Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard Von Bingen (11 page)

“Hildegard, leave us,” she said.

Drooping in my disappointment at not being able to hear what the prophet had to say, I trudged out of the room, pulling the curtain in the doorway behind me. In the outer chamber, I pricked my ears to their murmurings. At first I only made out a few words here and there, but as Trutwib went on speaking, her voice picked up volume and power until I heard her prediction ring out, her words that changed everything.

“The one who lives under your wing, my lady, shall grow and grow until she outshines you. You will die, forgotten and obscure, and she shall blaze like the sun.”

There being no brazier in the outer room, I was doubled over from cold when Jutta finally allowed me back in the main room where the shutters were now bolted to block the screen. Trutwib, I wagered, was long gone, her broad peasant feet taking her into the thick of the woods. I hoped the monks had found some beer for her, though it was more likely that Trutwib had to content herself with our sour apple wine.

“Come stand before me,” Jutta said, her voice imperious. “Take off your veil so I can see you.”

Trembling, I obeyed. Jutta’s eyes were so hard and cold that I couldn’t bear to meet them.

“That
woman
says you see visions. Is that true?”

Dumbstruck, I froze, tears flooding my eyes. Trutwib had only to look at me to divine my secret shame and then she had pulled the scales from Jutta’s eyes. My magistra glared at me as Mother once had, as though I had betrayed her out of spite. No longer could I be Jutta’s pet, the living doll she hugged for comfort when her anguish and loneliness overpowered her. No longer could I be her trusted handmaiden. Trutwib’s revelation had turned me into my magistra’s rival. First cast out of my childhood home and now out of Jutta’s confidence, my heart raced in panic. I truly had nowhere left to hide.

Her bony fingers dug into my arms. “Tell me what you see.”

As I stared at her, I saw the skull beneath her skin. The stench of her breath, rank from fasting, struck my face, forcing me to recoil. I could only sputter and stammer about things far too strange to understand. The Lady at the axis of the wheel of creation, the greenest branch sprouting from her and flowering. The sapphire man emerging from her bosom, his hands outstretched. Adam lay before him, naked and asleep, and from Adam’s side, the blue Christ conjured a white cloud pregnant with a million stars and that brilliant cloud’s name was Eve, shining and innocent till the serpent rose to throttle her in his great black fist.

“Nonsense,” Jutta spat. “Those aren’t visions, just wicked and heretical fancies. I must inform the abbot. Once he knows the truth, he’ll cast you out.”

I couldn’t say anything more for the pounding of my heart. Could Jutta truly convince the monks to banish me? If my long-cherished dream came true and I could leave this place, where would I go? Mechthild, I was certain, wouldn’t take me back. I could no longer flee to Rorich, who was owned by the Church as much as I was. What happened to the tithed souls the Church no longer wanted?

A throbbing ignited in my head, a poker-sharp pain behind my left eye that left me queasy. As Jutta continued to berate me, I saw her mouth open and close, but I could no longer hear her voice.
God has struck me deaf and mute for my presumption, my unholy vision. The Church has used me up and now she will spit me out.

Somehow I groped my way to my pallet. Lying as corpse-still as I’d done when they first laid me in this tomb seven years ago, I waited for something to happen. For Abbot Adilhum to appear at the screen, drag a confession out of me, and then lay on a penance that would make hell seem merciful.

Instead, a cloud descended and from that billowing mist emerged a pale blue woman, crowned in majesty.
My name is Ecclesia, the true and hidden Church.
In her great arms, she cradled a company of consecrated virgins. They weren’t veiled, weren’t starving or frightened. They sported neither hair shirts nor scourges but were dressed like royal women, robed in crimson damask, crowned in gold, their unshorn hair flowing free. Faces alight with joy, they lifted their hands in prayer. The most beautiful girl with long black tresses smiled at me as though I were her dearest friend in all the world.
Have courage and endure. One day I shall come to you.

As the apparition vanished, I sat bolt upright, my face burning, as though Jutta had caught me in some shameful act. My magistra regarded me with eyes as glittering and cold as frost.

