Love Letters

by Madeleine L'engle

  Urraca whispered to Ampara in the dark of the hall, “They say it’s an Italian soldier who’s delivering the letters and that he’s madly in love with Sister Mariana …”

  Mariana, writing, waiting, waiting for responses, was aware of nothing but the ocean of water, the ocean of time, the ocean of silence between her and Noël.

  Beatriz came to Mariana in her cell: how did she get the key? Did Mother Escolastica—

  “Mariana.”

  Mariana did not look up to see who was speaking. “Go away.”

  “Mariana, it’s Beatriz.”

  “You’re not supposed to come in. Brites has forbidden—”

  “I know that. I have a letter for you.”

  Mariana rolled over onto her back. She looked up at the ceiling. She lay there as still as the sarcophagus of Dona Brites in the chapter room. Then with a sudden animal leap she was off the bed and had snatched the letter. She tore it open and read it. It was not long, and when she had finished she crumpled it and stood holding the ball of paper in her clenched fist. “How did you get this?”

  “I was at the market today with Sister Procuratrix, and while I was waiting for her I saw your brother Baltazar. He asked me to give it to you.”

  “How did you know who it was from?” Mariana sat on the edge of the bed. “The envelope’s plain.”

  Beatriz shrugged. “Baltazar’s guilt.”

  “The poor fool.” Mariana put her elbows on her knees, her chin in her hands. “Now I suppose you’ll go to Brites.”

  Beatriz leaned against the closed door to the cell. “I’ve known you’ve been writing to him.”

  “Known?”

  “Don’t write him again. It doesn’t do any good.”

  At last Mariana looked at her. “But it has to do good! I have to write to him!”

  “His letters make you cry. When they come.”

  “When I cry, at least I’m alive.”

  “You call that being alive?”

  Mariana rose and went to the long window that led to the balcony. “I’m nothing without him. He’s my life. If I couldn’t hope—When he comes back I’ll be—”

  “You think he’ll come back to you?”

  “It’s all that sustains me.”

  “You pray for it?”

  Mariana looked out the window, out across the balcony to the gardens. “I don’t pray any more.”

  Beatriz asked, her voice carefully impersonal, light. “Why not?”

  “Why pray when God has forsaken me?”

  “He has forsaken you?”

  “Hasn’t he? Would I still be here if he hadn’t. If he cared?”

  Beatriz’s voice deepened with intensity. “You think he doesn’t love you any more just because you’ve stopped loving him? You think he doesn’t care? You think he sits up in heaven and sees you suffering and is indifferent?”

  Mariana put her hands over her ears. “Go away, Beatriz. Leave me with my letter.”

  With a helpless motion Beatriz left. Mariana rolled face downward on her cot, stuffing the rough blanket in her mouth to stifle her cries.

  “Where did you get the key?” the abbess asked Beatriz.

  “From Sister Isabella.”

  “She gave it to you?”

  “No, your Grace. I took it.”

  “Without permission?”

  “Yes, your Grace.”

  “This is not like you.”

  Beatriz bowed her head, a stubborn expression on her beautiful face.

  “I know about the letters,” the abbess said, abruptly.

  “I’m glad, your Grace.”

  “You wonder why I don’t stop them?”

  “No, your Grace.”

  “You took a letter either to or from Mariana this afternoon?”

  “Yes, your Grace. That is why I do not wonder.”

  “We are all involved in the guilt. But I want as little of it to be on the sisters as possible. You are not to take such an action upon yourself again. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, your Grace.”

  “It is one thing for me not to stop the letters. It is another for anyone within the walls of Nossa Senhora da Conceição to participate in their delivery. I know that you love Mariana.”

  “Yes, your Grace. I do.”

  “You must be careful not to love her too much. You know that I do not allow special friendships.”

  “I know, your Grace. But it would seem I have little control over the feelings of love in my heart.”

  The abbess’s voice was sharp. “This is not reasonable of you, Sister. Of course you do. This is what Sister Mariana might say about her actions with the French soldier.”

