52 Loaves

by William Alexander

  Bruno was visibly relieved that I was staying, and he had a request: he liked the country loaves we were making just fine, but he had really been intrigued by the levain and wanted to make a true pain au levain, with no commercial yeast at all, on our last day of baking.

  “Bruno,” I said, starting to feel some real affection for this brother, “you are truly a baker. Monday, we’ll make a loaf like Poilâne’s.”

  It being a Saturday, a handful of weekend guests had arrived. The glum Alpine hiker was still there in his red jacket. (Would he ever take that damned thing off ?) I found myself, now a veritable veteran of abbey meals, showing the newcomers—three young men who’d arrived together and a Dutch priest—the ropes, pouring cider for everyone, putting my napkin in the ring at just the right moment. The father abbot read us some more about the Michelin Man, and then it was almost time for church again.

  After a fine None service, Bruno, Philippe, and I assembled in the bakery. With the schedule imposed on us, the loaves were proofing longer than I would’ve liked, but the bakery was chilly—in the midsixties—and I figured they could survive and still have enough left for a good oven spring. I had no choice, really, but I thought about all the times I had raced back to the kitchen—from the store, from the garden, even, memorably, from bed—a slave to a strict schedule, sure that if I was ten minutes late the bread would be ruined, yet here I found myself liberated from worrying about such precise timing. The only timing I was concerned with was that of the seven Divine Offices.

  Bruno scored the loaves with a lame and slid them into the oven with a good spritz of steam. The loaves swelled instantly in this marvelous oven with its massive brick deck. A mere half hour later, the bâtards were done, shiny from the steam and looking quite professional, if a bit puffy. Now there was nothing to do but wait for the verdict in the morning. And clean the bakery, which was coated with flour. As I reached for the broom, Bruno shooed me out. I protested, but he wouldn’t hear of it. “You’ve been living in here,” he said. “Go for a walk.”

  Hanging up my apron, I threw on my jacket and headed out to really see the abbey grounds for the first time. We were in the third of what would be five unbroken days of warm sunshine in Normandy in October, a time of year, I’d been told by one of the monks, when cold rain is far more likely. I sat on a bench for a moment and contemplated how this weather seemed providential, a reward for my earlier travails. But that would require a belief in a divine Providence, one, no less, who would alter the weather for millions of other people—possibly to their detriment (maybe farmers needed rain or fishermen cloud cover)—to reward me alone for a loaf of bread! “Not possible,” I muttered, “and why am I even having this insane conversation with myself?”

  As I ambled on, an amazing thing happened, a small, welcome miracle in its own right, one that I could freely accept: I stopped worrying about the bread. In fact, I stopped thinking about the bread for the first time since my arrival, so overwhelming was the beauty and peacefulness of this ancient place. My mind free, I drank in the solemn magnificence of the grounds, walking past neatly trimmed formal shrubbery, along the Fontenelle River, through apple orchards, discovering espaliered pear trees on a south-facing wall, and hiking to the remote seventh-century chapel that had been built by Saint Wandrille himself.

  I was hungry, and as I passed an orchard near the chapel, a bright red apple beckoned. I looked around. There was no one in sight. Surely they wouldn’t begrudge me a single apple. The temptation to pluck this low-hanging fruit was irresistible. As I reached out for it, I wondered if the picking of fruit was explicitly forbidden, and at the flash of that word, forbidden, my arm recoiled as I realized with horror the symbolism of the act I was about to commit.

  I had come that close to inviting disaster. It was time to return. On my way back I walked through a small cemetery with two rows of markers, the graves of deceased monks, on either side of the path. One stopped me dead in my tracks: a headstone marked billy with the year of my birth! This was getting weird. Forbidden fruit, unexplained celestial events, now my name and the year of my birth on a tombstone! Was this all a dream? I dropped to a knee both for stability and a closer look. The stone wasn’t reserved for me. It was the grave of one Jean-Baptiste, better known, apparently, as Billy, who died the year I was born. I took out my camera and snapped a picture, the act reconnecting me with reality.

