Rupetta, p.29
Rupetta, page 29
None of these things were unexpected.
Perdita picked up the dropped tent and packs and took them out into the yard. I followed and knelt beside her as we rolled out the oiled canvasses and scrubbed them clean and rolled them up again. We made piles of clothes to be washed, took the pots into the kitchen to be scrubbed. We hung the empty packs on the line and took the supplies they had not used into the kitchen. We made tea and baked bread and washed the windows and swept the floors and changed the sheets on all of the beds, save one. We worked together without speaking, knowing what had to be done. Our movements were precise, as though choreographed. We moved outside the circle of their grief, circumnavigating it as if it were not our own. Once, while I was passing her a folded blanket, our hands touched. I felt my fingers graze against the living warmth of the back of her hand. It gave me a shock—sharp, exploding, earthy. Like a seedling shooting out of the seed in which it has been contained. I knew I would never be able to lift her cooling body out of a chair and carry her into the house and straighten her limbs beneath a grieving sheet. Would never be able to bear the weight of such a thing.
I grasped her hand, her wrist, pulled her to me, up onto my lap, and put my head against the silk-slip of her hair. I could smell the wildness of the woods on her, as if grasses were growing in her scalp. She put her arms around my shoulders. I could feel the supple weight of them: their warmth and smoothness against my neck. I wanted to tell her something, perhaps that I loved her, though that didn’t seem enough. Words were such small containers, such inadequate, abstract things within which to live. She was curved into my lap, her feet dangling. I could feel her bare heels knocking against my shin.
Finally, we sat at the table, all four of us, and pretended to eat, pushing the food around on our plates.
‘Of course,’ said Judit, without looking at either of us, ‘you’ll have to leave this place.’
I nodded.
‘Giacomo had a friend—a contact—at the Haven where they took the Salt woman. I’ll go to the mainland and see her. She will help us find a new carer for Perdita; somewhere for her to go. Then you and Margause can move to the mainland, find a home. It’s time Margause went to school, anyway.’
‘We can stay together,’ I said. ‘We can find another place.’
‘There is nowhere we could go together. Nowhere where we would be safe and our daughters would be safe. You are fools: you and Giacomo. You think they will forget that you exist, and leave you to live out some utopian eternity of gardening and swimming and storytelling. You think you can slip out of the world, into a fairytale, and grow mossy with age. You think this is your afterlife, your reward for all those centuries of fucking life. You think their memory is not perfect, like yours, that it does not itch at them, but no matter how long you live they will not forget who you are or what you mean or what you might become. They will never give up searching for you; wanting to have you and contain you—to hold you in full sight—or destroy you. They are terrified of what you are, because they don’t understand that you are less than they are. They would like to tear you apart, just to prove that you are fragile. They would like to make you a god, and have you fail them, just to prove that you are not a god.’ Judit put her fork and knife down on her plate and pushed it away from her, into the centre of the table. ‘You will care for my daughter, and I will ensure yours is cared for. That is all we can do for each other now.’
***
I grope my way back along the thread of my life, like Ariadne making her way through the dark of the maze, step by step, knowing I laid the thread down surely, knowing it will lead, eventually, into the future, but never sure which step in the dark will be a misstep, which step will lead to death and which will carry me out in the sharpening light.
Here are those last days in the house on Oikos Island. The summer breezes sharp with the scent of sand, of waxy frangipani, of death. This is the key, this is the lock, with which we shut up the house. Here is the rush-basket in which the baby Margause once slept, rotted to nothing and burned in the final cleaning out of our lives, along with the driftwood bed, and the chair in which Giacomo died. Here are the books we wrote—too dangerous to keep—wrapped in oiled cloth and buried in the old Haven. Here is the house where we played and ate and laughed, locked up. Its windows blinded, its mattresses rolled and tied like fat snails. Here is the path, which points the way to the gate, and from there to the dock.
