Pilgrim

by Timothy Findley

  “An admirable idea,” Pilgrim said. “But quite impossible.”

  “No, no,” Peruggia countered. “Not impossible at all. For instance, I have studied how one may free the Mona Lisa from her pinnings.”

  Pilgrim said nothing.

  He was thinking: to return her to where she belongs. Yes. To want the light to return. To want the light instead of darkness. This is my whole intention.

  He remembered his rampage in the Music Room at the Burghölzli. He remembered throwing the wax recordings and smashing the violin. He remembered his rage and the overwhelming sense that art—all art—was impotent. And he remembered the figure of the Countess Blavinskeya crouching on the floor, looking up at Kessler and shouting: DON’T!

  To want the light back. To want the light instead of darkness. How could one make them understand? More must be wanted than the mere presence of art—something must be lifted in the spirit of the viewer, the reader, the listener. Something must be lifted out of the gutters of violence and degradation into which the human race had sunk so willingly. Could the answer lie in such simple men as this, as Peruggia, with his illiterate, uneducated notion that to restore a painting to its birthplace would be to shed light on a failed and failing people?

  “My problem is,” Peruggia said, “I have not sufficient courage. Many times I have been alone in her company, but I do not possess the bravery to take her down and run.”

  Pilgrim said: “but if someone else were to take her down and hand her to you, would you then at least be able to run with her?”

  Peruggia sat silent.

  Then he said: “what is Monsieur suggesting?”

  “That I agree with you,” said Pilgrim. “I agree that her place is in Italy. In Florence. I like what you say about art being born. It is absolutely true. All great art is born—its mother is its country, its culture; its father is its painter, its sculptor, its composer or its writer.”

  Peruggia smiled. “I could not have said it like that,” he said, “but I do believe it.”

  And that is how it happened.

  At 2:00 p.m., the guard, Verronet, went again to the W.C. to smoke another cigarette.

  Peruggia cut the painting from the wall.

  Pilgrim withdrew it from its frame.

  Peruggia was handed the canvas, wrapped in the portfolio.

  Each man left the Salon Carré by a different route, Forster leaving the frame and glass in the stairwell and all emerging from the Louvre at 2:20 in the afternoon.

  Pilgrim handed Peruggia five hundred francs and said: “journey well.”

  On parting, none looked back. Pilgrim and Forster walked to the Renault—deposited the picnic hamper, the pencil-box and the camp stool in the rear seat above the petrol. Pilgrim—exuberant and beaming—threw his topcoat onto the hamper and said: “we shall leave Paris at four. But first, we shall celebrate. To Le Jardin des Lilas for champagne!”

  As they drove out onto the Quai du Louvre, Pilgrim watched the tiny figure of Vincenzo Peruggia making his way across the Pont Neuf—overwhelmed, so it seemed, by the size of the artist’s portfolio clutched beneath his arm with its precious cargo.

  She is free, Pilgrim thought. I am free. We are free.

  It was done.

  There was now the next target. Chartres.

  7

  The American novelist and historian Henry Adams had read Pilgrim’s book on Leonardo, Sfumato—The Veil of Smoke, in 1910 and had taken the liberty of sending the Englishman a copy of his own privately printed Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, which had been published in 1904. Consequently, Adams and Pilgrim had corresponded, but never met. (Seven of Pilgrim’s letters are preserved in the Adams archive with the Massachusetts Historical Society.)

  The coincidence of Adams’s passion for Chartres and Pilgrim’s disjointed “memories” of it was a source, from the beginning, of fascination for Pilgrim, though he never felt compelled to write more than scholarly praise for the book to his new American friend. Adams, on the other hand, did feel a special bond with the man across the waters, as he called Pilgrim. He was fascinated by the Englishman’s informed response to his own exploration of what he called the last great age of understanding before reason intervened. What Pilgrim had to say confirmed, for Adams, the connection between his own singular reading of the past and the past itself. He never questioned the source of Pilgrim’s knowledge regarding that past, simply accepting his given standing as a knowledgeable art historian.

  Mister Pilgrim’s voice, Adams noted in his journals, is unique and one in which I rejoice, because like myself, he casts aside all the clever academic veils of reason that have clouded scholars’ ability to see the past as it was, and not as they would have preferred it to be.

