Women in the Wall

by O'Faolain, Julia

  “But is first of all an institution?”

  “And an institution needs support, you are going to say, Florius? Needs the crowd and to get the crowd what must one do? Join the circus. Put on my best vestments and receive Radegunda’s procession with appropriate pomp?”

  “I didn’t say it, my lord.”

  “No. I did. I said it myself. I am a churchman. I should not let personal distaste for her sort of piety get in the way of my duty, should I, Florius?”

  “No, my lord.”

  “But neither should I allow my authority to be flouted?”

  “No, my lord.”

  “No, and as there seems to be a clash of principles here, it would seem that I can take my choice. I can see that the Radegundas and Gregories are going to have things their own flamboyant way for a while. Discipline and order are ghosts. Even memory is dying, do you realize that? Do you realize that the younger generation, your generation, hardly reads? Can’t read, is illiterate. It is an odd feeling to be alive at a time like this, to watch the slow destruction of a whole mental universe and to be incapable of saving it. Oh, I suppose if I were writing history instead of poor, muddle-headed young Gregory with his dazzled eyes like a rabbit caught by a boy with a torch … but it’s too hopeless. Why try? I shall go into mourning for the passing of reason and drink a toast to the age of miracles which is upon us: the kingdom of the imagination. I drink. What else should I do? The imagination is the barbarian of the mind and, wed to the spiritual, can produce unhealthy offspring.”

  “My lord, if I might voice …?”

  “Voice, voice it whatever it is. It’ll be safer voiced than fermenting in your brain.”

  “You said, my lord, that Radegunda was proud.”

  “And I am proud too, is that it?”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “Yes. It’s true. I admit it. I am proud and I am not angry. Watch me, Florius. One of the last men of reason. What would a Frank do? What would the late King Clotair or the present King Chilperic have done if you were to turn his argument round and catch him in the net of his own garrulity?”

  “Quite possibly kicked me.”

  “Very possibly, Florius. It’s an aggravating trick. Yes, I’m proud, proud with the pride and lucidity of despair. Maybe Radegunda and I will burn in the same part of Purgatory, eh? The Purgatory of the proud. Not that I believe in Purgatory. It’s a concept, a symbol, a place of the mind. She believes in it as a place she can and will touch with her live flesh. Poor Radegunda: pursued by physical horrors! I am only pursued by mental ones. Who is happier? I am already in my purgatory, burning, Florius, burning. That’s why I drink. But I shan’t meet her procession. There’s a clash of principles, Florius, a clash. Maybe that’s for the good of the Church, what do you say to that, Florius?”

  “The good, my lord? I don’t understand.”

  “I’m not drunk, Florius. I was just thinking of clashes, you know, between my kind of Christianity and Radegunda’s and how clashes make sparks and sparks throw light. You have to have two sides so that they may clash and correct each other. My pride is humbled—a salutory experience—by having to deal with miracle-mongers and believers in a horned Satan who smells of shit—that is what they believe, you know. You haven’t been out among the people yet, Florius. You’ve been living in your father’s villa with your volumes of Euclid, your swans and partridges and your hot baths. A lost world. Living in the past. How many of your kind do you think exist today? You’ll learn—and maybe you’ll take a little comfort from this good Chian wine if they’re still importing it when your day of need comes. Do you know that in our own diocese within the last few years a man was sacrificed to the devil? That there have been scalpings … Maybe you’re right after all and Radegunda can communicate better with these people than I can. Maybe you’re right. But I shan’t meet her procession. She may learn something from my refusal. And the city gates shall not be opened.”

  “My lord, she may call on the king.”

  “She may. She will. Let her play her part. I’ll play mine. Good-night, Florius. I’m leaving for my estates in the morning.”

  Maroveus struggled upstairs to his bedroom and the secretary called to a servant to put out the red terracotta oil-lamps which stood in every room in the church house, flickering in draughts, smoking and throwing twisty shadows some of which were not at all unlike Satanic horns.

  Chapter Nine

  Although the next decades were to be bloody ones for Poitiers, the event of that time which future generations would commemorate was neither a siege nor the lifting of one. It was the coming of the True-Cross fragment from Constantinople.

