Women in the Wall

by O'Faolain, Julia

  Radegunda thought no such thing. One must, it was obvious to her, destroy and remake one’s identity in God’s image. One must transcend the given self. But Agnes knew this. So did the last little novice in the convent. Her wild statement was aimed somehow at provoking Fortunatus. It was clear that the two had quarrelled. Radegunda did not choose to know more. It would blow over. What it did show though was that Agnes was less far along the path of spiritual perfection than had appeared. Her acerbity might be a result of her sickness—or might mean that Radegunda had made a mistake in forcing her to enter the convent. For she could not deceive herself about this: she had left Agnes no choice. How could a twelve-year-old have resisted her? Agnes had given her life to Radegunda who had given it to God. But into what better keeping could she have given it? Fortunatus’s poem supported her. Could that be why Agnes disliked it? Might her bad temper, her repugnance be for convent-life itself? The thought was horrifying. Radegunda reassured herself. It wasn’t possible. Agnes had been a perfect abbess until now. Even Liliola had been impressed by her. A life of virtue didn’t suddenly crumble—oh but it did. There was the devil, and the devil put his pride in suborning virtue. That sly mockery Radegunda had glimpsed on Agnes’s face could very well come from him: the father of lies and source of all mockery. Radegunda saw that here was a battle which must be fought by spiritual means. She resolved to drive a bargain with God.

  *

  Agnes and Fortunatus were alone. Sooner or later this had to happen. Chance. Pure chance, she told herself and tried to quell the hammering in her head.

  “I heard”, he said, “that our Mother has been inflicting even more horrible mortifications on herself.”

  “Yes,” said Agnes. “She has.”

  Radegunda had tied chains around her middle some months before. They were so tight that now the flesh had grown over them and would have to be cut through if they were to be removed.

  “I hear”, said Fortunatus, “that parasites have lodged in the rotting flesh.”

  “Oh,” said Agnes, “this is for the biography? Pain fascinates you, doesn’t it?”

  There was a silence. Then he said:

  “You’re thinking of my poem. The one about childbirth. I’m sorry you didn’t like it. I can see—now—that you mightn’t. I’ve been thinking of you, you see, and now I do see—but, you know, it was meant as an offering to you.”

  Agnes laughed sourly. “Oh I knew it was for me. Fridovigia tells me that there are old women who restore virginity to girls who need to make respectable marriages. They use oak galls and the like. Astringents. Your poem was trying to give me back a spiritual virginity, wasn’t it? But the Mystic Bridegroom would hardly be deceived, would he? God is not mocked.”

  “I was trying to show that I knew you must have—suffered. That I’d felt for you. Writing the poem was a … a sort of trying to live through it with you.”

  “What I thought”, said Agnes, “was that it was telling me that married life would not have been all roses.”

  “Agnes …”

  “You want me to grant you absolution, don’t you? To say, ‘Forget it, Fortunatus; all is forgiven and forgotten.’ That is what you want, isn’t it?”

  “What can I say?”

  “Nothing. That is what you want. But it’s not possible. You see the child was not born dead and I—mentally—broke my cloister-vow. I was ready to leave. As to the other vow I broke …”

  Fortunatus was white. He covered his eyes with his sleeve.

  Suddenly, she was tired of baiting him. Tired of the knife-blades in her own voice and eyes. She had seen them reflected in the looks the nuns gave her. She had grown cutting, harsh—but mostly cut herself. She was like those snakes metal-workers traced on buckles, and monks in the margins of manuscripts. They writhed, wound but always ended by biting their own flesh. Their venom flowed in a closed circuit. Pity, Agnes. Try to find some. She did try: a mental exercise. She summoned the Agnes who had been happy sitting in a boat on the Garonne. She fixed her mind on the scene, willing it to bring back an old mood: gilded water, pale air, coot diving into widening rings of darkness, calm … No good. The memory mocked. Happiness slipped through. The black rings widened to enclose the whole scene. That Agnes was dead: worse, a ghost who would continue to haunt and sadden her. So would the other, the worried, still deluded woman who had ridden up the Rhone valley in a jolting raeda, tormented by the mechanical clack of crickets, a wooden sound made, she had been told, by the creatures rubbing their limbs together. She had dreamed then of a dangerous existence fleeing through Italy under an assumed name with this man who had no courage. Softened after all, she touched his sleeve—their first touch for over a year.

