Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard Von Bingen (16 page)

In that sepulchral gloom, my sisters and I endured our days as best we could. Guda would not stop talking about the margravine’s upcoming visit—their godmother had promised to make a rare winter journey and visit us at Christmas. She was bringing along her youngest child and only daughter, a girl of thirteen, to meet Guda and Adelheid for the first time.

Adelheid diverted herself by tearing through one book after another, eager to cram every scrap of knowledge into her brain. In bleak November she was particularly fond of reading herbals and bestiaries, then sharing the illuminations of plants and animals with Guda, who embroidered pomegranate and cedar, lily and dove, lion and hind on silk vestments and altar cloths.

The hunger on my sisters’ faces ran me through like a blade. How they needed to see real trees, real birds and beasts, real meadows full of wildflowers again, or they might go mad. How could anyone go on living like this, year after year, decade after decade, without cracking apart, as Jutta was cracking before our eyes?

The three of us were unwilling witnesses as Jutta broke, piece by piece. It was as though she had taken upon herself our despair and failings until this burden crushed her.

In the past, she’d had plenty of spells of weakness and illness that I had nursed her through. But she’d never been as bad as this. Not only did she refuse to eat, she also refused to sip water, even though we begged her down on our knees. She wouldn’t budge from her planks, even to make use of the chamber pot. Our magistra’s skin went as dry as old bark and came off in scaly flakes. She was disintegrating, dust to dust.

Adelheid lost her patience and tried to shove a spoonful of broth between Jutta’s lips, but Jutta remained as rigid as a marble effigy while the liquid dribbled down her chin to stain her hair shirt.

“Leave her be,” I said, for I knew from sad experience that we’d have to wait until Jutta grew so weak that she toppled over. Only then would I be able to gather her in my arms and carry her to her bed. When her frailty overpowered her, she would weep in my embrace and finally allow me to spoon turtle soup into her mouth.

I prayed she would give in and let us help her. But Jutta hovered for days in a realm between life and death, without even closing her eyes to sleep.

“It’s impossible,” I told Volmar. “How can she do this? She defies every human need.”

Volmar’s hair was beginning to thin around his tonsure, yet his eyes were as gentle as those I’d first learned to love and trust thirty years ago. My heart still swelled with my undeclared love for him, though the fiery heat of my youthful passion had mellowed into a warm glow. Through my many sorrows, Volmar had been there for me, his compassion the shining lamp that lit my way. In the secular world, we might have married. We might have had a son or daughter almost as old as Guda.

“Cuno’s right,” he said. “Jutta’s truly a saint. She has transcended this earthly existence while still living here among us.”

Just as I went on quietly loving him, he continued to adore his Jutta. Let him believe in his holy anchorite. Who was I to spoil his illusion?

Since Jutta rejected our proffered cups of water and broth, since the blankets we wrapped around her just slithered off her bony frame, we could only gather around and pray while she knelt there, her whole being shuttered to us. Meanwhile, Abbot Cuno led the monks in a vigil for our holy woman. The still center of this storm, Jutta remained on her knees, propped up by an unearthly might, for seventeen days and nights.

On the first of December, I awakened for Matins to find that our magistra had finally collapsed. Her breathing was shallow. Tears trickled from her eyes. She huddled on her side, curling into herself like a child in the womb.

Flat on her bed, Jutta stared with spectral eyes, her skeletal hands lifted in prayer.

“Behold,” she said in a reedy old woman’s voice, as though she had aged one hundred years since emerging from her seventeen-day trance. “My bridegroom has come to end my travails. He shall take me home at last.”

A needle of ice stabbed at my heart. Of course, it was not Christ she spoke of. How fervently my magistra had wooed Death, her true mystic husband, these thirty years. How languorously she had drawn out their courtship, leading him on, then holding him off, delaying their coupling until this rapturous moment on the brink of consummation. We, her handmaidens, circled round Jutta, born to be a countess, then ruined by her brother and locked away. Haughty as ever, she commanded us to lay her on a mat of coarsest goat hair strewn with ashes, for she would suffer till her last breath.

