She relaxed then, and let go. And far inside she felt some ancient exhaustion, the way she must have held herself always, inside her body, begin to fall away and dissolve. Indeed, she felt that she was no longer her body but something—she didn’t know quite what—an essence, an ineffable energy that resided at once both within her and beyond her; and she relaxed into this energy, allowed it to overtake her, allowed herself to become it—allowed everythg that she knew of herself—as a person, trying to find her way; as a woman, heartbroken by loss; as a maker of cremes, a success, so to speak, in the world; as the employer and teacher of Mademoiselle Objet; as the personage of the TeleVisions series—to all fall away. She became suddenly and entirely not any of these things. She had become her essence—who she was beyond and within all of them; and she felt an immense and transforming peace as gradually her personality dissolved and slowly, strangely, she surrendered to becoming everything and nothing.
Across the room, the boy stopped suddenly mid-scream and turned around. He walked halfway across the room and planted himself like a tree in earth, in the middle of the floor. He looked at Madame Métier, and she looked back at him; and although she had no way of putting this sensation into words, she could feel great pale streams of light flowing out of her eyes and into his.
Quietly, steadily then, as if his body was now weighted with a depth of knowing far beyond the number of his years, he walked over to Madame Métier and stood before her, curious and silent, as she herself sat unmoving, silent and still on the blue silk hassock, inhabiting the strange huge energy that now inhabited her.
Then—and Mademoiselle Objet and his parents, too, from where they were standing, could scarcely believe this—he reached up, and, as if he were blind and she a statue whose surfaces he was carefully discovering with his hands, he touched Madame Métier’s face, his fingers tracing the bones of her cheeks, her eyebrows, the orbits around both her eyes, the edges of her hair.
Madame Métier sat there, quiet, simply receiving his touch. Then, finally, when it seemed he had finished, she opened her arms and he climbed up into them and sat on her lap. She put her arms around him then, and he leaned his head on her shoulder, and as he did, she could feel herself—which seemed no longer to be herself—melt into him, and his small self begin to slowly melt into her.
There was what she could only call a flow of light between them, a wholeness that was neither one of theirs alone, but an essence seamless and continuous residing in the two of them. It was the essence of all things, and in her heart—or what she as a person she had always known to be her heart—she felt a vast undifferentiated bliss, the great joy, the incomparable privilege of being in this light with him.
She looked around the room then, and in it, too, it seemed that everything had changed. The chaoses, all the strewn and broken objects, the stains on the wall, the tipped-over couch and its shattered leg, his parents, and even Mademoiselle Objet, all seemed to have melted, luminous and shimmering, into a single vast, exquisite, and undifferentiated substance. The colors and outlines of each of the objects and persons remained, but the particularities of each had been subsumed in a shimmering, enveloping wholeness that undulated and moved, vibrated with a barely audible humming and scintillated with millions and millions of pixels of light.
Madame Métier could feel too, just then, that she and the boy in her arms, and his parents and Mademoiselle Objet and the room itself and even all the objects in it were part of this vast mysterious luminous effervescence, this infinite and exquisite, vibrating, pulsating energy. She could feel it now, magnificently and hugely, inhabiting her body, and she knew that although she might not remember it every day or be able to feel it always in exactly the way she felt it now, that this energy was her essence, that its name was Love, and that it was the author of all healing.
The boy on her lap now started to wiggle. He looked up at Madame Métier and smiled. Then, reaching up, he touched her face, and happily kissed her on the cheek. He jumped off her lap then, and running across the room to his parents, took hold of his father’s and mother’s hands, and then with the two of them, he started skipping, practically, across the room.
Mademoiselle Objet stood up, too, and started walking across the room to open the door. The boy’s parents, with the boy in hand, walked over to Madame Métier, and weeping, bowed before her.
“We’re speechless,” said the father.
“We don’t know how to thank you,” said the mother.
“We have no idea how much to pay you,” said the father.
“Yes,” said the mother. “We’ve been everywhere and spent thousands and thousands of dollars.”
“Paying—it is unnecessary,” said Madame Métier. “You have brought me a great gift.”
Across from her, the father and mother looked puzzled.
“She means,” said Mademoiselle Objet, laughing a tinkling, lighthearted laugh, “that she always enjoys a challenge, and that she loves her work.”
The parents looked at her once again, confused. “But what about the room?” they said, “and all the broken objects?”
“It’s all right,” said Madame Métier, nodding at Mademoiselle Objet, “I just happen to have someone here whose genius it is to solve exactly such problems.”
“Well, thank you, then,” said the father.
“Yes, thank you very much,” said the mother.
Mademoiselle Objet opened the door, and with the boy now standing relaxed and peaceful between them, they exited the Seeing Room and started walking down the stairs.
When they had left, Mademoiselle Objet came back into the Seeing Room, where Madame Métier was still sitting on the blue silk hassock. Madame Métier stood up then, and the two of them embraced.
Madame Metier was silent for a moment, and took a step backward. Then, looking directly at Mademoiselle Objet, she said in a deep, quiet way: “Thank you. Thank you for seeing what I could not see, for knowing what I could not know—what for so long I have needed to know.”
