been unfaithful to you, in no matter what sense of the word, if you took your marriage vows seriously it doesn’t matter. You know the words you said at the altar when you married Patrick. I don’t need to remind you of them. Or, to go to a more secular source, love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.”

  “But I didn’t—” Charlotte started.

  “You married Patrick of your own free will, didn’t you? You entered freely into this relationship. You were quite clear about that, weren’t you? Without freedom you cannot have anything but a mockery of love.”

  Out of her hurt Charlotte turned on the older woman. “So you mean we’re free to do anything we want? You’d say it was okay if I—or Patrick—did sleep around?”

  Violet stood up, stiffly. “You think that wouldn’t be a mockery of love? Are you misunderstanding me deliberately? Or is it just because you’re unhappy? Your suggestion would hardly fit my definition of freedom. I have to go practice now, Charlotte. Get up for dinner if you want to. I really don’t think it will hurt you.” (Was there an implied “I don’t care”?)

  After Violet had left the room, erect, rather stiff, not violent at all, Charlotte dressed, putting on a skirt and sweater. Yes, the rain had stopped. Sunlight, thin as bouillon, was streaming into the room, and she stood by the window and let the warmth flood over her. In the garden the grass looked fresh and green, and in contrast the evergreens were almost black against the pale, clean sky. The bare branches of the fruit trees were softening. If the cold did not return they would soon be in bud. Lovers would walk the roads, the streets of Beja, the convent paths, now only a museum, where once

  But all love is only once, is always and forever singular.

  … “We are taught that we must avoid singularity. Our habits, both those of behavior and apparel, emphasize this.” How well she had been taught. How poorly she was teaching Noël. “It is only when you look directly at us that you can tell us apart, and even this should be made difficult by our downcast eyes and carefully veiled expressions. If you see us from the side or the back you will not know which one of us it is, Mother Escolastica or Sister Joaquina or even her Grace or—me. Our habits are designed to minimize as much as possible all discrepancies of age or weight or even height.”

  He broke brutally into the careful recitation. “So you think that all nuns are alike in the dark? That I couldn’t tell you from one of your Sisters in bed?”

  “That’s blasphemous.”

  “No. I am not being blasphemous, Mariana. I only want to convince you that you are unique.”

  “I’ve never denied that. It’s I who keep telling you that I am—different. And that I must not be—singular.”

  “You mean you want me to take on the whole convent? I’m not in love with a religious order. I’m in love with one woman whose name is Mariana Alcoforado and who happens, through no fault of her own, to be a nun.”

  “Stop—oh, stop—”

  … There were happier times (weren’t there?).

  When he would come at night and leave before dawn. When the glory of their love seemed to burst the bounds of the tiny cell, of the convent, of the world, of time.

  I love you. Oh, God. I love you.

  Oh, Patrick. Patrick.

  And then the infinite sadness afterwards.

  “There are tears on your cheeks,” he said. And kissed them, taking the salt upon his lips, his tongue.

  They talked, as the young and in love have always talked, of love and life and death and eternity, of man and God, of passion and passions. They stood in the aseptic kitchen of Violet’s suite at the Plaza after an evening at the theater when Charlotte had come in to the city from college for the weekend.

  Violet and James Clement were in the living room, Violet having ordered supper, “For you do not eat properly, Clement. Wh
at are Essie and Reuben thinking of, to allow you to abuse yourself this way?” In the kitchenette Patrick removed ice from ancient trays that had to be run under hot water (“I do not care about modern devices,” Violet had announced carelessly; she wanted the results of them, nevertheless; she herself would not of course struggle with archaic ice trays), fixed four scotches, took two into the living room, came back into the kitchenette and kissed Charlotte. Then he sighed, heavily.

  “What is it?” she asked, panic coming into her voice.

  But Patrick smiled. “Sadness always follows intercourse, little Cotty, even intellectual intercourse.”

  She put her cheek against his dark dinner jacket; even his dinner clothes smelled faintly of ether and disinfectant.

