The Waste Land

by Simon Acland

  The Abbot stopped abruptly, perhaps realising that his enthusiasm was running away. It seemed to me almost that he was unaccustomed to speaking for so long.

  “You must go now. Say goodbye…for the last time.”

  I hesitated, unsure how to behave and fearing embarrassment in front of this forbidding figure. But then emotion overcame my reticence and I threw myself into my mother’s arms. I felt sure then that I would never again feel their embrace. I caught a murmur of maternal lamentation. We kissed. I fought to hold back my tears. I pulled away, hoping to see my mother’s cheeks wet, but her self-control was unbroken. Then the inner gate opened. I passed through into a strange new world where the future held unknown tests and challenges. Glancing back, I saw my mother now in a swoon on the floor. I felt guilty at leaving her thus, but also strangely gladdened at last to see such a clear demonstration of affection. Before I could consider further, and before my gratitude for this proof of my mother’s love could turn to shame for my own selfishness, the door shut with a firm thud.

  With it closed the chapter of my childhood.

  ST LAZARUS’ COLLEGE

  “Now do you see why I am so excited?”

  The Research Assistant was perched uncomfortably in the Modern Language Tutor’s untidy rooms on the only upright chair which was not piled with books and papers. The perpetrator of this mess was hiding in a greasy brown velvet wing chair, a dry martini in one hand and a half-smoked cigarette in the other. He was carefully positioned to the right of the younger man so that he did not have to see the awful mark which scarred the far side of his face. From here, he thought, the fellow looks almost human. This uncharacteristically compassionate reflection was broken by the harsh, nasal voice emanating from the object of his pity.

  “It must have been Chrétien’s Urtext. There are just too many similarities with Perceval. It can’t be a coincidence. Take the death of the father and the brothers for a start, the way their eyes are pecked out by crows and ravens. Then there are the words the mother uses to address her son – biax fix – dear Son – and her swoon when he leaves her. Later in the manuscript you’ll find that the young man’s description of Blanche follows Chrétien almost word for word – sorry, the other way round I mean. I tell you, Chrétien copies the young man’s description nearly verbatim. That Hugh must have been quite a poet himself, you know. Near the very end of the manuscript he describes the falling of the wounded goose in the snow with exquisite lyricism. Chrétien must have liked the image and lifted it.”

  The Research Assistant leaned forward, bringing the scarred side of his face into view. The Modern Languages Tutor shuddered, causing the long tail of ash on his cigarette to fall to the floor. He thought of the lower body wound suffered by the boy Hugh’s father, his unasked questions, the lands going to waste. That was the Fisher King all right. Yes, perhaps the Research Assistant was on to something. His attention was dragged back again by the unpleasant nasal voice.

  “I must be allowed to publish. I must. It will be the most important advance in grail scholarship for decades. It is my big chance. For once and for all the arguments about the legend’s source material will be laid to rest. Forget Loomis and the others. My reputation will be made.”

  The Modern Languages Tutor sighed and took a last long drag on his cigarette. He drained his martini to signal the end of the interview.

  “You know perfectly well that the Master will never allow it. He won’t give you the manuscript back. Not for a long time after his precious bestseller is finished at any rate. I am almost as keen as you – after all I am your supervisor. My name would be on the publication in front of yours. We would share the glory. But for the time being I just don’t see what we can do.”

  The Research Assistant’s eyes widened and then narrowed, their expression of twisted surprise turning to ill-concealed hatred. He stood abruptly and left the room.

  CHAPTER TWO

  BETWEEN TWO LIVES

  Were you patient, I could tell you much about my years at Cluny. I might detail the hardships imposed by the rules of silence, obedience and humility. At the start my faith was so strong that I could ignore those privations. But I will spare you and provide just as much of an account as you will need to follow the rest of my history. Indeed all you really need to know is that I acquired the normal skills of a monk, learning to read and write in the languages required to understand the Holy Scriptures.

