by John Brooke
And now struggling out of the water, close to dead.
As he lies at her feet he finds the strength to reach and touch her coat.
Ondine kneels, then lies down beside him, accepting him. He nestles against her warm belly there on the beach and she combs back his hair with her fingers, cleans the sand and seaweed from his face. She knows him; it’s Yann, the brother who had gone to war, her “twin.” For some reason he loves her. Ondine knows by the way he touches her. And Dorise has gone, the sea has settled, the clouds are breaking up, the spectral green of the aurora fills the sky completely and makes the water shine. She and Yann listen to the bells on the lowing friends surrounding them. There’s a face in the firmament: a woman, huge, watching them, pleased that it should happen. The wind hums on and on.
2.
Next morning Ondine wears the high coiffe to mass. All the women do. And, like their sisters on the mainland, the women of Sein have, in honour of Sunday, exchanged the plain grey tablier for aprons embroidered with bead work and colourful strands of ribbon. Dorise has put on a loosely netted black cord shawl over a blue velvet tunic top. Angélique wears a blue-violet amethyst in a gold-bordered cameo. After mass, walking up the lane toward the head of the island, these traces of colour are vibrant set against the stark stone cemetery wall.
The day, which started bright, is turning blustery. They walk head-on into northwesterly gusts. Ondine clutches at her unwieldy headpiece to protect it from buckling. Neither Angélique nor Dorise raises a hand to shield hers, so she cautiously lets go. The starched lace holds. Still, it’s like wearing a sail... A lightness has remained in her head and the morning appears with striking clarity; but she’s anxious, needing to say something about what she had seen or dreamt the night before — not at all sure, so vivid had her adventure been. Ondine looks out past the meagre gardens and the small fields beyond where barley and potatoes are grown, to where a gathering of cattle grazes on a yard-sized pasture under the greying sky. She sees a flat, barren piece of earth bounded by jagged rock and black water. No one should live here. The stone is too hard and the sea too sinister. And the light, Ar Men, standing in the waves: this morning it’s a drab and lonely signpost, halfway between here and nowhere, waiting for Saint Anthony to find it. “So isolated,” she muses.
Angélique says, “It’s what we know.”
“I think purgatory must look like this.”
“Qui voit Sein, voit sa fin,” is the defiant reply. “That’s what they say, isn’t it?”
Ondine nods. Yes, she has heard them say that: He who sees Sein sees his demise. Then she tells Angélique, “Last night I went to the beach. With Dorise and Céleste... I met Yann, your son.”
Angélique turns, bleached eyes probing. Ondine, in turn, looks to Dorise. To back her up? Dorise lowers her eyes in the submissive half-smile that marked her in the kitchen the previous evening. She walks on ahead to loose Céleste, who has been tethered since breakfast.
“It was a dream,” says Angélique, expressionless, like a judge.
“It was like a dream. I saw a woman. And the most beautiful sky.”
“Mari Morgan.”
“Who is Mari Morgan? I felt she loved me. Both of us...Yann and me.”
“She’s a messenger, a deliverer. Like Saint Christopher. She shows us the way to our fate.”
“Your death?”
“No — our fate. Our reason for living. We don’t die...although most of us have to go through death to find our fate.”
Ondine tries to weigh what she’s hearing. “I don’t know what that means,” she answers.
“Were you frightened?” asks Angélique.
“No, I wasn’t. Not at all.”
“I don’t know what it means, either...not for you. Each of us sees a different spark out there in the night. Each one welcomes a different sailor...”
Ondine’s look of disbelief is spontaneous.
“But didn’t Pauline Brekelian tell you about these things? About Celtic ways?”
There’s impatience in Angélique’s voice. She’s angry. Or worried? It’s not clear to a visitor. Ondine shakes her head, wary: some things; not these things. “Is it wrong, my...my dream?”
