John the Pupil Page 10
The larger of our pursuers spoke to us first. He asked if any of us had been in a village whose name I did not recognise. When he did not receive assent to this, he asked if we knew a healer by the name of Father Gabriel, and as we were still silent, he spoke more impatiently when he asked if we had stayed in Father Gabriel’s garden; and this sounded to us like an interrogation from an assassin who had sufficient scruple to determine that the mark for his malice was the same as the one his masters or confederates had ordered him to kill.
Brother Bernard splashed through the water to get to the side opposite to our interlocutors of whom the slighter shook, as if in tears, as he stumbled with wet hands and feet and knees to climb over the wet stones, falling back submerged into the water, but then it became apparent that it was laughter.
They were not assassins or assailants, and they were not intent on causing us harm. And neither were both men. The one who had been interrogating us was a visiting shoemaker and also a most practised guide through the mountains. He is the grandson of the old woman that we had attended, whom I had held shivering. The other with him is his sister. In their gratitude, taking us as friends of their grandmother’s village, they had been directed by Father Gabriel to follow us up the mountain to guard us from any trouble that might befall us.
I write in this way to mimic the knowledge we acquired of our situation as we acquired it, and in this way, in the event of these pages finding their way back to their rightful reader, my Master, the blame that should be apportioned me should I fail might be lessened or at least lightened in understanding and, therefore, maybe, in forgiveness.
• • •
Our guides wear blue tunics as badges of their office. They are careful of us, they slow down their pace for ours, take care to warn us of difficult steps. The sister is hardly less agile and swift than her brother. They climb ahead, but not so far that we will lose sight of one of them, while the other goes on looking for danger before us, falls of rocks and snow. In the distance between us, we can hardly distinguish one figure in a blue tunic from the other but my heart always lifts when we get nearer and see it is the sister who walks just ahead.
Touching the mountains, walking through the pass, I fell into step with the blue-tunicked mountain girl. Her brother had climbed on, Brothers Bernard and Andrew walked behind. Her hair, cut roughly, could have been a boy’s. Her hair is dark and straight, her features sincere and pure, and she has a hint of holiness about her, that sits unevenly with her pride.
That, she said pointing to the highest mountain where dark clouds hid the peak, is where King Romulous lived. He was a miser, who buried an enormous treasure, but no one has ever been able to climb to the top of the mountain, to reach the hoard. The boldest boys of the villages keep trying, they have gone past the stream that cuts through the mountain, they have travelled to the pool of water where the chamois and sheep and goats gather to drink, they have been into the forests, they have reached the meadow that has no name. But the clouds always gather to hide the summit and the boys always have to return, ashamed, older, heavy with care, and each time there are a few who have been left behind, to expire in the clouds.
And then she asked me if I would go with her to find King Romulous’s treasure, and if we did, and if we should prosper, what would I do? But before I could answer, she told me what she would do, she would use the riches to restore the prosperity of the village where she lived, whose relic had been stolen, whose lands had spoiled – and then her mood lifted again, she was no longer quite so solemn, and she asked me more questions, about myself and our mission, and I yearned to tell her all things, about my Master, and the Book, and the Pope, and some of the wonders we have seen already, my fears and hopes for the rest of our journey, my father and his goats, my mother who died giving birth to me, the demons who have tried to prey upon us and how we confounded them with the engine of my Master’s wisdom and our own sincerity of heart, and the angels who have guarded us, all of whom now in my blasphemous mind wear a blue tunic and have hair cut roughly and short, who have found us and rescued us and taken us back on the right path.
But my tongue was as heavy as ever Brother Bernard’s was. I told her my name and I did ask her hers, and she told me that she was called Aude, and she laughed at my name, which sounded to her so heavy and dull, like an old man’s grunt. She taught me some words from her native language, which was like French but the words had a rounder, fuller sound, and I asked her about the village where she lived and what had caused the land to despoil, and who had stolen the relic from the church, but all she said was that she was going to attempt a great work and she warned me that I was not to visit her there.
She has made two suppositions about me, which should be contradictory, but which somehow support each other in her mind: one is that I am extremely holy, the other is that I have committed a great sin. Both suppositions rest on the seeming fact of the pilgrimage I am making.
I am unworthy of such respect. I tell her this, but she takes my denial as an indication both of my modesty and my crimes that are so great that only a pilgrimage to Rome may expiate them, and of which nothing else can be said.
I think maybe you would prefer my sister, she says.
Her moods change with the breeze. She is solemn and shy and sometime then giddy and wild. I told her about the spiritual exercises I perform. We must concentrate, walk in Christ’s footsteps. Shut your eyes. He will steer you. But Aude gets distracted too easily, birdsong, the sound of water in the stream, the touch of the wind on her face, movements of thought, of feeling, within and without.
I shall never be married, she says. A lady who sleeps with a true lover is purified of all sins. The joy of love makes the act innocent, if it proceeds from a pure heart. Do you have a pure heart? And then she says my name again, making it sound even heavier and duller like a grunt.