  That door closed me out of my childhood and into a prison of relentless routine. My mother’s solemn words about the need to save my father and brothers from eternal damnation echoed and re-echoed in my head. So I prayed to God for their salvation with all the fervour that I could muster. My unquestioning faith carried me through those early years of monastic life. But even so, sometimes when I thought of my father and brothers, my mind slipped from careful prayer to careless memories of the joys that life had once offered but which were now denied to me, and had to be dragged protesting back.

  Under our saintly abbot, the regime at Cluny was not intentionally cruel. Only later in my life was I fated to discover and understand the real meaning, the deliberate nature of true cruelty. Hard was an better word for my life at Cluny. The timetable was hard, starting well before dawn for Nocturns, the first of eight long services on a normal day. The work was hard, whether in the gardens and fields, in the kitchen and refectory, or on the building site of the new church whose incomplete arches had fancifully echoed to me the ribs of Jonah’s whale. The very fabric of the abbey was hard, right down to the thin straw-stuffed mattress at the end of the long stone dormitory on which I laid my weary body after Compline. But normally I was too tired to notice.

  The communal life of the abbey permitted no privacy but created isolation. The only relationship that counted was with God. We monks might as well have been ants in a heap, workers in a common cause yes, but showing no more apparent feeling for each other than a busy insect. Our hands were our antennae, for we communicated by sign, not sound. It was unusual for me to speak to another human being above twice a week. Since that was in the confessional with the Abbot, or in his absence with the Major Prior, it could hardly count as a familic interaction. My voice’s sole purpose was to praise God in prayer or song. As one of the boys in the abbey, ranking below even novices in the hierarchy, my main duty was to sing in the chapel. I gained some solace from the plaintive sound of my clear treble reverberating beneath the vaulted ceiling. But there were times when that echo brought back the horror of my mother’s screams ringing around the courtyard of our old home.

  Loneliness drove me to draw what pleasure I could from learning. My routine every day save Sundays and Feast Days was to attend the library with the other boys immediately after Prime and to spend the morning under the tuition of Brother Anselm, the Chief Librarian. The library held a spectacular collection of works – indeed in all my travels I would only see one better. The Holy Scripture, of course, was its cornerstone. It formed the foundation of my faith. Then there were works of history and philosophy by all the great Christian writers – Saints Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome and Gregory and the Venerable Bede. Their wisdom – the great Augustine’s in particular – cemented my belief so that I thought it could never be shaken. I also read some of their earlier counterparts – Cicero, and fragments of Aristotle translated into Latin by Boethius. A few works even still survived in their original Greek; all this made a vast storehouse of knowledge to be pillaged to fill my empty young mind.

  Naturally, before I could savour these delicious works I had to learn to read and to understand the languages in which they were written. This skill came quickly to me. Perhaps in some way the linguistic challenge became a conduit for my dammed-up energy. Perhaps I was unusually gifted. In any case, before long I had outstripped the other boys, even those who had been at Cluny for several years more than I. In the outside world this might have earned me respect at the price of jealousy. In the abbey’s superficially unemotional atmosphere I could scarcely tell how t
he others felt towards me, and I scarcely bothered to care. How different to life at home, where my brothers’ feelings had been communicated in an instant with a blow, a laugh, a shout or a cuff.

  We used Latin of course as our daily language in chapel and in readings to avoid the confusing Babel of our different vernaculars, for the fame of Cluny attracted devotees from far and wide. Regular usage soon made the Roman language as natural to me as my Northern French. But I also culled some Greek from the fragmentary texts that survived in the library. Perhaps if I had had knowledge of how this would determine my fate in the years ahead, I would have been more cautious about acquiring this unusual scholarship.

