Stealing Heaven (53 page)

A man and his elderly father came to the gate with begging bowls. In the shade near the gate, Heloise washed their feet and sent them away with cheese and onions. When the nuns and novices returned from the fields, she read them the portion of the letter that pertained to Abelard's difficulties. Gertrude began to cry and the novices imitated her. Ceci and Astrane, dry-eyed, murmured their sympathies.

Ceci said, "I'm sorry for him. I mean that, Heloise."

Heloise stared at the ground, choked with misery. They went to the chapel for vespers.

She lay sleepless that night, thrashing from side to side on the damp sheet. She knew that she should be praying, but she had nothing more to ask of God. He did not bother to listen to her anyway. At last, she fell on her knees by the bed and pleaded for strength to live through that night and the following day. That was all, just another twenty-four hours and then she would worry later about the days to come. Bitterness gagged her when she thought of Abelard's words. He denied that he had neglected her. The fact that he had never written or comforted her should not be attributed to indifference; rather, he had the greatest confidence in her strength and wisdom. That was what he said. He seemed surprised that she felt in need of help, emotional or spiritual.

She sobbed against the mattress. At dawn, she got up, her body screaming with exhaustion, and dragged to the kitchen to light a cooking fire. During the morning office, she kept thinking of the house in the Rue des Chantres. Summer mornings when she curled in Abelard's bed, gazing at the soft sleeping face and listening with half an ear to Agnes rattling her pots in the kitchen. The world was full of happiness then, and it slept next to her.

All morning long, she weeded and thought of bodies, his and hers. His whole, hers smooth and young. The wind blew loose dirt into her eyes and made them water. The crows snapped their wings above the treetops.

They went back and pressed clabber into cheese. The whey they saved for the youngest novice's supper. The new cheese was covered with marsh reeds and then wrapped tightly in leaves. At midafternoon, two monks on mules came to the gate; Gertrude raced into the cloister crying that one of them was Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux. Dismayed, Heloise straightened her wimple and sent the novices to put on stockings. She walked heavily to the gate, wondering what brought the renowned abbot to the Paraclete unannounced.

He stood beside his mule, beaming broadly as she approached. "Ah, Lady Abbess, there you are." His auburn beard was plastered to his chin, and his general appearance was that of an amiable ambulating skeleton. Heloise stared. "A fine place you have here."

She went up to him and knelt in the dust. "Your grace. Welcome to the Paraclete. You do us honor." His white robe was filthy and reeked of urine and God knew what else. She tried not to breathe deeply. She got up and asked Ceci to bring bread and ale.

"Milk," Bernard broke in. "If you please. My stomach won't tolerate much else." He was looking past her into the cloister, obviously pleased by what he saw.

"My sympathies," Heloise murmured.

Bernard smiled at her for a moment. His eyes were a clear, brilliant blue. "Not at all. Prayer and fasting raise the soul to God."

Bernard, son of the lord of Fontaine-les-Dijons, was the most beloved, most admired abbot in Europe, and already people were calling him a saint. In 1115, he had taken thirteen Cistercian monks and settled in a desolate valley not many miles from the Paraclete and, living on boiled beech leaves and sleeping on the ground, they had built the abbey of Clairvaux. Emphasizing poverty and manual labor, he had created an order which had spread to all parts of western Christendom and which now included more than fifty monasteries. He toured the Paraclete with its bare buildings and haggard, black-swathed women and, not surprisingly, pronounced the place perfect.

Like a sleepwalker, Heloise led the abbot through the grounds, keeping a little way from him because his breath smelled sour. The nuns were euphoric. The way Gertrude and Ceci fluttered around him, anybody would have thought Bernard an angel of the Lord instead of a mere man.

Heloise remembered hearing that Bernard loathed women. Once, his sister, richly dressed, had arrived at the gate of Clairvaux, and he had sent her away, calling her a whore. But at the Paraclete there was no evidence of any antipathy toward females. The women fussed over him, and Bernard laughed and told funny stories and spoke a
great deal about love. Heloise forced a smile. Her stomach hurt.