But then she sees her brother waiting for us below, and she loses her joy and I say to her,
You could call me Johannes, if you prefer that, or Jean, like the French.
She is not listening. Something reaches her on the air, her eyes widen and she takes my hand.
We shall run down the rest of the way. Just remember not to stop running. If you stop running you will probably fall and die.
Oh my Master, to tell you how I stumbled and fell and flew. It feels so good to be battered and tumbling, to slide down the mountainside startling chamois and sheep and my old friends the goats, who scatter and flee at the fury of our descent. I am light, a cloud rising, a mountain stone falling gathering strength from its descent. Is this how the first men felt? The only difficult step was the first one, to walk towards her, to reach for her, to hurl into space. Once doing it, tumbling down, all will is suspended in the bruising delight of the fall.
Rivers and streams and rocks the shapes of patriarchs and dry river beds and harsh summer gorse and pale lonely flowers on lips of rock and waterfalls and all of it the mountains and my mountain girl. And we ran, tumbling, joyful, not knowing if the sounds we heard are the waters or the thunder on King Romulous’s summit, where the boys climb to die, or the sounds that our own bodies make in motion and glee, and the clouds around us like the fog of spirits, stones falling, something miraculous about our progress, occasions when I am running faster than I can believe is possible, and others when it is as if the two of us are entirely still, motionless, the only still point in the universe, and the world and the heavens are hurtling past us and spinning around us, and she told me not to have fear and never to slow, as we fall and roll and get up again, and tumbling and running always, always running.
We came to rest at a waterfall where, after our labours, our glee, we enjoyed a moment of pure peace sun-lit. I think I slept, and it was the arrival of my companions that woke me. I lay stretched out on a rock, head empty, arms and legs out wide. Brother Andrew, who may not resist sensation, jumped from a rock splashing into the water.
Come in! he called. It is very cold!
After some
delay, I lowered myself into the water.
Bernard, of course, did not join us. From his place on a rock, he consented to dip his feet into the lower stream, then quickly withdrew them.
Where is the girl? Bernard said.
It was the end of our glee. I climbed out of the water. We looked at the mountain behind, at the valley below, for signs of the blue tunic of her or her brother. I made us walk in three different directions and then another three. We did not find them, only a few blue flowers shivering in the breeze. Our guides had gone, our angels had completed their work and brought us over the mountains and left us on our own again, and I had not thought that heavenly creatures would have had such capacity for physical joy and so little knowledge of Latin.
Later, Andrew was shivering cold, as if in a fever that was impossible to dispatch. I warmed him with my body. The clouds are ghostly low, like fingers of fog, or angels or spirits lost in the heights trying to grasp hold on to our flesh, before they slowly break apart and scatter, or we are suffering, the world is punishing us for consorting with angels and for having been higher up and faster than man should be.
Saint Anatolia’s Day
Anatolia and Victoria were devout sisters whose marriages had been made to pagan Roman lords. Because the sisters resisted marriage to non-believers, the suitors denounced them to the emperor as Christians and received permission to imprison the sisters on their estates until they had been convinced to renounce their faith. But the spirit of devotion was pure and only grew stronger under pains and suffering. Later, in deadly mockery, a poisonous snake was put in Anatolia’s cell. The snake recognised her goodness and refused to bite her and so a soldier named Audax was sent in to kill her instead. The snake set upon the soldier, but gentle Anatolia intervened to protect him. Such was the effect of this that Audax converted immediately to Christianity, and had the joy of being martyred alongside the woman who had shown him the path to salvation.
My Master wrote,
He who is ignorant of the places of the world lacks a knowledge not only of his destination but of the course to pursue.
We are slowly learning some of the places of the world.
My Master has wondered if the differing peoples of the world vary according to their land. I will be able to tell him about the short men of the hill tribes, the way their bodies are bent to the shape of their climbing, and the longer, narrower men of the plains who stand so much taller. I do not know how much I will tell him about Father Gabriel in his garden, or the angels in the mountains.
My Master will be full of questions for me when we return. I can hear his voice now, slow and insistent:
What is the difference between one people and another? Is there a difference, a change in their build and capacities? What causes it? And when and how do you perceive it? What makes the Savoyards different from the Piedmontese? After all, they share the same mountains. They do not look so different, do they? They eat the same food. How then do you distinguish them and understand the causes of your distinctions?
Do people who eat mutton differ from people who eat beef? Is there a difference in their complexions? Their step? Their capacity of intellect?
Did you notice – no: he will not say that – What did you notice about the differences in education in different regions? Did some teachers demand more from their pupils at an earlier age? Were some more severe than others? What effects did the different regimens produce?