  The library soon became my favourite place. I enjoyed the relative comfort provided by the thick walls, for they kept out some of the heat in summer and excluded some of the winter cold. I warmed to the yellow pools of friendly candlelight and the mysteries they created of the dark corners beyond their reach. I was soothed by the hushed turning of parchment and the scratching of quills in the scriptorium. In later life, for better or for worse, the gentle musty smell surrendered by ancient documents alongside their secrets always carried me back to those days at Cluny.

  When one day flows after another with little change of routine, when a week, a month, a year drifts sluggishly by, an unusual event stands out like a great rock rearing up from a quiet river. So it was when I received a summons from the Abbot. Unaccustomed emotions – surprise, interest, curiosity – ran across the face of the monk who signed me the message. I felt the same expressions skating over my own, pursued by nervous apprehension. Pressing my clammy palms tightly together to prevent them shaking, I examined my conscience, but could think of no sin deserving of punishment. I hurried to the spartan room that served the holy head of my order as bedchamber and study. Outside the oak door I paused to compose myself and to steady my breathing. Then I knocked.

  Inside I heard a single word. I pushed the door open and found myself caught in the Abbot’s piercing gaze. I felt him measuring me, perhaps against his memory of the boy he had welcomed three years before. I wondered what he saw in my face. He had the better of me, for I had caught only indistinct glimpses of a pale oval reflection in the abbey fish pool, or stretched and bent in the silver chalices that I polished in the sacristy. I felt a sudden flash of resentment that I could not even know my own appearance. Then the Abbot’s face brightened in a gentle smile. Whatever he had seen in me must have pleased him. Warm compassion emanated towards me, and I relaxed. He made the Sign of the Cross in blessing and soothed me with his tone of ethereal spirituality, so familiar from the confessional.

  “Brother Hugh, I find it hard to believe that you have now been with us for three full years. You have learnt so much in that time. I can only say that your progress has been exemplary.”

  I stood straighter in pleasure and surprise. The Abbot’s smile broadened.

  “Indeed, Brother Anselm tells me not just of your talents in Latin. He says that your mastery of Greek is now unequalled in the abbey – praise indeed from a monk as learned as he in an ancient scholarship, and one so nearly lost to us. I hear your knowledge of the Scriptures and many important Commentaries is excellent too. Brother Anselm has asked me to appoint you as his junior assistant. I told him I would be pleased to accede to his request, so long as he would spare me some of your time to perform occasional secretarial duties for me. Well done. Your mother would indeed be proud of you.”

  I remembered the rule of humility and fought to cover my rising pride. Still, I could do nothing to hold back the warmth that flushed up my neck. The Abbot seemed to read my mind.

  “Your satisfaction is natural. But you must remember that your achievement has only been made possible by God’s grace. Remember the parable of the talents. Continue to put to work the skills that Our Lord has given to you for His greater glory.”

  My pride now dampened, I signed my thanks and backed out of the room.

  As junior assistant to Brother Anselm, one of my new tasks was to find texts requested by monks for their reading. Occasionally, with the Librarian’s approval, I might even recommend works to them. This created for me the opportunity – indeed the duty – to improve my own knowledge of the full contents of the library, and to extend my own reading material. I began to use this privilege to follow through lines of argument in one work back to the philosopher who had provoked the original controversy. So from Saint Augustine’s treatise De libero arbitrio about free choice and the origin of evil, I was able to reach back to the work which prompted it – the Enneads of Plotinus. Thus I learned that Saint Augustine’s view that the weakness of the soul formed the root of all evil had emerged as a counter-argument to Plotinus’s opinion that wickedness began in matter. Each scholar put a powerful case. I could of course not doubt the great Augustine, but I did gain the first glimmerings of understanding that a different point of view might be arguable. I realised that perhaps if I had been able to read Pelagius’s lost works in the original – lost I assumed because they were nowhere to be found in the great library – rather than just Saint Augustine’s refutation of those views – I might have wrestled still more with those awkward contradictions in the Augustinian belief that Man possessed free will in spite of God’s omniscience.

