Iceland's Bell (27 page)

14

The schoolboys quit their roughhousing and watched in dead silence as she walked, small-footed and slender within her wide cloak, through their quarters to the archpriest’s office.

Hoarfrost glazed his windowpanes. He sat at his desk hunched over some books and morosely called out “Deo gratias”* when the knock came upon his door, but he did not look up when the door opened; he just kept reading, completely absorbed. She stepped across the threshold and stared at the abominable wooden crucifix hanging over his desk, then greeted him in a tone both pious and carefree: “May God grant you—good day.”

Upon hearing this voice he looked up in bewilderment bordering on terror. When the light was particularly fickle, like now, his black eyes glowed like burning embers. He stood up, bowed to her and plumped the cushions in his armchair for her, then sat down midway between her and the crucifix, one cheek facing each of them.

“This is the first time a de-hm-destitute man is granted such an honor,” he began, but he was so unprepared for this visitation, and found himself therefore at such a loss for the twisted, scholarly word-clinches so suited to the standards of courtesy necessary for such a meeting, that all he could do was cough.

“No, you can’t call yourself destitute, my dear Reverend Sigurður,” she said. “You who own all those acres of land. And it’s a shame that you should have no stove here to keep you warm; it’s a wonder that you haven’t caught a cold by now. Besides, this isn’t the first time: I came to you once before, when your blessed wife was still with us, and she gave me honey in a box—oh, I see that you’ve forgotten—but you’ve brought this horrid image into your home—” she gave a short-winded sigh as she looked toward the rood: “Do you really believe that the blessed Redeemer was so miserable?”

“In cruce latebat sola deitas
at hic latet simul et humanitas”*

—mumbled the archpriest.

“Now that was a poem!” she said. “I’ve completely forgotten what little I knew of grammatica. But I know that ‘deitas’ is divinity and ‘humanitas’ humanity, and that these two can be called enemies— am I right? But do you think that a man ought to pray the
Ave Maria
constantly in atonement, Reverend Sigurður, or should he behave like our dear master Luther, who had a pious wife?”

“I would be better able to answer if I knew your reasons for asking,” said the archpriest. “Just now you reminded me of my dear wife. But when I gaze upon these wounds, I am filled with gratitude to God for the mercy He exhibited to me when He took my mortal comfort away from me.”

“Don’t take pains to frighten me, my dear Reverend Sigurður,” she said, and she looked from Christ toward the man. “You still own a fat horse, however; and land. Call me mademoiselle now, as you did before, and be my companion; and my suitor.”

He drew his cassock more closely about his frame and puckered his lips more tightly.

“You must be cold, my dear Reverend Sigurður. The frost clings to your windowpanes.”

“Hm,” he said.

“Do try to understand me,” she said. “I know you think that I’m never going to get around to the matter at hand. But you must realize that it’s difficult to discuss one’s own paltriness with a man who has his eternal victory in the Lord.”

“I once thought that I would be chosen to extend you my hand, Snæfríður,” he said. “But God has His ways.”

She asked suddenly: “Why were you standing in the hall doorway at the bishop’s house two nights ago? And why didn’t you wish me good evening?”

“It was late,” he said. “It was very late.”

“It wasn’t too late for me,” she said. “And even if you were tired, you were still up and about. I thought you could have at least said good evening.”

“I was speaking with a sick woman in one of the bedrooms and it grew late,” he said. “I was going to go out through the front door, but it was locked. So I turned back.”

“I told my sister about it first thing yesterday morning. ‘What do you think Reverend Sigurður thinks of you?’ she asked me. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I expect he believes all those ugly fables. I must speak to him myself.’ ”

He said, “What men think does not matter. What God knows is the only thing that matters.”

“Anyway, I’m not afraid of what God knows,” said Snæfríður. “But I do care what men think, most of all what you think, dear Reverend Sigurður, you who are my confessor and my friend. I would take it sorely if such an excellent man as Arnæus were to fall into disrepute because of me, a wretched beggar-girl dependent on parish-alms. It was for this reason that I went to his room the night before last and said to him: ‘Árni, wouldn’t it be better if I left Skálholt and went home to my husband? I can’t bear to know that you, an innocent man, might have to endure calumny on my account.’ ”

“If you are going to tell me something, then I ask that you tell me from your own heart, as you did so long ago when you were a girl. Do not speak in words that you have been given by others, especially by that man whom you named just now—he has a serpent’s forked tongue.”