And he will ask me about the herbs that I have gathered and the different quantity of sunlight and quality of ground that has enabled each of them to flourish, and he will ask me about the quality of the air, its moistness and dryness, its thickness, gross or troubled, and what these qualities have effected upon the operations of the soul (for a troubled air dejects the soul, saddens it, and blends the humours), and he will ask me about the diversity of beasts, and the manner of terrain that supports them, and he will ask me about the shapes of the leaves of the trees, and the different languages that men speak and whether their understanding of the holy scriptures is different in different regions.
Are the people who live in the mountains happier or freer than those who live in the valleys? Is the shepherd happier than the farmer? It seems so, I will say to my Master, but I do not think it is so much a matter of proximity to farmland or sky or the dryness of their air, more that the shepherd can roam where he may.
And he will ask me about the changes in myself, as if I am an object for my own investigation. He will remark that when I left I was beardless. He will ask if there have been other changes, within and without. He will ask me these questions without mercy but with, I hope, some kindness, as if he too is somehow affected by my changes.
• • •
Saint Veronica’s Day
And when Pilate had delivered our Saviour to the Jews to be crucified, it so happened that Tiberius the Emperor fell into a grievous malady. It was told to him that there was one in Jerusalem who cured all manners of illness, so he sent his trusted seneschal to Jerusalem to find this holy healer, not knowing that he was already slain. But the seneschal found Veronica, an old woman and devout, who had been familiar with Jesus Christ. He demanded of her where he might discover the one whom he sought and she wept and said that the one he sought for Pilate had condemned to death. But she said also that when her Lord had still been living, and she had ever occasion to be separated from him, she did paint his image, to always have her with him, to be in his presence, because the figure of his image, despite the proscription against such a thing, did give her much comfort. And when she had told her Lord of this, he requested her kerchief and he held it to his face and he imprinted his divine image as a figure upon it. And the seneschal asked, Is there neither gold nor silver that this figure may be bought with? And Saint Veronica replied, No, but strong of courage, devout and of great affection, I shall go with you and shall bear it to the Emperor for him to see it, and afterwards I shall bring it home again.
The sun shines, we take a voluptuous break. Sitting on the hillside I hear the sounds of birds singing, birds pecking at trees, the wind on the hillside, a boar in the thicket. A horseman rides by. He could be even closer and he still would not see me for I have become part of the land.
To be a hermit is not to renounce, it is to embrace this voluptuous delight and choose not to corrupt it with anything else.
There is a monastery on the very top of one of the mountains behind us. Andrew is stupefied by it, its magnitude, the boldness of the undertaking to have constructed such a thing on high, its grandeur. Brother Bernard is scornful. And the conversation we have about it is made entirely without words.
It was a kind of conquest to get over the mountains but, after the exhilaration and the glee and the tumbling, we still have a long way to go. But we are proved by the road and the weather. We walk with a kind of certainty, usually remembering our modesty when we come to a town. We settle into a rhythm, we can walk for days hardly talking between prayers. And, today, unremarked, we did not perform all the Divine Office. I look at my companions and I know that something has been transacted between us. A bond has been made that will be impossible to break. We are tied to each other, this is something beyond words or gesture. One speaks, but he does not need to finish his sentence, because his companions know what he is going to say, and he knows how each of them is going to respond, and they know how he will respond to their responses, so maybe a few words from the known exchange are uttered, or none at all. Bernard does not condemn the monastery on the mountain as a monument to Cistercian pride, but we hear him anyway, and there is no presumptuousness to this, just a tenderness.
And this would all be good, difficulties and trials behind us, the sun shining upon our journey, of which we have covered more than half the distance, the Book still with us, the model still with us, the fraternity of souls we have planted between us, were it not for the shame I feel, which is beyond scourging or repentance. I am no better than the men of Sodom, to have lusted after an angel.
• • •
Saint Alexis’s Day
Alexis was the son of two Romans who were noble yet extremely devout. Three thousand slaves wearing golden girdles and silk clothing waited upon them. Yet, every day Euphemianus set up three tables in his house for the poor and for orphans, for widows and strangers in need. He and his wife Aglaë themselves served at these tables, and did not eat until the last pauper had been fed. Long into their union, their prayers were finally answered and their marriage was blessed with the divine gift of a son, after which the noble couple swore a vow of chastity.
The son was as pious and devout as his parents and when he was seventeen, on his wedding day, he initiated his bride in the miracle of Our Lord, and gave her a golden ring and instructed her to remain a virgin. Then he left Rome and journeyed to the Syrian city of Edessa where he gave away all that he had brought with him and lived the life of a holy mendicant. His bereft father dispatched slaves to every corner of the world to find his son and every day they prayed for him to return.
The holy virgin spoke of the saintly Alexis to the church watchman in Edessa, appearing to him in a vision and saying, Bring me the man of God, because he is worthy of the kingdom of heaven. The spirit of God rests upon him, and his prayer rises like incense in the sight of the Lord. The watchman went to find Alexis, but to escape human glory, Alexis had left the city. He took passage on a boat to Tarsus, but by God’s dispensation, a wind blew the boat off course into the port of Rome and, as a foreign pilgrim, he sought alms in his own father’s house.