  “It’s all right,” she told him. “The child is being looked after. She’s a girl. Fridovigia found a family for her. It would be better”, she absolved him, “if they were left to bring her up on their own.”

  *

  Radegunda argued and struggled with her Mystic Bridegroom.

  “I want to die,” she complained. “I want to leave all this and follow you. You bade me have no care for the body and you know I have none—and yet you will not release me from it. I would joyfully release myself and join you. I long to. There is nothing I long to do more—yet you forbid me. You have forbidden self-slaughter and I must abide by your will. I must live on in a failing body in a world of flesh which I understand less and less—for my spirit strains only towards you. You. It longs to burst its bonds. It yearns to shed this body which is like an old husk gone dry, foul, senseless and ill-fitting, so that the spirit itself can see less clearly and hear less sharply through eyes gone blear and ears desperate for the sound of one voice: yours. I am neither here nor there. I am hungry for your presence. I hanker for the great blaze of your glance which, when you turn it on me, will burn out the husk of my body and draw my soul to you. This is what I covet and crave, what I have been longing and living for since I was a girl. You deny me. I submit. You deny me, too, the sense of your presence here while I am still in the body. You no longer visit me. I submit. I abide by your decisions although they are harsh. I am neither soul nor body now, neither fully of this world nor yet of yours and my fellow mortals find me a queer, blunt creature. I submit to all this. But there is one thing which you, since you are justice itself, cannot deny me and that is the salvation of my sister, Agnes, whom I entrusted to your love. This,” she insisted, “you owe me.”

  When she had said this she began to wait for some sign that she had been heard. Obstinately, she stood, concentrating her will and energies in a taut current directed towards God. Every last mite of herself was channelled into it and towards him. She had emptied her mind of every thought but this: that she must compel his response. She thought of him and she thought of the force flowing from her to him, speeding hotly through space, burning with the speed of its passage, burning with the heat of his presence as it approached him: the source of all light and power. Light, she thought, burning, and, opening her eyes, saw the air furry with a red glow. Now there must be a response. The flow must turn and come back to her. She braced herself, emptied her mind, waited, saw herself as a receptacle waiting for light, a lamp waiting for the oil and the wick and the tingling, searing flame. Several times she imagined she felt the wave of premonitory heat flow through her—but these were illusions. She lost count of time. Her limbs were cramped, her brain dry and wooden and her skin, she discovered, testing it against the cold flags of her floor, had grown quite cold. It was when she saw that the glow in the air was a reflection of the dawn sky that she grew impatient and, going downstairs and across the convent yard, entered the kitchens where she collected a brazier full of live coals and brought them back to her cell. Here she took a pair of tongs and, grasping a red-hot coal with it, applied it to her bared thigh. For a moment she felt nothing. Then the shock of the pain almost made her swoon, did indeed make her half swoon, but even though her mind was shrieking like a mad animal inside her and her flesh was ragi
ng, her will and the hand holding the tongs kept to their programmed decision. She did not move the coal until it had burned a hole deep in her flesh and its own bright, luminous edge had dimmed. Carefully, she put the coal back. Then, taking from a bench which stood in front of her personal reliquary, a monogram of Christ which had been cut in metal, she thrust it deep into the red center of her brazier. She waited for this to heat, staring into the heart of the fire with eyes as dull as the eyes of a statue. Once or twice her body contracted in a spasm, then gradually relaxed and once she let out the words “Jesus Christ”. Then, when the monogram was glowing so vividly that it looked translucent, she took hold of it with her tongs and applied it to her other thigh. She held it there until it had burned its letters indelibly through the skin then, removing it, applied the still-hot metal to her arm, branding herself as she had seen slaves branded with their owner’s sign or name. She let the piece of metal fall, dropped the tongs and dragged herself over to her bed. Carefully she settled herself on it so that no area of burned flesh was touching the sheets. Holding herself down with her hands, she tried to prevent herself from writhing.