  “But I do not let the feelings of my heart dictate my actions, your Grace.”

  “And stealing the keys from Sister Isabella? Going against my orders to Sister Mariana’s cell? You don’t call that your heart dictating your actions?”

  Beatriz said steadily, “I would have done the same thing for any one of the sisters who was in the same situation. For any one of them. Even Sister Joaquina.”

  “That is hardly likely, and I do not think you are being completely honest with yourself, and this, too, is unlike you.”

  “I am very sorry, your Grace.”

  “Are you?”

  Beatriz was silent for what seemed an interminable time, standing motionless before the abbess’s desk. “I feel very far from God, your Grace.”

  “There are times when this happens to us all. Is it because of Sister Mariana?”

  “No. I think it would be weakness to blame it on anybody else’s action, or on our response as a community to that action. Why has it shaken us so, your Grace? Why has her blindness thrown the whole convent into darkness so that we are completely unable to see to help her—or ourselves? I used the letter as an excuse to try to see her alone, because I thought I might be able to break through to her. I see now that this was pride.”

  She paused again, and the abbess sat, head bent, at her desk, her brooding face half hidden by her veil. At last Beatriz continued, “I suppose one reason I feel so alienated from God is that I want him to love me, I want him to give me signs of his love, and yet I don’t love him. I don’t know how to love him. How can I expect God to show me his love if I do not love him?”

  “You are not alone, Sister,” the abbess said, softly. “You know that many Religious, even saints, have gone through periods of drought, even of despair.”

  Beatriz leaned towards the desk. “And you, your Grace? Are you out of yours?”

  The voice cracked like a whip. “Sister Beatriz, you presume.”

  Beatriz dropped swiftly to her knees. “I beg your pardon.”

  “I have given you too much intellectual freedom, but I need your mind. It is a necessary curb to the religious emotionalism that is currently sweeping our convents. I need to counter it with reason. But you must not take advantage of this.”

  “No, your Grace. I did not mean to. It was not meant as presumption. It was only a cry in the dark. But I had no right to make it.”

  “You may go to the chapel,” the abbess said. “There the candles are lit if you need tangible evidence of light. I have your obedience about the letters?”

  “Yes, your Grace. You have my obedience. And I will make my confession to Father Duarte tomorrow.”

  In the chapel, in the classrooms, the corridors, Joaquina made herself a self-appointed watchdog, reporting the smallest infraction of a rule by sister or child, the raising of a glance, the turn of a head. Mother Escolastica confronted her. “You take too much upon yourself, Sister.”

  Joaquina stared with hostility at the shriveled little nun. “I don’t demand any more of my Sisters than I do of myself. But when I demand a great deal of myself it always seems to be pride.”

  “Demanding of oneself is not pride, child. It is being disappointed in oneself that is pride.”

  “But how can one help being disappointed in oneself?”

  “One can’t,�
�� Mother Escolastica said, and left Joaquina standing in the darkness just outside the chapel.

  In the tight confines of the confessional Mariana turned so that she could not see Father Duarte through the grille. “Father, I cannot come to confession again.”

  “You must.”

  “I’ve come and I’ve come because you’ve made me promise and because I’ve hoped that perhaps something—but nothing has happened, Father, and it’s no good. I don’t even want to be absolved.”

  “You will.”

  “Why? Why did he leave me? Why did he stop loving me? If you could only tell me that …”

  “Perhaps you gave yourself so completely that your very gift became a demand.”

  “But I asked nothing of him, except—”

  “Except everything. Mariana, my child, you can destroy with a love that is possessive and demanding.” Leaning her forehead against the rough wood of the box, she moaned. “You overwhelmed him with love, Mariana. You drowned him in it. Perhaps this is why he turned and fled.”

  She dropped to her knees facing the grille, but it was not in order to see Father Duarte’s face, it was not to put herself in the posture of prayer. “But if I loved him, how could I help showing my love? Love isn’t to be hid, is it? Father, what am I to do?”

