Women in the Wall

by O'Faolain, Julia

  Sooner or later I suppose I shall take orders and be safe. Is compromise so very despicable?

  I almost took them when I was twenty. Because of the girl, I didn’t. I suppose it was because of her? Or was it? I’ll have to face that memory or it will go on tormenting me all night, buzzing like a fly on the edge of my mind. All right then: I was younger than twenty, actually, eighteen and backward in worldly matters, a student at Ravenna school. Most of us were vaguely intending to be priests. It is the obvious career. More or less what the civil service used to be. Celibacy was just beginning to be strictly imposed on clerics and the old practice of keeping one’s wife on as housekeeper had been banned. The change-over was not smooth. A few old priests tried to cheat. There were scandals and endless talk, especially among students. Some of my comrades said it was meaningless to give up something without knowing what it was. One fellow called Clement, a lively, irreverent boy from Milan, said that no one had the right to dedicate an imperfect instrument to the service of God and better test its worthiness first. The implication was that, for all our talk, we were terrified of women. We were.

  “Shall we organize a trial?” Clement proposed one evening. “I think in all honesty you owe it to God and yourselves to find out more about yourselves. The priesthood is for men sound of wind and limb—so what about that limb? The most important of all. I can promise you that trying it on a woman is not at all the same thing as auto-stimulation!” No castrate, he reminded us, could be a cleric.

  This dig was offensive to those of us who came from genuinely religious homes and were struggling with the uncertain leanings of our flesh. Someone asked him did he receive money for drumming up business for local pimps. He wasn’t in the least upset.

  “What’s it to you?” he asked. “Were you thinking of offering your sister?”

  There was a fight. I moved away but Clement’s suggestion kept echoing in my head. I am a man whose impulses get filtered through the mind and can there develop a dangerous strain. I fantasize, I debate. In the moral maze which I construct over weeks of dither, my original appetite battens like the Minotaur, takes on quirks and intensity until finally it threatens to burst out with the urgency of a primeval need. In this case it did. I went to a brothel.

  I knew where the brothels were. Everyone does. They are tolerated, even approved by the Church since, like sewers, they concentrate the filth and make it easier to keep the rest of the city clean. If there were no sewers our streets would be smeared with excrement. If there were no brothels, decent women would be in constant danger of being assaulted by sex-starved soldiers and other riffraff.

  So in I went. I asked for a girl and she took me past a curtain to a cubicle almost entirely occupied by a bed. She was wearing some loose garment which she simply pulled open. I fancied she was looking at me with the same expression that Clement had: mocking me. Even her nipples looked like pursed mouths and mocked me. My senses were in a turmoil. I could hardly see. My ears were drumming and the humours were storming through my body. I grabbed her to me—and realized that for almost the first time in days I was not erect. She coaxed me back to the required state by various loathsome arts. I didn’t loathe them then but their images return to shame me. I coupled with her. I slaked my lust. I—yes, I was so enthralled by her, so in thrall, that I was talking to her, promising to come again and ask for her by name, I was even—was I?—yes, I was actually quoting a poem to her by Sidonius or someone when the screaming began. It was horrifying. It reminded me of the screams of a butchered pig and seemed to come from the next cubicle. Actually, it was three rooms off. The girl jumped up.

  “Oh God,” she said. What did she know of God? I was offended at her using his name. “Oh God, she’s dying. It’s Celia.” She pulled on her garment as fast as she had whipped it off. “Wait,” she told me and left.

  I had no intention of waiting. Nausea was already rising in me. Post coitum, etc. and, besides, that screaming reminded one harrowingly of the human condition and the fact that we are all dust. I had been embracing dust, lavishing sentiment on it. I wanted to get home and wash.

  I had just managed to find my clothes—the girl had undressed me, throwing them in various directions—and was on the point of leaving when she came back, pushing the curtain aside and caught me by the arm.

  “She’s dying. Do you know anything of medicine? You’re a student, you must! Come.”

  “I’m a …” I wanted to say “a student of theology”, but the ridiculousness, the blasphemy of such an avowal in such a place restrained me. “I know nothing about medicine. Let me go.”