  “Now,” she panted, through clenched teeth, “you cannot deny that I am yours! I have burned your hot caresses on my body! I have opened a passage into it. I have forced you to accept me for your own!”

  She closed her eyes and the bright monogram danced on the red screen of her lids so that she felt they were burning too. She opened them but the luminous image floated in front of her gaze still, following it a little unevenly as she swung her glance right and left so that the vivid flower-like shape lagged and lurked briefly in the corners of her eyes.

  “Haven’t I?” She challenged. “Can you be so unfair, so cruel as to deny me now?”

  She continued to challenge and scold the Bridegroom for his harshness and remoteness, though sometimes she changed her tune and thanked him for doing her the supreme honour of testing her and assured him that she would be found worthy. The pain was still acute, particularly from the first wound she had inflicted on herself with the coal and very quickly she found she had grown feverish and her forehead was burning. She heard bells ring for the nocturnal and early morning offices and, straining her ears, caught the sound of a psalm being sung in the chapel. She herself was in retreat, so nobody would come to her cell until about noon. More than once, for a brief moment, she was sure she felt the Bridegroom lying beside her as he had done in the past. At other times it seemed to her that he was inside her head speaking and challenging her to make the most supreme of all sacrifices and give him up: to embrace hell for love of heaven, to merit him by destroying her love for him.

  “I”, he said using the voice inside her head, “went down to hell to bring up Moses and Adam and even Eve the first sinner. Can you not choose to give me up for love of me? Why are you so grasping in your love?”

  “If I went to hell for you,” she cried, “I would love you still and my love for you would force you to follow me. My love would protect me and put out the flames and lighten the darkness and make a heaven of hell.”

  When noon came, Radegunda was quite delirious. She was aware that the novice who had come with food and water was trying to speak to her, but she could only vaguely determine what the girl wanted. She was aware that her own answers were not directed at the girl’s questions but she could not make the two jibe. The girl, she decided after making a massive effort of will to try and concentrate on what was being asked, wanted to know, wanted to know … what? The meaning which had been just within her grasp twisted capriciously away. She reached out after it again, had the sensation of touching it with the tips of some apprehending mechanism of her mind, had the conviction that she held it, knew it, was about to deal with it and again, somehow, found it had eluded her. It was not, she was quite sure, at all important. That was why her mind would not hold it. More important was the conversation she had been having with the voice inside her head. She could not deal with this and the novice at the same time.

  “It is all right,” she heard herself tell the girl, “hell’s flames must not be put out nor should we pity the damned in hell. Their sufferings are necessary to them. They assuage their terrible, unimaginably crushing guilt at having sinned against God. They are happier in their flames than they would be with unpaid guilt,” she told the girl while realizing that this was not what the girl wanted to be told at all. It had something to do with flame though. Something to do with burning. “I’ll be all right,” she told the girl. “Leave me alone.”

  Later, when the girl had gone, it seemed to her that her pains had too. She felt airborne, faintly giddy and elated by the sun which was now opposite her window and pouring inwards on beams hung with a dazzle of dust motes. These blazed and dimmed as they sailed on a tremor of noonday air. She watched their coruscations and felt a responding shimmer along her skin.