  At the same time Pilgrim made entries about Adams’s treatise on the twelfth century which read like a checklist of hits and misses. The negatives were never mentioned between them. For the most part, Pilgrim concluded: he got it right.

  But scholasticism was no longer what Pilgrim’s life was about. He had now veered towards what he called, in the notebook Forster had provided for him, rejectionism. Let us turn our back on humanity’s failed ambitions and confront the lower order we have become.

  The success of the “Gioconda escapade” had buoyed him to the degree that Pilgrim actually sang out loud in the car as he and Forster headed southwest along the newly gravelled road between Paris and Chartres.

  Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me,

  Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee…

  Perhaps, Forster ventured to think, the champagne Mister Pilgrim spent the last hour consuming will allow him to sleep tonight.

  Perhaps. But not in the car.

  “Look at the ship of the sun go sinking down,” Pilgrim enthused, sitting up rigid beside Forster, who drove with his goggles in place. “Look at all the birds a-flying, and all the trees—the trees—the trees…”

  Poetic talk, Forster decided. He’s off on one of his flights of fancy.

  All at once Pilgrim said: “we are for Chartres Cathedral, Forster—the greatest, grandest and the most sacred of Christian houses. It awaits us all unsuspecting. The last great fire at Chartres occurred in 1194. Seven hundred and eighteen years ago. Seven hundred and eighteen years. She knows we are coming. She knows, I tell you. We have been there before. She will smell the soles of my shoes. She will know the touch of my fingers. She will know I have come back. She will remember me.”

  Forster pulled the collar of his duster higher. The sun was directly in his eyes and he vowed to buy a pair of goggles with a darker tint. What might we have for our dinner? he was thinking. Where might we spend the night?

  “Mister Henry Adams—an American—wrote of Chartres Cathedral that it has moods. And he added that at times, these moods are severe,” said Pilgrim—laughing afterwards, but lightly. “I wonder what the grande dame’s mood is tonight. Apprehensive, I should think.”

  There was now an unimpeded view of the descending sun. It was a vivid burnt orange, shimmering beyond the earth’s steaming mists and gases. One could almost see its flames.

  “Dreadful fires,” Pilgrim drawled on. “Three of them, all told. One in my own lifetime…”

  Oh, dear, Forster was thinking. Now we’ve gone all the way back to imaginary lives. Such episodes had happened before—moments in the garden at Cheyne Walk when the mind boiled over—in Mrs Matheson’s phrase. Thrusting one’s walking stick at the branches of a tree in the belief that the Saracens were coming over the wall—standing in the wheelbarrow being tumbrelled to the guillotine—clutching the dog Agamemnon, saying that Clytemnestra must not find him. Traumatic moments, to be sure—but all had been survived. Now, they were going to destroy Chartres Cathedral.

  Well.

  They had stolen and given away the Mona Lisa. Not bad, for a fantasy. Thinking about it, Forster had to wonder—at least for a moment—if it had really happened. Did we really do that?

  Yes. Yes, we did. And she is now some
where in Paris, more than likely hiding under a bed.

  And so they drove on to Chartres.

  “We shall not be staying,” Pilgrim told him. “We shall register, but by four in the morning, we shall be gone.”

  The chosen venue was L’Auberge du Pèlerin. By the time they arrived, the journey had robbed Pilgrim of his good humour—so much so that he did not even bother to point out to Forster that they were about to stay in The Pilgrim’s Inn. There was a tiny dining-room, of which they took advantage, though without pleasure. The food was not good—a ragoût—and the wine was worse. They retired to their room equally bad-tempered, though only Pilgrim was allowed to show it. He threw his boots at the wall.

  For twenty minutes, he presented a diatribe against the discomfort of automobiles. After this, he retreated to the W.C. and complained that he was constipated. At 11:00 he retired fully dressed, announcing that at 2:00 a.m. precisely, he must be wakened.

  8

  On the morning of Tuesday, July 2nd, at 4:00 a.m., Pilgrim and Forster left the lobby of L’Auberge du Pèlerin and made their way, suitcases in hand, to the Renault, which was parked in the stable yard.