Here is my daughter, standing on the dock with Margause beside her. Two little girls in twin coats, their pockets filled with flat white stones. Margause and Perdita in their red and green coats. I am caught by the very word ‘girls’, and caught all the more by their form. By the beautiful image I have of them standing there, waiting for the boat that will take us to the mainland and sever us from that place, perhaps forever.
I have always understood and trusted images more than words. A white bird on a blue sky; a red coat and a green coat; a woman’s hand cupped beneath her dead lover’s foot. Perhaps you will find this strange, incompatible as it is with your own vocation of rendering the past into strings of sentences, paragraphs like stone blocks; but I no longer trust words. The last thing in my life will be a picture, not a word.
Judit and I went to the Haven, to find Mathilde, knowing that we had not yet seen enough.
I am faltering.
For so long I have avoided speaking of what I saw there. I do not want to speak. What words are there that would be the measure of that place, that would truly mark it? It is pure vanity to speak. To think that these words—my words, or any others—can mark the place where those bodies lived, suffered, died. All of the vanity and certainty inside me has been stripped away by what I saw. I was gutted, eviscerated. A sharp hook went in through my eyes and tore out my gut, my heart, my lungs.
I walked through the halls, with Judit at my side, silently. We went into that room. We sat in those simple wooden chairs. The stench overwhelmed me. Burned my mouth, my nose. I looked at Mathilde. This place had given her its shape. I do not want to remember her that way, as she was made and shattered.
Afterwards, Judit and I walked through the streets to the house where we were staying. The girls were outside, playing in the garden. They had perched Perihan on a thick branch and were taking turns climbing up the old tree’s trunk, perching on the branch like oversized birds. Their pretty coats had become wings; they were showing Perihan how to spread them wide, how to launch off the branch into the air. How to fly.
We set out tea and cake and called them in to sit at the table and eat. We said nothing about where we had been or what we had seen. We sat, exhausted, and lifted the cups to our lips but the tea was bitter, the cake like dust in our mouths. Like the flesh of the dead, rotted to sweetness. And our exhaustion was nothing; we were ashamed of it, and ashamed, too, to smile at our daughters. To remark on their beauty, or to smile when they set Perihan on the table, among the cake crumbs, and stood together and sang for us. We clapped when they had finished and sent them back out into the garden. We tried to love them, without shame, without fear, but there was no language left to do so except the language of the past. The language of the present had shrunk to the size of that small, stone room where Mathilde sat, to the shape of her bones, shining out from beneath her skin.
The last day I saw Perdita, we were in the treehouse at Salt Lane. The others were sleeping, and we had gone up to the top platform—the highest layer of that strange, leaf-sailing ship—to watch the light slip out of the world. The next morning Perdita would sail to Lisbon, where Judit would hand her and Mathilde over into the care of the Fallen Penitents. From there, I did not know where they were headed. It had been decided—we had all agreed—that it was better if nobody knew.
We sat at the edge of the platform, our legs dangling in the air. Perdita’s chin propped on a low railing. We fought. I wanted to know where she was going and she refused to tell me. I could not bear the sense of panic at not knowing where she would be. I knew I could not save her, could not keep her, but I wanted at least to know that I could find her if I needed to. When I needed to.
I tried to order her to tell me, as a mother orders a small child to confess to hiding sweets under their bed, or having not brushed their teeth. I had forgotten that she was not a child; that she only played at being a child for my sake, and for Margause’s. I was stubborn, and foolish, and afraid. I should have offered her comfort, but I could not say what would happen to her, and I would not lie and say that I knew what was to come. Or that I could protect her. She knew as well as I did that we had no chance against a world that thought of us as both goddesses and monsters. I pressed Perihan upon her—an apology, a connection—and she put it in her pocket. Later, I found out she gave it to Emmeline; a poor substitution for taking Mathilde so very far away, without knowing what lay ahead.
I stayed behind with Margause.
The pain reminded us of each other. When we met later, if there was to be a later, we knew we would recognise each other by that pain.