How she craved pain, how it thrilled her, weeping tears of blood. Our Savior died for the sins of the world—that was the true meaning of passion. Jutta mortified her flesh for her own self-indulgence. How she basked in this attention, how she played the saint, she who had never really grown up, she who was never anything more than a vain and broken young girl. Turning her face away from the bowl of broth I offered, she would take no food but the viaticum of communion bread and wine offered to the dying.

Coyly, she took my hand, her bony grip already death-cold.

“Please,” she said, assaulting me with her ghastly breath, “when my soul departs, don’t let them uncover my body.”

I lowered my head without giving my word, for I knew Jutta had only said this to beg the opposite. She longed to be exposed, longed for everyone to witness how she had tortured herself with her brother’s chain.

“Have them bury me in a place where I might be trodden upon by each passerby.”

Not knowing how long Jutta could draw this out, I sent the others to bed while I held vigil. The most traitorous prayer welled up inside me:
God, let her die so that we might live.

What an awful wretch I was. I had spent thirty years locked away with this woman, my mentor, my sister, my magistra, my spiritual mother, only to look on with a heart of granite when her chest juddered and sank, the last air bursting from her lips with bubbles of spittle. Her eyes rolled back. It wasn’t until the stink of her emptied bowels filled the room that panic seized me.

In a frenzy, I awakened the others. Together we raised the alarm, Guda and I banging on the church screen while Adelheid beat on the revolving hatch. Before long, the monks came running. I sank to my knees, my heart beating hard enough to bruise as the hammers and picks pummeled the bricked-up doorway.

“And the walls of Jericho came tumbling down,” I whispered to Guda, who knelt to take my hands. “When the moment of freedom comes,” I told her, cupping her cheek with my palm, “we must act and not hesitate. Step over the threshold before they can stop you.”

At last there was a path through the rubble, gray dawn shining through that aperture. Like a grieving widower, Cuno stumbled in to claim his beloved’s corpse.

“The holy anchoress,” he murmured, his eyes spilling tears.

Leaving him to mourn, I turned to my sisters. Adelheid took my one hand, and Guda the other. Squaring her shoulders, Adelheid led us out into the cobbled yard crowded with monks, their heads bowed in reverence at Jutta’s passing. Not letting go of my sisters’ hands, I gasped, arching my face to the winter dawn. The pale sun painted the clouds pink and yellow, more beautiful than even Guda’s embroidery. Fresh air bathed our faces. So much sky above us.

“Are we in heaven?” Guda asked, laughing, then weeping.

I staggered on my weak prisoner’s legs, but I had to be strong. A little farther and we might reach the gates, go out into the forest. Did we dare? In the dead of winter—what was I thinking? Without food or shelter, we would perish within days.

Egon, who had become prior when Cuno became abbot, planted himself in our path. “Sisters, where are you going?”

“To the mortuary,” I told him, thinking fast. “Surely our lord abbot would agree it’s only proper that a woman washes our sainted Jutta’s body.” I turned to my companions. “Sisters, let us gather what we need to lay her in her final resting place.”

I barely had a chance to accustom myself to the freedom of the open air before the morgue’s gloom enclosed me. Wishing to spare my sisters the spectacle of what I was about to behold, I worked alone.

After hacking away the soiled hair shirt, I gagged to see the rusting chain wound three times around Jutta’s torso. Spikes cinched her waist and ribs. They crushed her withered breasts. They bit deep into her festering, oozing flesh. This was Jutta’s last admonishment to me, her undeserving protégée. She had wanted me to see how her pain proved her holiness. She had expected me to reveal this to Cuno himself.

Gulping back my bile, I washed and bandaged her seeping flesh.

Gray and shrunken, Jutta von Sponheim lay on the mortuary slab, clad in the gown she had first arrived in as a fourteen-year-old girl. It hung loose on her skeletal frame. Her hands crossed over her bony breast in prayer and her bald head was veiled in Damascus silk. At her side lay her severed braid of soft auburn hair.

My work completed, I called in the monks. Silent and dry-eyed, I stood by while Cuno sobbed into his hands. Volmar’s spine threatened to snap under the weight of his distress. The men who had loved Jutta crowded round, touching her sleeve, her cold hands, the hem of her gown, as they never would have dared while she lived. I listened to them convincing each other how they could see the holiness rising from her. Their adoration covered my dead magistra in silver and gold.