Angélique ignores the question. Walks slowly on. “We believe a person tries her life several times. There is no punishment, there is only the next life, and the next one after that, on and on until it’s right. Then you don’t have to come back. Then you’ve met your fate.” Her brow is knitted up as she stares at the ground in front of her. It’s as though she were explaining it to herself, insisting, “You have to have an active spirit! You have to keep going forward, and strive to be good to finally find it... Now Yann.” She stops on the sand.
And is suddenly sobbing into clenched fists, almost silent, but deeply, her shoulders racked with the exertion, the tendons in the back of her neck pinched tight.
“Angélique?” Ondine is frightened of the pent-up forces inside this woman. Yet she is not rebuffed as she puts both arms around Angélique’s broad back and holds her. “What is it? Tell me, please...” She feels the pain of grief releasing itself from inside the woman’s heart, hears the meek, girlish weeping... It doesn’t last long. Ondine becomes aware of the wind again. “Are you all right?” Loosening her arms, easing away.
“He’s been killed.”
“Yann?”
“There’ll be another letter for me when the next boat comes. But not from him.”
Everything in Ondine’s heart denies it. No! What are you telling me? “I don’t understand.”
Behind the teary pools, Angélique’s eyes flash half-bright. She points toward the water. Céleste stands on the crest of a cluster of rocks. Dorise, her face transfixed in a dumb smile, is pointing too. It takes Ondine a moment — she’s inclined to smile as well at the sight of a perching cow... It suddenly comes into unmistakable focus: the shell and brow of a turtle. Céleste is showing her la Tortue, a rough megalithic figure, now undeniable.
A cow standing on a turtle? After the wonder, Ondine feels confusion verging on fear beginning to churn in her gut. “She was leading us. It was Céleste who took us here to the beach. She...and the rest of them...” throwing a glance in the direction of the heath, where eight other cows feed; “they brought Yann in through the storm with their lights. Their dance.”
Angélique Ménou nods, confirming this notion, but offers no explanation. Instead she says, “I’m going back. I want a drink.” She walks away from Ondine, hunched and tired as she steps up the sandy incline to the gravel path.
Ondine catches up with her. “Please...you have to tell me what happened!”
“I don’t know what happened. He’s dead. That’s all.”
“No! You don’t know that. I’m the one who saw it! I was with him. He didn’t die. I was holding him! Me! What happened to me?” And now anger supplants her fear. “You have no right to put me in the middle of your...your — ”
“My spell?”
“What is it that you drink!” Ondine is shouting at her. “What did you do to me! They told me about you!” Angélique trudges on, steely faced, ignoring. “Stop and face me!”
She does. “Of course they told you about me.” The wind folds itself around her voice, calm, low, implacable... “About all of us. They always have. That we’re witches? That we transform ourselves and control the wind?” It seems to Ondine, searching her eyes, struggling to fathom friend or foe, that the woman is mocking, bitter. “They tell stories but they don’t tell what they mean. That’s the shame of it. Our stories are their stories. We have the same blood. But over there, they’re stuck fast on the wheel, trapped by time and all its busy circumstance. Like your mother? I’d think yes... Here on Sein we’re almost lost, as close as you can get to nowhere...but at least we’re still partially free of the things that make them lose sight of themselves. That’s the most important thing: we don’t have to live in thrall to time. Time is in us, and if you believe it — and live it, the stories remain
pure. And your soul will find what it’s looking for.”
Ondine complains, “But I’m not one of you!”
“Something in your life brought you here. You saw what you saw.” Angélique shrugs; it is not hers to explain. She walks on.
But it is. It has to be. Ondine feels used. Tricked. “Is it a drug?” Demanding, grabbing Angélique’s arm and holding tight.
Angélique makes a sour face. “It’s a drink,” is her curt reply. But she has to tell and they both know it. She frees herself from Ondine’s fingers. “It’s just barley and the mould from the little bit of wild rye we manage to keep. And apples, from them...” looking eastward with ironic eyes, “for immortality. And sweetness. You want a person to like the taste of it.”
“Yes...?” Tell me more.
