Women in the Wall

by O'Faolain, Julia

  All this and more was reported to Agnes by Fridovigia who had steadfastly refused to leave her and equally steadfastly refused to become a nun. She survived as a sort of convent hanger-on, a position which would have violated the Rule’s prohibition of servants if Fridovigia had been even minimally efficient. As she was not, she could be regarded as a charity-case or Agnes’s private gadfly sent by God to temper her as he no doubt sent the epileptics and hysterics to temper Radegunda.

  “I can’t listen now,” said Agnes. “I have to see how the bath-house is coming along. I want the masons out of there by Easter. And the altar-cloths should be laundered carefully. That gilt embroidery is delicate. Then there’s the blessed bread to be baked. Why don’t you go and weigh the flour, Fridovigia? If there isn’t enough someone will have to grind more.”

  Fridovigia paid no attention. Head on one side, she was staring ironically at Agnes. “You remind me of your mother,” she said. “Just the same at your age, she was. Anxious. A bit fussy. Even to the way you fiddle with your key! She was a good manager. I daresay there was as much going on in your father’s villa as there is in this convent! She knew how to enjoy herself too. The banquets they used to have … She always presided. She wasn’t a prude. Mind you she was a fine-looking woman in her day. If you wore a little make-up you might look like her. Oh, I know it’s against your Rule, but it would tone down your cheeks. They’re too bright. Many’s the beauty came out of a pot of ceruse! And if you only wore something better than this!” The nurse plucked contemptuously at Agnes’s lumpy skirt. “Your mother’s clothes were made of Byzantine stuffs. Well, they say you can dress a broomstick to look like a queen and I say the opposite’s just as true. But then, I suppose, why should you bother? Here! But still when I think of all the gentlemen who used to admire her … All that liveliness, laughter, music, parties…” Fridovigia’s eyes glazed. The past she was remembering might have been her own. Had become her own. “Then to think of her leaving no son, no heir, nothing…” She let her hands fall in despondency. “I’d look for the bright side,” she said, “only I’d be hard put where to look.”

  “Will you remember my message about the flour?”

  “There was a Roman gentleman”, said the nurse unheedingly, “who was mad about her when she was the age you are now! He was some sort of a big noise, a high official or something. From Rome. He used to play music to her and send her poems. A black-eyed gentleman. Always joking. A funny thing but do you know who reminds me of him?”

  “No,” said Agnes. “I do not and I have work to do.” She walked off quickly towards the bath-house but Fridovigia followed her, panting a little.

  “Let me tell you something …” she began.

  “Please,” said Agnes, unable to keep the annoyance out of her voice, “don’t keep on about my mother.”

  “I wasn’t going to,” Fridovigia said huffily. “I was going to tell you of something I saw this morning on my way here. In town. Can’t you walk a bit more slowly,” she complained. “Anyone would think you were running from a bull!” Agnes slowed down. Fridovigia sighed. “I’m not getting younger and neither are you. Do you realize you’ll soon be thirty? What was I saying? Oh yes: a terrible thing. I passed the basilica on my way over this morning and there were three babies on the steps. In this weather! Can you imagine? The deacon was just opening the church door and there they were. One was dead: blue with cold! How do the women do it, I ask you? It must have been there for hours. Of course they abondon them while it’s still dark for fear of being seen. With the hunger that’s around, nobody’s going to bring them up. Only the Church—but what kind of a future is that for a child? The Church …”

  Agnes began walking quickly again. The old woman got on her nerves. Her monologues all tended obscurely in the same direction. Obstinate, insinuating, rarely speaking directly enough to risk contradiction, Fridovigia gnawed at the thread of Agnes’s life. Love and disapproval seeped from her. She was all self-abnegation in a bad cause: that of winning Agnes back from Radegunda’s influence. Years of defeat had taught her nothing. Humbly she lurked, congratulating herself silently, and sometimes not so silently, on not speaking her mind, yet spoke it by her sheer presence. Her figure in a room or at the turn of a corridor was an interrogation mark, a lament, a bleak, beseeching shadow which suffered and challenged the usefulness of convents, proclaimed her disappointment in Agnes, her foster child, and in her own son, a bad hat, who hung round Poitiers getting into fights and disgracing her; proclaimed her dependency, her utter incapacity to live for herself, her claims on Agnes. She hovered now while Agnes spoke to the masons about finishing the bath-house, then followed her into the sacristy and back to the laundry-house.

