Valley of grace, p.13
Valley of Grace, page 13
Luc sits at a cafe and drinks a beer. The carriages have disappeared. A few wheelchairs remain, but most of the crowd is healthy, tourists, pilgrims he supposes. A group of young people with Down syndrome dances past, laughing. The light is bright, the great church of Our Lady gleams sugary white as a Carème table piece, its stone spun into fantastical shapes. He shrinks it with his squinting eyes and breaks off a turret to suck. Except he hates sweet things, and the sight of this makes his teeth ache.
A young man asks permission to sit at his table. He is dressed in a black sweater and trousers, rather silky and shiny and not at all sombre in this bright light. He has round rosy-brown cheeks like polished apples and black curls. A Southerner, and when he opens his mouth he speaks with the local accent and very purely, not sloppily the way people do in Paris. There are spare tables, but the young man sits and begins to talk, he seems to want Luc’s company. He orders a cup of coffee and talks idly at first, he is from Montpellier, to begin with, but now he lives in Lourdes, where is Luc from, ah Paris, and a bookshop, that sounds wonderful. He has never been to Paris, he would like to go one day. He hears it is very different from hereabouts.
Luc is surprised to find himself in this conversation, it is as though the young man spins it like a web, skilfully, invisibly, and Luc who has had no intention of staying finds himself ordering another beer. The young man asks is he a pilgrim, and Luc tells him about Delphine. Ah, he says, and lays his hand over Luc’s where it rests on the table, looking sorrowfully into his eyes. Luc feels his hand go still like a trapped animal. He thinks of Julien and his white bottom in the spare room, the young man sliding out the door of the shop. Rough trade. This young man must be a person who picks up tourists, pilgrims, sad people whom he consoles, he is a professional consoler of men whom he recognises as gay. Luc imagines that his bottom wouldn’t be white but a golden biscuity brown like the skin on his face, his hands. But then he thinks that the view he has in his mind of Julien’s white bottom moving is that of the spy, the person who is outside the couple. He is surprised to find himself thinking spy. Would voyeur be better? Given that his seeing was unwitting, he does not think either word describes him. Neither was his intention. Ah, intentions.
The hand is soft and cool as it lies over Luc’s. Rough trade— very delicate rough trade this young man is. He is being offered a chance to find out if Julien is right about sex and love. Presumably he will have to pay which Julien doesn’t but this young man looks as though he would deserve it. Will they go to his hotel, or probably the young man has somewhere to take people. Maybe he shouldn’t have drunk two beers in the middle of the day. But why not, and why not, this is what life offers, in the midst of death . . .
That’s what the young man is saying. He is consoling Luc, but with words. He leans forward, his eyes shining with the hope he is offering, of his mother’s freedom from pain and her glorious welcome before the throne of heaven, and his own eventual reunion with her there one day. The man’s hand curls tight around Luc’s. The high neck of his black sweater pulls away a little, and he sees that the white shirt he glimpsed above the black jumper is in fact a priestly collar. Luc laughs, and the young man looking wounded takes his hand back.
I’m sorry, said Luc. I’m laughing at myself, my foolish self. I am afraid, well, no, I mean I’m just not a believer. I think I am going to lose my mother soon and that will be forever. But human life’s always been like that, that’s how it is.
The man put his hand out again. This might be your chance, he said. This place of miracles. The greatest miracle is the recovery of faith.
Luc stared into the moist brown eyes regarding him so lovingly. He thought of saying, I was supposing you wanted to go to bed with me. That could have been a revelation. But he was not so cruel. Instead he smiled, ruefully, for his lack of faith, or his own sexual confusion.
I will pray for you, the man said.
Thank you.
He walked back to the hotel, wondering if he was sorry that his chance for adventure had turned out to be the comfort of the Church. He ought to apologise mentally to that young man for thinking he was a gay hustler. Of course he could be gay, some men did see the Church as a way out. He recalled his soft hand so cool against his. And his mother’s words came back to him . . . a miracle for my health, or anything else. Of course . . . she meant him. That’s why he was here. If he’d thought of it earlier he could have told the young priest; that would have been a good subject to chew on. Well, the Church has saved him from sin this time, though that was not what his mother meant, he knew; she wanted him normal and married. With children. It is terrible to grow old without children, she says to him. Life without children—it is not to be thought of.