  “Move through time until you can turn to God again.”

  “Time! Every day another speck of time has been lost into Eternity, and I with it.”

  “God will wait.”

  “It seems that everybody is willing to wait!” she cried. “Brites was going to throw me out. Why didn’t she? Why did she let me stay? I oughtn’t to be allowed to stay!”

  “That is not a decision for you to make, my daughter.”

  “But I have broken my vows. I have sinned.”

  “You realize this?” the priest asked her. “You understand it?”

  “I have sinned in your eyes.”

  “And in God’s?”

  She shook her head, rejecting his words. “If you think I’m in a state of sin how can you let me stay here where I can contaminate the other sisters? I can contaminate them.”

  “We are aware of this.”

  “So?”

  “Once the plague came to Beja, and the sisters helped care for the ill. When the first sister herself was stricken with the plague she was not thrown out of the convent onto the streets in order that the others might perhaps be spared, and more than half the women in Nossa Senhora da Conceição died.”

  “Father! If only you’d stop trying to save me, and throw me out. I don’t want to be saved.”

  “I realize that.”

  “I don’t want to stay here. I don’t want to be Sister Mariana. I don’t want to be Sister anything.”

  “But you are Sister Mariana.”

  “I don’t want God, I don’t want my soul, I don’t want anything but Noël. Don’t you understand? I’m being eaten alive with love.”

  The gentleness left the priest’s voice. “You have yet to learn the meaning of love.”

  “I’m tired of words!” she shouted at him, ignoring his hand raised to silence her. “If I can’t have Noël I don’t want anything else.”

  He waited until the echo of her words had died against the small confines of the confessional. Then he said, “Mariana, hold out your hand. What does this gold ring on your third finger mean?”

  “It means that I’m the Bride of Christ, and I don’t want to be married to God! I want my lover to be a human being.” She looked directly at the priest; even the expression in his eyes could not stop her. “How can being the Bride of Christ be like being the bride of man when he has so many brides?”

  In the world in which Father Duarte worked and struggled with his priesthood many things disturbed and grieved him, but little shocked him. The very quietness of his reply undercut her cry. “You don’t understand the nature of God.”

  She grabbed the grille with both hands and shook the bars. She was like a beast tormented behind the bars of the cage. “He doesn’t want me! Christ or however you want to call him doesn’t want me! He’s abandoned me! At the time when I need him most desperately he’s left me completely alone.”

  Father Duarte’s voice cut through her hysteria. “You are not talking about Christ. You are talking about Noël.”

  … “I lose sympathy for Mariana,” Charlotte told the doctor when he joined her in the garden. “The more I read these letters the more I see she wallowed in self-pity. And this shakes me. I’ve done it too. But at least now I’ve lost sympathy for myself. So maybe that’s something. I do apologize. I’ve trumpeted my anguish aloud like—a wounded elephant trampling blindly through the jungle. Usually when I’m unhappy my single effort is that nobody see it, that I endure my pain alone so that I bore nobody with it. Nobody wants anybody else’s suffering. But I’ve been pouring it out all over, on you, on Violet, even on Tonio. Is it the fever?”

  “Yes, partly. Although I think you’d about reached the overflowing point anyhow. Tell me, Charlotte—I don’t probe this wound for nothing—when Andrew died did you go all stiff upper-lip? Did you hide your grief from Patrick?”

  “No. From everybody except Patrick. It was our grief together, Patrick’s and mine. But we couldn’t share it because my guilt came between us.”

  “Was it your fault, Charlotte?”

  “I don’t know. In a sense everything is everybody’s fault. We all share in a corporate guilt.”

  “That’s much too abstract an answer.”

  Her face was strained, very white. “I know. But I’ve needed abstractions. I’ve needed to share the blame.”

  “Patrick wouldn’t?”

  “He tried. But I still—I still felt that it was all mine.”

  “Isn’t that because he needed you to carry it for him? Because of the two of you you’re the strong one? Because he needed you to comfort him?”

  “But I needed him, Dr. Ferreira. I needed comfort, too.”

