Women in the Wall (17 page)

Fortunatus had written a new poem just before they’d left: a hymn to the cross, it turned on the most basic Christian paradox and he had written it to celebrate Radegunda’s obtaining the fragment of the True Cross from the Emperor Justin. It had been sung by the
procession
which had come to deliver the relic, sung by the nuns receiving it, sung again so often Agnes could not get bits of it out of her head:

O
felix
culpa
! He would love blood washing away guilt. So surprising. Life was like winter meat. It needed spice.

It should have aroused a disincarnate awe. But it didn’t. Not in the least. There was something brutal in the bargain: a blood-price being paid for man by God-made-man during the transaction’s length. Dislikeable. Familiar. Were not thieves’ hands lopped? And where had she heard that in parts of the East adulteresses might have their noses slit so that the fissure secret in their bodies be figured by a disgracingly visible one?

Agnes’s fingers flew to her face. Her moods changed like the wind. They said here that the local wind made people mad. It was a melancholy hot wind from Italy. She looked across at Fridovigia but the old woman had fallen asleep. Radegunda was praying or in a trance. Agnes was alone.

At night now she accepted Fridovigia’s sleeping draughts but polarities pursued her in dreams animated by daytime images of this harsh country with its blazing light and shadows blue-black like bruises on the ground. Monuments passed on their journey spelled out harsh messages. They had seen one Roman arch where toga’d victors triumphed over bound and kneeling Gauls. Someone was always being subdued. Christian churches preserved the same vengeful drama: picturing the damned on one side of their painted walls being devoured by beasts, the saved rising
weightlessly
on the other. No half way. “Those who are neither hot nor cold,” said Christ, “I spit them out of my mouth.”

And into the devil’s.

A few mornings ago Agnes had woken to see a black carapaced creature on her bed. Its two waving claws and tail aimed straight at her and grew in the magnifying prism of her sleep-dulled eye. A devil. She shrieked and Fridovigia rushed over and killed it.

“It was only a scorpion.”

“A what?”

Agnes had never heard of such a thing. What a hideous place! Besides, nothing was only anything. Everything meant, threatened and signified something more and other than itself: signals, omens, divine or diabolic warnings. The black, mutilated body on the floor, crunched and split by Fridovigia’s foot, revealed itself as full of grey egg-like things. She buried herself in Fridovigia’s fat and comforting embrace.

“Fridovigia,” she whispered. “I think I’m going out of my mind!”

She was thinking more and more—even when
indisputably
awake—of her dream of running away with Fortunatus. She would take Fridovigia with her, she decided. She couldn’t leave her. But where would they go? A runaway nun was liable to imprisonment anywhere in Christendom. But would Radegunda denounce her? She would. She would. Radegunda would always sacrifice a body—anyone’s—to a soul. It was a mad, bad fantasy but she couldn’t rid herself of it. Not, anyway, until she’d shared it with Fortunatus.

*

“Your condition”, said Fortunatus, “must have affected your brain! I’m assuming it has and that I have to think for us both.”

He and Agnes were once again in the rose-arbour of the convent henceforth to be known as Holy Cross. It was the first time they had managed to be alone since her return.

“Can’t you get that woman of yours, Fridovigia, to help? Those old women are as handy as any physician. How long is it, can you tell?”

