The Madonna of Notre Dame

by Alexis Ragougneau

  “How should I know? Somebody could attack the bishop or the statue of the Virgin.”

  “You think so? Who’d do such a thing?”

  “How should I know? The people from Act Up, for instance.”

  “Act Up? What—the queers?”

  “I’m just saying for example. About ten days ago, they staged a sort of a raid inside the cathedral, to protest against what the Pope says about condoms. They put up banners, tried to chain themselves to the entrance gates. They were quite forceful. There were journalists, cameras, TV people.”

  “Quite a goddam mess then.”

  “Oh, yeah!”

  “As a matter of fact, Mourad, yesterday afternoon, during the procession, didn’t you have a little problem?”

  “Yes, a fight. There’s one or two every year. Usually, it’s old ladies fighting to get into the cathedral first after the procession.”

  “Very pious, these old women—are they?”

  “It’s the fact that, once inside, they want a seat.”

  “But the fight yesterday, it wasn’t between old women, was it?”

  “No, they were young people.”

  “So tell me exactly what happened, Mourad.”

  “There was this guy—we know him well—he’s been coming here for months. He’s a bit—how can I put it?”

  “A bit of an oddball.”

  “That’s right, a bid of an oddball. Sometimes, it’s as if he thinks the Virgin Mary’s his sister, you know? Or his mother.”

  “I get the picture, yes.”

  “He prays and cries at her feet. Lies down on the stone floor, takes pictures of her, tries to touch her, brings her flowers. Every evening, when we close up, it’s always the same thing. He doesn’t want to leave, he wants to stay and sleep with the Virgin of the Pillar.”

  “Which one’s the Virgin of the Pillar?”

  “It’s the statue over there, to the right of the podium. She’s the one on all the postcards, guidebooks, candles.”

  “On the candles, too?”

  “Yes, sure, on the candles, look.” Mourad went to get a candle from one of the stands.

  “And so this guy who’s so in love with the Virgin Mary, who did he try to beat up?”

  “This girl in white walking next to it.”

  “Next to what?”

  “Next to the statue of the Virgin. She’d been walking there since the start of the procession. Next to it, in front of it. It’s true that after a while, she was beginning to disturb everyone.”

  “Who’s everyone?”

  “The auxiliary bishop, the priests, the knights. Everybody, really.”

  “Who are these knights, again?”

  “The Knights of the Holy Sepulcher, the ones who carry the silver statue of the Virgin on its stretcher. It must weigh at least four hundred and fifty pounds, you know.”

  “And why would this girl have disturbed your knights?”

  “Because she was very beautiful and her dress was very short. At one point, the Head Honcho even asked me to go talk to her.”

  “Who’s the Head Honcho?”

  “The rector. It’s what we call him among ourselves, but don’t go repeating it.”

  “So the Head Honcho himself told you to go to the chick in the miniskirt, to ask her to walk farther away, otherwise the knights, the priests, and the auxiliary bishop would be sweating buckets. Is that right?”

  Mourad just smiled in reply.

  “And so what did the girl say to you?”

  “I didn’t get a chance to speak to her because the other guy went for her. Grabbed her by the hair, started shaking her, calling her a prostitute, a whore, a slut, all sorts of stuff. That she should leave the Virgin Mary alone, that she should follow her example, that the Virgin is the woman above all women.”

  “And what did you do at that point, Mourad?”

  “I grabbed the kid by the neck and flattened him on the ground with my knee. Then I asked the girl if she was OK, if she wanted me to call the police, because her lip was bleeding a bit.”

  “And?”

  “Well, she didn’t want to call the police. She said, ‘What are you doing here? Why are you working for these people?’”

  “What did she mean by that?”

  “How should I know?”

  Gombrowicz had been fidgeting for a while, ever since Mourad had started talking about the attack. “Tell him, Mourad, tell him what you told me earlier. What language was the girl speaking?”

  “With me? Well, Arabic, of course.”