“We call it Maeve. She was one of us, a Celtic queen. Her son was a brown bull calf who defended her against her enemies, but then he killed himself by smashing his brains out on a rock, maddened with pride for all his prowess and bravery... I thought you said you weren’t afraid.”
Ondine won’t speak till she knows more.
“We’ve always used the rye fungus. It’s called ergot. It helps ease a heavy menstruation and it brings contractions, to stop the bleeding after a birth. I’m sure they’ve used it where you come from. Your mother never said?” Ondine shakes her head. And Angélique shakes hers: a mirror filled with things felt but never known. “Well, it has always been there and it has always helped us...helped us be women, you could say. If you leave it a bit longer, and cure it right, with some barley or potatoes, well, then it helps us in other ways.”
“How?”
“Visions. It shows us what we need to see to go back inside the stories that are in our blood — so we can be who we are and not who the priests or the politicians or the wars or all the machines would have us be.”
Ondine has no reply to that... They walk back past the cemetery. Ondine looks behind to see Dorise and Céleste following in a meandering way, just now ascending to the path by the sea wall. “Does Dorise know all this?”
“Yes. But differently. She’s only fifteen...hasn’t been with a man yet. She’s not a traveller like you. But she’s the one who gave me the clue.”
“What clue?”
“When she asked your birthday and said you and Yann were twins...I knew I should give you a sip of Maeve.”
“And you think he’s dead.”
“I know he is.” To her, it’s a matter of fact.
Ondine bites her lip as she hears the truth in this woman’s connection to the ground where they walk, and to the sea surrounding. “I’m sorry,” she murmurs.
They return to the dim salon, unlit and even more shadowy on a cloudy morning than the previous night. Angélique pours another small glass of the liquor and passes it.
Ondine asks, “Why are you giving me this?”
“Last night was for me... Today it’s for you. But you won’t see Yann again.” She looks sadly down into her small cup. Raising it, she sips; then raising it again, this time to Ondine in a toast, she swallows the rest in one shot. She closes her eyes and relaxes into her chair. From behind those eyes she asks, “Don’t you want any?”
Ondine wonders if last night’s confiding and trust had been real at all. Tomorrow morning she would be on the boat, headed back...over there. “Do I need it?” She’s still wearing the tall coiffe. She reaches up and touches it, running her fingers along the grain of lace. Turning to the blue-gowned Madonna in the corner, she looks for help in the thing she knows: “What about her? I thought you loved her. I thought she inspired you...your beautiful work. Aren’t you ashamed to betray her with this? I...I don’t feel right.” Staring at the drink, unclear, unsure; afraid.
“I do love her,” says Angélique. “Would I allow her in my house if I didn’t? We all do. It was us women who carried the stones to build her chapel. She’s one of us.”
No... It feels wrong, a sin, to say that, then drink this thing they called Maeve.
“Don’t hide from what you saw...what you heard,” is the woman’s challenge. “There is a second existence. It’s beautiful...no?”
Leaving Ondine saddened because she’s unable to turn away, unable to not listen.
And Angélique watching as if she knows well the curse of mixed emotions. “Don’t feel guilty, Ondine. That’s the last thing she wants of us.” Gazing at the mournful icon in the corner, she says, “She had her miraculous child far from here, but her name, Mary — she comes from the sea.” Now sighing heavily through her nose, gross but endearing, almost a chortle; “...in a way, those grim grey Jesuits brought her back to us when they finally found us and taught us to sing their songs. Did Pauline Brekelian ever tell you the Creator’s holy spirit is female and that she moves on the face of the waters? Did she ever mention that Celtic heaven is the sun itself, caused by the shining together of all pure souls? Le Sid. She never told you of Le Sid?”
“No...” She never told me. Nor did my mother. No one ever did.
“The church of Rome took away the beliefs but it left the lore. But a truly religious person heeds the stories and songs as closely as the scriptures because they existed before the scriptures were written and they remain after the scriptures are gone... First there were nine priestesses, right here on Sein, all of them virgins. They could tell the future...and they could control the wind. Now any man worth his salt would try to make it through the storms to find out from those virgins... No?”
