The Priest's Madonna Page 2

  Michelle, I should explain, was my dear friend and sister from my tenth year onward. She came just after the death of my infant brother, Christophe, several months after our pilgrimage to Sainte Baume. After he died, Mother wore a blank stare and stopped scolding Claude and me when we were naughty. Father worried. He began bringing home tins of grisettes and tortes sent by the sister of one of his workers, a Mme Lèvre. Claude and I enjoyed the treats, of course, and Mother wrote a note of thanks. I suppose M. Lèvre had his request in mind all along.

  It so happened that the Lèvre family had a cousin, M. Baron, who had just lost his wife to consumption. M. Baron was done in by grief; he refused to leave his smithy’s shop, and spent his days and nights at the forge, hammering incessantly, his face blackened with soot. He seemed to hardly recognize his daughter, who was my age and in need of good meals, schooling, and company. Father told us this story one night at dinner, and I remember being angry with him for telling such a story in Mother’s presence—one that could only make her feel worse. But the next day, when Michelle arrived bearing a battered suitcase and a bunch of half-wilted lavender, I understood why he’d spoken.

  My father must have thought that it would cheer my mother to have another child around the house. Or maybe M. Lèvre was a remarkable salesman. Whatever the reason, Father, impulsive as ever, had agreed to take Michelle in without consulting my mother. She was furious; she wept and raved. She wanted nothing to do with another child, especially a practically grown girl. What she wanted was a baby—her baby, Christophe—back again. Didn’t Father know the difference between an infant and a prepubescent girl? But my father’s word was his word, and he had given it to M. Lèvre. The matter was closed. I pitied Michelle, for my mother would barely look her in the eye, and the rivalry that might have easily grown between us did not so much as germinate. She had raven-black hair that she wore in plaits, and small, intelligent eyes. She must have understood my mother’s grief for Christophe, for she left her alone and did not hover or cling. It was skillfully done; Mother could observe Michelle from a distance and could see how quickly the rest of us took to her. Before long, it was as if she had always been a part of our family. We dreaded the day that her father would call to claim her again. As it turned out, M. Baron died a few months after his wife, and Michelle and all her quiet, sad wisdom was ours to keep.

  IN THE FALL of1884, when Michelle and I were about six teen, my father hired a vagabond. Gaunt and shoeless, he’d come from a tiny mountain village west of us, close to the Spanish border. We didn’t know much about him, and he didn’t speak our patois—his was broader, his pronunciation closer to Spanish—but my father hired him anyway. He clearly needed the work. My mother fed him and let him sleep in front of the hearth, and the next morning my father set him to work boiling the carded wool into felt. I don’t know what his real name was, but the men called him le bandit. He slept on the workroom floor.

  One afternoon, my father got into an especially heated argument with one of the men about the hypocrisy of the Church. That night our bedroom filled with smoke. I woke first, coughing, and ran barefoot to the window, scorching the soles of my feet on the floor. Father jumped first, then caught Claude, Michelle, and me. Mother appeared at the window, weeping, her arms full of lace and linen. “Jump, Isabelle!” my father yelled. He broke her fall, collapsing beneath her weight. The church bells began to clang then—someone had raised the alarm—and men came quickly, carting buckets of river water. They doused the fire, but not before both our house and the workshop were destroyed. And le bandit was gone.

  We walked through the charred ruins that next dawn, searching for anything salvageable. The walls of the workshop still stood, but they were streaked with soot; the tables were blackened and crumbling, the carding machine half melted. “The devil’s gone walking,” I heard one of the old women say, and this was how I imagined it ever afterward: that the devil had stepped on our house and left an inferno as his footprint.

  So, we moved—to the nearby hilltop village of Rennes-le-Château. My father bought the house sight unseen, swayed by the low price and the reputed beauty of the village. (“Magnificent views of the mountains,” he repeated to us, “and an ancient castle, just down the road!”) But, as my mother had suspected, the purchase price proved too good to be true, for the house, like most others in the village, had been neglected for centuries. The incessant wind whistled through the cracks in the mortar, chilling us to the teeth. My mother forbade us from walking near the edge of the cliff beyond the church because she worried that the wind might send us over.

