Marlena de Blasi

by Amandine (v5)

  “Why? Andzelika’s, mine, our names will never be spoken. Through your connections with the curia there, you shall ask a favor. A paid-for favor. Your wish is to place an infant in the care of the good Carmelites there. You’ll say that the infant’s identity and place of birth are to remain unrevealed, that, in exchange for a certain donation, the infant and its nurse are to be given refuge in the convent under the auspices of the curia. Something like that. You could accomplish all that quite easily, Józef. I know you could.”

  “And who is to be the child’s nurse?”

  “Why your Solange, of course. Don’t you see? If what you’ve told me is true, Solange would be devoted to the infant, and if this devotion were to be carried out within the very convent where Andzelika herself was so content for six years … Was it six? Yes, aged six through twelve she was, and how she cried when I insisted that she transfer to the Carmelites in Krakow. A selfish move on my part because I’d missed her so. I’d only sent her away because I believed that if she stayed far from our ‘society,’ if she remained distant from people who knew about our ‘misfortunes,’ then we, she and I could pretend to retrieve her childhood. Unstained, unburdened. Yes, with Solange as her nurse and the curia her protectorate, that’s how I shall walk away from the child.”

  “Do you truly think that no one among the good Carmelites of Montpellier will remember you? Or will you simply send the child by messenger?”

  “The abbess in Andzelika’s time was a virago called Paul. Do you know her?”

  “Not personally. I know of her. Know that she has been the bishop’s champion and servant since his ordination. And before that I would guess. A lifetime of collaboration, shall we say.”

  “So then you are acquainted with this bishop at Montpellier?”

  “More than that. Fabrice is his name. Our ecclesiastical paths have been crossing since we were very young men. We’ve always admired one another. But this Paul, this Carmelite abbess, surely you met with her during Andzelika’s residence.”

  “Actually I never did. I never once visited Andzelika at the convent. All that was during the epoch of my ‘mourning.’ I traveled very little. It was my sister and her husband—Yolanda and Casimir—who performed the parental duties as far as the school was concerned. They accompanied little Andzelika there, brought her home twice a year for visits, went to fetch her when I could no longer abide her absence. Yes, it’s this Paul to whom I’ll take the child. And if Solange, your Solange, could be installed there to care for her until she is of school age, perhaps take on the role of guardian after that … until she was grown, until she married or—”

  “Uproot a French farm girl who has just run away from convent life, you will bid her reenter another order—what is it, a thousand kilometers distant from her home?—so she may devote herself to your responsibilities—”

  “As a lay sister, Józef, as a lay sister. With a lay sister’s rights and freedoms. I would make it worth her while. I would help the family, too.”

  “How deeply dyed is that margravine in you, Valeska. My telling you the story of Janka and Laurent, of their family, it was meant to demonstrate the otherness of them. They cannot be bought.”

  “Everyone knows that everyone else has a price. It wants cunning to divine the price and a greater cunning to offer it so that the one being bought saves face. The Carmelites shall be even more pliant than your Janka and her kin. A check-strewn path through the curia. Yes, I’m certain that you,—that I—could place the child at Montpellier.”

  CHAPTER VI

  WHO COULDN’T LOVE YOU? WHOEVER YOU ARE. PERHAPS I LOVED YOU even before today, perhaps I’ve loved you from that moment, that first moment when Grand-mère told me about a child without a home. Surrounded as I was by all my family, I was a child without a home. I began to think about you, about what you’d be like, how it would feel to hold you. Who are you, from where do you come? And what shall I tell you when you begin to ask those questions of me? I shall tell you what Paul has told me, that you were left as a newborn, an unidentified newborn, at the doors of the convent, your date of birth estimated, your parentage unknown. You were registered, then, as a ward of the curia. All of it true, of course. As far as I know.

  Women are often left alone to bear their children. Was that how it was with your mother? And if it was? So be it. You were hers. Why did she leave you, Amandine? Was she sick, was she poor? It should be she who holds you now rather than I. Sweet child, I am sorry for you that I am not she. And if not she, why is it I who holds you? Why was I invited here? I still don’t know. The woman with the eyes like a deer, the woman who came to the farm late last spring? Was it she? Is she your mother? Even though Grand-mère said she was not, I wonder.