  But she took no notice. “Well, someone has to help,” she said. “The midwife’s drunk. Out cold and the physician won’t come. Oh holy angels, help her! She’s having an abortion but it’s gone wrong!”

  I slapped the girl’s mouth. “Blasphemy!” I shouted.

  The girl touched her mouth in surprise. It was bruised. She was, I noticed now, only about fourteen: a child.

  “You’re asking the holy angels”, I explained, for she clearly didn’t understand, “to help you commit a sin.”

  But as well tell that to a calf or a puppy dog. The girl crouched and began to embrace my knees. She was whimpering. I pulled her up. “Please,” she was begging hysterically, “please help my sister.” She had managed to pull me down a corridor and now pointed to a curtain like the one in front of her own cubicle. The screams were coming from behind it. I pulled it aside and was faced by the open mouth of a woman’s matrix. For a moment I had the delusion that it was screaming at me. Then I saw the rest of the body and its head. The face was pale, straining and wet with sweat. The mouth was gagged but the gag had come loose and the screams were coming past it with the regularity of a baby’s. A pot of herbs were placed on a brazier and the steam from it had filled the room and begun to condense and rain down in drops from the ceiling. The smell of mallows and fenugreek was overpowering. The girl’s ankles had been strapped to her thighs and a stout cloth passed across her chest and under her arms to bind her firmly to the bed. Bundles of faggots had been placed under the bedposts.

  The first girl—I had not actually learned her name—said “The abortion’s gone wrong. There’s an impediment. It won’t come. Help me shake her. Take hold of the foot of the bed and I’ll take the top.”

  She bent down and actually managed to raise the bed on which her sister was strapped. She was strong. Probably when she wasn’t working as a whore she had to do heavy jobs. Most of those girls are slaves. I stared at her.

  “Help me!”

  “Are you sure this is the thing to do?”

  “Yes. They gave her sneezing powders and that didn’t work. Then they tried fomentations. Then they shook the bed. Now we must try again.”

  Mechanically—my mind was stunned—I did what she said. We raised the bed several times and brought it down sharply. The faggots broke its fall. We did this about eight or ten times. Suddenly the sick girl gave a nerve-shattering shriek and fell silent. Her sister ran round the bed. I didn’t look at what she was doing. She was in my line of vision and anyway I was suffering from nausea. I was suffering too from shame for, after all, what I had been doing not ten minutes before might well, in a few months’ time, produce just such another scene as this one. I began to imagine I had been responsible for what was happening to Celia. The two girls fused in my mind and when the girl—my girl—stepped away from the bed holding a basin full of blood I fainted.

  When I recovered I was in another room. A man was holding some sort of acid to my nose. He turned out to be the brothel-keeper, a Greek and very anxious that I should not report what I had seen. It was not, he assured me, illegal—a lie—but would not be good for business either. I could have my money back and was welcome to come again any time I liked. He apologized for the incident. But why mention it to anyone? People came here for a bit of fun, after all, not for …

  “What happened to the girl?” I asked.

  “Oh, she’s all right. T
hey’re both all right. They’ll be dancing tomorrow. We can’t allow them to have babies, naturally. We’re quite used to this sort of thing. She’s had the best of care. The midwife had just stepped out for a minute but she’s back now. Everything is all right. Really. Would you like a glass of honeyed wine?”

  I refused with courtesy. Curtly, however, and left. He was being coherent. For what had I come to his place if not in search of women and wine? How could I blame him? That God blamed me was clear from what I had found there, and from the memories which haunt me and won’t be conjured away. They have kept me from sleeping again with women, contaminating their beauty for me with an awareness of what lies beneath the thin white veil of their skin.

  A week later I picked a fight with Clement and gave him a knocking about. He must have wondered why. It was unworthy and ineffective. A persistent disquiet has stayed with me since and I cannot diagnose it. Almost as though I could not accept the human condition—which is in itself an act of blasphemy. We are fallen and imperfect. That’s dogma. Our society, it follows, must be imperfect too. God’s kingdom is not of this world.