Delphine was asleep, the nurse-nun would get her some soup when she woke up, so he went out again, to a small restaurant, and ordered steak and chips and a pitcher of red wine. This was the hot south, he could have a siesta after lunch. Over a piece of local ewe’s milk cheese, salty and rather good, and the last of the wine, he read the nurse-nun’s pamphlet. The story of Bernadette, the child to whom the Virgin Mary appeared, when everything began in this small mountain village.
Bernadette is gathering wood. She’s always hungry; she’s stunted and undernourished. Her father had been a prosperous miller, they’d lived in a large stone house by the stream that turned the mill-wheel, in a pretty field on the edge of woodland, till someone built a steam mill nearby and put him out of business. Now they live in a derelict hut and the parents’ day-labouring doesn’t bring in enough to feed the family. Her brothers have been caught gnawing church candles to assuage their hunger. Bernadette wanders along the river bank, picking up sticks. There’s a cave on the banks of the river and there Bernadette sees a small girl, no bigger than herself, in a white dress with a blue girdle and a yellow rose on each foot. Over her arm is a string of rosary beads.
So, the Virgin says the rosary, does she, mutters Luc. For clearly the girl is she, though the pamphlet takes a while to explain. As though it is stretching out the narrative’s suspense. It describes the number of visitations: eighteen. The miracles. One is the spring, that the small person directs Bernadette to scoop out of the earth. Still flowing—still filling the drinking cups, the plastic madonna bottles with their screwtop crowns. A rosebush is made to bloom in winter. A paralysed hand is cured.
The rosebush is the priest’s idea. He wants a sign because he is doubtful about this small person—the same size as me, says Bernadette. The size of an undernourished fourteen-year-old. One hundred and forty centimetres, not very tall. The small person says she is the Immaculate Conception. She speaks in the local patois.
What gibberish. Of course the priest should be doubtful. Clearly these are the hallucinations of a starved teenager. The lady asks her to come to the cave every day for a fortnight and promises to make her happy not in this world but the next. That’d be right.
But then . . . Luc reads the words the lady spoke to Bernadette, the words reported by her. Would you do me the honour of coming here every day for fifteen days, says the vision. But the thing is, she uses the polite plural, vous, not the singular, tu, that is always used to address children, intimates, inferiors. And Bernadette is absolutely aware of this. She, the sickly illiterate peasant girl, says: She was the first person who ever said vous to me. The first person ever to speak politely to her, respectfully, as if she were an adult.
Luc is shaken by that. If anything could make him believe in Bernadette’s vision of the Virgin Mary it is that vous. She could not have made that up. She would be able to recognise it, but not invent it. That small detail, so much more true than roses flowering in February. If anything could make you believe, that would. Verisimilitude. The pamphlet hardly seems to notice, certainly doesn’t recognise how powerful it is.
He has a thought to jump up and find the priestly young man and talk to him about this. What would he make of the doubter convinced by grammar? But Luc knows he is not really convinced. He just sees that there might lie some possibility of truth. He doesn’t move, no; what could a devout young man possibly make of the second person polite?
He orders a cup of coffee and goes on reading the pamphlet. It finishes with a quotation from Jean-Marie Demagny, the famous Catholic philosopher, from his book The Lourdes Experience:
It is the site par excellence of a paradox, divine in its scope and intent, where the individual soul, in all its singularity yet also at one with millions of other struggling souls, enunciates a powerful cry from the heart that creates a veritable atmosphere of Godly anticipation, almost as tangible as the heavenly manna, and indeed as nourishing. And as so often in this Faith of ours, the way is shown by a child.