  That afternoon. How I wish I could recall more of it. More of her. Everyone gone to school or to the fields; there was no one in the house when she came, no one save Grand-mère, me, and the little ones napping up in the attic rooms. Grand-mère said I must stay in the kitchen. At all costs, I must stay in the kitchen. “Prepare tea, but don’t bring it out until I come to knock on the kitchen door. Don’t come into the parlor,” she warned.

  The wind shuddered the window where I stood wiping the mist from one small pane with the elbow of my sweater, lightning flashed in the dull yellow sky, and I saw her totter daintily up the road wearing a man’s coat and pretty shoes, pointed shoes with double straps and high heels. I strained to see her face, but she was looking down, her kerchief pulled low so that only her mouth showed. Red lips. Pointed shoes. They spoke in Polish, she and Grand-mère. Grand-mère Janka spoke in Polish with the lady, and not a word of French did I hear from behind the kitchen door, the tea tray in my hands. So quiet were they then I’d thought the lady had gone, and so, putting down the tray, I slowly slid the tongue from the lock on the kitchen door, opened it a crack, and there they sat still, the lady in the man’s coat and the pointed shoes and Grand-mère in shawls and pearls. Grand-mère turned to me, smiled. “Solange, please bring the tea.”

  I placed the tray on the big oak dresser, keeping my back to them. “Shall I pour the tea, Grand-mère?”

  “Yes, child.”

  “Will Madame take sugar?” I asked, still not turning around.

  “No, thank you. No sugar. A drop of milk, please.”

  Her voice small like a girl’s, her French perfect. Trying not to look yet wanting to see her, I handed the tea and, as she took it from me, held it in one hand, she tore off her kerchief with the other. “Thank you, Solange. Let me look at you, dear. I’ve heard such lovely things about you.”

  She held out her free hand, palm up, to me, and when I took it, she closed her fingers about mine, then half let go of them before regretting it, I thought, and holding them longer. “I am happy to meet you.”

  Stunned by her face, such an astonishingly beautiful face, eyes like a deer, black and full of tears, I said nothing, nodded my head. It was I who let go first. I who let her hand fall from mine. I went to pour Grand-mère’s tea, and when I turned to take it to her, I saw that the lady was gone. A small package, roughly wrapped, tied in butcher’s twine, lay upon the arm of the chair where she’d sat.

  “Where did she go? Who was she?”

  “A friend of the family, child.”

  I picked up the package, ran to the door, flung it wide. “Madame, Madame, your—”

  Halfway to the top of the road, she never turned back. A droning wind shimmied the chestnut leaves, thrashed the door against the stones. She would never turn back, the lady with the eyes like a deer.

  “Why did she come here, Grand-mère?”

  “She came because she needs help. Our help. Yours and mine.”

  “Mine? Yours and mine?”

  “She has proposed a certain position for you, child. She has asked that you take on the responsibility, the caretaking of an infant. An infant girl, barely a month old, an orphan. She has proposed that—”

  That this baby come to live with us?

  “No. N
ot that. She would like you to care for the baby in another place. In a convent. She would like you to live, as an extern sister, in a Carmelite convent in the south, near Montpellier. You and the baby would live together among this Carmelite community.”

  “For how long? When? I don’t understand why.”

  “Solange, there will be many things that you will not understand should you take on this work, this next part of your life. I can’t say for how long it would be. I will tell you what I know. Almost all of what I know. You will consider the offer, and you will either accept or decline it. Come here, sit with me.”

  I knelt before her chair, took her hands in mine, kissed her fingers, reached up to turn her face to look down at mine. The blue of a dragonfly’s wing, Grand-mère’s eyes, blue melting into green, green hemmed in black, Grand-mère’s eyes. Janka’s eyes. She bent my head to the sun-smelling fiandre of her apron, rested her chin in my hair, touched it again and again with her lips. Her way of talking to me. We stayed like that for a long time. Already saying good-bye.

