Love Letters

by Madeleine L'engle

  Two soldiers approached the gates but she was staring away from them, not into the dark shadows of the gatehouse, not, at this moment, into nothingness, but back into herself, as though she were looking down into the darkness of a well, the walls slimy, the water black and stagnant in the depths.

  One of the soldiers was in Portuguese uniform, was Baltazar. The other was French. They dismounted and hitched their horses, and still she did not turn. Baltazar rang the bell.

  She roused slowly at its clangor. She did, somehow or other, the habit of obedience not entirely broken, manage to perform the minimal duties of the portress. She turned. With a glad cry she rushed towards the Frenchman.

  “Noël!”

  But it was not Noël. It was little Mathieu de Berenger, who replied, sadly, “No, Sister.”

  She retreated into herself, into the shadows of the gatehouse. Where for a moment there had been a strange and stormy glow there was darkness again. Baltazar moved into the shadows towards her. “Mariana.”

  She bowed her head in a mockery of greeting. “Baltazar.”

  “Will you talk to me today?”

  “What about?”

  “Please, Mariana, I have a suggestion.”

  “Brites will be delighted.”

  “Not for Aunt. She mustn’t know. Will you listen at least?”

  “I always listen.”

  “It may not be the right thing, I may be compounding the sin that has already been done. But I thought it might make you a little happier if—Mariana, if you want to write a letter to Noël, the Marquis de Berenger—” he indicated the Frenchman, “—will see that it reaches him.”

  Mariana whispered, “A letter?”

  “If you want to write.” Baltazar spoke loudly, clearly, as though she were standing far away. “If you think it would help.”

  Mariana turned slowly to Berenger. “You’re going to France?”

  “Not yet. But a battalion is leaving for Lisbon tomorrow and I’ll see to it that anything you write gets into the hands of one of the officers I know to be reliable and discreet.”

  She murmured, half comprehending. “Yes. Discreet.”

  “And if there is an answer I will see that it gets to you.”

  “An answer. Yes. Yes. Thank you.”

  “Mariana.” Baltazar’s voice was urgent. “You must not let our aunt know that you are writing.”

  Her voice was scornful, almost careless. “What business is it of hers?”

  “She is your abbess. She is your Mother Superior.”

  “I have no mother, natural, superior, or inferior.”

  Baltazar looked around, but Berenger had withdrawn to a discreet distance and was contemplating a clump of overgrown flowers at the side of the road. “I can’t bear to see you like this.”

  “Then go away.”

  Stung, he replied, “I only came because—”

  “To tell me that I might write a letter. Yes. I’m sorry. I’m grateful to you. And to you, monsieur,” she called.

  Berenger looked up, came back towards them. “It’s nothing. If I can help—”

  “Thank you. And now if you—”

  “Yes.” Berenger’s smile was full of compassion. “I know you want to be alone to write. I’ll go down the road and wait out of sight.”

  “I have to write it now?”

  “I’m afraid this is my only chance to come to Beja before—”

  “Of course. I see. I’ll be as quick as I can.” With an abrupt movement, with no farewell or further thanks, she turned her back on them and went into the gatehouse.

  Oh, my darling, if only you had known when you first came to me what was going to happen! You expected so much joy from our love, and all that is left is the pain of our parting. Will this separation keep me from ever looking into your eyes again, those eyes in which I saw so much love, which taught me so much, which filled me with joy, which replaced everything else in the world for me, which became my entire world?

  … “Still at those letters?” Dr. Ferreira asked, coming back out to the balcony. Violet had gone in to the harpsichord, leaving Charlotte sitting in the winter sun and relaxing in the framework of a pattern of four notes, repeated and repeated, tirelessly, rising to the balcony in the clear air. “Charlotte,” the doctor said. “You had no business getting up and going downstairs last night, but it does not seem to have done you any harm. How is my patient today?”

  She put the book of letters down on the soft linen of the tablecloth. “Thoroughly impatient.”