  And Ausonius’s roses? Did he know what the birth and death he so blithely invoked smell like? That smell of blood, mallows and fenugreek is in my nostrils now. Well, perhaps I lack liver.

  Cold again. Poke up the fire. If only I were at Gogo’s villa now or at Duke Lupus’s where the heat is diffuse, unlike my fire which burns my knees while my backside freezes. Those Gallo-Romans know how to live! I couldn’t believe it when I came on my first Gallo-Roman villa. Even now something weeps in me when I see one of those porticoed façades. How long can they last? Yet the owners go on playing chess and backgammon and laying out lawns and pruning vines. Just as though this were still the Roman diocese of Gaul. I suppose there is something a touch deliberate, theatrical even about Lupus’s ease. He gives me too many presents for one thing. His grandfather would not have extended such a welcome to poets. There were more around.

  Am I the last?

  What a responsibility? Should I flame? Grow incandescent? Overblow like a ripe rose reddening the earth? Die—when I do—in a spasm of passion or smoulder wetly like this wet-peat age?

  If Radegunda heard me! “Pagan posturings!” she would say.

  I should work on my acrostic: nothing pagan about that. It’s the subtlest I’ve devised and will consist of four holy proverbs—which should please her—placed two aslant, one vertically and one athwart to form two superimposed crosses so cunningly concealed in a poem that they might pass unperceived if not picked out in coloured inks. That’ll impress the patrons! “An astounding piece of work, Fortunatus! Unique. The ancients themselves never …” “Oh spare my blushes, my lord bishop,” (or duke? Why not send it to Lupus? Or the kings?) “it is a trifle, merely a token of my profound and heartfelt etcetera. The cross, they say, is the ladder to heaven and so I have sent your lordship (or majesty) two. Not that your lordship needs …” Flourish and reflourish. Meanwhile my fingers are frozen. Skin sticking to the pen. Rub. Shake. Swing. Pull. Have a drink of mulled wine. Oh these lonely, lonely nights! To think I was once gregarious! In taberna quando sumus. I had, have, a nice voice. But who would sing alone? Alone, all alone and with enough lamp-oil to see the night through. Few men around here can afford that—but then few suffer from insomnia. Does that make me Fortunatus or infortunatus? Old question. Radegunda too is probably awake but praying—and so not alone. I perhaps should pray but am always afraid of boring God. “Arrogance,” says Radegunda. “Humility,” say I but acknowledge that the boundary-line is thin. “Words don’t matter,” she says and I disagree. For me words matter more than anything. I cannot cope with what cannot be put into words. Like her experiences. Her trances which she describes as “beyond words”. But can anything human be “beyond words”? “Yes,” she says and to some extent I believe her. I believe she does come in contact with a life source, the godhead perhaps, anyway a level of reality unreached by the rest of us and which she can’t describe. What I cannot accept is that I‚ with her help, may not manage eventually to grasp and describe it. I harry her, pressing for precision about these forays, these edgings into the undefinable. I wait. I am like a cartographer questioning some sun-stunned mariner who has been lost off the map, trying to chart the contents of a raving mind, appalled but stimulated by the news that there are wastes about which nothing is known—in cartographer’s terms—and that I may be the one to draw the first map. She needs me to write her life. I shall ensure that when it is finished she will be more revered than any saint who has not had the benefit of my promotion. Careless of the world’s opinion, she won’t appreciate this. Others will: my patrons and perhaps even God.

  I knew within an hour of meeting her that I was meant to stay and be her biographer. That was two years ago. There were practical reasons too but they were merely clues to a destiny I had already somehow divined. I told her and she offered me this house. “Destiny” was the word to sway her. Not my sort of word at all. As though it had been put into my mouth. Everything did seem to happen without my taking much initiative. It wasn’t even my own idea to come here. It was King Chilperic’s, her stepson. Odd go-between!