“You’re welcome,” said Mademoiselle Objet softly. “I don’t know why it took you so long, why you had to be the last one to know. I’ve always told you, it’s not your cremes, it’s you that heals everyone.”
“Now I see,” said Madame Métier. “Now, finally, I know.”
“Shall we have some tea then?” asked Mademoiselle Objet.
“Yes, that would be nice,” said Madame Métier.
PART VI
CHAPTER 1
Much Time Had Passed
Much time had passed. The three of them were sitting at a table under a huge white umbrella on the sea-washed plage of a white sand island, where, for several years running now, they had come together on vacation.
Tanned, and in spite of her now all-white hair, looking young and immensely beautiful, Madame Métier, in a new red bathing suit, though not quite so daring as the old one, was sipping a pink lemonade, when, from a distance, a young man, walking along down the beach in long loping strides began gradually to approach them.
“You always had adventures at the beach,” said Mademoiselle Objet, noticing him. “You never told me, but I know you did.”
“You look very beautiful sitting there, drinking your lemonade,” said the young man, who, having arrived at their table was now standing in front of Madame Métier. He was tall and strong and had blonde hair and blue eyes. He was wearing a square gold watch and its crystal, catching the sun, laid down a small rectangle of light on the blue tablecloth.
A tear, many tears, fell slowly out of Madame Métier’s eyes, and, discreetly, she wiped them away.
“Would you like to go for a walk?” he asked her, raising his arm in a single long elegant gesture. “The light is so pure. The beach is so calm.” He pointed into the distance, and as she watched, the rectangle of light was lifted up from the table and disappeared in the air.
“No, thank you,” she said. “Though I do thank you for the lovely invitation. But we have so little time here together on
the island, my dear friends and I, that I’d like to stay here and talk a while with them.”
“I understand,” said the young man, and, turning slowly away, he walked off with long loping beautiful strides until he was gone.
CHAPTER 2
As Time Went On, How They Changed
Monsieur Sorbonne had long since quit the Artifacts Museum. He had become a famous photographer. Because of his extraordinary portraits, especially those of Madame Métier, he had had many exhibitions of his work—“Images of the Soul,” he called them—in many cities around the world.
And it wasn’t—as he so often told Mademoiselle Objet when they were sitting at home having tea—the photographs in themselves that gave his life’s work its meaning. It was—as he had learned so many years ago when he photographed cornices and buildings and all the images disappeared—because now he photographed with love.
Mademoiselle Objet had long since become peaceful. She had gone through so many things with Madame Métier, and so many things had passed through her, that she could no longer hystericize about anything. The peace of having been for so long in Madame Métier’s presence, like a molecular change, had settled within her and become, at last, her own true possession. At night, at home with Monsieur Sorbonne, she returned to reading her poems books. Gradually, she started writing poems herself, and from time to time she retrieved the twisted tubes of watercolor paints from the small grey Belgian linen bag, and made little paintings to accompany her poems.
And Madame Métier also had changed. She had become more deeply herself, had become, as she said simply, “more big inside.” And outside, where, as she always said, it really didn’t matter, she had become famous. Indeed, wherever she went, she was recognized. People would call out her name and touch her clothes, and quietly bow in her direction.
“It’s a nuisance, being famous,” she said to Mademoiselle Objet, who finally bought her a red wig so that, incognito, she could pass through the streets.
She also got fan mail from all her fans, great bags and bags of it. In the beginning, Mademoiselle Objet had tried to sort them out and get them organized, but in the end she gave up. “They all say the same thing, anyway,” she said. “They all say you saved their life.” And so every day when the big canvas mail bags arrived, she brought all the letters to Madame Métier to bless them, and then she threw them away in the trash.
In her diamond jubilee year—“and when you are old, and the pleasures of your beauty have faded—recognition, honor …”—there was a festival, a public celebration in honor of Madame Métier. “I don’t like public events. I don’t want to go. These recognitions aren’t what’s important,” she said to Mademoiselle Objet.
“Not to you,” said Mademoiselle Objet. “But to them. To the others. To them it’s a gift simply to be in your presence.” And so, in the end, she agreed to go. In a green velvet dress, embroidered across its bodice with fine gold threads and little round mirrors (“so I can hold the reflection of all their faces over my heart”), escorted by Monsieur Sorbonne and Mademoiselle Objet, Madame Métier arrived at the party.
There were hundreds of guests of every generation, old people who said that her cremes had kept them young, middle-aged people who said that her cremes had helped them gain wisdom, young men and women who said her cremes had given them hope, lovers who said that her cremes had healed their estrangements, young couples with babies who asked her to hold them and bless them so they would have a good life.
There were vases of lilies and hundreds of candles, and huge silver trays with tiny T-fish and cucumber sandwiches. There were urns of tea of every flavor, bottles of flavored crystals waters, and, in the background, beautiful music—a piano player, note after note unwinding a beautiful song in the summer evening air. It was a song about angels and heaven and remembering forever, and Madame Métier was enchanted. With a beautiful sorrow in her heart, she thought of Monsieur L’Ange.