  “Good. So you will not be a patient much longer. Your temperature was subnormal this morning, but do not be surprised if there is a slight elevation this evening. It will not be as much as yesterday. Let us go inside so that I can listen to your chest again.”

  During the examination she watched him, studying the kind, tired face. His was not a vague, general good will that could fall apart under stress, but a specific, disciplined compassion. It would not alter, though it might alteration find.

  As he put away his stethoscope she said, “I wish you were a priest.”

  “I am not.”

  “I would like to talk to you as though you were.”

  His great laugh boomed through Violet’s room. “My sweet child, I am only an obscure medical man.”

  “I know, but—” Her voice trailed off.

  He sounded gruff. “Are you still looking for that famous point of reference of yours?”

  “Not the way I was yesterday. I just want to know—if you would tell me—I just want to know what yours is.”

  He answered simply, “For me it is God.”

  “Is it still?”

  “Yes.”

  “What kind of God?”

  “Have you ever read Plato’s Republic?”

  “Yes.”

  “You may perhaps remember, then, what Socrates said: God is single and true in word and deed, and neither changes himself nor deceives others.”

  She nodded for a moment in silence. “If I can’t find God I suppose it’s more my fault than his, isn’t it?”

  He smiled. “It usually is. However I do not ever presume to define God.”

  “But Plato—”

  “Did not define him either, Charlotte.”

  “To give yourself wholly to someone—” Charlotte said. “It doesn’t mean to drown him with you, does it?”

  “No.” He turned from her and sat down at Violet’s desk, its inlaid top almost hidden by a disordered mass of papers and music manuscript.

  “I don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong any more,” Charlotte said. “Aren’t there unalterable standards, doctor? Is it all right for anyone, even people like Violet and my father, to live apart from the laws that are supposed to bind the rest of us?”

  (Mariana did. Wasn’t that the trouble? She wanted it to be right for her to do wrong with Noël. She wanted special rules to be made for her. And when they weren’t she got mad at God.)

  “To give yourself wholly,” she said. “What does giving yourself wholly mean? Did Mariana give herself wholly to God before Noël came to the convent? And then did she give herself wholly to Noël?”

  “What do you think?”

  “To neither. Not in the way you’re talking about it. So how, in the end, could she learn what giving wholly means?”

  “The same way Charlotte is learning it.”

  “Is Charlotte learning it?”

  He sucked at his pipe. “Forgive me if I seem to generalize about Americans—”

  “You, too?”

  “I have a reason for this, Charlotte.”

  Smiling, at last she pulled herself up to a sitting position, leaning back against the pillows of Violet’s bed. “Go on.”

  “Two people are never equal in the outward needs of a relationship. There is always one who is more physical, less cerebral, or perhaps only more insecure, who wants the constant reassurance of affection. But marriage is acceptance of this discrepancy. Of saying, I would like more of the o
utward demonstration of love, but this is the way I am and not the way my spouse is. He loves me in his own way to his own capacity. And I love him in mine. And you are quite right, Charlotte child. If you are the one whose love flows most freely you must be careful not to drown him. Not unless he is very well able to swim. I think, Charlotte, that if you will grow up, you will be an excellent swimmer. I think that is your vocation: to do the loving. But with discipline. Not with demands.”

  “You sound like a priest after all,” she said. And then, quickly, “You’re right. Everything you’ve said is right. So I wanted to hit you. I’m sorry.”

  He smiled at her, his great bear’s body perfectly capable of accepting any number of blows. “It’s a lovely day, Charlotte. Walk out in the garden for a bit. It will do you good.”

  “Yes.” She picked up the letters.

  He looked at them, raising his shaggy brows. “You must understand, Charlotte, that it is perfectly possible that these letters are a fraud.”

  “But what do you think?” Charlotte asked. “Do you think it all happened? There was a nun in the convent called Soror Mariana, wasn’t there?”