  Rubbing her softly between the shoulder blades he said, “That’s how I know our relationship has become real. By this sadness. Because it means there has been intercourse.”

  Where has the sadness gone?

  Without the sadness there is no joy

  And the strange thing is that that is not a contradiction

  While there was sadness there was laughter, there was singing, there was soaring

  Where has it gone? Is it only the sadness that distinguishes us from the animals? We take our bodies so for granted that we’re hardly aware of them, of what extraordinary means of life they are. We think about them most acutely three times: when we experience a birth; when we make love; when we watch a death. Perhaps a fourth time might be when we watch someone we love dearly in sleep. The face then is utterly vulnerable although we are shut away from the sleeping thoughts or dreams. We become suddenly aware of the intake and outlet of breath, of the faint rhythm in the chest where the heart beats. The creature we love strains our senses with its incomprehensibility. But that is not the kind of body Patrick sees now when he looks at me. He sees only a thing.

  … “To love God is to honour His creation,” Mother Escolastica had told her novices. “We accept the world, and that it is fallen and sinful, and we try to purify ourselves, but this does not mean that we reject or dishonour what He has made.”

  Sister Joaquina said, “But God hasn’t made sin.”

  “Who said He had?”

  “But you said—”

  “That we accept sin, even in ourselves. Most of all in ourselves. But we rejoice in God’s creation.”

  Beatriz looked at Joaquina, then at Mariana. Joaquina’s brow was furrowed. Mariana lay on her back on the dry summer grass and looked at a fragment of cloud drifting across the blazing blue of sky. Her eyes, half closed against the glare, were a lighter blue than the sky; the gold flecks reflected the sun. She sat up. “Oh, Mother, darling little Mother, how can we help rejoicing when it’s so beautiful!”

  “To love God is to honour His creation.” Mother Escolastica said so. A long time ago. But I remember. And you created Noël, dear my Lord, and I am honouring you in loving him. We don’t learn to love you more by loving people less, or by refusing to love them. “But,” Mother Escolastica has said, “by loving them differently, by stripping love of selfishness.”

  So if I fall and fall in love over and over again, maybe people like St. John of the Cross would say I ought to renounce it. But this still seems to me to be death and not life, darkness and not light. Even if I succeed in stripping only one small iota of selfishness from love, it is still what I have to do. It is still the only thing worth doing.”

  At night the gardens were alive with sound and shadow. Did the birds never go to sleep? The fountain caught the distant silver of the moon and the silver was sound as it splashed into the marble bowl. A burst of laughter came from the street, a scream (no one paid any attention to screams now), a snatch of song. Frogs. Insects. From the convent the heavy creaking of a door. A nun: a nun coming out into the arched cloister, the hood of her night robe up and shadowing her face, her white garment a lighter shadow moving against the white stone of the vaulted arch. A nun hiding behind the deeper shadow of a column, listening to new sound, a sound of—what was it?

  So that she saw, she had to see, as the French soldier climbed over the wall. He was careless now. He did not stop to listen, to hear her sibilant intake of breath. He did not stop to look around him, to see the shadow of robe against shadow of stone.

  She stepped out from the archway and watched him as he ran lightly across the garden and climbed up to the balcony. She stepped further out, out, in plain view if he had turned his head (but, single-minded, he did not), and watched as the French soldier moved, quiet and supple as a cat, across the balcony and into Sister Mariana’s cell.

  Her breath came in shallow gasps as she stood watching. But he did not come out. The open long window to the cell remained a dark scar in the white stone of convent. The moon moved across the sky and struck against the watching nun, cold as a whip. How long had she been there? She shuddered under the moon’s lash and went back into the convent.

  When the moonlight left the cell they knew their time was over. Raising himself on one elbow Noël looked out the long window and across the balcony. The eastern sky was beginning to pale with a light warmer than moonlight. He sighed.

  Mariana echoed his sigh. “It’s almost time for Sister Isabella to open our doors.”

  “Sister Isabella can—”

  She laughed, putting her hand over his mouth. “Hush. It’s her duty.”

  He stretched, slowly, fully. “I don’t want to leave you.”