  Since the advent of the automobile, such yards had become a pleasant olfactory mix of horse manure, oil spills and the fumes of petrol. Added to this were the scent of hay and the grey aroma of dusty cobbles. Pilgrim paused to drink all this in, the few hours of sleep having restored his good spirits.

  Pilgrims over time, he thought. Think of all the pilgrims who have paused here in this place—L’Auberge du Pèlerin—knowing that at the end of their journey, the great cathedral awaited them with its storied spires and windows and its Christian relics. Seven hundred years and more of journeys—seven hundred years of pilgrims. And I, the last pilgrim—who shall raze it to the ground. To know that God is dead, we need proof. Habeus Corpus. The ruins of this cathedral dedicated to Jesus Christ will tell us Christ is nowhere and that all his heroic chroniclers were liars. Here is where art first perished.

  He reflected on the building’s history. After the last great fire in 1194, it was said that the survival of three icons demonstrated the Virgin Mary’s continued love and respect for the faithful of Chartres. These were the skull of Saint Anne, the Virgin’s mother; the stained-glass window in which the Virgin is depicted holding the Christ Child—and the mystical Palladium.

  The Palladium was said to be the tunic Mary had worn on the night she gave birth to Jesus. It had been donated to the original cathedral—also destroyed by fire—by Charles the Bald, Charlemagne’s grandson, in 876.

  The surviving window was the one which, so Pilgrim had informed Jung, contained his initials when I played the role of Simon le Jeune, lead-man to my father’s glass-cutter. Then, he had been a chronicler in glass. Only Heaven knew why this single window had been selected by destiny to survive—but there it was.

  The figure of the Virgin was seven feet tall. Above her head, a dove was tilted downward, its wings spread as a forewarning of the Cross. In her lap, the Virgin held the Christ Child, whose right hand was raised in blessing. In His left hand, He held an open book which showed the words—in Latin—EVERY VALLEY SHALL BE EXALTED—a quote from Isaiah.

  And every mountain and hill shall be made low, Pilgrim remembered.

  Well—this night the whole of Chartres would be made low.

  The journey to the great cathedral was brief, though somewhat confused, due to a lack of universal street lamps. Many turnings took them down darkened alleys and past what appeared to be, in the dim light, a disabled cityscape. It had the look of a deserted village—or of a place under siege, with all its citizens barricaded behind locked shutters.

  In the dooryard, beggars and lepers slept in separate compounds, both of which were enclosed behind wooden fences. Roofs of thatch and board had been erected to protect them from the rain. Each of these communities of outcasts had its own fires and its own sense of identity. The lepers’ fires were low and almost devoid of heat, since it was forbidden that lepers should venture into the larger community in order to gather firewood and coal. They depended entirely on charity. And the blessings of God.

  They might have been there for ten thousand years, these people of poverty and disease. Pilgrim went so far as to believe he recognized individuals as their faces loomed up beyond the firelight as he passed.

  The only words spoken were whispered: “pilgrim, have you any bread for us?”

  No bread, but money—which Pilgrim gave without comment.

  As they entered the building, the great door creaked and groaned as though it had not been opened in a century. Inside the cathedral, hundreds of votive candles provided the only light, but it was adequate—spread as it was from chapel to chapel, corner to corner and near the various altars erected to saints, the Virgin and Saint Anne.

  The naves of all the great cathedrals of Europe point to the east, in the direction of Jerusalem. Each and every altar is consecrated to that holy place. This means that each cathedral’s main port faces west. In the morning, matins—in the evenings, vespers—the prayers lighted by the sun ascendant and the sun descendant. The choir stalls lie mostly along the south wall, though this is not universally so. But at Chartres, it holds true—and it was there, beyond the choir, that Pilgrim’s “personal window” rose.

  He went at once to the High Altar, where he knelt and crossed himself. With no religion, he nonetheless felt obliged to pay his respects to a monument he was about to destroy.