The light let go of the world, as if it had been shrugged off by the earth as she turned over in her sleep. We fought, and then fell silent. We had nothing to say: no promises, no lies, to offer each other.
Henri’s Story: Part Seven
Mathilde and Emmeline Salt:
An Account of Their Lives from 1895-1946
Submitted by Henriette Francine Bellmer in accordance with guidelines for the presentation of theses at Obanite College. Completed under the supervision of Master Abel Jenon.
Chapter One
The Salt Lane School was founded in 1904 by Emmeline and Mathilde Salt. The two women had lived on the property, prior to opening the school, in almost perfect solitude for nearly ten years, having inherited the property without encumbrance from Emmeline’s uncle, Charles Birney, in 1895. There is evidence to suggest the women were involved with the fledgling Oikos movement from its inception, that Mathilde, in particular, played a key role in the operations of the movement during the height of the Oikos heresy, particularly in the years after the Rupettan re-settlement of the Territory began. This thesis explores some of this evidence, and draws modest conclusions concerning the centrality of the Salt Lane Women to both a history of the Oikos, and to the history of Rupetta and the Wynders.
Both Mathilde and Emmeline kept extensive records of their work at Salt Lane: records concerning establishing and managing the gardens, their work with the children who attended the Salt Lane School and, later, sometimes in a mildly encrypted form, of their activities as part of the Oikos heresy. While these records had been preserved in the stacks of the Obanite College, they have never before been catalogued, folioed or studied in detail. This thesis, then, is the first to explore the lives of the Salt Lane Witches in any detail, and to begin to appreciate their significant contribution to History. The thesis details some aspects of the operation of the Salt Lane School, and includes two detailed appendices listing the primary sources that were retrieved, archived and folioed as part of this research project, and which might be used to write a more detailed and comprehensive history of the school, of Emmeline’s extensive work in education after Mathilde’s disappearance, and so forth. The thesis also explores the extent of Mathilde and Emmeline’s involvement in the Oikos heresy in the Territory, and of the centrality of the Territorian Oikos, particularly those who made their home on Oikos Island, to the ongoing attempts to overthrow the Rupettan Trilogy since the rule of the Consort Mateo, drawing on a range of sources from the Salt Lane Archive. Again, this work is supplemented by two appendices: Appendix One, which details the primary sources, including diaries, journals, gardening journals, correspondence and occasional writings, and Appendix Two, which is a linguistic map of the various encryption codes used in both Mathilde and Emmeline’s papers. The final section of the thesis brings the two threads of the women’s work and lives together, introducing connections between the aims of the Salt Lane School, the identities of its students, and the previously unsuspected and perhaps deliberately-suppressed nature of their involvement in the Oikos heresy.
Mathilde’s diary for the year of 1895 (D4:ff1.1-12.54) documents her growing despair at the changes being made under the rule of the Consort Mateo in Europe, particularly those that had begun to be felt in the Territories—the Oikos Territories, as they were then known—as well as documenting the work she and Emmeline were undertaking to develop the site at Salt Lane for use as a school. The entry for May 14th, 1895, for example, includes details of purchases of ‘12 pillows, 12 sets of white sheets (cotton), 6 metres oilcloth, 20 straw hats (various sizes)’ (D4:ff5.16).
At first, Mathilde and Emmeline’s response to the political upheavals of the time was to retreat from the city and to think, increasingly, of ways to diminish their dependence on the Penitent Orders and Rupettan technology. After moving permanently to the Salt Lane Property in 1894, they became increasingly self-sufficient: adding to the existing, established orchard with new plantings, building two extensive greenhouses in which to strike and nurture seedlings, converting the old milking sheds to an extensive if primitive storage facility, and establishing the extensive kitchen gardens that are, to this day, a feature of the Salt Lane Property. (See illustrations 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7 (images of the grounds during the years 1894-1896), and map 1.1 (map of the grounds drawn by Emmeline in June, 1895: SB7:ff8).)