  “Let me carry those.” She tried to take the piles of embroidered sacred cloths from Agnes’s arms.

  “No,” said Agnes, not wanting Fridovigia to feel useful. Recognizing her own meanness, she stopped. “All right then, take the top ones.” She tilted the pile of cloths towards the old woman whose reactions were too slow. A heavy gold altar-cloth fell to the ground and the nurse, in her nervousness, trod on it. “What a fool you are!” said Agnes irritably. “Why do you hang round me? You’re not fit to be in a convent. Pick it up and put it back, then go away, will you. Go away.”

  The old woman obeyed in hurried silence and had pattered down the corridor and clicked the outer door behind her before Agnes’s temper had abated enough to call her back. Anger and shame were still struggling in her when she reached the laundry-rooms where the sisters who should have been on duty were nowhere to be seen.

  Dropping the pile of cloths into a coffer, she ran back after her old nurse, but when she reached the garden the woman had disappeared. Just as well maybe. Agnes might have wounded her again by her apologies. She was not yet controlled enough for gentleness. Her mind and temperament felt like one of the hair shirts which Radegunda wore constantly next her skin. Agnes seemed to have an internal one: all the parts of her sensibility rubbed abrasively against one another. “I am a bad nun, a bad abbess,” she thought, “a bad Christian, I … There is too much ‘I’ in me.” She found the nuns who should have been in the laundry, scolded them and sent them back there and set off for the kitchens which were in a separate building. “It’s the spring,” she thought. “It annoys me.”

  In the bakehouse she found two slatternly young novices mixing the dough for the blessed bread with great raw hands garnished with black-rimmed nails. By now her indignation was worn out and it was in the gentlest of voices that she told them to go off and wash. Left alone, she began to shape the dough. The mound of it was bigger than herself, for the convent alone would have two hundred communicants at Easter and the church of St. Mary Outside the Walls probably more. Calm, she told herself, calm, and gave herself up to the soothing mechanical task which might have been hers if she had not been abbess. So many “if”s. Her mind spiralled after them. Firmly, she brought it back to the immediacy of dough. Oh the relief of what was purely physical! She liked the elastic quality of the damp dough, enjoyed pummelling and slapping it down, feeling it yield then slowly swell back, arching into the palms of her hands and nuzzling upwards through the slits in her fingers. She scraped her hands clean with a wooden spatula, dipped them into the flour bin, then plunged them once more into the mixture. A minute later they had got a cramp from the effort and she had to rest them. Fluttering her fingers and pulling at her knuckles, she moved for a moment to the back window.

  Fortunatus was outside and, thinking she had fluttered at him, waved back. Agnes made a sedate gesture. Could she, he mimed the question, come out? No. He mimed resignation and went back to his writing. He was sitting in an arbour. Roses. But they had not yet bloomed and the grey stringy vines sifted pale sunlight on to his head. The tufts of his eyebrows cast shadows around his eyes which gleamed occasionally like water deep in a well. Black eyes—who had been talking about black eyes?