He launched questions through which a faint touch of masculine distaste seeped as pus will through an
ill-adjusted
bandage. No. It was she who was all pus and wound. She was the unhealthy figure in Fortunatus’s tidy world. He was unsure how to treat her. She felt this. He could not just cast her off. She was not disposable. Not a wench with whom he might have satisfied a passing lust. She was the abbess of Holy Cross convent, a figure of lasting importance in his life. Fortunatus had no desire at all to leave Poitiers with or without her, nor had he any to forfeit her friendship. She could see his regret at having let it slide into the unmanageable and marshy regions in which it was foundering now. His astonishment. Theirs, he had convinced himself, had been a mingling of spirits figured forth by a few carnal acts of as little importance, really, as metaphors. Now, somehow, as in one of his own
paradoxes
, everything had turned upside down: the carnal was the real and affirmed itself in a way impossible to ignore.
Amor
,
dilectio
,
amicitia
,
had all those courteous, monastic tropes, been masking—no, certainly not. She saw his head twitch backwards like a shying horse’s. With dual vision, she watched the man whom her body craved and her mind was judging. And her heart? Ah, the heart was the body’s fool. Minutes ago, she had asked him to take her to Italy. He was a layman and free. In times like these no one would know or come after them. The sin would be all hers. She had seen him cringe, his mind casting cautiously about for ways of calming her folly while keeping alive her good will for himself. Ah God, she whispered, have you sent me this lucidity as a punishment?

“My poor sweet lamb,”—
agna
, his pun on her name—“it must have been terrible to have to box this secret up yourself! No wonder you’re a little beside yourself! What you said just now was mad, you know? If only I had been there with you to share the anxiety. Thank God for Fridovigia! Didn’t she suggest anything? By the way, I thought Radegunda said you had to ride part of the way? I should have thought the jolting …?”

“Excuse me,” said Agnes. “I must go. I feel ill. My condition, you know …” She left him, with a touch of vindictive pleasure, to his bad conscience. The jagged ending of their interview would irk the poet in him. She hoped. At the very least.

[
A.D.
587]

Many sins have become impossible since I became an anchoress. Despondency and lassitude are the two against which I must still be on guard. Lassitude breeds idleness, drowsiness, restlessness, instability of mind and curiosity. But even of these, several are without scope in my cell. To keep my mind stable, I try to pray or count or stretch my arms to feel the wall all about me. I count the jutting hewn stones in the wall, starting from the ground and reaching up as far as I can. The number is always the same. I have not grown since I immured myself although I might have, for I had just turned fourteen a while before. Or if I did grow a few fingers’ thickness, it was not enough to reach a further row of stones. Besides, I stretch less easily now than before. I have become a little hunched.

There is that noise again! Noise!

Could it be thunder? No—that was a scream. I hear a clashing. Metal. Men’s voices. Breakage and what might be a battering-ram at the outer door. Noises crash through the cloister close to my wall—God, what was that?

A light flashed past my slit. A flame? What? Oh My God, what? Blessed Radegunda, how can you be letting this—what?—happen? That light again. Smell of burning resin. Metal on stone. A weapon rattles in my slit. It does. It does—God if it will serve you I am ready to die. Or live … God? Are you there … God? God, God! The noises … Are they real?

*

[
A.D.
570]

Radegunda spent more and more time in her cell.

Protected by the fragments of the True Cross, her nuns needed her less. The Great Relic hung in the chapel in a reliquary set with garnets and green paste. Its brightness was quelled by shadow but the wood within regulated life in the convent as surely as a hidden moon controlled tides, seasons and the rhythms of women’s blood. Lesser relics abetted it, some from as far off as Jerusalem. Trusting in their influence, Radegunda felt free to isolate herself from the community for weeks on end.

