Aelred's Sin (3 page)

These monks, who seemed to float a few feet above the ground as if in permanent levitation, whose liturgy broke upon Jean Marc like the waves that broke upon the beach at Sans Souci on Les Deux Isles with the rhythm of the tides, became the heroes of his adolescence.

The ideal formed to enter their choir, clothed in their habit, reclining on the misericord, offering back to his brothers antiphonally the inspired chant of Saint Gregory:
‘
Dixit Dominus domino meo, sede a dexteris meus Gloria Patri et Filio et Spiritui Sancto… Secut erat in principio et nunc et semper, et in secula seculorum, Amen…’

He convinced himself of all this. He saw Ted’s face and renewed his commitment.

The moment of the naming arrived. ‘Brother de la Borde, henceforth you shall be known among us as…’ The Abbot paused for effect. The young novice held his breath. He could feel the community around him hold their breaths before the Abbot’s secret was revealed: his name, his monastic name, always a point of excitement for the old monks, who had known many clothings, and for the younger monks, for whom it was relatively new, reminding them of their own clothing ceremony. The Abbot continued, ‘Brother Aelred.’

Everyone sighed, smiling with approval, and the Abbot
looked around with almost a smirk of self-satisfaction that he had kept them all guessing. Would it be Chrysostom, who had just died? They didn’t have a Leo. Everyone had had their own theory on the naming in the preceding weeks.

The new novice had an enviable name: the name of their monastery, St Aelred’s of Ashton Park; the name of the great English Cistercian of the twelfth century, Aelred of Rievaulx.

The new Aelred remembered the story he had been told as a boy. He remembered his question then. Is love painful? He saw Dom Placid’s answer in the nod of his head.

The Abbot drew him towards his embrace and gave him the kiss of peace on both cheeks.

Then the acolyte of the clothing came forward with a pair of scissors on a silver salver and offered it to the Abbot, who took the scissors and symbolically cut off a lock of the new Brother Aelred’s hair.

Fully clothed and named, baptised anew, the old man stripped off and the new man put on, Brother Aelred was led by Father Justin to the opposite end of the chapter house, where he sat on a stool especially placed for him.

The chief cantor intoned the clothing sequence,
‘Ubi
caritas
et
amor,
Deus
ibi
est
’:
‘Where there is love and charity, there is God.’

As each verse was in turn picked up by the choir of monks, antiphonally, the entire community, led by the Abbot, came to Brother Aelred where he sat on his stool clothed in the black habit of a young Benedictine novice. Beginning with the Abbot and followed by the prior and even the old men of the community, they knelt, each one,
and, using the silver jug and basin offered by the acolyte of the clothing, they poured water over the naked feet of Brother Aelred, who had, immediately on sitting down, taken off his shoes and socks, his friend Ted’s boots.

They washed his feet and dried them with the linen towel handed by the other acolyte of the clothing and then kissed his feet. All the while, the choir chanted the clothing sequence: ‘
Ubi
caritas
et
amor,
Deus
ibi
est.
’
Each member of the community performed this act, as Christ had done to his disciples the night before he was betrayed and had said to them, ‘Do unto each other as I have done to you.’ It was on that night that the beloved John, he whom Jesus loved, had lain his head upon his chest.

Then it was the turn of the simple-professed monks, led by Dom Benedict. Brother Aelred kept his eyes lowered, but he noticed, in the solemnity, the encouraging smile of Benedict, as he liked to call him when he thought of him, remembering how kind he had been over the last three months helping him to settle in; Benedict, his guardian angel.

Aelred returned the smile of encouragement, lifted up by this wonderful expression of love and initiation into the community. His smile flickered over his lips as Benedict knelt in front of him and washed and dried his feet and then bent to kiss them. His lips on his bare foot. After kissing his feet he looked up and smiled again.