  For weeks beforehand rumours, omens and domestic mishaps kept people in a fever which spread to the animal and even the spirit world. Cows went dry, hens laid monstrosities and there was no doubt but that the demon population of the town was in a state of malignant terror. Demons were even seen within the convent walking, in the shape of small goats, across the refectory wall, but when the blessed Radegunda raised her hand to sketch the sign of the cross, they turned into smoke and evaporated. She was acting with her accustomed tenacity on two fronts. On hearing that Bishop Maroveus had so unaccountably taken to horse and left for his estate, she sent word to the bearers of the Great Relic telling them to turn back. She did not want to welcome the cross in a hugger-mugger way and was resolved that it should not enter Poitiers until another bishop had been found to receive it. Accordingly, she prayed, kept vigil, wept and wrote letters to King Sigibert. While awaiting the outcome of these endeavours, she advised the bearers to seek hospitality in the male monastery which she had founded years before on a visit to the town and shrine of Tours. The monks received the relic with joy, proper pomp and a chanting of psalms which they kept up for the whole time of its stay. This was not prolonged, for Sigibert acted with all speed in persuading Eufronius, bishop of Tours, to accompany the relic to Poitiers. The ceremony devised by Radegunda was of a splendour never before seen in Gaul, as befitted the welcoming of spiritual riches such as Gaul had never seen. The Emperor Justin had generously added several lesser relics—bones, hair, nail-parings, teeth and strips of the dried flesh of martyrs and apostles—from his personal collection. The power of these, although enclosed in an iron-clad box, sent tremors of violent joy and terror through bystanders and even penetrated into surrounding houses, where many sick and bedridden people were afterwards found to have been cured of their maladies and haunted or uncanny rooms to have grown salubrious. The box was borne at the head of the procession by the clerics who had brought it from Constantinople. Behind walked local priests, chanting and carrying a great profusion of lighted tapers whose glow seemed to pale and multiply as they walked through open spaces, then to blaze like knives in the darker gulleys of the town. Incense was burned and scents scattered whose fumes astonished the simple citizenry, many of whom had to climb on the roofs, as the procession itself took up the whole width of the streets through which it passed. It was said afterwards that several people had fallen and been found miraculously intact and other wonders too were witnessed, although, no doubt, the high point of the day came when the procession reached the convent. There, on the walls, the nuns were waiting, looking, in their white, fluttering habits, like doves ready to fly up to heaven. The iron box was opened and the relic shown in its naked glory. It was in five pieces arranged in the form of a double-barred cross on a plaque of lapis lazuli. The crowd fell to its knees and, as it did, there rose, first gently, then booming and echoing from all sides, the strong strains of Fortunatus’s new, now famous hymn whose martial syllables so splendidly celebrate the pain, power and paradox of the cross:

  Vexilla regis prodeunt,

  fulget crucis mysterium,

  quo carne carnis conditor

  suspensus est patibulo.

  Chronicle

  *

  [A.D. 569]

  Agnes and Radegunda were travelling across Gaul, Pale skies, dark woods, summer rains, nights spen
t sometimes in the comfortable annex of a bishop’s house—at Bordeaux and Saintes—at others in wretched improvised quarters. Days of jolting one’s bones in a four-wheeled raeda. Now they were in a boat. A second one behind carried their baggage and escort. Gliding. The waters of the Garonne stretched, absorbed light and hardened, icily opalescent as a mussel-shell with a dark-blue rim: the wooded horizon where a storm was threatening. Agnes felt light caressing her, felt her own secret paleness, the paleness of a body she had only recently learned to know, burn in the vigour of the late summer air. Her skin was hyper-sensitive and she had begun, secretly, to wear a silken undergarment beneath the rough wool of her habit. Fridovigia had provided—who knew how? Possibly a stolen altar-cloth? Agnes lay back, stared at a mild, cloud-specked sky and felt no guilt. She loved. She was in accord with a love which she felt in the air’s delicate glitter, in the river’s movement, in the crew who were busy steering the boat between islands of purple loosestrife, meadowsweet and reeds. Surprisingly, her scruples had evaporated faster than Fortunatus’s.

  “That’s why I’m good at running the convent,” she had said to him before leaving for this trip “I take a decision and stick to it. No point in half doing something. I love you. Wholly. How can that be wrong? I see God in you. Don’t be frightened.”