“You who love Christ,” she said, “how can you hate a man?”

“Christians hate the words and deeds of a man who has pledged himself to Satan. The man himself they pity.”

“If I didn’t know that you are one of the saints, my dear Reverend Sigurður, I might sometimes believe that you were jealous, and then what could I do but congratulate myself and end up a conceited spinster?”

“In some ways I am indebted to you, Snæfríður, for the fact that the soul’s prayers for stigmata and the cross should have become the words that I hold closest to my heart, ‘Fac me plagis vulnerari, fac me cruce inebriari.’ ”*

“Yet it wasn’t any longer ago than last summer that you came to a married woman one day when her husband was away and as much as proposed to her,” she said. “At least she couldn’t understand the meaning of your words in any other way after she’d plucked the theology and Chancery jargon out of them.”

“I deny, madame, that my visit to you last summer had any sinful purpose,” he said. “If my thoughts toward you were ever in any way blended with sinful yearnings of nature, then it was long, long ago. The soul’s love for other souls rules my thoughts for you now. I also pray that the evil mirages that confound you might pass away. Dear Snæfríður, is it not clear to you how disastrous your words were, when you said just now that you do not fear the eye of God watching over you? Or have you never tried to comprehend just how much the Lord is the lover of your soul? Do you know that His love for your soul is so overwhelmingly extensive that the entire world is as a grain of dust next to it? And have you ever considered that the man who does not love his own soul hates God? ‘My precious soul, my beloved soul,’ says our good psalmist when he addresses his soul, mindful of the fact that the soul is the part of the individual that God was born in a manger and crucified on the cross to redeem.”

“Reverend Sigurður,” she said, “will you just once push aside your great works of theology; will you place your hand on the heart and look in the face of a living individual for one moment, instead of gaping at the pierced wooden feet of the Redeemer, and answer me candidly one question: who has suffered more for the other in this world, God for men, or men for God?”

“Only someone who is inclined toward terrible sins would ask such a thing. I pray that this poison cup containing eternal death might be taken from you.”

“I think that you’re completely ignorant as far as my affairs are concerned,” she said. “You lend your support to the servant-girls’ drivel and rumor about me more by your ill will than by credible reasoning.”

“Those are heavy words,” said the priest.

“All the same, I don’t threaten you with eternal death, which I’m told means Hell in your language,” she answered, and she laughed.

His face quivered.

“A woman who comes to a man during the night,” he began, but then stopped. He shot her a glance quick as a flame and said, “I so much as caught you in the act. It has gone beyond servant-girls’ drivel.”

“I knew you would think that,” she said. “I’ve come to tell you that you’re mistaken. And I would like to warn you about slandering him. His reputation will live on after they have stopped laughing at both you and me. He was eager to give his life and his happiness to increase the honor of his poor country. Nothing lies farther away from such a man than an ignoble, wayward female who comes to him to beg his help.”

“A woman who comes to a man during the night has only one thing in mind,” said the archpriest.

“A man who is never able to tear his mind away from his miserable flesh, fastening an icon of it to his wall, like an idol, with needles through its arms and legs, or who constantly witnesses to this carnal desire with citations from holy books, will never understand the man who has turned in body and soul to the service of the defenseless and the vindication of his people.”

“It is the Enemy’s habit to assume many different disguises and seduce women under one pretext or another; the first time was when he assumed the likeness of a serpent and deceived a woman by painting a flattering picture of an apple. He himself did not hand her the apple, but rather confounded her with words so that she took it herself, in violation of God’s commandment. It is not in his nature to commit the act of defilement, for if it were so, mankind would get off free, and therefore he is called the Tempter, for he allures man’s will into consent with his own. In the book
De Operatione Daemonum,
* which you see lying open before you here, his operations are witnessed in hundreds of exempla. For instance, a certain damsel, trapped in despair after Satan has inflamed her with fleshly desire and then slipped out between her fingers, asks: ‘Quid ergo exigis carnale conjugium, quod naturae tuae dinoscitur esse contrarium?’— ‘How can you allure me into carnal relations, being of no flesh yourself?’ And he answers: ‘Tu tantum mihi consensisti, nihil aliud a te nisi copulae consensum requiro’—‘You consented to intercourse and your consent was all that I required.’ ”

By the time the archpriest finished conveying this lesson carefully in both tongues his guest’s patience had shortened noticeably. She looked at the man for a while with the kind of wordless expression of shock that borders on complete vacuity. Finally she stood up, smiled aloofly, curtsied, and turned to go, saying:

“I sincerely thank my devoted friend and confessor for his charming obscenities.”