‘
Ubi
caritas
et
amor,
Deus
ibi
est.
’

Brother Aelred was so overcome by these acts, and by the chant of love and charity, that he was thankful for Brother Stephen tickling his feet in jest, bringing a small irreverence to bear upon the solemnity of the moment. Brother Stephen had whispered earlier in the day while
they were working on the farm, ‘Make sure you wash your feet well before tonight.’ Brother Stephen was well known for these little pranks and Brother Aelred already hoped he would get to work on the farm again with the old brother whose way with the animals was almost as inspired as St Francis of Assisi’s.

As the community filed out of the chapter house to process along the cloister to the church for Compline, the last office of the day, they each, starting with Father Abbot, stopped to give the new Brother Aelred the kiss of peace, the monastic kiss offered on each cheek with their hands firmly placed on his shoulders. By now he was again properly shod in his friend Ted’s black boots. The young monk, thus embraced, felt at one with his brothers.

Then it was Benedict’s turn, and, quite spontaneously, they broke the formal embrace and hugged each other. Aelred’s heart grew as big as his chest. They held on to each other and their cheeks brushed against each other, first the right and then the left. Benedict squeezed his hand and filed by as he made way for the next brother. The monks coming after smiled, knowing that Benedict was Aelred’s guardian angel.

The chant continued. ‘
Ubi
caritas
et
amor,
Deus
ibi
est…
’: ‘Where there is love and charity there is God.’ The refrain was picked up by the whole choir processing out of the chapter house into the monastic church for Compline.

In the dark church, with only the single candles on either side of the altar flickering, the acolyte of the door closed the doors quietly and stood inside the entrance, before
proceeding to his place in the choir, to allow the acolyte of the choir to implore the Abbot’s blessing upon the whole community and upon himself, before he should read the opening lesson for Compline. ‘
Jube
,
Domne,
benedicere
’: ‘Pray, Father, a blessing.’ The hooded monks with bowed heads received their Father’s blessing, and then listened to the admonitions of the lesson: ‘Fratres…’: ‘Brothers, be sober and watch, because your adversary the devil, like a roaring lion, goes about seeking whom he may devour. Resist him…’

The Confiteor was then intoned:
‘Mea
culpa,
mea
culpa,
mea
maxima
culpa.
’
The monks knelt to examine their consciences. They beat their breasts. The psalms were intoned and sung reclining upon the misericords. Brother Aelred was one of these in the church militant who joined their voices with the church suffering and the church triumphant with the hosts of angels, archangels, cherubim and seraphim, transcending themselves and being the mystical body of Christ.

The new Brother Aelred left for bed exalted by the tones of the ‘Salve Regina’ still in his ears. His fellow monks paid their visits to the altars of the saints, the Lady Chapel and the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament.

The following morning, after Prime, Brother Aelred sat with a white sheet thrown about him, as Brother Walter shaved off his thick brown curls with an electric shaver. ‘You’ll soon get to like it, brother, and your hood will keep you warm.’ Brother Walter tidied up the back and sides and mowed over the top once more, giving Aelred the monastic tonsure. He was like a sheep being shorn. He was now like a sheep led to the slaughter, a sacrifice
for Christ, shorn of the adornment of the world, the sensuality of the flesh. His thick dark curls lay on the tiled floor of the sacristy.

Aelred stood fully clothed as a novice. He had removed his brown pants and wore only the customary vest and underpants beneath his habit. He stood in Ted’s boots.

The Guest House, Ashton Park:
23 September 1984

Scattering sleep from our minds
Now before dawn…

I keep his breviary open at the appropriate hour, the ribbon in the crease where he marked his pages. I learn my hours and enter my brother Jean Marc’s life, Aelred’s. J. M. we always called him at home.

It was Chantal’s, my sister’s, idea. Call him J. M., Mummy.

This is a kind of waking sleep. What am I waking up to? What is it that I don’t want to stir? Even now, having come all this way.