  “Yes. But there are many people who think that the name was stolen, that she has been maligned, that the religious vocation has been smirched.”

  “And you?”

  “There have always been people who cannot understand the meaning of vocation and therefore would like to see it belittled. As for Soror Mariana, yes, I happen to think it probably happened, but that is hunch and personal opinion, not authentication.”

  “Do you think the letters are shocking?”

  “If they are real, no. If they are a literary fraud, yes.”

  “Why?”

  “They aren’t good enough art. If they aren’t a true outcry, they were written purely for sensationalism. It is not that as a subject I find it shocking. I don’t feel that in art there is any subject that is taboo. It is how it is handled that matters. A study of nudes is a simple enough example. Some are art; others are nothing more than pornography. Your father, Charlotte, wrote of shocking enough matters in Piero’s Giraffe, but I think it is his greatest book. Do you remember the setting of Piero’s Giraffe when ‘domestic animals had already been tamed and wild animals were not yet shy’? In a sense Mariana lived in Piero’s world.” He looked at Charlotte’s fingers loosely holding the book of letters and said, “And so did Andrew, didn’t he?”

  “Violet told you about Andrew?”

  “It was a grief for Violet, too, you know, which I shared with her as best I could. She had a concert in Madrid that night. After the concert Julia called me to come to her. But I had a patient I couldn’t leave in the hospital here. I couldn’t go to Violet any more than she could to you.”

  “I didn’t expect her,” Charlotte said. “I understood.”

  He made a strange, angry face. “We’re both protecting her, aren’t we? She could have come. Violet can do anything she wants to. She didn’t want to. She was afraid.”

  “It’s all right,” Charlotte said. “I knew that, too. It didn’t matter.” Then, “Andrew and the other little boys in the park used to play horrible games. At least they seemed horrible to me. Sticks for guns or swords, stones for bombs. Always some weapon of death. And somebody had to be killed. I didn’t want to give Andrew guns to play with. I thought it was parents teaching death and war. So in the park they used sticks. Children are more intelligent about death than we are, aren’t they? We’re afraid of it because we believe in it, and we’re afraid to mention it for fear death will hear us and come. But children aren’t afraid because they don’t believe in it. Not as something permanent and dark and enduring. It’s just going somewhere else, down the street, around the corner, to the grocery store. It isn’t any further away from them than that. So they can play games and shoot themselves without fear. Bang. I shot you. Bang. I’m dead. Now I’ll get up and let’s start again. Let’s play another game.”

  She held her arms tightly across her chest as though for protection.

  “Andrew used to go completely in to his games. The way Violet does into music. That’s why she couldn’t come. She’d have gone into pain the same way. Andrew’s pain. And Patrick’s and mine. It isn’t because Violet is dispassionate that she stays away from things. It’s because she’s much too passionate. It’s that her awareness of suffering, like all her other senses, is more acute than the ordinary person’s. She can sustain the peaks of emotion and pain; she can stay impaled on them. It’s only her music that orders this and makes it bearable. I think it’s really only artists and saints who know the meaning of compassion.”

  To her surprise the doctor came over to her and folded her in his arms, holding her in a great, warm hug.

  “Oh, Charlotte,” he said. “Sweet, beautiful little idiot.” He held her close to him, rubbing the warm fur of his beard against the pale gold of her head. Then he released her.

  “Go out in the garden, child. I’ll be along later.”

  In the garden the sun was warm, touching her head and making her remember, as sometimes a tactile sensation or an odor will do, a day when she had walked with Andrew in the park, and he had trotted along beside her, talking, while she had been preoccupied with her own thoughts.

  “What makes people be robbers?” he asked.

  Charlotte, only half listening, answered, “They don’t have mothers to help show them how to behave.”

  Andrew, disbelieving, asked, “They don’t have mothers?”

  “No,”

  “But if they don’t have mothers, how did they get inside there so they could be borned?”

  Charlotte then absent-mindedly, still with only half her attention on the child, explained how they had mothers once but either lost them or lost track of them.