She was seeking that union with God in which she had often experienced the separation of her spirit from her body and an energizing peace. At those times her spirit had been swept up, charged by the currents of a life-giving power, then annihilated like a river pouring into the saline reaches of a great and turbulent sea. On returning to herself her chief sensation was disappointment and a longing to return to the rapture. She had been unable to reach it for a long time now. Why? Why had God turned from her? What had she done wrong? She raked her conscience and was brought up short each time by a single name: Clotair. Had she—as
he
had said she had—chosen her own salvation over his?
Was
he in hell and, if he was, was she to blame? She mortified herself and offered the mortifications for his soul—but the divine favours did not return. Neither did peace of mind. Remorse, biting and rebiting at her brain like some tunnelling insect, was an impediment to prayer. She began to believe it came from the devil and fought it. Her suspicions were strengthened when a little novice was found paralytic with terror after seeing a devil run up and down her
dormitory
pulling at the hair of the sleeping nuns. Devils in convents were common enough. Their tricks were part of a strategy with which the religious must cope if they were to merit heaven. Virtue offered a challenge and this made the devils’ attentions almost reassuring. What frightened Radegunda was that her visions should have stopped. Life was a menacing carnival, a booby-trapped maze through which the blind soul groped looking for the light. Humble souls took a straightforward, ground-level path through this. They only ran the ordinary dangers of temptation and sin. She—presumptuously perhaps?—had tried for immediate knowledge of the unseen powers. She had taken flight towards God. Her soul now was in suspense and open to folly, figments, failure of nerve and always the machinations of the devil who could deceive by taking on the appearance of his Great Enemy. God might allow this. Those who tried for the most were tested most. The soul setting forth into rarely charted spaces must be prepared for diabolic as well as divine encounters—and for a dangerous uncertitude as to which was which. With the interruption of her visions,
Radegunda’s
confidence began to fail. She was not even sure now that
any
of them had been from God. Proof that they had could only lie in their outcome: her life and works. But she was—quite lately—beginning to wonder about these. It was only a crack of doubt but, coming at such a time, it threw her into a near panic. She had refused Clotair for the sake of the convent. Did it justify her? She wasn’t sure. It was not she who ran it. Slowly, it was borne in on her that the nuns were terrified of her. She had no real contact with them at all. They froze or scattered at her approach. She loved them, but it was a disembodied, prayerful love. She could pray for but not talk to them. Shy, shifty, twittering creatures, she watched them from her cell window and realized that their femininity was as alien to her as Clotair’s maleness had been. They giggled. They poked each other. They pinched, twitched, joked in a way she could tell quite well, from the distance of her window, was hardly verbal at all but more a kind of pooling of energies, an overspill of mood and humour into a current which held them in its orbit as rubbed amber might silk or a lodestone metal. There was nothing improper about this friskiness but it was something in which
she
couldn’t join. She needed Agnes as a go-between to understand her nuns. Unfortunately, Agnes had been sick and confined to a sick-cell for several months. After the return from Arles, she had fallen ill. Fridovigia had nursed her, discouraging visits, but insisting that, with the help of a course of remedies devised by herself, Agnes would pull through. She did. By Candlemas, Fridovigia pronounced her out of danger and by Shrovetide Agnes was back in the common dormitory and carrying her full load of duties. This was a relief. The slackness Radegunda had sensed during the abbess’s sickness disappeared. The nuns had a more contained look. Tensions seemed to have gone. That was all reassuring. What was less so was a change which seemed to have taken place in Agnes herself. Radegunda could not put her finger on it. She was not, she realized a little sadly, at all good with people. She would not dream of asking Agnes what the matter was but seemed to know that the abbess’s character was convulsed: closed in. It might be a result of her illness. It might pass. Radegunda prayed it would but was hurt to feel Agnes had withdrawn from her. Being incapable of making quick contact with people, Radegunda needed them to make it with her. She valued Fortunatus’s easy conviviality. The daily chats which she and Agnes had enjoyed with him in the convent garden were important to her. Now that Agnes was well and the fine weather starting, she had assumed they would begin again. But Agnes did not come. She never said she wasn’t coming; on the contrary, she usually promised she would be along but the time would pass, the bell for Compline ring, Fortunatus be obliged to leave and there would have been no sign of Agnes.

“I’m sorry,” she would say later to Radegunda, “I thought I could get away, but …” And of course she never lacked excuses. “Tomorrow,” she would promise insincerely.

Radegunda was hurt.

“She’s snubbing us,” she told Fortunatus.

“She’s probably very busy.”

“No. She’s snubbing us.”

“I’ll write her a poem,” he promised.