Robert, the guest master called my name, knocking me up for Matins. I sit here in my small room, my cell, neat and straight. A narrow bed is in the corner on the right as I enter from the dim and silent corridor. There is a wash basin in the other corner by the window seat, below a window in two stone arches. There is a narrow desk against the other wall and a crucifix on the wall above me. A cell like the one he had: I’m here for him. This is a younger brother’s pilgrimage. Will there be a conversion for me in this? Me so different, our lives taking such different paths.

Cocoa planter! I say to myself, What you doing here, boy?

I sit with my prologue, the way I remember the
Lives
of
the
Saints
told. We had the same book, read by our mother. Is this a fiction like those, a way of telling of a younger time in another place? Was his wish to be a saint? His life can now seem like a hagiographic tale itself. One
part of me writes it that way. To write it out is to understand it. That was his method. Without his journals, I would be nowhere. But then I’m also out of my depth.

I speak of him as another, Aelred. That was the custom, named for a saint, clothed. It helps too with the distance which time has wrought. I’ve made a character of him. To think of him as not my brother, as someone else who did those things, is perhaps easier. But there is too the brother I always loved, for sure; the one who went away, the one I lost.

As I say, I have his words, and words are everything: journals, letters and my own words, enraptured by his ideas. I was inspired by his youth, yes, but startled and shocked. There is a sense of occasion, vocation. But can I face up to what in some ways I don’t want to know? I let words stand on their own. Do they ever, those words? I find myself hardly able to utter them. Our mother would use that expression.

Unutterable, she would say, something that should not have happened, something that should not be said, a story which should not be told.

I know a secret history of Ashton Park. I know that this will not be a pious story. The monastic life? Not the one I imagined he had left all of us for.

I have come to see Benedict, his friend. I am confronted with my own memories as well as his. Things I don’t like to think about myself. It’s a strange feeling, because it’s as if I’m the older brother now as I resurrect that young man in the first year of his monastic life.

What can Benedict tell me? Will he? Can I really expect him to talk to me of things I have read in the journals, explain them to me, perhaps?

In front of me, the monastic day:

His day. This was how he spent his days.

Because he went away, and I was the one son among a family of sisters, I had to grow into our father’s shoes and take on the management of the cocoa estate at Malgretoute. Life has fashioned me differently; from the same mother and father, the same home; loved and admired by the same sisters, by Toinette, the same nurse. How is that possible?

Now, I’m coming here, leaving the world I know, to try to say how it happened, tell it to myself, tell it all. Will that be possible, to tell it all? How do I remember it, now? Can I bear to? Ted? Ted and the others, they, the others, who still stand around me. They, those boys, who stood around him, him and Ted. This is in another place, in a younger time. That’s what comes back on top of
everything else. Is that why I’m here?

I am following the ritual. I get to know this life, this liturgy. The bells are so unashamedly, so scandalously, I think, ringing out, like loud gonging prayers themselves, waking up the neighbourhood. It is the voice that calls us to prayer, pealing out over fields, the distant town, over the stone enclosure wall and the sheep like stones as the world sleeps.
‘Domine,
labia
mea
aperies
et
os
meum
annutiabit
laudem
tuam…
’:
‘Lord, open my lips, and my mouth shall announce your praise.’ I hear them in choir.

Open my lips. I need to tell his story. I owe it to him, owe it to myself.

The city hums at the edge of the fields, a horizon, an amber hum. There is the silence and my scratching pen, as when I’m up late at night at Malgretoute having to do the accounts. The rain drips in the cocoa. I miss home. I’ve been here longer than I first planned. I think of Krishna looking after the estate. I’m lucky to have such an expert to leave things to. I thought I would come and settle these affairs and return quickly. But it’s taken much longer.

The affairs of the heart take much longer.

Keep an open mind, Joe said to me as he drove me down from Bristol. We had got drunk the night before, in the flat with all of J. M.’s things scattered on the floor, all those red notebooks with black spines, photographs of our parents, one of me.