He buys Julien a glittering fridge magnet, not Bernadette’s childish figure nor the simpering pastel demimondaine of the grotto but a clumsy icon radiating blue and silver metal ridges of light that seem to pulse as you look at her. Pretty fancy technology for something so crude and cheap. It’s the kitschest he can find, at that moment. He wasn’t going to buy Fanny anything, but then he notices a rack of postcards of madonnas. And buys her one of the black Virgin of Rocamadour, a simple medieval carving, atavistic, mysterious, magical.
Delphine is ready to go home. I have made my pilgrimage, she says. And you, my dear, are you glad you came?
He takes up her hand and kisses it. Yes! he says, and does not lie. He would cheerfully perform much harder tasks for her.
She smiles, and he believes she is blessing him.
Back in Paris. He came up out of the metro to the late afternoon sun gently gilding the square. The summer evening, the calm cafes spilling over the pavement. The reasonable pleasures of reasonable people. He tried to tell Julien about Lourdes. The horror of the rational man, Julien said. They say it is full of devotion to God, Luc said, but . . . I wish I could explain, that desperate anxiety of hope, and a sort of miasma of fear . . .
It sounds bad for the health of mind and body.
I thought your robust faith might have made sense of it.
I think my robust faith would have enough sense never to go near it.
I was thinking of Montaigne: the task of life is to construct death. You know, that place was full of death. Everywhere death, and nobody was admitting it. Except perhaps my mother. She was so graceful, Julien. She was constructing her death, she knew that.
Julien hugged him. Luc gazed into his glittering eyes.
Did you fuck anybody while I was away?
No, actually. I sort of didn’t want to.
Luc smiled, the pink blood flooding his cheeks.
Did you?
He explained about the priest he thought was trying to pick him up.
Julien laughed so much he didn’t notice Luc’s rather feeble smile.
You should have propositioned him. Corrupting a priest, in Lourdes. What devil’s work.
Luc was thinking, I shall never know whether I would have done it or not. If I hadn’t gone looking for Montaigne I would never have known about Julien.
I should think there’s quite a lot of devil’s work goes on there, he said. What if I’d come back and told you I’d done it?
Julien smiled, wickedly perhaps. I’d say hurray, he said.
Luc took his hand and bit his finger, not really hard, but sharply enough. Julien yelped.
What are we going to do about Claude and Agnès?
Ah. Luc bit his own finger. Shall we give them a baby? Why not.
Which of us?
Both of us? And we won’t tell them which?
That’s a mad idea.
And then I can tell my mother, I am going to have a baby after all.
Will she approve?
I wonder. He thought of the woman full of grace, looking at her death. She just might, he said.
Delphine died early on the morning of Midsummer’s Day. The doctor had warned them it would be soon. She had a little bottle of morphine to sip if the pain became bad. She lay against her pillows with her big eyes regarding her family but only vaguely, it seemed she was looking where they couldn’t follow. Speaking had become too hard for her. She went to sleep, and slid imperceptibly into death. She didn’t suffer at the end, said Maurice. Thank God.
COMPOSING
THE DAY
CATHÉRINE HOPED THAT THE TINKLING of the water fountain wasn’t going to make her want to pee again. The restaurant was heavily decorated with the regional artefacts which went with its name, La Table de l’Aveyron. Wide-brimmed black velour hats hung on the walls, along with a lot of dark ironmongery in the form of clockwork spits and long-handled basting funnels. There was a great deal of copperware too, bowls, moulds, warming pans, jam basins, and those antique wall fountains made up of a cistern with a tap and a flattened bowl underneath. When she was a child there used to be one of those in the waiting room of the doctor, a stone room, vaulted and groined, in the street that was once the moat of the castle above. The doctor’s house was somehow built into the walls of the old town, and as well as the copper fountain, kept polished to a mirror shine and now of purely decorative purpose, there were faience plates, and on the door a brass knocker in the shape of a lady’s beringed hand. As a child she had taken it for granted that all doctors’ waiting rooms were like this, chilly, dim, stony caverns with glowing ancient copper on the walls.
