by Tuvia Fogel
Galatea was about to answer, but he raised his hand to silence her, a gesture men often made when speaking with women, which infuriated her. She did not let him cite any other holy texts.
“Forgive me, Father, but I must return to the convent right away.”
She left the stunned theologian behind, taking a few steps toward the entrance. When she’d passed the altar, she turned to the east again, bent one knee and crossed herself, her eyes fixed on the enormous ones of the Virgin in the vault.
A little before ninth hour the nuns held chapter in the hall of that name, on the opposite side of the cloister from the church. The prioress introduced a new oblate who had just arrived from Germany. Gudrun, blonde and chubby, was eight years old. Her cheeks were as red as apples and streaked with tears. The poor thing felt much better as soon as her sisters, as befit a new family, smothered her in hugs and caresses that overcame the language difference in no time at all.
After making room for Gudrun on one of the benches, chapter began with the usual litany of complaints: one nun had slapped a sister, one hadn’t gone to Mass, another received far too many visitors. Then the sisters sent Gudrun on a child’s errand. A commentary on the Song of Songs had been circulating among them, causing sinful fantasies in the minds of those who found their marriage to Christ, so to speak, incomplete, so they started morbidly discussing the weakness of their flesh.
One sister confessed to exploring the recesses of her body; another had been seen by the choir mistress going to a sister’s cell in the night. Galatea made a face. Sister Erminia, the choir mistress, had a natural gift for spotting weaknesses and faults in every one of the nuns and had no friends in the Borgognoni because of the pleasure she took in doing so.
After chapter, the prioress asked Galatea to follow her. Mother Elisabetta’s bright squirrel eyes shone from minute, tightly gathered features, framed by the linen cap under her hood. To the young nun’s surprise, they exited the little door onto the fondamenta, Mother Elisabetta heading straight for the quay.
“Where are we going, Mother?”
“You’ll soon find out,” said the abbess, refusing the hand an oarsman offered to help her aboard the roscona. Roscone are the size of gondolas, but twice as beamy and with a short mast, raked aft, in the middle. In the lagoon they were used for small transport and local fishing. When the women were on board, the men untied the moorings and took up the long oars. They rowed standing—one forward, the other aft—as the nuns sat across the boat’s middle, the mast between them. Galatea’s eyes begged the Mother, her curiosity unbearable. Finally, as Majurbio passed on starboard, Elisabetta relented.
“Two weeks ago, a hermit arrived on the Island of the Two Vines. He doesn’t preach and refuses alms. They say he forgives himself nothing . . . and others very little. He awaits God’s imminent judgment and prays for us all.” She paused. “He already cured four sick Torcellans.” Then she lowered her voice. “The abbess of San Zaccaria told me he is a disciple of Gioacchino!”
Galatea grabbed Elisabetta’s hands excitedly. They had heard much about Gioacchino da Fiore, the Calabrian seer who’d died a few years earlier. He announced the fall of Jerusalem a month before the news reached Christendom and wrote a book explaining all the secrets of the Apocalypse. They had also heard of his prophecy of a third “Age of the Holy Spirit,” after those of the Father and the Son. Mother Elisabetta and Sister Galatea took great comfort in the similarities between the visions of Hildegard and Gioacchino of a future world permeated with love. After his death, some of his monks started wondering apostolically, preceded by rumors of miraculous deeds. People climbed to the inaccessible caves the monks chose as hermitages to seek their blessing or just to watch them meditate.
“I brought you with me, my dove,” concluded Mother Elisabetta, “because I’m going to consult the holy man on the future of our monastery.”
“Here is real adventure!” thought Galatea. “Never mind entering the cathedral! Crossing the lagoon to seek the advice of a holy hermit is something even a countess in Tuscia would never have done!”
A little later the perfect serenity of the afternoon and the regular rhythm of the oars inspired the nuns to praise the Lord with song. The abbess started humming the Cistercian “Salve Regina,” and soon they broke into the soaring arches of Hildegard’s hymns, at one point abandoning all musical restraint and singing a B flat, a note expressly forbidden to Cistercians. The harmonies they wove delighted the oarsmen and faded over the water behind the roscona, leaving musical trails that seemed to sparkle in the sun.