  The two young nuns came back with scrubbed hands and Agnes left t
hem to finish working the dough. She went for a moment to the convent chapel to pray. Terce. Sun poured through stained-glass windows making coloured tesselations on the floor: red and blue. Pray for the blue-faced baby that died. What use? It had surely been unbaptized. Hell’s limbic border for it: a neutral, unrealizing place. The Church would keep and bring up the live ones as Church serfs. They would be exempt from military service. But might die before experiencing that unique advantage. Have mercy on them, oh Lord. Preserve them from starvation and avoidable disasters: tumours, fevers and malignant growths, from yaws and leprosy, gangrene, rot, abscesses, plagues and slow material decay. Agnes had worked with Radegunda at her hospital at Aties and her alms-house at Saix: well-run places where fresh linen was given out twice a week, baths scheduled in rotation, wholesome food laid on trestle tables and dispensed by Radegunda herself who took joy in this, in washing the filthiest inmates and in kissing lepers’ sores.

  “Nobody”, Fridovigia had remarked with healthy disgust, “will want to kiss lips that have kissed the like of that!”

  “Oh,” said Radegunda tartly, “I won’t have much trouble resigning myself, Fridovigia, to getting no kisses from you!”

  You couldn’t shake Radegunda. She had visions and vision, being fortified by encouragement from on high. Agnes, who never said so, felt lepers and indeed most people would be better off dead and had no business procreating if they were going to leave the product on the basilica steps—or perhaps at all. She was not blaming them—how blame such unchoosing victims?—but just saw little point in helping them prolong lives spent in ditches, alms-houses and the edges of roads. Many, having had limbs amputated by frost or torture, could not work. She was pursued by memories of departing patients who stared at her through scales of mucus and thanked her foolishly for her cruel help. “Give up,” she wanted to cry, but instead sent them off with bundles of clean clothes, bread and dried meat which might last at best a week. “God be with you,” she said in disbelief. Maybe, if too much sin did not prove necessary for survival, they might one day manage to be with God? Agnes crossed herself and left the chapel. In a way it had been a relief to give up charity-work and withdraw into a convent. Prayer, at least, reached to the root of matters. But Radegunda was better at that too. Agnes’s job was to keep the convent going so that others might pray efficiently.

  She continued her round now, checking briefly on the wine cellar, the weaving and spinning rooms, the reading room where manuscripts were being copied and the granary. Her last call was back to the bakehouse where the two young novices, intent on what they were doing, did not notice her entry. They were eastern Franks and she could not understand their dialect, but knew from its pitch and tremor that they were engaged in something more exciting than baking bread. Their backs were turned to her and she had to rap firmly with her ring on the door before they turned. Their faces were red, she noticed, but perhaps that was the heat from the oven? Then she saw what was on the table. For a moment she thought it was a corpse: a man’s. But it was only dough. They had moulded it into the shape of a life-sized—indeed somewhat outsized—naked man. With some skill. Even, Agnes noticed with quick dislike, the most intimate elements had been crudely though recognizably supplied. The girls looked up at her mildly. Her face, she saw from theirs, must be awry with shock. And their flush, she knew then, did come merely from the oven which was gaping red and ready for the body of bread.

  “What,” she managed to control her voice, “in God’s name, is that?”

  “The Easter Christ,” said the elder novice in her thick dialect. “Don’t you know? We always do it like that in our part of the country.” The girl spoke with anxious kindness and Agnes realized that she must be astonishing the girls by her agitation. But even while a sane voice in her mind told her this, repugnance was bubbling through her.

  “You know,” explained the second girl, “‘This is my body! People eat the body of Christ. Everyone gets a bit: the eyes, the toes. It depends—and you can tell what kind of a year you’ll have by the part you get to eat …”

  By the part … Agnes’s eye bounced off the generous penis and testicles of powdered white dough. Did eastern Franks really practise the custom quite so integrally or were these girls having some foul joke at her expense? There was a lot of paganism still in those areas, but all the same … Her eye skidded back then back again to the girls whose glance was surely too innocent? Were Frankish—or any men’s—bodies really like that? How did these girls know? And did one also eat ..?