  “The woman who was here is—let us say—connected to the Church in another country. She has a particular interest in this orphan child, and she wishes to be assured that it will be cared for devotedly. Why she has chosen to place it in the convent in the south she did not reveal. About why she has chosen you to be the child’s guardian and nurse she said only that she had been told of you through the auspices of an extended member of this family.”

  “Someone in Poland?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who was it?”

  With her eyes, Grand-mère said she couldn’t tell me. She continued.

  “She knew of your time in the convent at Beaune. She knew that you’d only recently returned home. I believe it was instinct more than reason that convinced her of your worthiness, instinct being the more faithful device, the more courageous device, I think, when things matter most. We trust reason always less as we grow older, Solange, you’ll learn that. You shall have occasion to feel how feckless reason can be. In any case, she traveled here to speak with me about you. To see you, if only for a moment. I think that moment was sufficient for her. She left this package as a kind of trust. A first step. It’s for you to keep, to give to the child when she is older. When she’s thirteen, I think she said. Yes, when she’s thirteen.”

  “Thirteen? And she’s just, did you say that she’s a month old now? Are you saying that the child will be, that she is to remain under my care? Always?”

  “Yes. I think that, as long as the child lives, until she is grown, she will be your charge.”

  “I’ll be like a mother to her.”

  “Like a mother.”

  “But why in a convent? Why can’t I take care of her here with you and Maman and Chloe and Blanchette? It would be better that way. I have only just left a convent, Grand-mère, and I know that sort of life is not—”

  “It’s not a nun’s life you’ll live. Certainly not a sequestered one. You and the child will be under the protection of the convent. Your work will be to care for the child, to raise it in the atmosphere of a religious house, but the freedoms of a lay sister shall be yours.”

  “I’ve never heard of such an arrangement and I—”

  “I know. I, too, have never heard of such an arrangement. A most particular situation. In addition to the lodgings, the table provided by the convent, you will be given a stipend to further maintain yourself and the child. Every detail has been considered, Solange, but not every detail can be explained, most especially to your martinet’s satisfaction. Now it is you who must employ instinct rather than reason. It’s your turn. No matter what you do, you’re bound to suffer. It’s the way of things. But now, right now, you are straddling two lives, and I fear you will live neither of them. You say the convent is not for you—and yet I sense, nor is the world. This … shall we call it a rare chance? Yes. This rare chance of being called to Montpellier as lay sister, as nurse to this child, it may serve to reconcile discord if not to stave off sufferance. You may be able to combine the two lives rather than choose between them. You might appease your guilt, however contained, at having left the convent while affording yourself some measure of adventure. Once again, however contained. You would live the portions of the religious life that so appeal to you but without surrendering your liberty. That was it, I know. The suffocation of final vows, the inextinguishable promise. That was what you couldn’t make. So much for a woman-child to consider, was it not?

  “And then there’s destiny, Solange. Sooner than later, make friends with the Fates and be less alone. What little more I know than you do now, what very little more that I know, I shall not tell you. If your curiosity is stronger than your compassion, the position is not meant for you. If you must know more than that this child is to be entrusted to you, refuse, Solange, send your regrets and get back to pruning vines and stirring soup. And outwitting the occasional lechery of your father. Not a bad life here after all, is it, child?”

  At ease with the vague ways of her mother yet trusting her implicitly, Maman said little about it all. If Janka proposed my going to Montpellier, then it was for the good. That’s what Maman told me as we bent to gather vine trimmings, sat tying faggots of them round with hemp weed.

  “But Maman, I’ve just come home. Were not two years of my being away enough for you? Were they not penance enough to suit you?”

  She didn’t answer. She looked at me as if she would speak but then touched her hand to her mouth—as though to close it?—went about her work. All this silence. The convent, the farm, barely a difference save the bells. Everyone sealed shut, even if they speak, especially when they speak. No one can ever know another. I watched Maman then, sat back on my heels and watched her wrapping the hemp round and round the twigs, tying a loop knot, slicing the hemp with a rusted chestnut knife, piling the faggots into her apron.

  “Let’s get to the kitchen, Solange. La joute for this evening. From the cellar we’ll need a cabbage, some potatoes, a string of sausages, two thick trenchers of ham. The chickens are dripping in the barn sink. Here, take a basket.”