At last, after many people had spoken about her work, Madame Métier herself stood up. She walked up to the stage to the sound of a long and thunderous applause, and took her place at the podium.
“Thank you. Thank you so very much,” she said, as the clapping quieted down. “I thank you all very deeply for being here tonight.
“It has been my great joy, my great privilege for so many years, to have done this beautiful work, to have offered to you through my cremes, the healing spirits of the plants. It has been my sacred honor to serve, and I am deeply grateful. But, in truth, my work, like any great work, could only have been accomplished through the miracle of relationship—collaboration with those whose gifts so perfectly complement mine that their fulfillment and my own have been for so many years now, exquisitely intertwined.
“And so I wish to thank first of all the dear ones who have assisted me most, who have done all the important, intricate, tedious, daily tasks to help me accomplish my work”—here she smiled out at Mademoiselle Objet and Monsieur Sorbonne—“the ones I have loved, who have loved me so well. Who have stood at my side … through everything. To them I owe a great debt.” She paused for a moment, and nodding at Monsieur Sorbonne and Mademoiselle Objet, invited them to stand up. They rose for a minute, and, turning, smiled as the audience clapped and clapped for them. “From my deepest heart,” said Madame Metier, folding her hands across her heart as they sat down again, “I thank both of you.”
“I wish also, deeply, to thank all of you who have received my work, who have allowed me to touch your pain through the healing spirits of the plants. Each of you, with your hurts, with your needs, with your anguish, has shown me what I came here to do. In so doing, you have granted my life its meaning. And so I wish to thank you all very dearly.” She paused for a moment, and then with her eyes traced a circle around the entire audience.
“I know it is my work, my so called ‘achievements,’ that we have gathered here to celebrate, and I am deeply grateful for this honor. But I have been given to learn, through the long and gracious span of my life, that it is not what we do, not our accomplishments in themselves that have meaning, but the love with which we undertake them. Indeed, with love, whatever our work, whether the simplest act of service—straightening a pencil, washing a dish, serving a tea—or the most complex achievement—building a temple, governing a nation, unravelling the strange equations of the universe—no matter how humble or grand it may be, whatever we undertake in love becomes a sacrament.
“So it is that each plant which gives its essence for a creme, each person who manufactures the jar or tin in which it is delivered, each person whose suffering need has called it into being, each artist who enchants our hearts with color or exquisite images, with beautiful words or breathtaking notes of music—insofar as his or her work has been undertaken with love, it comes alive with the power to heal, to move all our souls a bit closer to the dazzling brightness of our being.
“For, it is in fact, only Love that heals, and everything else—all our particular achievements—are really only the means we have each been given for delivering love in its many-splendored multitude of individual expressions.
“Each of us has love to give. We give it through our work. We give it through our waiting and our praying. We give it through our words and through our silence. We give it through our grieving and through our celebrations. We give it through the beautiful, complex, ever-flowing array of our emotions. We give it with our bodies, through touch and movement and passion. We give it with our hearts when they skip a beat for pure joy, and when they rest in the peace that passes all understanding.
“And that, my Dear Ones, is because Love is our one true work. It’s who we are. It’s why we’re here. It’s what we came for. And it’s what we have to give.”
Madame Métier paused for a moment. She looked around the room, with her eyes engaging for a moment the eyes of each person present. Then she laced her hands over her heart, and bowed softly to her audience.
“And so, once again, and ever so deeply, I thank
you,” she said. “I thank you all with all my heart. Thank you for being here. Thank you for the love you bring. And thank you for allowing me to give you my love these many years through the healing spirits of the plants.”
When she had finished, everyone stood up and clapped. They raised their hands high in the air and some of them shouted, “Thank you,” and, “Bravo!” Many faces were washed with tears, and a few people noticed with interest the large rectangle of light that seemed to contain and follow her as she stepped away from the podium, walked down the center aisle of the room, and then out the back doors, where under a starry sky, Monsieur Sorbonne and Mademoiselle Objet were waiting to take her home.
CHAPTER 3
Madame Métier, Monsieur Sorbonne, and Mademoiselle Objet Have One More Reunion
It was not long after this that, one night, upon entering her bedroom, Madame Métier found every inch of it, from corner to corner, bathed in a huge rectangle of brilliant white light.
The pillow also, on the far side of the bed, seemed, more than usual, to smell distinctly of clary sage, was it? or saxifrage?—and clasping it to her heart and feeling finally free to weep for all the losses of her life, she cried in a way that she hadn’t cried for years.
In the morning, she went to work as usual, but in the afternoon she told Mademoiselle Objet she was tired and she went to her room to lie down. She slept and dreamed that she had awakened in her bed and looked up at the ceiling to see a huge pale orange butterfly, its shimmering wings spread out so flat it seemed to have been painted, tromp l’oeil, against the wall. It fluttered a moment as she watched, then slowly it dissolved.
The Magical World of Madame Métier Page 22