  It did not matter how many times Patrick told her that she was in no way to blame. The truck could have gone out of control while she was walking Andrew to the park. It was not her fault. It was not anybody’s fault. It did not matter how many times he told her. All she could hear was his first bitter accusation: “Why did you let him go out alone? You should have kept him in the house or taken him to the park.”

  But you cannot always take a child to the park. There are things that have to be done about a house. And the child needs to be out of doors. He cannot sit on the kitchen floor banging around with pots and pans and getting in your way. He needs to be outdoors. And Andrew was always careful. She knew she didn’t need to worry about his going out into the street. She knew she could trust him to stay on the sidewalk.

  I told him to get out from under my feet while I was trying to clean the kitchen.

  But all mothers tell their children to get out from under their feet. No matter how much we love them there are always times when

  I told him to go out and play and leave me alone for five minutes

  But I didn’t mean it.

  No mother ever means it.

  But it’s what I did. It’s what I said.

  Gus said, “You must stop blaming yourself, Charlotte. It wasn’t in any way your fault.”

  But Patrick said, “Why did you let him go out alone?”

  He didn’t mean it, any more than Charlotte meant “leave me alone for five minutes.”

  But I did mean it. I said it and I did it. I sent him out. And I have this knowledge to live with for the rest of my life.

  It isn’t that I think God can’t forgive me. It’s that I can’t forgive myself.

  … Father Duarte said, “Before you can accept God’s forgiveness you have to forgive yourself. It is arrogance not to forgive yourself.”

  Mariana replied coldly, looking at him through the grille, “I feel no need to be forgiven. As to forgiving myself, I will never forgive myself for having lost him.”

  “For having lo
st God?”

  “No, Father. You know who I am talking about.”

  “Is there, for you, a difference?”

  She shrugged.

  He said, “Sister Mariana, I want you to go into the chapel now and kneel before the altar. I do not forget that you say you cannot pray any more. I don’t even ask you to try to pray. Simply kneel there.”

  He did not miss the weary insolence in her voice. “How long?”

  “Until your knees are sore. Until you start to fall.”

  How could she pray?

  She had forgotten what prayer was.

  Staying on her knees was no more than a physical posture. She was not on her knees before God. Nevertheless she knelt there.

  While Father Duarte talked with the abbess in her study. His great hulk seemed shrunken; the deep brown eyes had retreated with age and fatigue. He spoke almost as though to himself, his voice a low rumble. “One of the most difficult things we have to do with those we love most is to love them enough to let them do it themselves. We have to believe in their capacity—or God’s—to do it themselves. I know that it hurts you to see poor foolish Sister Isabella bump into things, to see her spill food on her habit as her eyesight grows dimmer. But you are letting her do as much as she can for herself. It would be far easier for everybody if you assigned various sisters to lead her around, to feed her, to help her dress and undress. Because Sister Isabella is childish and ignorant it is what she longs for. She thinks that you are cruel to let her blunder about alone in her increasing darkness. And so do some of the other sisters who rush to help her when they think you aren’t looking. But if you did what she wants, if you did the easiest thing, if you didn’t snap at the sisters when they do too much for her, you would be diminishing her, you would be helping to destroy God’s image in her.”

  The abbess leaned against the back of her carved chair. “I have never quite put it this way, Father. But yes: I suppose what you say is true. What does it have to do with Mariana?”

  “We have to love her enough to let her find her way in her own darkness. We have to love her enough to let her crash, as it were, into furniture in her way, to fall downstairs. Sister Isabella’s sight is going to continue to fade, but for Mariana we must never lose hope that she will move into the light again. Can you imagine Mariana if she were physically blinded, thrust into absolute visual darkness as she is now into spiritual? She would perhaps go through a period of this same kind of wild resentment, of anguished rebellion. But the time would come when she would start to fight through it, when we would hear her say to any offer of help, ‘Leave me alone. I can do it myself.’ And she would do it herself. And we would have to love her enough to let her.”