  He’s a truly nasty piece of goods, a memorable monster: epic, ruthless and, when I first saw him, visibly bloody. His finger-nails were packed with it. A smear was drying on his beard. He’d been hunting and his appearance startled me into a Virgilian quotation about black and flowing gore—not the most tactful greeting to a multiple murderer. As soon as I’d said the words I wished I’d swallowed them. But he was pleased and the quote—a well-worn one from a florilegium of pagan writings for Christian readers—struck the court as betokening astonishing learning on my part.

  “We Franks”, he told me, “are heirs to the whole Gallo-Roman system and that includes poetry. I’m a bit of a poet myself but I don’t delude myself as to my talents. Latin isn’t my first language. Now you are a godsend. Ravenna’s loss will be Soisson’s gain. Write me an ode.”

  He gave me a purse of gold solidi and I wrote an ode in praise of all the qualities it might have been appropriate for him to possess. He was flattered but possibly bored by such a list of—even fictional—virtues.

  “I think you should meet my stepmother,” he told me. “An extraordinary woman. Very holy. You’ll have to go to Poitiers. I’ll give you an escort. Our roads, unfortunately, are unsafe. One can’t see to everything at once. We are plagued by civil wars. My brothers are most rapacious. I sometimes wish my father had strangled them at birth. He killed his nephews so as to prevent civil war in his own time but had no thought for mine. Unforesighted. But, as you know, Rome had a lot of civil war so we needn’t feel ashamed.”

  I accepted the escort. I was coming as far as Tours anyhow where I had vowed to visit St. Martin’s shrine to thank the saint for curing a bad case of ophthalmia which at one point had looked like costing me my eye. Poitiers was close. The escort would be useful. Under the protection of the kingdom’s chief murderer, I would be safe from the knives of lesser ones. I was learning how Gaul is governed. Even disorder has its order—the only one future generations may know. Mine is perhaps uniquely cursed in that it retains a memory of true, institutional order, without any hope of its revival. Like the Garden of Eden, order was and was taken away: a sour and godly trick. All gone now. Illiteracy obliterates memory. The last image of the Roman experience survives in the language—Latin—and even that is crumbling like a weedy aqueduct, gnawed at by epidemics of prepositions which subvert its syntax as termites do timber. I root them out of any text I can, just as I would destroy the termites.

  Another glass of wine. It’s sweet, warm and dulls the devils of the mind. Odd: warmth and sweetness, the most scarce of all sensations in a Gaulish winter are the very ones God chooses for reaching Radegunda. When she has fasted for days she tastes honey on her tongue and when she has been kneeling on cold flags gets a feeling of heat about the heart. Or are these lazy metaphors? I’d like to lick h
er tongue with mine. Find out what she means by “a taste of honey”. In the gospels God is the Word but comes to her as a sensation. Another sign that language is collapsing. I dedicate my middle age to shoring it up. My letters to our half-literate bishops are lessons. I send them flattery in careful prose, hoping that when they’ve sucked out its sweetness, some sense of its form may stick in their skulls. “Gaul”, I wrote to Bishop Felix of Nantes, “need never envy the Orient the rays of the rising sun since she is illumined by the rays of your glory …” Extravagant? Yes, but his schemes for irrigation and land-reclamation are impressive. “Pray make of my unworthy limbs a footstool”, I begged Bishop Martin with rather less cause, “and lean your weight on my chest.” He sent me some excellent wine and papyrus in exchange. Several patrons are better than one, which is another reason why I didn’t stay with Chilperic but came all the way across Gaul to here, rattling my bones on a wooden waggon. A ghastly journey: I saw ditches rank with filth, carcasses of animals in various stages of decomposition, abandoned infants, beggars dead from exposure, pagan shrines surrounded by every sort of idolatrous rubbish including some stinking horses’ heads set on poles and picked at by daws. Water was suspect, food inedible and I was obliged to wear three different relics to keep off disease. At the inns we heard stories of ritual cannibalism. The economy seemed to have broken down. Murrain was widespread—hence the dead cows—and cured by rubbing oil stolen from church lamps on the cattle’s heads. For poverty there was no cure. Life seemed an increasingly poor gift.