  They say that the wind is the breath of phantoms. If this is true, then Rennes-le-Château was a village full of spirits, for the tramontane blew all the time. It seemed the wind even brought word of our arrival and the circumstances surrounding it, for the villagers appeared to know all about us: where we’d come from, what we’d lost. They did not welcome us sympathetically. When we climbed the hill, accompanied by a mule carrying the few things we’d managed to save—the lace tablecloth, the bed linens, several pewter dishes, a few books, their pages fragrant still with smoke—no one greeted us. They treated us from the first as if they knew that we felt coming to Rennes-le-Château was a debasement. And though neither of my parents ever said as much, I saw that there was truth in this assumption.

  Father took what he insisted was a temporary job at the new hat factory in Espéraza, a place he had long decried for the inferiority of their products. There his expertise was largely disregarded. He was expected to do the same menial labor as any other worker: operate the levers, remove the forms from one machine and place them in another. He grew bitter and perpetually tired, for the walk to Espéraza from Rennes took an hour each way. He—and Claude, once he turned thirteen—left at dawn and returned well after dark, leaving Mother, Michelle, and me alone in our unfriendly village.

  The first morning we arrived, Mother and I went together to collect our water from the pump, which sat at the far end of the château square. Several women stood in the center of the square. Silence fell as we approached, and though my mother greeted each woman, she received no more than a nod in return. Mother turned the iron wheel that powered the pump and we filled our buckets and then made our way back, past the staring group of women. I concentrated on spilling as little water as possible. The silence felt like a scolding, especially as their voices began to hum once again as we reached the crest of the hill.

  There were exceptions; not everyone was so unkind. The grocer welcomed me when I stopped in for flour. The mayor came—in time for our midday dinner—to introduce himself. And Mme Gautier, the butcher’s wife, brought us a lamb pie. But she did not stay long and spoke in a whisper, even when we’d closed the door behind her, as if she was afraid of being overheard. How I longed for our first Sunday! I had the idea that the village would transform itself for Mass—that somehow the shared ritual of communion, of kneeling together to pray, would initiate us into the community, and that we would finally be welcomed as neighbors.

  Mother, Claude, Michelle, and I walked the short distance uphill to the church that first Sunday. (Father only accompanied us on Easter or Christmas, when Mother insisted.) I noticed again, as I had already on several occasions, how the dome appeared lop-sided, as if it had been gradually sliding earthward since the eleventh century, when, we’d been told, it had been built. Moss grew between the limestone bricks, and pigeons nested beneath the porch roof. The interior was in even greater disrepair: the walls were of varying thickness and almost seemed to ripple. Most of the windows had been blown out by a storm some years back, and the wind whistled through the nave. The main altar was nothing more than a stone slab supported by two stone pillars. On the slab stood a wooden tabernacle from which the gilt had begun to peel. A secondary altar set against the wall consisted of another stone pillar, this one cracked down the length of one side, topped with a statue of the Holy Virgin and decorated with a plaque that bore the devotion of the Miraculous Medal: “O Ma
ry, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.” The only object of beauty in the church was set in a niche behind the main altar: a gilded Christ figure, haloed and robed in blue, two fingers extended in blessing.

  The nave was tiny, with seats for maybe seventy people. Most of the congregants were women and children. As at the fountain, talk ceased when we entered, and heads turned. The first pew had been left empty, and I guessed this was a test to see if we would have the audacity to sit there. My mother wisely chose the last pew instead, and we slipped in beside her and knelt, bowing our heads. I sensed that even our prayer—customary before the service in our home church at Espéraza—was interpreted as an unctuous rebuke, for it was not the custom at Rennes-le-Château. I felt as if I’d swallowed a stone.

  The priest at that time was a man who seemed as old as the church itself. He doddered up the aisle, swinging the censer, his hands shaking so that I feared he might drop it. His sermon was impossible to follow. He spoke so slowly that by the time he reached the end of a sentence, I’d forgotten where he’d begun. People slept or chatted. He didn’t seem to notice—he carried on as if we weren’t there, as if the Mass was solely a personal communication between him and God.