Leaving Boreano to starboard, the roscona headed for Sant’Erasmo. The western horizon above Venice filled with black clouds, and soon thunder could be heard in the distance. The air became clear as crystal and filled with the exciting, metallic smell of thunderstorms. When the first big drops began to fall, the oarsmen tied the gaff to the mast along the axis of the boat and threw the sail over it as an awning for the nuns. Then they tied the sail’s edges to the gunwales and went back to their rowing stations.
It rained hard, without a breath of wind. The men took turns rowing and bailing, so the roscona wouldn’t fill with water. The nuns knelt under the sail, embracing each other and praying softly. Suddenly, the roar of the rain on the canvas brought the vision back to Galatea’s senses. The blue of the cloak and that of the lightning over the lagoon were the same. The creaking pier of the vision became confused with the crash of the rain on the water all around.
Galatea sat motionless, eyes wide open and fixed straight ahead.
The Island of the Two Vines lies just north of the bigger one of Sant’Erasmo. The first islanders to land there found a pagan altar whose carved stones would have thrilled Rosalino had they not all ended up in God knows which fondamenta around the lagoon. But the memory of the blasphemous stones remained, giving the island the aura of mystery of a place the ancients considered a residence of the gods.
The boat went ashore where three planks were thrown onto the bank for peasants coming to tend the vineyard. The rain beat down, the smell of weeds was strong, and mud was everywhere, so much that the prioress had to hold on to a man’s hand to disembark. The two nuns ran off down the path, habits lifted, as the men settled down under the awning, looking forward to a leisurely wait.
Almost immediately, they came upon a hut built of woven reeds with a little altar inside. A small bell hung from three branches stuck into the thatched roof. The nuns took refuge in the makeshift chapel and squeezed the hems of their habits, still panting from the run.
“You can take off your cap, my dove. I know how long your hair is. I won’t make you cut it.”
Galatea shot her a look of daughterly love. As she shook her hair, her eyes wandered over the little horizon visible through the hut’s door. Suddenly she realized that what had seemed an egg-shaped gray rock was in fact a man. Perfectly still among the reeds, he was hunched up to offer less surface to the rain, just like the birds around him. It could only be Gioacchino’s disciple. Galatea tugged on Elisabetta’s sleeve and pointed to the shape. The abbess nodded.
“He is supplicating the Virgin on behalf of us sinners,” she murmured.
A sudden impulse overcame Galatea, and she dashed out of the chapel bare-headed, wet, and beautiful like the heroine of some Provençal romance running toward her long-lost lover. She squatted down two steps behind the hermit and tried to listen with her inner ear.
His voice startled her. Low and raspy, it seemed to come from far away, as if someone else spoke through the fragile figure hunched in front of her. “What do you see, when you see?”
Her heart missed a beat. He knew of her visions! She felt immense relief, as if some heavenly power had just found her innocent of a mortal sin.
“I see shreds of events. And often they later happen . . . as I saw them.” The anchorite didn’t answer.
When it was clear he wouldn’t speak again, Galatea closed her eyes and tried to commune with his prayers. The rivulets of ra
in on her face felt like an angel’s darting, delicate fingers. Then she made the mistake—as she would think of it later—of letting herself be transported by the sounds of water all around. Suddenly she was staring at the visio secunda, the viscous black liquid looking unbearably malignant.
A finger of the hermit’s hand twitched imperceptibly. Galatea shivered. Hildegard’s vision took over, and she felt irresistibly drawn to the dark pool as in a dream. She slid into it, unable to scream, and started thrashing in the water, trying to reach a receding bank. In the back of her mind, she noticed it was all happening in total silence. Something grabbed her ankle and pull her to the bottom. She floundered, resurfaced, and then saw that the sky above was full of stars, as in the visio secunda.
“How strange, it’s already nighttime,” she thought and committed her soul to God, not without a last thought that this was a really stupid way to die.
“Ego sum, nolite timere!” The hermit had laid his hand on her arm, and she felt she was being slowly pulled out of the black pool.