  “You must. It’s time. If her Grace should find—” When she talked of the abbess to Noël she used the secular form of address. She could not, though she did not know why, say “your Reverence” when she was with him.

  “What would happen?”

  She shuddered. “I don’t know. When she’s angry she’s terrible.”

  “You’re afraid of her?”

  “No. Not of her. But of her anger. Of what she would do to us.”

  “That priest won’t—”

  “How could he? I’ve spoken to him only in the confessional.”

  “God, how can time go this quickly? I don’t want to leave you. I never want to leave you.”

  She pressed her face against him, breathing in the warm scent of his flesh, his sweat. “But you’re leaving me today. You’re leaving Mertola. You’ll be far from Beja. Why do you have to go?”

  He touched the short, springing vitality of her hair. “Because I, like you, have to obey orders.”

  She pressed closer. “How do I know you’ll come back to me?”

  “I said I’d come back before, and I came, didn’t I?”

  “Yes—”

  “How can you doubt me now? After tonight?”

  Her voice still was muffled. “Perhaps I don’t doubt your desire—” He raised her head and lightly kissed her. “But how can I keep from being afraid that you might be wounded?” She traced with her finger the line of scar that ran across his cheek, the scar that had faded to a thin line. “Or—even killed?”

  “Dear love, have you so little faith in your prayers?” A tremor ran through her. “Mariana, I know that I shall dwell in safety.”

  “How can you know?”

  “Because at all times I shall be clothed in the protective garment of the prayers of the most beautiful nun in the world.”

  “After what has happened I haven’t any more right to be called a nun.”

  “Do you think you’re the only nun who ever—”

  “Noël!”

  He put his hand quickly over her mouth. “Hush, my love. I know. I’m sorry.”

  Tears rushed to her eyes. “If I thought I were like—everything her Grace has tried to keep this convent from being … if I didn’t believe that this is different …”

  “Different from anything in the world. And I believe in your prayers.”

  “But perhaps now my prayers will be blasphemies in the ears of God.”

  “Never.”

  “I wouldn’t dare pray for you now.”

  A tinge of impatience came
into his voice. “It’s that priest.”

  “No. No, Noël. He loves me.”

  “How dare he!”

  “Not that way! Like a father!”

  “Then why can’t you pray for me?”

  “Because I’m afraid my prayers might do you more harm than good.”

  “Nothing you could ever do or say could be anything but good for me. But I’m afraid of what I may do to you.”

  She raised her head to look at him, and the last rays of moonlight glinted against her tears. “You’ve shown me what glory means. Noël. My heart. I have prayed. I pray all the time. When I go to Father Duarte I try, oh, God, I try to confess sin. I have tried to use the word sin. And the word fornication.”

  He stopped her words with his lips. When she tried to turn away he said, “Don’t be afraid of words. That’s all they are. Words used by dirty-minded priests. They have nothing whatever to with what happens between us.” Again he kissed her, caressing her to quiet her distress. “Dear girl, I’m only a soldier. I’ve never had time to think much about sin one way or another. It’s my mother who says the prayers for the household.”

  She forced herself to look directly at him. “What would she think of this? An affair with a—nun?”

  A veil seemed to clothe his eyes.

  (Things are different in Portugal. It’s a backward country. Women are a simple and necessary part of life like eating and sleeping. Everyone knows that Portuguese convents … even in France it is assumed that the cardinal accepts his right to a woman as long as he is discreet … one simply observes the rules and doesn’t think about these things or all the fun goes …)

  “Noël?”

  “I don’t know.”

  As she had given him her body so now she must give him her fears, because it is only he who can do what Father Duarte cannot do, absolve her from guilt. “Noël, it says—it says in the psalms that we are shaped in iniquity, that our mothers conceived us in sin. That the night that made you was sinful—No! Not if it was like our nights. I try to understand, and I don’t understand anything except that I love you and that it is right. When I touch you my heart is so full of love that there’s no room for fear. But Noël, when you’re away … then I lose my faith and in the corners of my cell there’s a lurking terror …”