Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy

by Rumer Godden

  There came a day when there was real news. ‘You will never guess,’ Vivi had written – as if I didn’t guess at once – ‘we have a baby, a son, Luigi and I. You might think a baby had never been born before. Luigi thinks him so wonderful. It’s to be called Giovanni-Battista Giuliano, I can’t spell it’ – which was obvious – ‘and you are to be godmother …’

  That softened Lise but she had had to write: ‘I can’t be godmother. You must get a Catholic.’ The answer came back: ‘No one but you.’

  Lise had been tempted to go but, of course, could not. She imagined herself saying, ‘Patrice, I’m going to Italy.’

  ‘Oh – where?’

  ‘Milan.’ The Branzanos’ village was near Milan.

  ‘And why?’

  ‘That’s my private business.’

  ‘You have no private business.’

  That was true and to go would have been too risky.

  Every now and then, Patrice would still assail her. ‘You have heard from Vivi?’

  ‘How could I? You see every letter, every note that comes here.’

  ‘Telephone calls?’

  ‘I have no calls except on your business.’

  ‘Yes, but I still think you know where she is,’ and he would break out in an agony of blows and arm wrenchings. Suppose I went, and he traced me, thought Lise. It would be the end of Luigi, and she had to content herself with sending extra money for the baby. She bought what she thought Vivi would admire – a fleecy white topcoat and a minuscule pair of white kid boots – ‘The first time in my life and probably the last that I have ever been in a baby-shop and bought baby things.’ She would have liked to keep them for a day or two to look at and fondle, just for the novelty – but novelty was not the right word for something so new and wonderful – but she did not dare to take them back to the Rue Duchesne.

  ‘Would you have liked a child?’ Soeur Marie Alcide asked her which had startled Lise. ‘Even as a thought, it never came my way,’ she had said, ‘but I suppose in most women somewhere deep down is a wistfulness, perhaps an innate unfulfilment,’ and it was true that even now Lise felt a pang when she remembered Luigi’s pride in his son and, Vivi must be like a child with her first doll, Lise had thought fondly.

  I know more about dolls than Madame Lise.

  ‘I’m not going to,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to – I won’t.’ I lay face downwards on the bed so that Mamma – Luigi’s precious Mamma, ‘Mamma mamma mia’ – couldn’t turn me over; I couldn’t bear to look … my two little ‘lemons’, as Patrice used to call them, are big and swollen ugly. But that will go away if I don’t …

  ‘But this is Luigi’s son,’ the older woman was dumbfounded. ‘And yours!’

  ‘All right. Feed him yourself.’

  Mamma had on one of those black cotton blouses peasant women wear, high-necked, long-sleeved, like Marcelline’s; Mamma’s was patterned with small white flowers with tucks down the front so firmly stitched they would last a lifetime and probably had. ‘Open it. Feed him yourself. You’re always telling me you fed eight. Go on.’

  Luigi’s mamma hasn’t Luigi’s patience. She slapped my face hard. ‘Mamma, don’t! don’t!’ It was Luigi who wept. ‘Please mamma, she’s only a child. She’s frightened.’

  That was true. No one knows how frightened I was. I don’t want that brat near me, but I wasn’t going to let them know and I called out, ‘I’m not frightened. I don’t want to, that’s all.’

  ‘Mamma, don’t be angry,’ begged Luigi. ‘She’s little and a Parisienne – different.’

  ‘Yes, different! Trash!’

  Luigi tried to coax me himself. ‘That’s what it’s there for.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The beautiful milk. Try and understand, cara. None of our babies has been fed from bottles and he’s crying …’

  ‘Let him cry,’ and I lie back on the bed against that uncomfortable bolster and polish my nails. I have put a tight bandage round my chest and the doctor – they called him in for quite the opposite reason, I’m sure – has given me pills to take the milk away.

  ‘She got round him, the minx!’

  ‘Yes, I got round him – easily,’ and I laughed.