  When he died later that year, his requiem was a somber festival. Soon afterward, hopeful rumors spread through the village about the young priest who was to be appointed in his place. He was coming from Clat, we heard, where he’d served for three years. My mother showed some interest in this news—she must have known Bérenger’s whereabouts at the time and guessed it was he.

  THE DAY HE arrived was warm and clear. I was outside sweeping the front stoop when I saw him coming up the path. The hem of his cassock was white with dust, and sweat had darkened the cloth below his arms. He carried a small yellow valise, dusty as well. Heads peeked around half-open shutters. He smiled at a few faces, but received barely a nod in return.

  As he approached our house, his face brightened and he greeted me by name, which surprised me. I did not recognize him—it had been eight years since we’d met—but, wanting to appear more welcoming than my neighbors, I bowed my head and returned his greeting. He set down his valise and, placing his hands at his waist, stretched backward, causing his back to pop like pine in a fire.

  “You don’t remember me,” he said, smiling devilishly. Having the upper hand in this way seemed to amuse him, but as he spoke, I did remember him: he wore the same expression of roguish delight when he hoisted me on his back at the grotto.

  “Yes, I do remember you. We met at Sainte Baume.”

  “A-ha! And you’re all grown up now. A young woman.”

  My mother appeared at the door and exclaimed, “It is you!” before rushing to greet Bérenger with a kiss on each cheek. “I knew you had been at Clat,” she continued. “What a coincidence!”

  “A lucky one,” he said.

  “How is your dear mother?”

  They exchanged pleasantries—Bérenger asked after Father and Claude and expressed his regret at the change in our circumstances. “Mother told me of the fire,” he said, shaking his head. “Such a loss.”

  “It can’t be helped,” my mother said, dismissing the subject, which was her way with unpleasant topics. Michelle emerged, her hands still black with soil from the garden, and curtsied as Mother introduced her. “I’ll be glad to show you the presbytery,” Mother said, “though I’m afraid you will find it disappointing. It hasn’t been lived in since God knows when. The last priest stayed with his sister in Rennes-les-Bains.” She instructed us to set another place for our midday dinner, and then escorted Bérenger up the hill.

  Michelle and I prepared the estofinado and the tomato salad, chatting excitedly all the while about Bérenger. The fact that Mother knew his family gave us a feeling of privilege. And though we would never say it out loud, we were thrilled by his looks—the dark, commanding brows, the thick black hair, the mischievous grin, and the athletic build that was not entirely hidden by his cassock. When my mother returned with Bérenger, Michelle served him dinner, demurely spooning the cod onto his plate and giving him an ample amount of sauce and potatoes. I poured the wine.

  While we ate, Mother continued to inquire after Bérenger’s family. His father, it appeared, had been mayor of Montazels at one time and now served as the steward of the old castle. His brother David was a Jesuit who taught school in Narbonne. He had several other siblings, one or two of whom had children. When Mother asked again after his mother, he sighed heavily, but said only that she was “the same as ever.” Mother nodded sympathetically, then changed the topic.

  “You’ll stay with us, I hope,” she said. “Until we can get the presbytery into a livable state again.”

  Bérenger raised his eyebrows and looked at me, which made me blush. “That’s very kind of you,” he said. “But I couldn’t impose.”

  “Nonsense,” said my mother, and she brooked no further protests.

  So Bérenger became our boarder. He slept on the floor by the hearth, his feet to the fire, his head beneath the table, and until my father found him a cot, he smelled of food: garlic, sheep’s blood, goat cheese. The primitive accommodations embarrassed me, but Bérenger seemed not to mind. He was always cheerful, despite his habit of rising early and staying up well past midnight reading scripture. He ate with us at dawn, and when Father and Claude left for the factory, he went to church to conduct morning Mass. After Mass, he worked in his office: a table and chair in a cleared corner of the presbytery kitchen. There he updated the parish accounts, which the previous priest had neglected. When he did not have church affairs to tend to or his own devotions to practice, he busied himself with making small repairs and constructing serviceable furniture for his own use (I know this because Michelle and I made it our habit to stop by the presbytery often, under some pretense or another). My mother, who had offered her services as his housekeeper at a modest rate, tackled the formidable job of cleaning up the presbytery and maintaining the church. This doubled her work, of course, so Michelle and I took on more responsibility at home.