  Landard burst out laughing. “You’re right, Mourad, what else could you and she have been speaking? After all, we’re in France, right? And then?”

  “Then I told the kid I didn’t want to see him for the rest of the day. He ran away saying it was a topsy-turvy world, and telling me to go back home.”

  “And what do you think he meant by that, Mourad?”

  Mourad looked intently into Landard’s eyes. “You know perfectly well what he meant, inspector.”

  Landard rummaged in his jacket pocket but could find only a dark blue, crushed, empty pack. “OK, Mourad. And then what happened?”

  “Then the procession went back into the cathedral for Solemn Mass.”

  “And was the girl in white at Solemn Mass?”

  “In the front row, with her legs crossed.”

  “All right. And then?”

  “Then, at the end of the Mass, at about eight p.m., we emptied the cathedral, so we could put up the tulle.” “The tulle?”

  “On summer evenings, we stretch a huge canvas across the transept, because at nine-thirty p.m., we reopen the cathedral for Rejoice, Mary.”

  “What’s Rejoice, Mary?”

  “It’s a film about the Assumption.”

  “Of course, stupid question. So at half past nine, you reopened the doors once again and people came back in, like a movie theater.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And at what time did Rejoice, Mary finish?”

  “The film is forty-five minutes long. At ten-thirty p.m., we got everyone out again.”

  “And was the girl in white also there for Rejoice, Mary?”

  “I couldn’t tell you.”

  “You didn’t see her?”

  “No.”

  “After Mass you didn’t see her again for the rest of the evening?”

  “No.”

  “And were there many people at Rejoice, Mary last night?”

  “It was full. Over a thousand people.”

  “What do you do inside? Is it like a movie theater? Do you dim the lights?”

  “We just keep the night-lights on in the entrance. The night-lights and the candles.”

  “And can people come and go as they please?”

  “As they please, yes.”

  “And you never have any problems?”

  “What kind of problems?”

  “I don’t know, couples smooching in the corners, kids trying to remain locked in the cathedral overnight so they can piss in the holy water basins.”

  “Very seldom. In any case, after we close, we do the rounds to check everything properly.”

  “Hard work, all that, Mourad.”

  “I told you. Along with Christmas, it’s the hardest day of the year.”

  “Because of the crowds?”

  “The crowds, the crazy people.”

  “And tell me, Mourad, where do you live?”

  “ In Garges-lès-Gonesse. Why?”

  “It’s quite a trek home.”

  “I take the local train D, from Châtelet. Then the bus. Then there’s a bit on foot.”

  “Are there still buses in Gonesse when you lock up here?”

  “I generally miss the last one.”

  “So what do you do?”

  “I walk.”

  “You walk all the way from the train station?”

  “I have to.”

  “You don’t have a car?”

  “Can’t afford one.�
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  “If you leave here at about ten-thirty—eleven, what time do you get home?”

  Mourad did not answer.

  “Are you sure you did your rounds last night, Mourad?”

  “What are you trying to say, inspector?”

  “Don’t get excited, Mourad, I’m just asking you a question. After such a long day you must have just wanted to go home to bed, right? I’m trying to put myself in your shoes. If I’d had the chance to catch my train fifteen minutes earlier by skipping my rounds, I wouldn’t have hesitated, trust me. Hell, the last bus in Gonesse, that’s vital.”

  “Last night I did my rounds like I do them every time I get to lock up in the evening, inspector. Do you have any other questions or may I leave?”

  “You can go home.”

  “The girl they found this morning, is it her? Is it the girl in white who got attacked yesterday?”

  “You’ve got it exactly right, Mourad. You should join the police.”

  The guard walked away, and his keychain kept jingling in time with his footsteps long after Landard lost sight of him behind a pillar.

  “Gombrowicz, have you got a cigarette?”

  Gombrowicz took a pack of Camel Lights out of his jeans pocket and offered it to Landard. The latter pulled out a cigarette, made a face, put it between his lips, then shook his lighter for a long time without managing to light it.

  “Do you have a light, Gombrowicz?”