  Maman, slow down, Maman, look at me, I wanted to tell her, but I didn’t. Rather, I took the basket without even looking at her. She knew what Grand-mère knew. About suffering, I mean. Could it have been that she, too, would have liked to save me from it, and so, in her powerlessness, she was awkward? Ashamed? She turned away from me so I would love her less. Was that it? Was she warning me?

  “Don’t love me so much, Solange. I’m hardly worth it, I can hardly bear it, this blind devotion of yours. Worse now than before you went away. I’m only a woman, perhaps not yet a woman. I have borne three daughters, and still I am trying to find my way. How can I help you when I know so little myself? Don’t love me so much.”

  Was that what Maman told me with her diffidence? Did she steel herself so that, once again, she could part with me, and I with her? I forgave you, Maman, for sending me away. For choosing him. But I’d come home. It was all okay. He wouldn’t have come near me, Maman, and had he, I wouldn’t have been afraid of him. I wouldn’t have let him, Maman.

  Mothers and daughters. Jealousy, envy. How is it that a mother can feel jealousy and envy even of her daughter? Maman’s defense of me back then was quick, singular. That night when she followed Papa. Watched his back from behind my door. From the door opened only a chink, she watched him sit on a chair near my bed. Watched him kneel, then bend his head. His mouth. Watched him slide searching hands flat over my body. His hands under the thin blue quilt. She watched him, and I watched her. At last, she threw open the door, stood there, hands clutching her face, no words, no screeching. Stood there making sure of what she saw. By his hair, she dragged him away. I watched as she kicked him then, moved him down the narrow, dark hall with her feet. Never resisting her, she kicked him about the face, the loins, centimeter by centimeter across the stone floor. She left the heap of him outside their room. I could hear him weeping.

  But after th
at, it was “Solange, that dress is ready to pass down to Chloe. Solange, cover your hair at table. Solange, is that rouge you’re wearing?” Not he, it was I whom you watched. Not I, it was he whom you chose. You chose him. How you began to look at him, Maman, as though none of us were there. And when you both thought none of us were there, you would let him turn you about to face the wall, let him pull you to him from behind, bury his face in the nape of your neck, separate your buttocks, press himself up against them to make a cleft of your skirt with that part of him. When I saw that, I remembered his hands from another time. A time when I saw him pick a melon from the vine. He stood there in the dirt, pushing together the sides of it, softening it, twisting it, ripping it open, raking out the seeds with his fingers, sucking and chewing at its heart, the juices dripping from his mouth, his chin, heaving down what was left. Knowing I was watching him from where I crouched, weeding potatoes, he turned to grin at me. “I was thirsty,” he said. His performance had been just for me. I hated him, and I hated you more. I hated you almost as much as I loved you. I love you, Maman. I tried to stop loving you. Sometimes I feel as though I’m older than you. Like I’m the mother. The one who understands. I understand that you thought, that you hoped you could keep him if only I were away. Out of sight. Isn’t that how it was? “Solange, Papa and I have been talking. About your spiritual life, I mean. About your future.” And so I went. But I had come back. Did you really want me to go away again? Did you still choose him? And will you send Chloe away, too? And Blanchette? Is that how you’ll keep him, Maman? Don’t you understand that he’s already gone?

  CHAPTER VII

  BUTTRESSED, ARCHED, PILLARED—A MEDIEVAL CHURCH RE-DRESSED for the Renaissance is the Carmelite convent of St.-Hilaire. Once a granary, then a fortress, it stood neglected for a century or two before its fragments were restructured into a grand villa. For these last forty years since its reformation into a religious house, it has seemed to the villagers a grotesque, a breach upon the peace. Twenty-seven brides of Jesus and their abbess pray, meditate, and work in the convent proper, while seven more cultivate the spiritual and secular educations of thirty-six girls, aged five through seventeen, in the convent school and dormitory. Retired from his offices in a nearby parish and residing alone in a remote wing of the convent, the Jesuit priest Philippe celebrates holy mass before his feminine congregation each morning at five, interprets and illumines doctrine for the teaching sisters, lectures morality to the upper classes, is father confessor, absolver of sins, and legendary estate vigneron.