Mother Elisabetta saw the holy man’s hand on Galatea’s arm and ran out of the hut under the endless rain. When she reached them Galatea embraced her, sobbing, breath short.
The hermit muttered what sounded like a prayer. Then the rain stopped, and in the sudden silence his voice rose clear and strong as a trumpet, the way ancient oracles must have sounded.
The Woman is the Jew, and the Jew is the Woman!
Only they see, and both are despised because they see!
For this reason they will be redeemed together, in the Last Days!
He turned and pointed a bony finger at Galatea. “Behold the woman who will find the center!”
With the word centrum, he fell silent. The nuns exchanged a hesitant glance as the first sunrays lit the thicket of reeds. Elisabetta drew Galatea’s shivering body closer. Was that the answer she’d been hoping for? Was it confirmation that Galatea would be prioress after her and save the nuns of the Borgognoni? Holding her charge tight, she addressed the holy man, who had turned back to the lagoon. “What do you mean by ‘she will find the center,’ holy father?”
“Oh, the glory of God!” said the old man impatiently, his voice once more hoarse with age as it had been before the prophecy. “That she will solve the enigma in Jerusalem!”
Galatea leaned urgently toward him. “You mean I . . . I will go to Jerusalem? And tread the ground our Lord Jesus walked on. . . . Is it true then that only a woman can solve the enigma?”
“‘A woman and a Jew’ is what Gioacchino said. But then, Jesus himself revealed the highest secrets only to Mary Magdalene, the prophetess he took for wife.”
The two women were stupefied at the old man’s words, but nothing more was said. The birds started singing again, and after a short while the nuns stood up, kissed the hermit’s tunic, and made their way back to the Borgognoni.
Just as the hermit in the Venetian lagoon was pronouncing his prophecy, outside the walls of Rome at Ponte Milvio, ten men were leaving the eternal city on the Via Cassia.
They were barefoot and unkempt, their tunics the color of earth, tied at the waist with pieces of rope. Hot dust floated up from their heels and hovered in the air behind them. They couldn’t have been monks, for no monks were so destitute, but a well-traveled pilgrim would have found them similar to heretical preachers in Lombardy and Provence and would have been surprised to see such men in the city of the pope. In fact, had you told such a pilgrim that the leader of that ragged band had been received by Pope Innocent III twice in the space of a few days, he would not have believed you.
A leper’s bell approached from beyond the next hill on the road. When they saw the wretched, amputated figure struggling to advance, four of them rushed forward to mitigate his suffering. But the leper was full of bitterness and hatred for the world; he abused and reviled the friars. At first they didn’t mind, but when he began to obscenely insult the Blessed Christ and the Holy Mother they backed off, scandalized.
Then the smallest and least handsome of the ten asked his brothers for the traveling pan and water, telling them to continue on their way, saying he would catch up. Once he was alone with the obnoxious leper, the friar addressed him as sweetly as he could. “May God grant you peace, my brother.”
“What peace could I have from God, who took peace and everything else from me and made me rotten and stinking?”
“Allow me to serve you; I will bring peace back to you,” said the little friar, gentle but firm.
“And what can you do for me that others can’t?”
“Whatever you desire, I will do for you.”
“I want you to wash every part of me, for I stink so much that even I can no longer bear myself,” said the wretch.
And so it was that in the country just north of Rome, on a fiery August afternoon, the small friar lit a fire, warmed water with some herbs, unraveled the bandages, and washed the leper from head to toe, rubbing him with his hands and washing his bandages, too, before wrapping the sores again.
And for the whole time the friar served him in that way, the leper wept without making a sound.
CHAPTER 4
BEIN HA’OR U’VEIN HA-HOSHECH
Between the Light and the Darkness
THE SAME 15TH OF AUGUST 1209, OUTSIDE THE WALLS OF CARCASSONNE
A few hours before the hermit’s prophecy to Galatea, the column of survivors leaving the city, their only baggage painful memories and the rags on their backs, stretched down to the river. In the fiery midday sun, they shuffled under a rain of insults and spit from the jeering mob outside the walls. The brief siege of Carcassonne, the mostly heretical city on the banks of the river Aude in Languedoc, had just ended. A short way outside the gate, cross-wearing northerners searched each straggler. The papal legate’s orders had been clear: “They are to take nothing, not even an earring. Just their sins!”