  After all, Radegunda had taught Agnes that knowledge was something one reached directly and with immediacy. One knew God, sin, one’s own calling in one illuminating instant and by intuitive—God-given—grasp. Rules were swept away when the soul was enraptured and Agnes was sure hers was. By sweeping away Radegunda’s rules, was she not being faithful to Radegunda’s spirit? Not quite—but then surely God’s way would not be the same for every soul. Agnes had continued to do her work at the convent and these had been busy months. The coming of the True-Cross fragment from Constantinople had brought all sorts of changes. There was the reception ceremony to be planned involving one of those upheavals which disrupt community life. Radegunda was ebullient at the news of the arriving relic, stunned when the bishop inexplicably refused to welcome it, fired at last by energy and defiance: all disruptive emotions. She wrote letters, sent ambassadors to King Sigibert, wept, prayed, tortured herself, received the king’s assurance that the Bishop of Tours would be sent to take Maroveus’s place and preside over the ceremony, then once again wept, prayed and tortured herself. Other nuns, infected by her emotion, also tortured themselves slightly but showily and grew incompetent. Agnes kept her head and temper and the convent on an even keel during the difficult months.

  “Because of us,” she told Fortunatus. “I draw strength from our love. I need a human intermediary between me and God. I am an efficient but dependent person. I need love. Before you I loved Radegunda. But her love is all turned towards God. It consumes her and does not warm others.”

  “Do not go forth into the world,” quoted Fortunatus bleakly. “Return into yourself. Truth is in the inner man.” He grasped her to him with what she feared was cold lust. “She’s right, you know,” he said.

  “Your truth”, Agnes told him tartly, “won’t turn up in other men’s books. You are all divided, Fortunatus. You’re like one of those corpses the pagans mutilated to keep their spirits from haunting them. Your head is buried in one place—usually a book—your body elsewhere and your spirit can never get itself together.”

  “Every human being is bound to the living corpse of his own body.”

  “Is that a quotation too?”

  “From Aristotle.”

  “I am making a penitentiary”, said Agnes, “with scales of penalties to be paid by you every time you talk with another man’s tongue. The least will be making love to me right away, wherever we are and without delay.”

  “Dangerous.”

  “So don’t quote,” she said. “You owe me two lovings already.”

  She loved him as a pony eats an apple: skin, juice, seeds and all, rotten bits too if there are any. Easily and with pleasure, nuzzling, ready for more. Wanting to be loved back the same way. And at first he had—who had begun it all? The furtive chanciness of their meetings meant that they never left each other sated nor met too soon again. He was always ready, always tremulous—but he disliked this. There was the difference between them. He was humiliated, feeling caught in his own body as in a trap.

  “That’s a quote too!” she accused.

  “No, it’s how I feel.”

  “Liar! Welsher! Come on. Pay up.”

  Ebullient, she could carry him with her for a short while, just as she carried the whole convent. And that was surely a sign of her rightness? Her being in control. It was she who had encouraged Radegunda to make this journey to Arles where they were to visit the convent of St. John which had been functioning for fifty years and, having been founded by St. Caesar, a bishop and papal vicar, enjoyed exemption from later episcopal authority.

  “It’s the only sensible thing,” she explained. “If our own bishop won’t be responsible for us, what we’ll do is adopt the Rule of St. Caesar and the exemption going with it. The Rule will guide us. The exemption will protect us. We can visit the convent and learn how their system works.”

  Since leaving it, this was to be her first return to what nuns call ‘the world’.

  Letters had been exchanged, gifts and messengers sent. Fortunatus had alerted friends and bishops along the way, recommending the two nuns to their care. Their journey led through three Frankish and one Visigothic kingdom. Borders were vague. Gaul was like a painted chessboard whose inks have run. The nuns had provided themselves with an armed escort and wore around their necks small receptacles containing dust from St. Martin’s tomb at Tours, a present brought by the bishop of that diocese, Eufronius, when he came to Poitiers. It was a sure specific, he assured them against the dangers of the road. Which was all very well but, Agnes noticed, a storm was coming up. The surface of the river had darkened and grown choppy. A breeze was rising and the sky turning a luminous but dangerous pale green. She called to the helmsman.

  “Will we reach Agen before the weather breaks?”

  “I don’t think so, Mother. Currents.” He shrugged.

  “Where can we spend the night then?”

  Another shrug.