  The doctor didn’t come when it – I can’t call it ‘he’ – was born because, though I thought it would hurt me, it didn’t. It was funny when it just slithered out, wet and warm, still tied to me. For the first – and the last time if I have anything to do with it – Mamma was pleased with me. ‘As easy as a ewe with a lamb.’ But it wasn’t easy. Suddenly I was back in the shed with Claudine; the baby, still wet and warm, tied to her – I dried its slime with an old towel and Claudine cut its string with a penknife we found on the window sill. We put it under the corn in the dark end of the shed; the corn fell on to its face, into its eyes and mouth. I still wake up in the night and I could shriek again because of that baby under the corn. There were sacks of corn and corn falling … and suddenly in that big bed of Mamma’s and Luigi’s I began to shriek, like in the Maison Dieu. I shrieked and shrieked. ‘Why? Why – when it’s all over?’ Mamma and the midwife couldn’t understand, nor could Luigi. ‘Cara, don’t, don’t, cara mia.’ In the end they had to take the baby away and Luigi held me till I went to sleep.

  ‘The first son of my first son, the eldest of the eldest,’ said Mamma. The eldest – and the only – I’m not going to let anyone do this to me again, ever.

  The funny thing is that if it, ‘he’, I suppose I must call it that, had been helpless like Rico, even a hunchback like Renée or a dwarf like my Pom-Pom, I would have loved it, but this Giovanni-Battista Giuliano – yes, I suppose I must say ‘him’ – was beautiful from the beginning, as beautiful as Luigi with the same black curly hair. ‘It’ll fall off,’ said the midwife. ‘It won’t,’ said Mamma. His eyes were blue. ‘But they’ll soon be black,’ and his creased face was already rosy.

  I looked at him once. That was enough. ‘You’re not going to hold your son!’

  ‘Ugh!’

  Mamma showed him round the whole village. ‘Giovanni-Battista Giuliano – eldest of my eldest.’

  ‘Vivi – he’s crying, Vivi.’ Poor Luigi, he’s so puzzled. I shrug. ‘She’ll find someone to feed him,’ and she has; that great tub Angelina, bursting out of her bodice. ‘And you! Good for nothing.’ Mamma Mamma spits at me.

  ‘You don’t know what I’m good for,’ and I go on polishing my nails.

  ‘Lying there like a princess, you lazy slut. I was always up cooking dinner, making pasta, the next day.’

  ‘Which is why you look seventy, not forty.’ I said it sweetly, which made her angrier. ‘No thank you. I’ll get up when I’m ready’ – and when I’m ready, – only I don’t say this aloud – I shall take Luigi away. As for that morpion – that crab-louse – Angelina can have him.

  For Lise, the thought of Vivi, Luigi and Giovanni-Battista Giuliano had been like a little flame of warmth, of reassurance in those days. I don’t expect I have ever done any good to anyone but at least I did that, she used to think.

  ‘Yes. You did that!’ the inexorable voice came back.

  Put it behind you, Lise was able now to command herself and succeeded now and then. There had been enough – too much – of Vivi, Lise had thought there had been enough of Lucette too, Lucette and her endless questions.

  ‘It’s like a boarding-school here, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, if it’s a school where no one puts you – you put yourself; and from most schools you can’t go away the moment you want. Here you can.’

  ‘Why do you have to stay so long before they make you proper?’

  ‘Because it takes a long time to see if it endures. The life might come to bore you if you haven’t a vocation; there is nothing more boring than trying to live a contemplative life unless you are a contemplative – which means prayer, by yourself, Lucette.’

  ‘But if I can’t pray, there are other things. You pick gooseberries. I have seen you. I can pick gooseberr
ies. I can do that as well as anyone.’

  ‘I’m sure you can. But we don’t just pick gooseberries. It sounds impertinent, but we pick them to help in the work of God.’

  ‘Merde!’ But when Lise came to think of it, the questions had ceased lately. Talking to Lucette had suddenly become like talking to an ordinary person on an ordinary level and, ‘I thought she had given up the idea,’ Lise told the Prioress. ‘On her last two visits, she hasn’t mentioned it.’

  ‘Which is the very time when it has possibly taken root.’

  ‘But Lucette! That funny little thing.’

  ‘God often likes funny little things. They tell me at the hostel, and the hospital, that she loves, no, venerates responsibility, and when she is given any, carries it out as gravely and carefully as a child.’

  ‘If only she can stay like that,’ said Soeur Théodore and sighed.

  ‘I think you may have been privileged, Lise,’ said the Prioress. ‘You may have been the instrument of a vocation.’

  ‘I can’t believe I had anything to do with it.’