“I’m not a virgin,” whispers Ondine. A girl and her sister out travelling alone will find boys and men wherever they want to, and have some fun before they go their separate ways.
“Virgin has little to do with your body. That’s the one the priests invented. It’s how you think, and how you feel. Isolated. Self-reliant. I think you might be.”
Ondine looks at the glass in front of her as her life is being described. All that searching for the happy thing she had heard in her mother’s voice... This woman was giving her something that was looming, inevitable, in her life.
“Between here and heaven is a vast purgatory, but it’s not the dismal place you learned about at school. You saw it — in the north. It’s a place of hope, a beautiful emerald sky, where the dead are gathered and re-formed, to start again. That’s the real story, the deeper one, the one that’s full of life — and I have no qualms if I drink to celebrate it. I need to celebrate it...it’s my life. It might be yours as well.”
Why? asks Ondine once more...asks it with her eyes as she picks up the glass.
“Because she loves you. The goddess loves you. Look at Céleste: she takes you out and shows you around...la Tortue.”
So Ondine tastes another sip of Maeve. And she sits with Angélique...and Dorise when she joins them, until mother and daughter disappear into the privacy of quiet tears and memory. Then she wanders out and finds herself walking alone by the shore. Angélique was right; the presence of Yann is vague, just the image of another boy whom she had known...before.
As if a line has been drawn across the fabric of her life.
But it’s easy to see all the shapes on Sein now. All the colours too, in the sea.
11
The Dreamiest Song of the Sea
Slightly more than half a century later, a sun-browned Aliette watches Sein take shape in the distance. Her father is dozing, oblivious to the chop and spray. Maman pulls the binoculars from the picnic hamper and adjusts them. Her sister Anne is in the cabin getting chatted up by their boatman.
“Witches and seaweed,” was her mother’s laconic comment the night Aliette had announced her intention to go to Sein.
It was followed by her father’s decree: “We’ll all go. A day trip.”
“I really should go alone.”
But Maman, putting aside her usual skepticism about her daughter’s job “with the police,” had dug out some books and together they’d read up on the Cult of the Sun, curses and human sacrifice, shape-shifting...how Sein wa
s celebrated in antiquity as the dark home of nine Druidic priestesses and thought to be a kind of way station between this life and the next; how its megaliths were believed to be the doors to the underworld and the Celtic paradise which lay beyond; how the isolated community was the last in Christian Europe to be evangelized by the Society of Jesus. “It’s a shame you weren’t interested in this when you were children. Your grandmother knew a thing or two about it...”
Yes, and if Mémé were alive, no doubt she’d be along on this excursion too.
And Anne, too often less than focused, had spent an entire morning on the phone figuring out connections, arranging for their own private water taxi across. Today she’d roused them at 5:30 a.m. to ensure they made the first ferry from Belle Île to the mainland.
And Papa (I’d rather be sailing!) had shopped painstakingly for the exact wines he believed they would need as he’d planned their lunch.
Everyone’s helping the inspector out on this one and she loves them for it — she honestly does; but it creates a disorienting time-warp effect: zoom...back to the middle of girlhood. It has nothing to do with investigating a murder. No, it happens every summer, in one way or another. It’s the problematic part of a family holiday for an adult child with no family of her own. It can leave her feeling outside of time and going nowhere.
Going nowhere? Going to Sein. They had taken the bumpy regional road along the coast, through Audierne, past hydrangea, deep violet and bridesmaid blue spilling from the stone window bays of roadside houses, then west across the plateau where fields of grass running down to the strand were topped with yellow wildflowers glowing richly in the early sun. Descending to the wharf at Raz, they’d passed a shrine depicting the Virgin receiving a sailor at her knee. Now Aliette takes the binoculars from Maman and peers at the flat speck of land: 6 miles out, 15 acres, 20 feet at its highest point, 348 registered inhabitants. It would be lost if it weren’t for the presence of the Ar Men light... Closer in, the rock formations in the tide waters along the shore are foreboding. Those would be the doors to the way to Paradise.