  Agnes turned to Fridovigia who was in the prow of the boat behind. “Find out is there somewhere we can stay tonight,” she called. “Somewhere close. A church, a house. Ask the boatmen. They should know. They’re local.”

  The river banks were hairy and wild with dark brambles and soaked overhanging beards of grass. No sign of a road. The breeze was clattering the branches of the trees together with that dry warning which comes just before a storm. Agnes shivered. She had been feeling so unguardedly at one with the landscape that its sudden change was like a rebuff. A drop fell on her cheek and rolled down like a tear. Be rational, Agnes. The weather did not lend itself to rationality. Lightning ripped its rent in the sky. She clutched St. Martin’s dust and braced herself for the thunder.

  The church house where the party finally found lodging was a small one attached to a village church. The nuns’ party was not the only one driven here by the storm. A pair of Syrian merchants were already installed when they arrived and, although the priest was quite prepared to put them out in favour of the new arrivals, Radegunda forbade this. Radegunda, whose energy came in spurts then died down like a fire covered by wet slack, now took over. This was something for which Agnes always had to be prepared. Radegunda, who thought she left control and responsibility to Agnes, was not even aware of what she was doing. Authority was part of her. She had to make a conscious effort to get rid of it as she had rid her diet of meat, fish, fruit, eggs and wine. When she forgot, her directions were immediately obeyed and often ran counter to some arrangement made by Agnes. Now, she chose to be charitable. The merchants must stay. Travel suspended convent rules and were these not doubly in abeyance anyway since the convent was about to adopt a new Rule? Besides, how send a Christian out into a night like this? Agnes reflected th
at the merchants could well have slept safely in some stable, and prepared for an embarrassing evening. Radegunda would not eat, would fall into one of her semi-trances in which she was perhaps quite simply conserving the energies which she insufficiently nourished and would be unaware of what was around her. What was around, Agnes had quickly noted, was a half-drunken priest, a housekeeper who was not of canonical age, and a sense of something interrupted. There was a cauldron of some herbal mixture on the fire and a number of bottles and and phials had been arranged on a bench but were now being put away by one of the Syrian merchants. Merchant, she wondered, or doctor? There was a Syrian colony in Bordeaux where they had spent a night on their way here and where she had heard strange tales about these Easterners. “Syrian” was a vague term used, she knew, for any Christian of Eastern descent. They were thought to have curious, perhaps diabolical lore. Their knowledge of surgery, philters and inexplicable cures made them suspect. The Bishop of Bordeaux—who had told her of all this—was of the opinion that the only medicine a God-fearing Christian should seek for bodily ills was the application of a relic. Yet, Agnes knew, the old Romans, probably even her own ancestors, had had medical knowledge which was now largely lost. Or had it been gathered up by these acquisitive Syrians who travelled the trade-routes buying and selling whatever they could market? Greeks? Persians? Armenians? Their quick foreign eyes flashed messages at each other and they moved to a distant corner of the smoky room where Fridovigia was unpacking the food. Minutes later the two were in conversation with the old woman. Agnes closed her own eyes and tried to imitate Radegunda who carried her cloister with her and was totally withdrawn from the obscurely sinister scene. Agnes sat up and tried to face down her own reaction. Why ‘sinister’? Wasn’t it just poor? The oil in the lamps was of an unpleasant cheap variety and the wicks must certainly be of elder-pith. No, it wasn’t that. There was something not right about this house. Secretive: that was it. There was a secret here. The priest and the Syrians had been interrupted in the middle of some activity they did not want known. Well, it was no concern of hers or Radegunda’s. They would spend the night, shelter and move on tomorrow, leaving their hosts to finish whatever it was they were up to. She shivered. Absurd! How absurd it was! Her cool confidence in herself—the competent abbess—her control had simply gone. She felt vulnerable here off her own ground. It was just as though she were a mollusc which had been scooped from its shell and exposed. Her skin moved on her back. The simplest young girl, she thought, knows more about the outside world than I. Glancing over, she saw the two Syrians’ eyes fixed on her. Fridovigia was whispering something and she saw one of them signal the old woman to be quiet. They had been discussing her. Or was Fridovigia just haggling over spice or garum? But there was curiosity and a flicker of something—something like pity?—in the younger Syrian’s eyes. Then Fridovigia said something else and they detached their gaze.