The week after Easter a synod was convened in Skálholt, attended not only by clergy but also by cloister wardens, authorized agents, and others who managed church estates throughout the lowlands. Their discussions focused on rents and rental taxes, the ministration of lepers and the administration of hospitals, migrancy in the countryside, lawsuits against church administrators who exhausted their estates’ chattel, the interment of vagrant folk who had given up the ghost on mountain tracks, sometimes in large groups, and of course they did not fail to haggle over their yearly petition to the king concerning the shortage of sacramental wine and lack of cord, which, as far as the latter was concerned, made it nearly as difficult for men to drag fish from the church’s fishing-grounds as the former did to prevent men from successfully sailing the sea of mercy. These and many of the other issues normally discussed by clerics at their synods occupied their attention for three days. At the close of the synod the bishop ascended his throne before his priests and once again admonished them concerning the chief articles of the true faith, wording his admonishments gently and pleasantly so as to alarm no one. The congregation was ready to depart. Finally a hymn was sung for the journey home: “Let your spirit nourish us.”

During the final verse of the hymn, however, the archpriest, Reverend Sigurður Sveinsson, rises from his seat, walks over and stands stock-still, gravely, in the choir doorway, waiting for the song to come to an end. He removes a letter from his cassock, unfolds it carefully, and holds it up with trembling hands. Then he lets his voice ring out throughout the cold church as the coarse chanting dwindles, announcing that it is not for him to hinder the petition of one of his parishioners, a respectful and beloved gentleman, who had written to this synod and entrusted the letter to his furtherance; the archpriest considered himself and the others even more duty-bound to comply with the petition since he knew full well that the petitioner had tried by all means possible to find a more convenient solution to his case.

He now began his monological delivery of the petition’s massive quantity of text in a tone rich in edificatory spirit, with astonishing word-windings and entangled sentence constructions, so that his audience was for a very long time prohibited from determining where the text was headed. After a weighty lecture in praise of moral conduct and a description of the correct estimation of the proprietal worth of this exalted condition, which should furthermost be upheld by the servants of Christ as an exemplary model for the general public, reference was made to the dreadful tragedies that by now had become so common in this country, particularly amongst high personages, male as well as female, but which were concealed or passed over in chilling silence by the clergy, though they were so greatly ruinous to the commoners’ moral life, that is, mores,* as one reads in the
Book of Seven Words
—it went on endlessly like this.

At first it was not surprising when one man or other opened his eyes wider, let his jaw drop, or thrust his chin forward, or when the old priests who were hard of hearing made trumpets round their ears with the palms of their hands. But as his endless prattle stretched on even longer, unwavering in its overwhelming sheen, the men’s expressions became as dull as those of strung-up ling heads. Yet after a while the petitioner finally gained a slightly more stable foothold, as he began to reveal the terrible tale of woe so firmly affixed to his heart, how his wedded wife Snæfríður Björnsdóttir had during the previous autumn let herself be duped into leaving her own home. Then he repeated down to the last detail the story that he had told many times before whenever he had the opportunity, concerning his wife’s departure, the rumors about her previous acquaintance with Arnas Arnæus and the recent report of the renewal of their secret, forbidden relations in Skálholt, his attempts to get highly placed members within the bishopric to act as go-betweens between him and her to persuade her to return home, and furthermore, how these said attempts had been completely rebuffed. Then the petitioner described how, when he finally tried to publicize his troubles in Skálholt, the dogs were sicked on him and he was threatened with bodily injury. He knew full well of course that these threats did not come directly from the bishopric’s landlords, but he did have a substantiated suspicion that they were descended from those who at the present time considered themselves to be even greater landlords than the true representatives of the bishopric. Now it was the petitioner’s request, his public and tearful lament, that this worshipful council of priests take steps to put a stop to his wife’s aforementioned reprehensible riot in Skálholt and grant him, the husband, assistance in dragging her up out of the ditch into which she had in the sight of God and Christianity fallen. The letter wound to a close with repeated references to the
Book of Seven Words
and intricate theological salutations in which all the persons of the Trinity were invoked in prayer for the strengthening of morality throughout the country, followed immediately by the words “Amen, amen, Magnús Sigurðsson.”