  A few minutes later I was back in the courtyard. I had been out for two hours, and not once had I encountered another living soul. The thought occurred to me that I was more likely to encounter God. Not that I really expected to, but it did, for the first and only time in my life, seem possible in this ancient, otherworldly place to realize some kind of divine experience: a vision, a voice, an epiphany. I stayed on my toes, alert to His presence, but all I could see were the timeless ruins, the sparkling stream, flowers and herbs, fruit trees heavy with ripe apples and pears, birds chirping in the trees, church bells ringing in the distance, all of it drenched in that incredible Norman sunshine, and, above all, perfect, transcendental solitude.

  Day 4: Le Verdict

  Normandy is still dark at seven thirty in the morning, so imagine what it’s like at five when the bells signal the monks and, on this occasion, one amateur baker to rise for Vigils. I wound my way down to the guesthouse kitchen (where guests serve themselves breakfast, the only meal of the day not taken with the monks), only to find that the hot water dispenser for instant coffee hadn’t yet been switched on. With a few minutes to kill before Vigils, I crossed the courtyard to feed the levain, stopping midway to look at that extraordinary star. If anything, it had grown brighter, looked closer. Then, wrapped in a wool sweater and my lined, hooded leather jacket, I entered the dimly lit church. Only a handful of monks entered behind me. Even the abbot didn’t show up. “It’s very difficult,” Bruno said later when I expressed surprise at the poor attendance. A couple of frères sleepily wandered in late, as always, and a few yawned repeatedly throughout the service. A quarter of the dozen assembled blew their noses or coughed.

  Like all the services at the abbey, Vigils is sung, but this one is sung with a difference: Vigils is a one-note song. For a full hour and ten minutes, the monks chanted psalms in monotone, while I questioned my decision to attend. I thought I’d dressed sufficiently, but I was freezing. And badly in need of coffee. I could see myself coming down with one beaut of a cold when this was all over.

  The only saving grace was that most of the service was conducted seated, relieving my empty predawn stomach from the jack-in-the-box routine—Up! Down! Stand! Kneel! Stand! Sit!—of the other services. Even the monks were allowed to sit, rather than lean, for this one. Still it was brutal, and so cold. Afterward I hurried back to my room to take a long, hot shower, which was a challenge because the faucet was on a monastery-appropriate twenty-second timer, like the faucets on public washroom sinks. With some experimentation, I found that by leaning against the knob with the top of my buttocks, I could keep the water on while remaining in an acceptably comfortable position. After I’d thawed, I barely had time to wolf down a couple of slices of very stale baguette and a cup of instant coffee in the guest-house kitchen (while the monks were at this very moment judging my pain de l’abbaye in the refectory!) before the five-minute warning tolled for Lauds.

  Adding a corduroy shirt under my sweater and jacket, I scooted back to the church. I didn’t regret it. Lauds is perhaps the most beautiful of the services, almost uninterrupted antiphonal chanting, although since it came on the heels of the hour-long Vigils, I’d expected it to be brief, fifteen minutes or so. It turned out to be closer to forty. It wasn’t yet quarter past eight in the morning, and I’d already spent nearly two hours in church. How did these monks get anything done? I wondered. Then I remembered: this was what they did.

  After spending a few minutes in the fournil, it was off to Mass at quarter to ten. The monks entered in a procession, some dressed in muted green frocks. These were the pères, whose extra st
udy had elevated them to the rank of father. I was surprised to see Bruno, such a young man, in green. Brother Bruno was in actuality Father Bruno. Later I would ask him about it. “You’re young to be a père, no?” Bruno, I knew, was thirty-six.

  “No. I’ve been a monk for eighteen years.” He thought for a moment. “Half of my life,” he said, sounding surprised, as if he’d never stopped to think about it before. But that’s quite possible. Bruno was doing something that he didn’t ordinarily have an opportunity to do: chat with a visitor, as guests are normally not allowed to speak with the monks. I had extraordinary access to the community, a fact that I knew and appreciated, and I’d like to think some of the monks appreciated it every bit as much. They, after all, were the cloistered ones.