Awaiting my audience with the abbot, I hovered between dread and mad hope.
Let them toss me out.
I had prayed for this moment for so long. Oh, to be free of this place, free of the fog of Jutta’s pain, that poisonous vapor I was forced to breathe every living moment. I imagined myself staggering out of the monastery gates, an outcast left to find my own way in the forest. I’d set off like a lost pilgrim until Trutwib heard my cries and took me under her protection. Trutwib was a seeress—she would know how to find me. She would teach me how a free and masterless woman could embrace God.
Let the abbot come.
I would hurl my most heinous sins at Adilhum to force his hand.
I never desired this life. I hate this place. I hate Jutta. I hate
you.

The meeting never transpired. After another week dragged by, I understood that Jutta had thought better of the idea. Why should my magistra draw attention to my visions? Why should she take my fancies, as she called them, the least bit seriously? Perhaps she feared that if she divulged my secret to Adilhum, I might be tempted to reveal hers—that the holy Jutta was in fact no virgin.

The only thing Jutta said to me that week was one stark sentence.

“Trutwib is no prophet but a fool.”

What could Jutta do with me, then? The sullen truth dawned that there was no way she could be rid of me, for like my magistra herself, I had made my vows before God. When she knelt at the screen to chant the Holy Office, she left no room for me but blocked my view into the church, my only glimpse of the outside world. Crouched behind her, I murmured my psalms in a whisper too choked to disturb her.

I turned my face to the wall, my head swimming, my entire body gone numb. My last chance of escape had turned to dust.
I will grow old and wither and die here.
This was my living death. I was but a ghost. I had become nothing.

To further escape my presence, Jutta sank even deeper into her sufferings, haunted as ever by Meginhard, whose crime remained etched on her body, racking her. When she awakened screaming from her night terrors, she beat me away if I dared to comfort her. By day, she fasted, scourged herself, moved through the anchorage rooms on her bare knees until they bled and festered, as if this could finally purge her of her brother’s stain. If she couldn’t make him vanish from this earth, she would make herself disappear, starving herself until her skin went gray and her teeth were stained brown, till her shorn hair began to fall off her scalp and down grew upon her face. Until her eyes, as huge as medallions, were her only beauty that remained.

Stirring inside my breast, the whisper grew into a roar until I was forced to admit that I mourned the Jutta I had loved. Once, like Eve, she had been as innocent as that white cloud full of stars, but then the serpent’s poison sank into her, sickening and corrupting her. Now I could only watch, powerless to plead or help, as she grew more and more distant, shrinking deep inside herself to a place where even Volmar could no longer reach her.

“If only I knew what to do,” Volmar whispered from his side of the screen.

Over and over again, he called Jutta’s name until his voice grew as hoarse as an old man’s. A few feet away, she knelt, her eyes open but unseeing, her soul flung into some other world.

“She used to trust me.” He sounded so heartbroken that I longed to reach through the screen and clasp his hands.

“She despises me,” I told him. “She’d get rid of me if she could and, by God, I wouldn’t mind.”

“Don’t be disrespectful. She’s still your magistra.” Volmar sighed. “At least we know she’ll remain safe and undisturbed. Her brother”—he merely mouthed the words lest Jutta hear them and fly into a panic—“has gone on a pilgrimage to the Holy Lands seeking penance.”

I roiled with hatred for Meginhard. How easy for him to play the penitent, jaunting off to Jerusalem with the sun on his face and a fine horse to carry him, while I remained trapped in this hell with the fruit of his mortal sin, this shattered woman who would never be right again. My old love for Jutta brimmed, bringing tears to my eyes.

“It’s melancholy,” I said. “I told you from the beginning. One day it will kill her.”

“She’s so much more than a melancholic.” Volmar’s undying adoration illumined his face. “Jutta’s a saint. Cuno appointed me to write her Vita, but how can I if she no longer speaks to me?”

Jutta would deny herself every last comfort, even Volmar’s chaste, unselfish devotion.
If only he would cherish me that way.

“Ask
me.
” I grew bold. “I’ll tell you anything you need to know.”

Cuno appeared at the screen daily, not speaking but only kneeling to gaze at Jutta as she prayed, her face hidden in her veil. Like Volmar, his love for her remained steadfast. It was as though the sainted anchorite were some tragic maiden locked in a tower. Though Cuno could never touch her, he guarded the ground beneath her citadel, pledging himself as her champion, determined to protect her till her dying day.