  “No. Just use a candle.”

  Landard went up to a rack, grabbed a lit candle with a picture of the Virgin of the Pillar, and took a long drag on his cigarette. He remained lost in his thoughts in the midst of a thickening cloud of smoke. Then he suddenly waved the air away as though to clear his head, and turned to Gombrowicz.

  “Hey, Gombrowicz. What do you bet Mourad didn’t do his rounds last night?”

  Father Kern was going home, his head buzzing and his body weary. In the square, amid idle tourists, Eiffel Tower trinket sellers, and gypsy beggars, the woman whom guards and sacristans nicknamed Madame Pipi seemed to be dozing on a bench in the shade of Charlemagne’s equestrian statue. A little earlier that morning, she had been syphoned out as part of the general evacuation ordered by the cathedral rector. His thoughts still absorbed by the image of the dead young woman lying on the stone floor, Kern with his eyes had absentmindedly followed the eccentric old lady’s absurd, flowery hat. He’d seen it struggling to stay afloat above the noisy flood of tourists pushed toward the emergency exit, tossed about like a wisp of straw, desperately trying to swim against the current, losing a few plastic poppies on the way, and finally vanishing into the whirlwind funnel of the Portal of the Last Judgment.

  When the priest walked past her, she seemed to miraculously wake up from her nap. She gave him a worried look, bordering on panic, as usual, and made an unsure gesture at him. Kern reciprocated her greeting and picked up the pace. Not today. Not now. This time she’d have to wait to tell him about her apocalyptic visions, her paranoid delirium, and the satanic attacks only she had been chosen to witness, as well as the dazzling retaliations to which only the Virgin seemed to hold the secret. Kern didn’t know what kind of chaotic path could have led Madame Pipi to that permanent chair in Notre Dame, three or four yards from the Virgin of the Pillar where, every morning, she came to lay her anguish. What could she have possibly suffered that she now came to seek, like a daily fix, the benevolent gaze of the marble Madonna? Nobody among the cathedral staff knew anything, or at least not much, about the old lady with the flowery hat. They didn’t even know her name. Very few priests had heard her confession. All that could be gathered about her was that she’d had a youth marked by a violent father; fear was her constant traveling companion, followed by solitude, then a slow descent into a kind of mental confinement, an increasing dependence on things religious, and a more and more airtight mutism from which she always seemed about to emerge but never succeeded. In other words, she suffered from the kind of—hateful as the term may be—madness that some cathedral regulars sometimes appeared to border on.

  Over the course of the eleven summers he spent neglecting his Poissy parish in order to stand in at Notre Dame during the month of August, Father Kern had had the time to get to know these cathedral strays. In that respect, it was probably not very different from the Middle Ages: the cathedral doors were open all day to those damaged by life, those who couldn’t find their place in a brutal world reserved for the strong, a world they’d been hurled into by an accident of birth, and who, in their search for a bubble of comfort or illusion, had found refuge in this huge church at the heart of Île de la Cité. There were quite a few of them, men and women, who, every morning, as soon as the cathedral opened, would go into the nave, to a chair they’d abandoned the day before, and stay there until evening, impervious to the army of tourists invading the aisles. These strays seemed to float between two worlds, staring into space or at a Virgin, a figure of Christ, or a candle, for hours on end. Nobody would ever think of moving them. Sometimes, you had to gently hush them when they entered into direct communication with God or Mary, and engaged in an overly loud conversation. And every so often, you had to take a rag and wipe up the floor under their chairs.

  This time, however, Father Kern was going home and his heart would be, like the cathedral doors, exceptionally shut for a few hours.

  On the suburban train taking him back to Poissy, he tried to put some order in his thoughts. First, there was the haunting image of the girl lying on the stone floor, tragic and immodest, discovered just as he was starting the Salve Regina in the chancel.