  He had the vaguest, dreamlike memory of having knelt in the same place more than once before—when I knew my God. It had always been sacred here, even before the Christians came. In Druid times, the earth above which he now knelt had been dedicated to the pagan “miracle” of a virgin giving birth. Virgo paritura, Pilgrim muttered. And then: Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum…Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee…

  Having had his say, he rose and walked over to the choir stalls on the south wall. Peering through the gloom, he gazed at one of the windows in the upper series above him. Notre Dame de la Belle Verrière—Our Lady of the Beautiful Glass. There was not enough light outside to show the incredible blue, ruby and rose of its ancient panels—and it was too far above Pilgrim for him to see the initials he maintained were etched in one of the blue lozenges near the Virgin’s feet. But he knew they were there. He knew. S.l.J.—Simon le Jeune.

  After a moment, he turned back to where Forster waited for him, the containers of petrol resting on the floor beside him.

  “We shall begin here.” Pilgrim indicated the wooden choir stalls beneath Our Lady.

  Taking the petrol, he spread it liberally over the benches with their carved facings and, having done so, he stepped back.

  “Well,” he said to Forster—as he handed the valet the emptied containers and withdrew a box of matches from his pocket—“say goodbye to it all and we shall leave.”

  Forster said nothing. He was pale with fright and emptied of hope. In his mind, he would not survive this—nor would Mister Pilgrim. It was an act of dreamlike madness.

  “Are you ready?” Pilgrim finally asked.

  “Yes, sir. Yes,” Forster muttered.

  “You precede me. I shall follow.”

  Forster, not looking back, began his exit. The nave, so it seemed, was suddenly twenty miles long, and as he headed towards the great door at the far end, he felt as though he must wade through an incoming tide.

  Pilgrim reached into his pocket and withdrew the three handkerchiefs he had placed there before leaving the inn. He tied them together, forming a linen rope which he then placed on the floor, one end of it just touching a puddle of petrol.

  Then, with great care, he lighted two matches, held side by side.

  He closed his eyes—opened them—and dropped the matches onto the nearest end of the handkerchiefs. He watched the flames begin to creep along towards the petrol, and then turned and rapidly strode down the nave towards the door.

  At 5:00 a.m. they were
on the road to Tours, while behind them, the windows of the great cathedral at Chartres began to glow with fiery light.

  9

  Die N.Z.Z.’s lead headline on Thursday, July 4th, had to do with the hundred-and-thirty-sixth anniversary of American Independence. A second headline declared that the Emperor of Japan was sinking towards death—and indeed, he would die some three weeks later.

  Jung, being angered by America’s recent sabre-rattling in Honduras, paid no attention to the lead article. As for the Emperor of Japan, he had been given to sabre-rattling of his own—most notably with Russia—and his regime had been entirely one of power-mongering. Jung skimmed the piece and turned to what remained on the page.

  A mysterious fire in the cathedral at Chartres in France.

  Good God.

  He skimmed the short article: fortunately, little damage…authorities baffled…investigation about to begin…

  Pilgrim. It could only be Pilgrim.

  First he had stolen the Mona Lisa—it must have been him—and now he had set fire to his beloved cathedral. Did he intend to sack the whole of France of its treasures? Somehow, he must be stopped.

  On reaching the Clinic, he asked Fräulein Unger to find out how to get in touch with the French Ambassador at Berne. Jung’s reputation would lend credibility to what he had to say—that an escaped patient had “declared war on art” and that, undoubtedly, the incidents at the Louvre and Chartres were his doing. How to find the man would be another matter, but surely at least to know who he was would help.

  At Küsnacht, Emma regarded the day’s news with equal despair, but for a different reason. If Mister Pilgrim was captured, what would it do to his passionate quest to reclaim the past? This was her interpretation of Pilgrim’s dilemma: all that stood between an ominous present and a disastrous future was recognition of the true meaning of the past. In his writings, she had found again and again a plea for the innate integrity of art. PAY ATTENTION! he had shouted in capital letters, over and over. But no one had listened. Now, in order to draw attention to that integrity—and its double message of compassion and reconciliation—he was on a campaign to destroy the very presence of its most articulate voices. Once the evidence of compassion and reconciliation is gone, he had written in one of his journals, our memory of it will turn us back to its true meaning. Now, he had begun his rampage—and where would it end?