Blinded by his tears, Cuno nearly trod on me. But then his eyes snapped open, as if horrified to find me still standing there. I confess I needed to breathe deeply and gather my strength to face my abbot, face these milling monks that I had only ever viewed from the other side of a screen. After thirty years of seclusion, I found this strange and new. My eyes sought Volmar’s. My hands burned to touch his, to offer him consolation. Only I understood how he had loved Jutta, and how she had loved him, as much as she was capable of loving any human being.

Abbot Cuno loomed before me, his disapproval written on his face. Unlike Jutta, I was no saint, no martyr, no ascetic, but a mature woman of little beauty and middling breeding. And yet I was his last link to his great love.

“Did our holy woman tell you where she wished to be buried?” he asked, not looking me in the eye but past my left shoulder.

I spoke the truth. “She wanted to be laid in a place where people would tread over her.”

“Such humility,” Cuno said, his face flushed and lost. “She humbles us all.”

My head bowed, I kept my own thoughts private. Even after death, Jutta wanted to make a display of herself and be buried where her self-abnegation would attract the most attention.

“We could bury her beneath the floor in the chapter house,” Brother Otto suggested. “That way she’ll be with us in spirit every morning during chapter meeting.”

“But do we want pilgrims traipsing into our chapter house at all hours?” Prior Egon asked, eager to trounce his brothers with the authority our abbot had vested in him.

“We could house her relics in the church,” Brother Udo suggested. “At the Lady Altar, perhaps.”

“Relics,” Egon said, latching on to the word as if it were a golden coin—Jutta’s relics were sure to draw pilgrims with their fat purses. He turned to Brother Otto. “Before we lay her in her coffin, could you not amputate a finger bone or two?”

“How dare you!” Cuno placed himself between his prior and his saint. “You shall not despoil her corpse.”

“But it is
customary,
” Egon began to argue.

Then even he shut his trap when he saw Cuno reverently lift Jutta’s severed braid to his lips.

“Her hair shall be placed in the reliquary,” our abbot said with finality. “That shall suffice.”

Their backs to me, the men continued their discussion, leaving me to vanish back into my invisible existence. Instead I planted myself before Cuno so that he had no choice but to acknowledge me.

“Let those of us who were Jutta’s disciples”—I picked my words judiciously—“attend her funeral. I have composed songs in honor of our holy woman.”

I strove to sound as docile as they would have me be, when, in fact, I wanted to spit and scream at the thought of being bricked inside that anchorage again. What was the use of our isolation and suffering? What purpose could it possibly serve?

“Lord abbot, leave the doorway open, I beg you. Give my sisters and I leave to accompany our beloved magistra to her final resting place.”

“Very well,” he said. “The doorway shall remain open until after her burial.”

So he planned to brick us back up after Jutta was laid to rest. I swallowed, arranging my face to mask my true emotions. If I was to win this game, I would have to play it with cunning.

Prior Egon had to stick his nose in. “But the funeral might not be for weeks.”

I stifled a smile as my heart raced in hope.

“We must send for the archbishop,” Egon went on, “not to mention our saint’s relatives. In the meantime, are we to have females wandering around the monastery, gabbing about like market wives?”

“My lord abbot,” I said, my head bowed to the floor so the men could not glimpse my rage. “I give you my word that my sisters and I shall not disturb the holy brothers.”

“You may go,” Cuno said, as though dismissing a servant.

“Reverend father, wait just one moment,” Volmar said, before I could depart. “There is one other matter of business. Hildegard, you and your sisters must elect a new magistra.”

My head brimmed with a thousand thoughts as I stepped into the glittering sunlight, my sandals scraping the crust of snow in the courtyard. How like Jutta to choose to die in December, which made any notion of escape daunting. I was thirty-eight, older than my mother had been the last time I’d seen her, well past my prime. If I reneged on my vows and attempted to live once more in the secular world, I’d be unlikely to find a husband, not that I wanted one. My thoughts turned to Trutwib, proud and alone, how she’d survived in the woods.
Did she still live
, I wondered,
and how did she survive the winters?
I doubted I could survive such a rustic life. My only choice would be, as before, to throw myself at my brother’s mercy, beg him to let me live out my dotage in some nunnery in Mainz, where I would sew his vestments and learn to keep my mouth shut.