  But together we were efficient, and managed to finish our chores by early afternoon most days. It was my mother’s belief that if we were well educated, we might have a better chance of marrying genteel husbands, and, in Espéraza, we’d had a small library of books that we’d taken great pleasure in, reading aloud to each other from Balzac and Hugo as well as the Lives of the Saints (which Mother insisted we read daily). But we had managed to salvage only a few volumes from the fire—a history of the French Revolution, the letters of Abélard and Héloïse, one or two Balzacs—so in Rennes our studies slowed. Rather than bore ourselves with the same old stories, we would stray to the open pastures where the hill began to slope toward the valley. From there we could see the red rooftops of Espéraza and the towers of the new factories, puffing smoke from their mouths like fat industrial dragons. We would chew on sprigs of wild rosemary and thyme and look out over the garrigues, talking of Bérenger and what we imagined he thought of his new home.

  Miryam of Magdala

  Miryam rose at dawn from a restless sleep. The house was quiet, her sisters and parents still asleep. She pulled on her cloak, wound a sash at her waist, tucked a leather purse beneath it, and left the house, sandals in hand. Outside, she slipped them on and walked to the shore to watch the fishermen haul in their nightly catch. Torches bobbed on the lake, marking the location of boats that were still out. As they approached, the men extinguished their lights and prepared to unload their seines full of small silver musht, some still quivering with life.

  Miryam had lately heard tales of a teacher traveling through the Galil, healing the sick. Great throngs of people had gathered near Kfar Nahum to hear him speak and watch him perform his miracles. It was rumored that he and his followers had now camped just outside of Magdala, and that they would be passing by the city that very day. This was why she slipped early from her bed: she intended to seek out this itinerant prophet.

  “
These are the stages of the people of Yisrael, when they went forth out of the land of Egypt,” she whispered as she watched the fishermen spread their nets on the shore to dry. A few began to build a fire several feet from the shore, close to where she stood. Some of them looked in her direction, then looked away. They knew she was well beyond the customary age of betrothal and yet unmarried, a woman incoherent in her speech, wild in her actions, possessed, it was said, by seven devils.

  A wind blew off the lake, chilling her. But though the sun had not yet warmed the air, the men were stripped to the waist. Sweat dripped from their hairlines and snaked down their backs as they squatted by the flames, cleaning some of the fish with bright blades. They ate the roasted musht for breakfast, picking the thin bones from their tongues.

  Chapter Two

  AT THE TIME of Bérenger’s arrival, I knew little about the political tenor of the country. My father had taught me simply that the republicans stood for the common person, the true Frenchman, while the monarchists wanted to maintain the rule of the wealthy elite. Times were changing, according to him, and it was the republicans who would usher in modernity.

  But Bérenger, I learned, was as passionate as my father about politics—and he was a monarchist. He arrived in Rennes just as Jules Ferry and the fledgling republic were excising the tumor of religion from society. Divorce was legalized; Sunday was no longer an obligatory day of rest. Public education was declared free, mandatory, and lay-taught, causing Bérenger’s brother David to lose his teaching post. Bérenger deeply resented the republic’s antireligious militancy.

  These changes barely affected my family, though my father and mother argued when divorce was legalized. Mother did not have political views, on the whole, but she supported the Church in all things. Religion, in my father’s mind, was a tower of lies constructed to contain and dominate the populace. Normally, my parents avoided the subject, but the divorce ruling set my mother’s blood boiling. The day she heard of it, she raged at my father from the moment he set foot in the door, as if he had cast the deciding vote. She took it personally: if his Republic had legalized divorce, then he must support the notion, and therefore must be planning to divorce her. She wouldn’t allow it, she told him. “Let no man put asunder!” she shouted, clanging the ladle against the soup tureen until M. Paul, who lived next door, knocked to see if all was well.