Two days later he produced it.

“Read it,” he said, “I wouldn’t like you to think I was conducting a secret correspondence.”

Radegunda took it with amusement, expecting to read one of his light Latin jingles about an indigestion or colic brought on by eating too much of some titbit Agnes had sent to his quarters—though now that she thought of it, Agnes had given up sending titbits to his quarters. Odd. The poem too was odd. Agnes, whom so many of his other verses had described as a little maid or ‘maidenlet’,
virguncula
, or as a lamb,
agna
, was here hailed as
Fortunatus’s
“mother in religion and sister in friendship”. Like an epitaph, thought Radegunda wonderingly, and went on to read a declaration that the poet loved Agnes with a love free from fleshly complicities—surely there was no need to say so? “I call Christ and the Holy Apostles to witness …” the poem went on and then went on further to empanel half the heavenly population. This was religious rhetoric rolling in its rut and Radegunda was not disturbed until she met a mention of “evil rumours” which Agnes must ignore.

“Have there been evil rumours,” she asked, “or is this a figure of speech?”

Fortunatus said he thought something might have been said to make Agnes think so.

“Why”, he asked heatedly, “would she avoid us? “That woman, Fridovigia, has a poisoned tongue. I wonder that you tolerate her here!”

“I wonder at your intolerance.”

“Forgive me,” said Fortunatus. “This has been driving me mad, burning me up! People who soil things. I … Look, I’m sorry I mentioned it. It’s irrational of me. Perhaps I’m wrong besides. I beg you, say nothing to Agnes.”

“But why should anybody think such things—whatever they are?” Radegunda was perplexed. But did not, she knew, understand people. Nor really want to perhaps.

“My poems, I suppose, are open to interpretation.”

“But Fridovigia wouldn’t know about your poems.”

“No, no, I suppose not.”

Radegunda made the best fist she could at telling all this to Agnes. “I really couldn’t make out what he was saying,” she said. “But he is upset. Very. Hurt too. I think you should join us once or twice. He
is
upset.”

“He’s clever,” said Agnes who looked rundown. She must, Radegunda resolved, be persuaded to supplement her diet by a little fowl-meat.

“Clever? Oh you mean the poem?”

“The poem too.”

“What does he mean by ‘evil rumours’?”

“A literary device.”

“Will you join us tomorrow?”

“If you like.”

Later Radegunda chanced to go into the kitchen as Agnes was throwing a scroll of papyrus into the fire. She was throwing it with an angular, almost theatrical gesture—an upward vindictive jerk of the wrist—and Radegunda thought she recognized the scroll on which Fortunatus had written the poem. She could not, of course, be sure.

Next day the three met in the garden. Fortunatus read them some more verse. It was a dour account of childbirth intended as a foil for his celebration of chastity. He had tipped the scales.

There was a lot more. He was clearly affected by his own arts for his voice shook and he had twice to wipe his eyes. Radegunda, who had run a hospital for the sick poor, could have supplied him with more harrowing detail. The subject did not shock her. His zest for it did. The nimble meters struck her as flippant when used to package this anatomy of her sex at its most vulnerable. Woman, in the performance of her essential function, had no dignity here. She was so much matter: grotesque, turgid, torn, a numb lump of it. Radegunda was repelled but, recalling the poem’s purpose, could only applaud its success. Agnes’s reaction struck her as aberrant. The nun had a sly and, Radegunda could have sworn, malicious, even triumphant expression. Fortunatus, taken up with his own feelings, did not seem to notice. By the time he had recovered his calm, Agnes had composed her face.

“Well done,” she said. “Very nice. How useful life is: a compost heap for the garden of verse.”

“Have you no pity?” Fortunatus asked.

“I suppose,” Agnes said, “people’s first pity must be for themselves. I am not”, she forestalled Radegunda’s protest, “denying the need for charity. But don’t you think one must first love oneself if one is to love others and care for them?”

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.