  Then there was the irruption of this army of police, pistols at their belts, into a sanctuary, that, since the dawn of time, people had been entering in peace, having left their weapons outside. But perhaps that was mere illusion. Perhaps evil and violence had wormed their way in through the impenetrable stones of the cathedral long ago. Perhaps the battle between light and darkness had been raging within the centuries-old walls forever. And perhaps it was more intensely violent there than outside.

  A little earlier that afternoon, a young investigator from the Crime Squad had questioned him, along with all the other priests and the rest of the staff. He’d had to recall the events of the previous day. The holy masses, the crowds, the noise, the procession, and the stifling heat. The hymns, the prayers, and the Ave Maria through the sound system. The moments of silent contemplation. Again, the crowds and the heat. And that provocatively beautiful young woman, so visible, so radiant, so mesmerizing, deliberately served up to the eyes of the six Knights of the Holy Sepulcher at the head of the procession. Restricted in their three-piece suits, wearing white gloves, wrapped in their cavalry capes bearing the scarlet cross of Jerusalem. Sweating under a blazing sun, staggering under the weight of a stretcher carrying the silver statue of the Virgin. Their eyes bulging, bloodshot. Was it the physical strain? Or the pain from the weight of the statue digging into their shoulders? Or the sight of this girl parading right under their noses and the inebriating clicking of her heels on the asphalt? And what about the twenty or so priests marching behind the knights? Brief, furtive side glances from surplice-wearing colleagues, sliding from top to toe and from toe to top, to better caress with their eyes—in spite of themselves and the liturgical dress—the shape, the curve of the buttocks, the outline of the legs of this girl who was walking in very high-heeled pumps, parallel to the procession. And what about the auxiliary bishop, Monsignor Rieux Le Molay? Wedged between the knights and the troop of priests, his miter and crozier towering over the crowd, his hand stroking the air in an infinite repetition of signs of the cross, again, and again, and again. And sometimes, as his fingers would complete the gesture on the right hand side—not always, but sometimes—his eyes would veer slightly, a little beyond the imaginary cross that was already evaporating in the heat, and his gaze would caress, even just for a second, even in the midst of a circular glance, the beautiful white form, the slender ankles, the bend of the calv
es, the tanned thighs that disappeared under an unreasonably short skirt. The temptation of lust. A man who asks to emerge for an imperceptible instant from the heavy cope embroidered with gold thread.

  After all, hadn’t the entire Île de la Cité ogled her with desire? Hadn’t the whole of Paris? And in the end, like a thunderstorm tearing through an overcharged sky, there had been this absurd fight with the blond young worshipper, who looked quietly insane and harmless, but who had suddenly given in to violence. What had happened? And who was that girl? They’d found her the following morning, dead. What was the real truth?

  Naturally, the police had questioned him about the incident at the Assumption. Who was the blond boy with the pale, angelic face? Did he know his name? Had he been coming to the cathedral for long? Had he ever shown any signs of violence? Had he heard his confession?

  All Father Kern could do was shrug at these questions. Yes, he knew the young man, but only by sight. No, he didn’t know his name. He’d never heard his confession. And even if he had, a priest wasn’t expected to ask to see the ID of a sinner come to ask the Lord’s forgiveness. No, as far as he knew, the boy had never been violent. He was one of them. One of the Notre Dame strays whose immovable figure appeared every morning amid the rows of chairs.

  One day—as it happens, during confession—a young woman with a slightly unhinged expression, an eight a.m. Mass regular, had opened her purse and revealed a half-rusted bread knife. “In case I get attacked by the devil,” she’d said. Father Kern had not thought it appropriate to point her out to the duty guard, since he judged a satanic attack to be highly unlikely. Had he been wrong not to? Were the Notre Dame strays crazy to the point of being dangerous?

  These thoughts kept going around and around in his head until he reached his presbytery. The bell of his parish was ringing six p.m. He’d barely shut the door behind him when the phone rang.

  “François? It’s Monsignor de Bracy.”

  “Yes, Monsignor.”

  “You got home alright?”

  “Yes, Monsignor.”

  “Have you also been questioned by the police?”

  “Yes, Monsignor.”

  “What did they ask you?”