The following extract from Mathilde’s journal (J5:ff1.1-250) is a typical one for the year preceding the opening of the school, reflecting both her intellectual, and domestic/agricultural interests, and also revealing some sense of the political discontent, the heretical doubt in the Fourfold Rupettan Law, which would later contribute to her arrest and imprisonment:
Centuries ago, living in a world that did not value women, and in which nearly everyone in Europe was bewitched by the mythology of a single, mysterious god who had gifted them with life, a sexless, ageless creature who sat outside of both Natural and Mechanical Creation, who was the source of all things, who gave and took life both mortal and eternal, the mystic Hadewijch, a Beguine recluse and mystic wrote: we all indeed wish to be God with God, but God knows there are few of us who want to live as humans with humanity. And it strikes me that though humanity is no longer enamoured with God, but with, instead, a mechanical goddess, it is perhaps true that the great mass of humanity still does not wish to live as humans with humanity. Perhaps part of this is, as Emmeline often says, that the mass of humanity is just too overwhelming. She is fond of Teilhard du Chardin’s way of putting it. He wrote of the whole vast anonymous army of living humanity . . . this restless multitude, confused or orderly, the immensity of which terrifies us, this ocean of humanity whose slow monotonous wave-flows trouble the hearts even of those whose flame is most firm. (Check this source—ESP check it doesn’t predate the entry in Mathilde’s diary) Certainly, though our flames are firm, they have burned low these past months. We have had no wish to live among a humanity that treats its own kind so ill: a humanity that includes the Consort Mateo and his Obanite soldiers.
The Consort and the Penitents seek knowledge at all costs, persecute and silence those who value this life, this earth, this body, as though the eternal life they seek is the only life. As though to speak of joy and pleasure and love and friendship in this life, in this body, were to deny the possibility of the other, eternal life they seek so violently. They insist on a literal, limited, hopeless interpretation of the Law: they insist Life is only a kind of animated death. And yet, I cannot believe this: Life is not only death, though death is an essential part of our existence. Life is also birth and hope and love and joy and pleasure: the breathtaking, exhilarating [sic] suck and sap of time, of our bodies stretched in movement, of our lips joining to kiss, of our hearts beating towards each other against the endless current of the wind.
The ancient Greeks had a word—Oikos—which is the ancient word at the root of ecology and economics. It meant simply household. Life is the house in which we are held, perhaps while we search for and await immortality, the cessation of pain and uncertainty, the cessation of change, but—perhaps—oh perhaps!—Perhaps not. Perhaps life is the house in which we will always be held. Or the only house in which we will be held. Perhaps life is our household/Oikos.
Hildegard of Bingen, another mystic, wrote about the ways in which our bodies—those cages of flesh the Consort despises, the organic prison from which the Penitents seek to free us—was not—is not—a cage, but a gift, a home. She writes: It is the senses on which the interior powers of the soul depend . . . a person is recognised by her face, sees with her eyes, hears with her ears, opens her mouth to speak, feels with her hands, walks with her feet, and so the senses are to her as precious stones and as a rich treasure sealed in a jar. (Mathilde here translates Bingen’s work in the feminine, whereas the original and most translations record the quote as: It is the senses on which the interior powers of the soul depend . . . a person is recognised by his face, sees with his eyes, hears with his ears, opens his mouth to speak, feels with his hands, walks with his feet, and so the senses are to him as precious stones and as a rich treasure sealed in a jar (from the Scivias: 1.4.24). Throughout this work, where Mathilde or Emmeline misquote sources in their letters, journals, diaries, etc I have preserved their wording in the main body of the thesis and supplied, in the footnotes, details of the quote as it more usually appears.) This last, it seems, might echo the Consort’s beliefs, his interpretation of the Fourfold Law—this notion that we are ‘sealed in a jar’—and yet I think Hildegard did not mean to conjure up the image of a soul trapped like a butterfly in a killing jar, but of a soul safe and nurtured within its home: a soul held as a child might hold a bird in its hand: with wonder, awe and grace.