  Concerns thus began to creep into my awakening mind. Once unshakeable certainties came under threat. I longed to express my disquiet in the confessional with Abbot Hugh. Week after week I attended my interview with him determined to pour out my worries. Then I looked up at his ascetic profile as he knelt in front of me, and was unable to summon the courage to do so. Instead I resorted to muttering banalities about how I had allowed my mind to wander in chapel, or been unable to control my greed by longing for an extra helping of soup at supper. Afterwards I would go away more troubled than ever, my discomfort now mixed with dissatisfaction at my own timidity and lack of frankness.

  Little by little, as I carried out more secretarial work for the Abbot, our relationship tightened. Eventually the day came when my courage did not fail me and my doubts poured out.

  “My Father Abbot, my mind is troubled. Saint Augustine tells us to greatly cherish intellect. He says we should apply reason to our faith. Yet when I do so I get confused. There are so many conflicting arguments. If God is all-powerful and all-knowing, why does he allow evil in the world? How can I have free will of my own if God knows what I am going to do before I have even done it?”

  Lesser men might have belittled my worries and told me brusquely to limit the range of my reading. But I thought I detected in my Father Confessor’s sighs that my own adolescent intellectual stirrings were not totally unfamiliar to him. He turned his wise eyes towards me and this time I was able to meet and hold his penetrating gaze.

  “Hugh, my son, philosophy is no substitute for faith. It never can be. The true love of God counts for more than all the metaphysical hair-splitting in the world. Remember… remember that there is no absolute truth outside the Holy Scripture. Even the wisest commentator falls far, far short of the all-encompassing wisdom of God. Read and believe. Do not always expect to understand.”

  For a while I gained comfort from the absolute security of his belief. And I think that the Abbot was satisfied that he had been able to return my searching mind to the straight and narrow path, and that I had moved on along it. The tenor of our confessional reverted to the uneventful. He entrusted me with still more secretarial work and ended the sharp looks of concern that once shot from under his bushy eyebrows to discomfit me with their searching diagnosis of my spiritual health.

  And indeed I had moved on. In the library I had discovered reading material of a quite different nature. One of my duties was to take books from the shelves one by one, to dust them off and clean them carefully before replacing them. My cycle brought me to a forgotten row which was seldom visited, to judge by the thickness of the dust lying there. I tut-tutted to myself under my breath as I took the obscure volumes carefully down, nevertheless throwing
up enough of a cloud to make myself choke. As I stifled my coughs, hoping that I had not disturbed my brothers in the library, I noticed that there was another row of volumes tucked behind the first. They were considerably smaller in size. I assumed that they had been placed there to save space. With idle interest at my discovery I pulled one off the shelf and wiped the dust from its cover. I opened it and inside I made out the title ‘P. Ovidi Nasonis – Metamorphoses’. Curious, I rolled around my tongue those unforgettable opening lines:

  In nova fert animus mutates dicere formas

  corpora; di, coeptis (nam vos mutastis et illas)

  adspirate meis primaque ab origine mundi

  ad mea perpetual deducite tempora carmen!

  My soul bids me sing of body shapes transformed;

  O Gods, you wrought those changes, now shape

  my task with inspiration and spin out my song

  from creation onwards to my modern times!

  The magic of the ancient gods transported me in a flash to another world. A window opened in the dull grey walls that enclosed me, revealing a thrilling universe bursting with colour. Shaking with excitement and sudden guilt I pushed the book back onto the shelf and hid it again in its double rank. I hardly knew that I had returned to my desk. Librarian Anselm signed a question toward me.

  “Brother, do you have a fever?”

  I struggled to pull myself back into the real world. For sure I did feel feverish, hot and cold at the same time. I composed my trembling hands enough to indicate in response that a long night of prayer had left me tired and weak. But I just boiled in an irresistible frenzy to read the book that I had found. I wrestled with the problem of how to take it unseen out of the library, utterly ignoring the dreadful consequences of discovery.