The cistern in the restaurant was converted into an ornamental fountain; this was the diuretic water that trickled out of the tap, tinkled into the basin and then was pumped back into the reservoir. Round and round. Cathérine had already been to pee once, down a crooked staircase and into a dim smelly lavatory, only one, with a man in it, standing at the urinal, who turned his head to look at her. When she went into the cubicle she couldn’t find the light switch, and realised it was the old-fashioned system, where the light goes on when you latch the door, so there are seconds of blackness while you are getting it to work. She didn’t think there were any of those in existence any more, not in Paris. Perhaps it was part of the regional décor.
I ordered for you, my angel, said André when she got back. I know what she likes, he smiled at his guest: a business colleague. Usually Cathérine was not present when André entertained his business colleagues, but he thought she’d like to meet this one since he came from the Aveyron too, from a little town called Meyrejouls. He was a lean rangy man, with small eyes looking out from a face like one of those natural carvings in the landscape that make up the Chaos of Montpellier, and strings of oiled hair combed over his bald head. One string had become detached and dangled down the side of his face like an earring; it was quite long and flapped languidly when he turned his head. Cathérine wondered how he couldn’t notice it. André said he was very rich, and a nice man when you got to know him. Cathérine had been thinking about people being nice, lately, and had decided that mostly they weren’t. People just said that to comfort themselves. She thought that this man, who was called Louis Prouzot, wasn’t nice at all.
The first dish was a thrush pâté. It came on an oval platter with moss and a twiggy branch on which sat two tiny stuffed birds, their beady eyes regarding the other but equally grim fate of their fellows. There were two intricate nests perched on the twigs, containing eggs as inedible as the birds. The pâté was a small round pat, and beside was its empty tin. Cathérine didn’t think the provenance was much to boast about. The thrushes were a bit shabby; you wondered how often they had been carried out, once-inquisitive heads cocked, to proclaim the authenticity of the delicacy offered. If she’d wanted to get out her glasses she could have picked up the tin and read just how much thrush was in it. Much more pig, she guessed. It could be soya bean protein, for all the sad little birds could proclaim otherwise.
André had ordered aligot. He was right, it was her favourite dish. But it wasn’t a good one; the potatoes were dry, the cheese was not juicy enough—Cathérine took the metro across to the rue Mouffetard market to buy the very fresh new Cantal cheese, before it had firmed up into its usual hard yellow self, to make her aligot—and there was hardly any garlic in this one. She found it difficult to swallow.
The partridge with cabbage wasn’t very much better, an ancient bird, dry and stringy, which is of course quite the normal choice for this dish but it must not end up like this, and the cabbage tasting stewed to death. She was thinking how she could have cooked these dishes, and how delicious they would have been, when she heard Louis Prouzot say, Do you not think so, Madame? And she had to beg his pardon, because she hadn’t been listening.
I said, a Frenchman has two homes, the place where he is born, and Paris. Do you not agree, Madame?
André was nodding, and she said yes, she supposed that was true, and then she thought, does that mean that nobody is born in Paris? But then André wasn’t, and she wasn’t. But Fanny was.
She couldn’t get any more flesh off the partridge. She stopped listening to Louis Prouzot talking about the importance of rootedness in the French provinces to the French character. Instead she remembered a young woman called Henriette who’d lived in the next door flat when Fanny was a little girl. She’d told Cathérine how she’d gone to Isère to have her baby, so the child would be born in the country of her forefathers. And afterwards, she said, I took Claudine to my grandmother’s grave and I talked to her. I said, Grandmother, I am here with my new baby daughter Claudine. Do you know we are here? I would like your blessing, Grandmother. Give me a sign. It was very quiet, said Henriette, the graveyard was nearly in the country, there were hayfields around and that buzzing still feeling of bees in the flowers. Give me a sign, Grandmother, I said, and do you know!—here Henriette opened her eyes wide and looked solemn—do you know, two blue butterflies came and flew just above the grave, round and round in spirals. For minutes. I’d never seen blue butterflies in that place before. I knew it was my grandmother speaking to me. Claudine opened her eyes and held out her hands. To the blue butterflies the same colour as her eyes. I’m certain she understood. She won’t know her great grandmother but maybe one day she’ll remember the blue butterflies she sent to bless the new baby in the family.