At supper, along the trestle in the refectory, Bernard asked each of them their names, where they had been born, and so forth. At his elbow, Heloise struggled for control. Suddenly she was afraid of fainting. Bernard smiled at her and said something, but she did not hear the words. She had only to get through the meal, then she would retire to her chamber and it would be over. She thought, I can't go to pieces at table. I am Heloise, abbess of the Paraclete, I can't let go. An abbess, an abbess. What would happen if I fell apart in front of Bernard, but that thought only made the panic worse. She turned her face toward the abbot, a foot away. His mouth was moist, smiling. He said, "Now you, my lady. You, I know, have spent your life in study. The pope has spoken of you often."

She said nothing.

A novice brought up a bowl of onions, but Bernard waved her away. "Onions give me gas." He said to Heloise, "It's an excellent idea for holy women to study. As long as the knowledge is not acquired for its own sake."

"Alas,” she replied, "we have few books here. It's a handicap in instructing our novices."

Bernard raised his eyebrows. "Books? You will find more in this wilderness'—he waved his arm in a wide circle—"than in all your books. No, the trees and stones will teach them more than any master."

"But don't you believe that reading helps a person to develop his powers of reason?"

"Faith is not dependent on reason," he said, very reproachful.

Giddy, she shook her head. "I suppose not, but reason sometimes illuminates faith, don't you think?"

"No!" thundered Bernard, snatching a crust of bread and stuffing it into one cheek. "Faith transcends reason and don't let anybody tell you differently."

"Of course," said Heloise, keeping her face straight. She said over her shoulder, "Alys, bring more clabbered milk."

Bernard was scratching at his hair shirt. "Lady, my health is delicate. I feel like a plucked bird." She was about to ask him about his ailments, since he clearly enjoyed speaking of them, when he jerked his head at her and said, "Your convent was founded by Peter Abelard, wasn't it?"

"Yes, my lord."

"And he provides you and your sisters with spiritual guidance."

Floundering, Heloise finally answered, "No, my lord. He is busy in Brittany." As she spooned clabber into his bowl, she could feel his eyes on her face. She wondered if he had read a copy of Abelard's letter.

'Tell me. You haven't let your mind be affected by schoolman's logic, have you? No, of course you haven't—you don't impress me as that type at all."

"What type?" Heloise coughed, suspicious.

"I'm thinking of those masters who bedazzle their students with their personal grasp of the sublime and sacred." He broke off a crust and dipped it into the milk. "You know. Sophists, bandying about the mysteries of God on the Petit Pont." His voice was thick with contempt.

My lord abbot," she said firmly, "I never studied with a master on the Petit Pont. Shall we walk in the cloister? I would like you to see our new herb garden."

The abbot of Clairvaux rose and followed her meekly.

 

A storm blew up deep in the night, bumping thunder and lightning against the cloister. Twenty minutes later it was over. The eaves sloshed water steadily, the sound reminding Heloise of Bernard, who never stopped talking. Despite his extreme conservatism, she rather liked him. It was hard not to.

Her stomach ached. A stream of nausea rolled up into her throat. She went to the privy, vomited, and crept back to her chamber, where she sat down in the dark. After a while, she lit a tallow candle and picked up her pen. "To him who is her only beloved after Christ."

She laid aside the quill. What frightened her was this terrible feeling of helplessness. Hundreds of miles away, Abelard would be murdered and someone would bring her his body, gutted, embalmed, wrapped in leather to keep the corpse from stinking on the journey from Brittany. If he died, she would collapse. She wrote: "A heart overwhelmed with anxiety knows no calm. A mind beset with anxiety cannot devote itself sincerely to God." God. She had not once thought of God since yesterday, when the letter had come. Not even during prayer.

"What have I to hope for if you are gone? What purpose to prolong this charade"—she marked out "charade" and substituted "pilgrimage"— "in which I have no support but you?" She said to herself, But I have no support from him, save the knowledge that he is alive.

Sticky with sweat, she leaned back in her chair, away from the circle of candlelight, and tasted herself with revulsion. Scared and sick, helpless. Appalled at her helplessness. Where was the efficient Lady Heloise who fed her starving nuns, dickered with barons and popes for favors, gave pious advice to half the neighborhood? In the shadows, she clung to the table and laughed at herself, knowing that there was no Abbess Heloise. Hypocrite, she screamed inside, poseur. She wrote: "Men call me chaste; they do not know the hypocrite I am. I can win praise in the eyes of men but deserve none before God, who searches our hearts and loins and sees in our darkness.