  ‘No? How many people accept what it means to be an instrument? Have the patience? Particularly,’ added the Prioress with her direct gaze, ‘when you did it against your will.’

  ‘Ma Mère … I don’t know what to say or do!’

  ‘You do. Keep out of her way – and pray.’

  ‘Nuns are always trying to get hold of you.’ It was not only Lucette who said that ‘everyone knows it.’

  ‘I wish,’ Lise said to Bella, ‘that mythical “everyone” could know what you have to go through before you are accepted, even as a postulant.’

  There was a rule in the Constitutions that applied to every stage in the religious life, ‘every rung of the ladder,’ as Bella said. She used to sing to her guitar in her deep warm voice the old spiritual:

  We are climbin’ Jacob’s ladder, ladder

  We are climbin’ Jacob’s ladder

  We are climbin’ Jacob’s ladder

  For glory of the Lord.

  The ladder was steep to climb, ‘and it gets stiffer and stiffer,’ moaned Bella.

  To become a postulant, each of them had first to provide some worldly things – ‘we are still in the world, though people talk as if we weren’t,’ said the Prioress. Birth certificates if possible – some of those street births were never registered, nor was baptism or confirmation – and a medical one was needed ‘to show you are strong enough in every way to stand the life.’

  There was a questionnaire to be answered, in writing again if possible, and each woman or girl had to sign an assurance that she would not expect any payment for the work she would do in the House. ‘We come here to give, not get.’ She had to make an inventory of all her possessions, usually they were meagre enough, which was signed by her Responsable, and she herself had to write, or dictate and sign, a formal letter asking for entry. Then everything was sent to the Mother-General, head of the Congregation, who would lay the matter before her Council so that they could vote. ‘That is on the worldly side,’ Lise was to tell Marc, ‘and, on the spiritual, if the answer is “Yes”, you make a three-day retreat, so that you can be quite, quite sure you want to go on. You see we are thoroughly sieved, and have to sieve ourselves, which is more difficult.’

  She, with Bella and José, journeyed to the mother house away in the French Alps. ‘Right across France,’ said Bella. ‘Funny,’ she was to say, ‘I never travelled so much until I tried to be a nun.’ Bella did not know it but she was to go to an American house one day. When they arrived, José went straight to the novitiate proper while Lise and Bella joined the petites soeurs.

  ‘There used to be two ways, two paths,’ Lise told Marc. ‘One for the réhabilitées, another for the sisters who came in the ordinary way – ordinary for nuns, that is.’

  ‘So there was a difference.’

  ‘For a time,’ said Lise, ‘but of course no réhabilitée knew what another had done, nor did the sisters. For the réhabilitées it was longer, that was all – and in those days, I think they needed that; there were not the opportunities, the care there is now in prisons, nor for prostitutes if they wanted to get away. In those days they could come to Béthanie as aspirants, then become a petite soeur as they were called. A petite soeur probably had an easier time than those in the novitiate proper but, though they wore the habit – it was black – they were set apart. Yet, even then, they could eventually merge with the others, going up to become a postulant.’ Lise did not mention that she had spent three years as a petite soeur tertiaire before she and Bella went up. ‘We called it “going up” because then the novitiate was on the top floor of that huge building and as the would-be postulant came up the staircase we used to sing the Magnificat.’

  ‘It was a big jump,’ said Lise, ‘exchanging Soeur Théodore who had come with the petites soeurs for Soeur Raymonde, Responsable of the Novitiate.’

  No two nuns could have been greater contrasts: Soeur Théodore was small and as round as the round horn spectacles she wore, behind which the eyes often had a kindly twinkle. There was something comfortable about Soeur Théodore; Soeur Raymonde, far younger, was statuesque, austere and exacting, yet once they grew to know her, she cast something like a spell. ‘She makes you taller than you are,’ said one of the other girls. Soeur Raymonde had, in particular, a curious influence on Bella, not curbing her but somehow teaching her respect. She never flinches, thought Lise, and is never ruffled; perhaps that’s why we’re half afraid of her. It was no light thing to go through the hands of Soeur Raymonde.

  ‘But she brings you up and up,’ said Bella, ‘higher than you think you could go.’

  After six months, perhaps even a year, as a postulant, came noviceship, an even more serious step: a vote would be taken from every professed nun in the house after a private report was made by each to the Prioress. ‘I’m terrified,’ and Bella rolled her eyes.