  I was appreciating some other advantages of my unusual status as well. As my breakfast of bread and water (flavored with instant coffee, but still bread and water) was leaving me famished well before lunch, I’d taken to visiting the kitchen midmorning with a breezy, “Bonjour, chef!” and grabbing an orange or a small container of yogurt, along with my levain, on the way out.

  After lunch I was afforded a private tour of the abbey with Brother Christophe, the monk with the British accent whom I’d met at the guesthouse door the first day. We strolled the buildings for an hour as Christophe, who was remarkably versed in the abbey’s history and architecture, played docent, revealing to me the symbols hidden in the bas-relief sculptures and filling in my century-size gaps in French history. I asked him if he’d heard of A Time to Keep Silence. I probably should’ve known this beforehand, but it was like asking a U.S. senator if he’d heard of the Gettysburg Address.

  “Heard of it! That’s why I’m here,” Christophe answered, amused. He had come across the book in his native Canada some years earlier (he acquired his accent during his schooling at Oxford, where he earned a master of arts degree in history) and had been inspired not only to visit a monastery but to become a monk. “We have a signed copy in the library.”

  A decidedly modern beep sounded as we walked around the medieval cloister, its pavement covering tombs of the founding abbots. Oh, no, I hadn’t absentmindedly taken my cell phone with me, had I? I patted down my pockets while pretending I hadn’t heard anything. No, I was clean.

  The beep sounded again. It was close; it must be me—what could it be? A low-battery warning or something?

  “I’m so sorry,” I said to Christophe while I frantically searched for my phone, my camera, or anything else that could be beeping.

  “Oh, it’s me,” he said casually, and pulled a pager out from under his robes. My jaw almost dropped to the tomb of the fourteenth-century abbot directly beneath my feet. Christophe excused himself and made a phone call. As the tour wound down and we walked across the grounds, I gently edged the conversation from architecture to religion. I had come to the abbey protected with a healthy shell of skepticism and in a mood to discuss—maybe even challenge—the rationale of the cloistered life. These monks, as commendable as they were, weren’t exactly Mother Teresa. That is, they weren’t out feeding the hungry, or defending the poor, or running hospitals or schools, or even, as their predecessors had done, copying texts during the Dark Ages. What, then, were they doing? “How do you see your role in the modern world?” I asked.

  Christophe thought for a moment as we looked down at the quickly moving Fontenelle. “To pray.” He paused and was about to elaborate, then stopped. “To pray. I’ll just leave it there.”

  “To pray,” I said. “It’s as simple as that.”

  “It’s as simple as that.”

  To pray. For all of us. That was the end of my much-anticipated debate over the cloistered life, since it seemed like a perfectly sensible answer, and I could find absolutely nothing in it to challenge. Four days ago the skeptic in me might have, but on this afternoon I accepted Christophe’s answer as he and the monks of Saint-Wandrille had accepted me—willingly, unquestioningly, and, most of all, without judgment. No one had asked about my religious convictions, about my commitment, about my motives for being here; it was utterly impossible to question theirs.

  Up until the moment I asked Christophe that shamelessly loaded question, I would never have known I was speaking with a monk. The same was true of Bruno and Philippe. These men—all the men I’d met at Saint-Wandrille—wore their piety lightly. Perhaps that’s why I took to them so easily. I suspect I’m not alone in generally feeling uncomfortable around priests, ministers, and the holy, some of whom wear their holiness as a badge. Priests, like cops, move and speak in a certain way that is unmistakable. They don’t even have to be overt about it. Trust me, nothing is worse than running into your minister in town and hearing, “I haven’t seen you in church for a while.”

  By contrast, the monks at Saint-Wandrille spoke so strongly with actions that they didn’t need words. Christophe’s simple answer—to pray—had, I thought, a corollary: To be. Not to preach. To be. As he might say, it’s as simple as that.

  Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote about the feelings of claustrophobia and oppression he had felt in his first days at Saint-Wandrille, and I had made sure I’d packed some Valium, as I fully expected I might feel trapped, if not experience a full-blown panic attack. I never needed it. With each passing day, the rhythms and traditions of the abbey seeped deeper into my soul, aided and fueled by the still-unbroken autumn sun, and the pure joy of being with these stimulating, intelligent, gentle men in this mystical and timeless place had overcome any feelings of isolation or foreignness. In fact, never had I felt less foreign.