"For a long time, my pretense deceived you, as it did many, so that you mistook hypocrisy for piety . . .

"Do not feel so sure of me . . ." She pushed strands of damp hair behind her ears.

"Do not suppose me healthy . . .

"Do not believe I want for nothing and delay helping me in my hour of need. Do not think me strong, lest I fall before you can sustain me . . .

"Stop praising me, I beg you!" His praise was the e most dangerous of all because she hungered for it.

He had said that she was strong, independent, but he knew nothing of her. She cast about herself, hunting down in memory the girl she had once been, so long ago in the Ile-de-France. That person had gloried in her love for a man, in the sweet touch of his body, and although time should have killed that girl, it had not. Into her head came an image of herself and Abelard, flesh intertwined, in the room high above the Seine, and with the picture came words and she wrote: "The lovers' pleasures that we shared have been too sweet—they can never displease me, and can scarcely be banished from my thoughts. Wherever I turn they are always there before my eyes, bringing with them awaked longings and fantasies that will not even let me sleep. Even during mass, my thoughts are on wantonness instead of prayers. Everything we did—everything—and also the times and places are engraved on my heart, along with your image, so that I live through it again with you. Even in sleep I know no respite. Sometimes my thoughts are betrayed in a movement of my body . . ."

Shaken, she got up and threw herself on the bed. She shut her eyes and rolled over onto her stomach, riding the prickly tension that throbbed through her thighs and swept up along her breasts. Later, spent, she slept.

 

In the morning, Bernard offered to preach a sermon before leaving, and the women filed into the chapel, excited over this great honor. He chose as his theme the mortification of the flesh, clearly one of his favorite subjects. The only things they should worry about, he told them, were loving God and punishing their bodies. Heloise, kneeling to one side, observed his scabby bare feet, his skeleton chest, and then she concentrated on his voice. Not for nothing was he called Doctor Mellifluous—the Honey-Sweet Doctor. Like Abelard, he had a gift for speaking, and she could understand his enormous popularity. The man was lovable, if you did not think about what he said.

Behind her, she could hear someone crying, probably Gertrude, who took sermons quite seriously.

At the altar, Bernard was saying, "Listen, handmaids of Christ. Look at those bodies which you clothe with such diligent care, nourish as if they were royal offspring." He wiped his forehead on his sleeve. "Are they not a mass of putrefaction? Are they not worms, dust, and ashes?"

Under her breath, Heloise grunted. She thought, He hopes to merit heaven by making earth a hell. Everything he said revolted her.

"Don't think about what your body is now," Bernard cried. "Sisters, you had liefer consider what it will be in the future. Pus, slime, decay." He tucked his fingers together happily. "The filth of obscene corruption."

At the back of the chapel, one of the novices began to sob.

"Tears!" exclaimed Bernard, smiling. 'Tears which are from God assure the remission of our sins. Tears are spiritual delights, above even honey and the honeycomb, and sweeter than all nectar."

Bernard went on for a while longer, but Heloise did not listen. She squirmed back on her heels, waiting for him to finish so they could say the Lord's Prayer and go out to the fields. There was work to be done today.

Bernard knelt. The nuns began to pray, "Our Father which art in heaven . . ."

Heloise wondered what the storm had done to the corn. It should be ready to pick soon.

". . . Give us this day our supersubstantial bread, and forgive us our . . ."

She must give Bernard some food for the journey. It would not be courteous to send him away empty-handed. Perhaps some cherries or plums. No, he would not eat them.

". . . deliver us from evil. Amen."

She opened her eyes to find Abbot Bernard leaning over her, furious. "Lady," he hissed, "what kind of prayer is that!"

"My lord," she cried, scrambling to her feet.

"I can't believe that I heard it. What happened to daily bread? Answer me that, madame!" The veins in his neck were stretched taut. "What is this supersubstantial? Don't you know how to recite the Lord's Prayer?" He tugged at her sleeve with a bony hand.

Startled, Heloise freed her sleeve. "We follow the old
vulgata
version of St. Matthew," she replied carefully.