You foolish man,
I wanted to scream.
If only you knew.
Now that my magistra had withdrawn from the screen, the men who adored her couldn’t smell her rancid breath or see how her once-white teeth had rotted to black stumps. Only I was privy to that.

As Jutta wasted away, the miasma of her unspoken resentment filled the room until I thought I would gag on it. My magistra had never forgiven me for Trutwib’s prophecy.
The one who lives under your wing shall grow and grow until she outshines you. You will die, forgotten and obscure, and she shall blaze like the sun.
I wished Jutta would listen as I struggled to persuade her that I, too, thought Trutwib was mistaken.
I am no saint. I am full of sin. I will never be your equal.

But as lacking in holiness as I knew I was, I was still everything Jutta longed to be and was not, a true virgin gifted—or cursed—with visions that came as pure gifts in their gleaming orbs, without my having to pummel or starve myself to summon them. In Jutta’s mind, I had done nothing to earn God’s favor. Little could I dispute my magistra—I hadn’t chosen any of this. But even as Jutta tried to freeze me out, she appeared unable to ignore my absences when I knelt unmoving, in thrall to the things I saw that she would never see. If these visions indeed came from God, why had God chosen me over Jutta? If I could, I’d give it all away, lay every last gift at her feet, only to have peace again.

Jutta ignored her pilgrims. In vain they loitered beyond the screen while their holy woman huddled barefoot in the courtyard, clad only in her hair shirt, regardless if it rained or snowed or pelted down hailstones. And so it fell upon me to receive our visitors. Over the months, I grew accustomed to sitting beside the screen during the hour of visitation and listening as the matrons and widows poured out their torments, telling me such secrets that blistered my ears. They revealed the unspeakable illnesses their husbands brought home from foreign battlefields. They poured out the sorrows they could tell to no priest. Of the cancers that ate away at their very breasts, of their struggle to love their own children, those infants who died like flies, one after the other, from croup and small pox, grippe and flux.

A fifteen-year-old bricked inside my anchorage, I knew little of the outer world in which these women struggled to survive. Their laments were my education. As my vocation demanded, I offered them my prayers, but I also told them what herbs might ease their afflictions. For those with cancers, I bade them go to the hospice and ask Brother Otto to give them yarrow, which helped prevent the growth of tumors, and violet salve, which healed existing tumors. To those maidens and matrons who believed themselves under attack from a man’s love spell, I prescribed mandrake root. For those who simply wished to curb their husband’s insatiable lust, I suggested marjoram and cowbane.

“Tell Brother Otto you need them to cure your headache.”

One warm June day, a young priest appeared at the screen. He was tall and beautiful, and his brown eyes were shot with flecks of gold like brook agates. Upon seeing me, his face lit up with such love and pain that I could only gape at him stupidly, my palms dripping sweat.

“Hildegard,” he said. “Don’t you know me anymore?”

“Rorich?” Tears clouded my vision of his beloved face.

I threw myself at the screen, coming as close as I could to embracing him.

“I thought I’d never see you again!” I pulled back so I could gaze into his eyes. “Have you come to take me away?”

Hope beat so madly inside me that I didn’t care if Jutta overheard and came charging in from the courtyard to upbraid me.

“Get me out of here, I beg you.” My fingers poked through the screen to touch his. For seven long years I had dreamt of the moment when Rorich would rescue me.

His face crumpled. “Hildegard, you know I can’t undo your vows.”

“
Vows?
” I spat the word back at him. “I was just a child!”

He rested his brow against the screen. “Do you think your abbot will knock down those bricks even if I beg him on my knees? I had to grovel to the prelates just to get permission to visit you. I am bound by obedience just as you are.”

Desolation swept through me and then a boiling rage.

“Those are fine words when you can walk out of those gates whenever it pleases you. Why did you even show your face here if you can’t help me?”

“Mother is dead.”

My brother’s face turned ashen.

Mechthild.
I sank to my stool. How many times had I tried to convince myself that she wasn’t really my mother, that chilly, toothless harpy who had pressed me down into the grave dust beside Jutta seven years ago? Why did the news of her passing make me shrivel up and sob?