A yellow turban caught the eye of a young, armed peasant. The big Jew wore a black sarbel despite the heat and nonchalantly carried a bundled two-year-old in the fold of his elbow in what looked like a very comfortable position for the infant. The youth looked at the olive-skinned face and the black beard, and then shouted, “Hey, you! Hey, Jew!”
Yehezkel had debated with himself for an hour, in the “but on the other hand” style of Talmud sages, on what he should do if he heard those words as he left the city. He turned to look at the barbarian. The lanky, freckled teen was armed with a battered shield and spear. The rabbi stepped out of the stream of refugees.
“Show me the child, Jew! You’re crafty enough to have hidden the gold in the wraps!”
Slowly and wordlessly, his eyes fixed on those of the young goy, Yehezkel stripped Aillil naked, shaking the sweaty rags in the air before dropping them to the ground. The toddler squealed with pleasure. The cross wearer looked peeved but unconvinced.
“I know you’re trying to fool me somehow, Jew! That blond babe can’t be your blood, you’re from Outremer. . . .” He looked at the ground, rubbing it with one foot. “I know! You stole an orphan from the heretics to sell it to your Saracen friends, or . . .” the young man’s eyes widened in outrage, “or maybe to raise him as a Jew!”
Visibly impressed by his own acumen, the peasant was already thinking of the prize that awaited him for exposing this perfidious scheme. The kabbalist’s voice caught him totally by surprise. “LAMA RAGSHU GOYIM?”*9
Lower than a roll of thunder, the first three words of the second Psalm swept the uncircumsized youth with something like supernatural force. It was as if an earthquake had shaken the ground beneath his feet. Like the voice of a dead man from the depths of hell. No, like the voice of all the Cathars who died in Béziers screaming in unison!
The boy swallowed and then pointed toward the river, unable for all his efforts, to detach his tongue from the roof of his mouth. Yehezkel picked up the wraps and turned away.
He’d projected his voice with the secret technique Rav Yitzhak the Blind taught him in Posquié
re. From the moment the peasant called out to him, he started breathing the “folded breath.” Stripping the child slowly had been an excuse to prolong the preparation and to hold the goy’s eyes long enough to reverse the flow of fear between them. Then, his chin pressed on his chest, he had lowered his tone beyond, as Rav Yitzhak put it, “the mere physical size of his sounding chamber” and howled the three Hebrew words in a vibrato of barely repressed wrath.
Yehezkel smiled, imagining the thoughts of the panicked youth. Most likely he was sure to have just survived an encounter with the devil. After all, he must be saying to himself, if Satan needed a heretic infant for his plans, who was he to dream of objecting? Yehezkel surveyed the sorry wartime scene to make sure no one had noticed the exchange, and then crossed the sun-baked knoll and rejoined the river of exiles.
Carcassonne and Toulouse are the doors to a corridor connecting the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. At the eastern entrance to the valley known as the Lauragais, the Montagne Noire looms from the north, while sweeping hills overlap southward until they become the Pyrenees. The bulk of the refugees set off on the road that climbs to the doorway to Spain and takes pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela. The Lauragais was like one big forest bewitched with heresy. Lonely watchtowers and menacing fortresses were more frequent on that road than bell towers of churches.
There was no noise of carts—just shuffling feet, moans from the wounded, and the odd woman’s sob—all of it blanketed by the shrieking of crickets rising from everywhere like derisory, demonic laughter. Everything spoke of the month-old war: abandoned villages, unkempt vineyards, the desperate bellows of surviving cows—and most of all the whitish, overgrown fields—eerily deserted at the height of harvest time. As the infant slept on his chest and the air shimmered in the heat, Yehezkel mused. “Here I am, the only Jew stupid enough to be caught in a city of Christian heretics under siege!”
He smiled, fingers immediately reaching into his beard to scratch the underside of his chin. “True, I could have left with the other Jews, but what would have become of Aillil in all this?” He raised his gaze to the sky and let out a long sigh.