  “Eat?” she screamed in a voice which shocked herself as much as it did the two shattered novices—Agnes had a reputation for self-control—“How can you talk like that? You’re pagan cannibals! You understand nothing of Christianity! This is sacrilege! Oh my God…” Agnes clenched the table and her teeth in a supreme effort to pull herself together. After all, she reminded herself, this was still only dough. Not consecrated yet. “Roll it up,” she directed with enforced gentleness. “Make plain round loaves with a cross in the middle of each. Handle the dough as lightly as possible. It’s been mauled too much already. And I’m sorry I shouted at you. I apologize. You had better talk to the chaplain. Get him to explain the mystery of transubstantiation. I will arrange for him to give you some of his time when he comes tomorrow. Meanwhile, remember”, she said, “that we do not eat our God.” She left, walked into the kitchen-garden and let herself fall on a stone bench where she lay trembling with her eyes hidden in her sleeve.

  She lay there quietly until her body had relaxed. Sun motes were caught and splintered on the downy nap of her cuff. They made swirling spectra which survived, when she closed her eyes, then changed into insistant, unwelcome images. She berated herself for a bad nun, and abbess. The Frankish novices had been crude but surely innocent. Now she had disturbed that innocence, given scandal. What was religion, after all, but a channelling of dangerous passions into safe celebrations? “Eat me” said Christ, “and do not eat others. Love me so as not to love other men. Let your mind dwell on me and lust will leave you…” Agnes’s mind tried to cope with the recurring image of the pubic curls the Frankish girls had sketched on the doughy underbelly with the curved tip of a knife. Priapean. Why were such girls nuns at all? Why was anyone? She had been unkind to Fridovigia too. Unkind, uncharitable—and what use was the institution of convent life if not to develop kindness? Love? She sat up, opened her eyes and found Fortunatus standing within inches of her. He had been watching her in her spasm of self-distrust.

  “Agnes, you’re not happy?”

  She denied that she was not.

  “You drive yourself too hard.”

  “Maybe,” she agreed humbly. “I … She stopped. “I” again, she thought and mentally stepped on the word as images of the virgin step on the snake’s head.

  Fortunatus began to speak of some poem he was writing and she half listened, letting him propel her along beside him through the kitchen-garden where curly winter kale grew in hedges thick as a cart-horse’s belly and as high. His hand was on her elbow, an unsensual area but which tingled now as though every feeling in her body were dancing on its tip. “Oh God,” she thought. “I’m lonely, arid. I need a little human tenderness.”

  Fortunatus talked gaily and lightly. Surely her incandescent elbow-bone was burning his palm? But no. He went on about his poem. It was about virginity, was to surprise Radegunda when she came out of retreat but would be formally dedicated to Agnes. “Since Radegunda is of course not a virgin.” It was a very long poem which Fortunatus had been working on all through Lent and had demanded research. Agnes’s mind swam. She stumbled, managed to right and take hold of herself and struggled with the impression that Fortunatus was making little sense. The poem, he was saying, praised Radegunda, made puns on Agnes’s name and Agnus Dei, then plunged into the delicious paradox of holy virgins who, because they did not know love, would know Christ, the Mystic Lover. He, born of a Virgin, sought his pleasure only in virginal viscera. “Human love”, said Fortunatu
s, excitedly gripping Agnes further up her arm, “is an image of the Divine! One reaches one through the other. Hence my imagery is the same. The experience is identical. Radegunda has had”, he reminded her, “the experience of heat around the heart spreading to her bowels and womb: God’s love following the track of man’s. A holy hallucination. Knowledge comes to us through the senses only. There is no other door … Agnes!”

  He had pulled her down in the furrow between the hedges of kale. Hands groping her, he whispered, “let’s love each other, Agnes!” He talked and talked and moved above her, furrowing and burrowing and she, battered and exhausted by a lifetime of scruples, felt irresponsibility invade her and tension flow from her as he rolled her on the crumbly earth releasing smells of crushed kale and parsley.

  “Oh God, Fortunatus, you talk so much!”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “This is better than talk. But you need talk too. It gives edge to things.”

  “Sin …” she breathed hopelessly.