  Andrew, trustingly, satisfied, said, “Robbers on television aren’t real, right, mummie? They aren’t real robbers. They’re just pretending to be, because they really have mothers.”

  Later, when she was writing Violet, Charlotte had remembered enough of this conversation to record it for Violet’s amusement, as she had when Andrew, out of the blue, had asked her, “We’re human animals, aren’t we, mummie? But we’re made differently, without tails or barks or meows. Only with talks.”

  Andrew.

  She shivered, in spite of the warmth of the sun, the remembered warmth of the doctor’s hug, and stretched out on one of Violet’s lawn chairs. Her fingers held the book of letters too tightly. She could look at Andrew’s picture. She could listen to his words. But Patrick’s words were still to be faced. But she could, she knew now, face them. As her father had always risen from the black leather couch and turned back to his typewriter.

  “… why should I try not to remember all the wonderful ways in which you showed me your love? How can such beautiful memories have become so cruel? It’s unnatural that they should hurt me …”

  Memories. Was it unnatural for them to hurt? She had sat with Patrick, that wild glorious winter after he had come back to her, in the kitchen of the house on East Seventy-fourth Street. Essie and Reuben had gone to bed; her father was tapping away on the typewriter in the library. Violet was in Boston for a concert. Charlotte and Patrick were eating: how much they ate in those days, their appetites ravenous in all directions.

  “Eat your crusts, Cotty,” Patrick said. “It will make your hair curl.”

  “You make my hair curl,” Charlotte said. “You make it stand on end.” She threw her crusts across the table at him.

  In response he pulled her from her chair, held her, searching for her mouth.

  How little she knew.

  There was nothing she knew anything about, except, perhaps, martinis.

  But she felt more grown up than ever before. Or since. Adult. Sophisticated. Worldly wise.

  “Patrick, do you believe in free love?”

  His arms tightened about her. “Honey,” he said, his lips brushing close to her ear, “there is no such thing as free love. All l
ove is extremely expensive.” He brushed her pale hair back from her face. “Actually, I’m quoting Violet, who has a reputation for being rather free about it. But she’s right, you know, Cotty. You pays your money and you takes your choice. You get what you pay for. Or one might rather reverse it and say, you pay for what you get.”

  It’s true that in loving you I felt a joy I hadn’t known was possible, but I’m paying for it with a pain I didn’t know was possible, either.

  Even granting that nothing, even love, is free, Charlotte still would have been willing to be free with Patrick.

  But, “No, Cotty,” he said. “We may have unconventional parents. Our first meeting may have been unconventional. But our marriage is not going to be.”

  Another time, with an edge of anger, “Once we are married, Cotty, there will be no more baths in strange young men’s bathtubs in rooms without shades at the windows. Once we are married you belong to me, understand? And I will not tolerate your behaving with anybody the way you behaved with me.”

  “You said we were going to forget that evening.”

  “We will. As long as you don’t remind me of it.”

  Did she remind him of it? Then how could she expect him to trust her?

  You made me completely yours with your violence. It was your love that made mine burst into flame; your tenderness melted me, and then your promises completely reassured me. My own awakening passion undid me, and the result of what started with such happiness is tears, and deathly despair, and I see no help anywhere.

  That first letter, half-crazed with misery: it must have burned in Mathieu de Berenger’s pocket.

  There were only five letters in all. Five too many.

  … How did Urraca and Ampara find out?

  They would; of course they would.

  “She’s writing letters to him. Someone’s sneaking them out.”

  “And in. He’s writing to her. They both write every day.”

  “Hush. Somebody’s coming.”

  “You weren’t blinded by love as I was; why did you let all this happen to me?… Why do you want to be so cruel to a heart that belongs to you utterly?… I couldn’t ever forget you … Would I be able to overcome the thoughts that fill me and go back to a life of dull tranquility? No, I couldn’t bear to be empty and unaware …”