  Of course, I had another reason to be happy, as well. I had my own French bakery.

  It had become my home away from home, and after a few days of baking, the chilly room had started to warm up, to smell comfortably of flour and yeast and bread. We had managed to tame the oven and had mastered the antique mixer. I was happily spending fourteen hours a day in the fournil, becoming a familiar sight in the courtyard (and in the church), and receiving nods and smiles from the monks as I scurried across the quad in my T-shirt and stained blue apron, on my way to the kitchen or the guesthouse. If I looked strange, the tall, middle-aged, flour-dusted American who had come to bake bread, no one let on.

  The fournil was in fact where I was headed now, and moments after entering the courtyard, I saw another familiar tall figure enter directly across from me, carrying levain. I’d been avoiding Bruno and Philippe all day long, for I didn’t want this wonderful feeling I was experiencing to be spoiled with bad news about the bread.

  There was no avoiding the verdict now.

  ——————————————

  With my long strides and Bruno’s even longer strides, the distance between us closed quickly, and I soon saw that Bruno’s grin was as wide as the courtyard. He could hardly contain himself.

  “They loved it! The brothers all loved the bread! Every one! They want to have it all the time, instead of the old bread! They were so happy to have good bread, and bread that’s good for you!” As we walked toward the bakery together, this shy young man, who hadn’t even offered a handshake on my first day at the abbey, instead keeping his hands clasped under the billowing folds of his scapular, patted me on the shoulder—not once but twice—as he said, “And all because of you!”

  “You’re the boulanger now, Bruno,” I said, too startled by the gesture to return it. “If you hadn’t volunteered to bake, I wouldn’t be here right now.”

  Bruno had more exciting news. “One of the brothers told me it tasted like the bread he’d had in Paris.”

  Bruno had mastered the technique of speaking to me slowly, using a third-grade French vocabulary, so we were able to more or less converse in French, but had he just said what I thought he’d said?

  “Notre pain?” I asked. Our bread?

  “Oui, notre pain!”

  Bruno wanted to confirm something. “And this bread has never been made before, correct? You made this recipe just for the abbey, yes?”

 
; I answered in the affirmative, to his visible relief. Apparently he’d been repeating that tale and needed to confirm it, as the legend of the pain de l’abbaye was already spreading. Bruno had two reasons to be excited, of course. Not only had he formed the loaves that had garnered such rave reviews, but the unqualified success of the bread most likely meant that Bruno now had the new job he desired: the abbey boulanger.

  Of course, I was also thrilled—or more accurately relieved—but still a touch skeptical. Bruno was too much of a fan to be objective. Soon, though, other reviews started drifting in as we weighed out the flour and made the poolish for the next day’s loaves. A knock came at the door, and I waved in a monk I hadn’t yet met.

  “I want to congratulate you,” he said in English. “The bread is magnificent.”

  Even Philippe, who hadn’t been impressed with our test loaves, was won over. He was more excited than I’d ever seen him, telling me with great pride that a suggestion had already been floated that they start selling the bread in the abbey gift shop. Bruno quickly put the kibosh on that idea. He knew he had yet to even bake a single loaf on his own. Feeling in an expansive mood, I asked Philippe if he and Bruno could be my guests for a dinner in town to celebrate. I wanted to do something for these fine men, either of whom would give you the hair shirt off his back.

  “Thank you so much,” Philippe answered. “That’s very kind. But we simply cannot.” I had figured as much, but it was worth a try. Bruno, I noticed, looked disappointed.

  Philippe left Bruno and me to finish up, and it was dark when we left the bakery, matching strides as we crossed the courtyard, bringing the levain and poolish to the kitchen.

  “Look,” Bruno said, gesturing with his head toward the living postcard in front of us. A full moon was hanging directly over the refectory, adding its circle of moonlight to the rectangles of light softly glowing through the translucent windows.