  Slowly, she became aware that someone had entered her cell and was standing in the track of the light so that his hair—for he was a man of, she judged, about twenty-two—flamed glassily and his shape was half effaced by the radiance. He stepped closer and she saw that he was solid and disturbingly seductive: virile but with the entrancingly supple grace of an ungrown hound. There was something of her dead brother in him and she felt an urge so stinging that her fingers were twitching to caress him as she had failed to caress Chlodecharius on the night of his murder. Almost at once the sensation changed and she recognized a surge of the old sensual tides which had so humiliated her when she was married to Clotair. The young man stepped over to her bed and put his hand on the raw, uncovered burn of her thigh. His touch did not hurt but she cringed away from him in shame. Her spine was quivering like a divining rod and the erogenous parts of her body were unquellable. The young man’s hand plunged deeply into her wound. Radegunda opened her mouth to scream but the sound stayed jammed in her throat. Her wound was not hurting but was responding in spite of herself and with rapturous relish to a gratification which seemed to be a brew of all those perceptible to the bodily organs. It was febrile and languid, voluptuous, delicate, icy and hot, honeyed and tart, salty, spicy, aromatic, pungent, niveous and vivid, mellow, vigorous, an irresistible ravishing which she was, however, trying to resist, when the young man said:

  “Don’t resist me, Radegunda. Don’t you enjoy my touch? Doesn’t this give you pleasure?”

  “Go away,” she whispered. “Go! Go! Go! Christ,” she screamed, “why have you abandoned me? Jesus help me!” She tried to roll off the bed in order to kneel on the stone floor or even grope her way towards her reliquary, but the young man held her back.

  “Radegunda,” he said. “You are burning with desire for me.”

  “No!”

  “Yes! You have been imploring me to come and now that I have come, you don’t know me. I am your Bridegroom, Radegunda. You begged me to come and now I am here.” The young man lay down beside her on the bed and took her in his arms. Radegunda’s tormented body gave a spasmodic leap then slowly relaxed. “You must surrender yourself to me, Radegunda,” whispered the young man. “Relax. Give yourself. Be the plaything of my love. This is what you wanted, isn’t it? It was for this that you were made. Human love is only an image of this. Give yourself totally, Radegunda. Let me gratify myself at your expense.”

  When Radegunda returned to herself she found evidence that she had indeed been made love to. Her wounds, moreover, no longer hurt her at all. The depression in her thigh remained deeply visible however for she had burned away tissue and the monogram of Christ would be branded on her body as long as she lived.

  In the days following this vision she felt full of vigour. It was, she told herself, as though a wave of power had poured from the Bridegroom into herself, a wave so intense that it had penetrated her inmost soul and merged it with the divinity. Her doubts about Agnes were dissipated. It seemed to her now that they had been morbid, ungrounded in fact and a result of her own inner weakness. Agnes was all right. The convent was run as perfectly as eve
r, more so indeed thanks to the completeness of the new Rule. Radegunda herself was a new woman: energized and prepared to use her new strength in action. She gave up staying in her cell and began to occupy herself as she formerly had with the routine of convent life, taking on other nuns’ tasks—over Agnes’s protests—and, when there was nothing left to occupy her rage of diligence, sitting down to write long, dissuasive letters to the kings of Gaul who were warring against each other again. These—Guntram, Chilperic and Sigibert—were her own stepsons. She had known them well when they were growing up and the exhorted them in a variety of styles. They replied—or the Bureau of Scribes which each kept in his palace replied—with formal punctuality. The wars, however, went on and were to see many murders and to devastate Poitiers more than once in Radegunda’s own time.

  Chapter Eleven

  Agnes threw herself into her work as if she were throwing herself away. She had slipped once into the arms of human tenderness and they had not been reliable. She hoped the thing would not recur, avoided seeing the child, listened only reluctantly to Fridovigia’s accounts of how it was doing and half hoped it might die. What future had it at best? It was a girl: Ingunda. She had not chosen the name. Fridovigia had. The old woman’s starved motherliness fastened on it, leaving Agnes herself to a cold peace.

  She let the old woman take all the clothes, food, vessels and remedies she chose from the convent store. It was the least the family who were raising Ingunda could expect and, being poor, their right to convent charity was unassailable. Agnes was relieved at being prevented by the Rule of her cloister from visiting them and did not encourage Fridovigia to bring the child to her. Here too the Rule alleviated responsibility. Children were not allowed inside the convent walls until they were seven and then only if they were expected to become nuns.