Joe, out of the blue, had written, ‘I have some things which belong to you.’ I’m surprised how easily I get on with Joe. He’s like any other guy really. Looks like a monk with his crew cut, not the earring though. I don’t know of anything we have in common, except my brother, of
course, and his desire to drink rum, a love of the sun and cricket. I go everywhere with my cuatro, so I strummed and sang him an old-time calypso that first night when he and his sister Miriam welcomed me to the flat in Bristol. I taught them the refrain: ‘
Sans
humanité.
’ A kind of wake!

Sing, ‘Rum and Coca-Cola’, Joe said.

They all want that tune.

In the clubs, he said, it’s the popular calypso, Arrow’s ‘Hot Hot Hot’, that they enjoy.

Yesterday afternoon, I took the road alongside the farm towards the fields. There I found a path, a forest trail pointed with yellow arrows, painted at intervals on fences and posts. I followed assiduously as if the place would yield something. I wanted it to. But always there is this double thing. I don’t want to know.

I was circling the enclosure of the abbey, keeping the stock bell tower in view, the rest of the enclosure hidden. The landscaping of the natural woods encloses the cloister. I left the fields, and over a stile, made through some gorse scrub. I learn the words: gorse, scrub. I would say ‘bush’ back home. I learn that from J. M. He’s provided me with a miscellany of English flora and fauna. Still I was being pointed onwards.

I surveyed this English park the way I do my cocoa estate. Just beyond the gorse bushes, through a little wood of oaks, I came into a clearing. The phrases are becoming almost natural, like ‘Down by the mango tree, take a left for the pasture’.

If I could only bring him back!

Then I came upon it. At first, I hadn’t taken in this other noise. I was attuned to the fields, the silence and
the sheep like stones, the abbey getting smaller. But then, more than the silence, the hum drew me to the very brink of the escarpment. It horrified me, as it fell sheer in well excavated layers, like giant steps: a vast quarry of Bath stone, the guest master Father Dominic told me it’s called. In the centre there was a large oval pool of water glinting on its floor like a mirror, or, a mass grave. Just a fancy.

Long ago, there had been fields here, the monks tell me. Here they had climbed. And even a longer time ago, I learnt, from J. M.’s journal, that dogs hunted their masters’ prey in the nearby fields. I had thought that was a dream, but it was true. I once thought that it was a myth. The terrible trade! We were forced to confront it, my generation, in 1970 with Black Power! What do the dreams tell of that time? To dream a time past - is that possible? They stand around your bed in the light which is filtered through mosquito nets, like those of a waking child in another place, shadowy behind a scrim. Power! Power! So, he had found the beginnings of our history here?

Chunky lorries, almost like toys, those dinky cars we played with as boys, the ones of his I still have in a box somewhere at Malgretoute, were descending the terraced excavation, being loaded and then making the ascent. Huge arc lamps were harnessed to very tall pylons and girders for night work. Their metal glinted in the afternoon sun. My horror turned to awe and then fascination at the work. A notice told me that blasting took place between 11.00 a.m. and 2.00 p.m. I was safe. It was 2.45 p.m. I hadn’t heard any blasting earlier. I circled the escarpment and then descended the other bank into
a wood of silver birches, losing myself before finding my yellow trail again. I was lost among the silver birches.

They’re holding hands. Look at them now. Phrases and conversations with myself, with him, his words. He’s become word to me.

Dreams still haunt. Dogs - the cry of dogs still sounds where the water trembles over small blue stones the colour of blue blood, tongues lapping at the blood, flowing into the lake in the spinney. I see another running. Then, he turns, and throws a stone.

My memory haemorrhages with his words, phrases, metaphors.

In another river, in another place, a boy dives like a shaft of light into a bronze rock pool. Like an angel, scarlet like the petals of the flamboyante.

I make his poetry mine.

Both of them, angels? Athletes, angels! No, hardly angels.