  Though José failed the test and left, Lise and Bella were accepted to their own surprise. ‘There was a ceremony,’ Lise told Marc, ‘not as ceremonial as it was in other Orders at that time, when the postulant was dressed as a bride, but it was held in chapel and we knelt before the aumônier, then went to the back of the chapel where the habit was laid out on a table – at last a white tunic, scapular, white stockings, brown belt and shoes.’

  ‘Either you feel you’re wearing fancy dress,’ Soeur Raymonde had said, ‘or it fits you so comfortably you think you have been wearing it always, which is a good sign.’ For Lise it felt as if these were the clothes she had been looking for all her life, ‘and the veil should hide my scar for ever. Deo Gratias,’ said Lise.

  They changed in a side room and Soeur Raymonde cut Lise’s hair. ‘You can’t wear that heavy coil under a veil,’ and at once her head felt lighter. ‘You’ll have to shave mine,’ said Bella, ‘or my veil will stand up as if it were on springs,’ but with a species of crew-cut she looked like a strong boy.

  ‘Nowadays the ceremony is utterly simple, held in a room in the novitiate and, thank heaven,’ said Lise, ‘there is only one path now, one way. The name “Petites Soeurs” has been abolished, as has the black dress; aspirants and postulants alike wear their own clothes and when, as novices, they are given the habit, it is identical with that of a fully professed nun. White veils didn’t suit some of the older, sometimes ravaged, faces,’ Lise did not add, ‘like mine’, ‘but we are still given new names – our names in religion.’

  Bella became Soeur Marie Isabelle. ‘Lise will be the second name I have discarded,’ said Lise.

  ‘Why not go back to Elizabeth? Be Soeur Elizabeth or Marie Elizabeth?’ But Elizabeth seemed a phantom. ‘How strange names are,’ said Lise. ‘You would think any name would do – when you are going to efface yourself,’ but it still seemed of the utmost importance. ‘Could I be Soeur Marie Lise de la Croix?’ That was what Lise had meant to say. How then did it come out as ‘Marie Lise du Rosaire?’ – of the Rosary?

  ‘It seems I am
never to get away from it,’ said Lise.

  Luigi and I have come back to Francé with our baby – I can’t spell all his fancy names, wrote Vivi. Oh, Madame Lise, you would love him with his big eyes.

  His eyes are like Luigi’s, dark brown and trusting, she could have added, except when he sees me, then he cries. It’s funny how babies know far more than grown ups. The Morpion knows perfectly well I don’t like him. Luigi hates me to call him Morpion. ‘Cara, that’s a disgusting thing! It’s horrible to call him that!’ but I think he’s horrible so I do,

  but she wrote,

  How glad I am, Madame, to get away from Luigi’s Mamma with her nag, nag, nag. Isn’t this my baby, not hers? Luigi can’t bear to let him out of his sight, but he has to – Luigi is a long-distance lorry driver now …

  When she read that, the first apprehension had stirred in Lise; it meant that Luigi was away two or three days at a time, two or three nights. Vivi seemed content but …

  The house was at Ecommoy, in the Sarthe, a good centre as it was near Le Mans where Luigi picked up plenty of work. In that hot summer Luigi came to the Rue Duchesne whenever his lorry happened to be anywhere near Paris. From the breast pocket of his shirt he would take a new snapshot of the baby. ‘Not another picture,’ said Marcelline, but she herself had put a photograph of Giovanni-Battista Giuliano, naked but for his vest, at the foot of her Madonna. Luigi kept his photographs in a heart-shaped frame; on the reverse side was Vivi. He always had to show them, too, something he had bought for the house. ‘It’s one in a row but there’s an upstairs and a downstairs,’ Luigi boasted. ‘It has a shower and the kitchen has butane gas, but it’s so small I can hardly turn round in it.’

  ‘You turn round in it.’ Marcelline was shocked. ‘Vivi should do that when you work so hard.’

  ‘Oh well,’ said Luigi.

  Once he brought in a box of geranium seedlings from the market. ‘I’m going to plant them in our front garden,’ and the next time he came: ‘You know those geraniums! They’ve turned out so fine I’m going to put them in for the flower-show they’re holding at the château. They might win a first prize.’