Stigmata (7 page)

‘Were you, Father?’

His pride got the better of him. He looked at her down the length of his nose. ‘My father is a burgher of no little reputation. I was the youngest of his sons and he rightly saw an
opportunity for me in the ranks of the Church.’

‘You have never regretted his choice?’

This was the moment, Simon thought later, when he made his great mistake. He should have scolded her for asking such scandalous questions and reminded her of her station. But he did not. He
allowed himself a moment’s intimacy with a woman and what followed later issued inevitably from the decision to share his heart.

Why did I do it?
His daily communion with God should have been sufficient balm for his heart’s bruises. His real betrayal of the divine was that in succumbing to her questioning he
allowed that a life with only the divine for solace was not enough.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘there are times when I have wondered what man I might have been in other circumstances.’

‘What kind of man is that?’

A flutter of a smile, a childhood habit awkwardly retrieved from his memory. ‘I would doubtless have been a sinner.’

‘We are all sinners, are we not?’

‘Some of us hope for redemption.’

Their eyes locked and he felt his loneliness as he never had before. He longed in that instant to be keeper of her heart as well as her body. He knew he must retreat or be lost. ‘I do not
regret those choices made for me, Fabricia. When I look at the world, at its falsehoods and futilities, at the evil I see every day around us, I know that seeking only God’s goodness is the
right path.’

‘Did you never love a woman before you became a monk, then?’

She grew more impudent by the minute. Yet he was overcome by a desperate need to unburden himself, even though he knew where this ache in his treacherous heart might lead him. He sat down again.
‘Fabricia, you must understand. I was just a boy when my father offered me to the Church. My father had five sons, and I was the youngest. He was – is – a wool merchant in
Carcassonne, a man of some wealth, but not enough to secure an income for so many sons, so he used his influence to gain a place for me in the abbey.’

‘You look sad,’ Fabricia said.

‘I am not sad.’

‘You miss your brothers.’

Such a hard truth and so frankly spoken. He remembered his first few months as a novice, how he cried himself to sleep every night on his hard wooden pallet. ‘My father gave me an
opportunity to prosper. It was difficult at first but I am grateful to him now for what he did, for it led me to God and a blessed life.’

‘And yet you long for a life not quite so blessed. Is that not true?’

She might as well have hit him with the soup kettle; it would have shocked him less. He felt suddenly naked in her presence. She had disarmed him utterly.

She had astonished even herself by speaking in such a way. She thought he would upbraid her for it but instead his shoulders seemed to sag under the weight of some great burden.

His hands shook. Such beautiful hands! They were smooth and soft and white, so unlike her father’s, which were calloused and criss-crossed with scores of small cuts that evidenced his
daily travails; but these, these were hands that turned the pages of books, delicate hands that came together for prayer.

When he finally spoke, his voice was so low she could scarce hear him. ‘I took a vow of constancy to God, yet I am still a man. It is an oath of no small consequence for I struggle with it
every day.’

His frankness disarmed her. She was sorry now she had been so blunt.

‘This vow may seem trifling to you now,’ he went on, ‘but with each year it grows heavier on the shoulders. You should think of this before you take up the veil.’

‘But you are a man of God. Do you think it is wrong for me to dedicate my life to His service, simply because I might find the life difficult?’

He was just a young man who wanted to be good, she thought, and to listen to her mother talk, there were few enough of those in Toulouse. She found him both endearing and sad and for a moment
she felt an unexpected stirring in her heart.

It was growing dark in the square; the grey light that seeped through the oiled linen on the windows was almost gone. The fire leaped and danced in his eyes. He said suddenly and without
preamble: ‘You are so very beautiful, Fabricia.’

Perhaps he did not mean to speak this thought aloud. He seemed as shocked as she.

He got to his feet. ‘I must go,’ he said.

After he left her mother and father crept back down the stairs holding a smoking tallow candle. They seemed puzzled, but said nothing. Her mother seemed to have divined what had happened.

All churchmen were alike. She said it often enough.

S
IMON HURRIED ALONG
an alleyway of wine shops, bawdy houses and tinker’s stalls. Evening was drawing on, the Devil’s hour. An ox cart creaked
past and he shrank into a doorway. The whores took this as an invitation to mistake him for the Bishop and one of them bared her breasts at him and offered him congress against the wall for three
deniers.

He pushed away from her with an angry shout. She had foul breath and bad teeth like a demon. I have made of myself a common joke; a monk transfixed by a woman, he thought wildly. I have
dedicated my life to contemplation of the divine; instead I am fixed on cunny like a bawd.

What was it that St Augustine said of woman?
The gate by which the Devil enters.
She is a temptress set by Lucifer to lure a man from his perfect state. Fabricia was then a perfect demon:
fire-haired, slender and ripe as bruised fruit.

He passed a man lying in the street who had been blinded as punishment for some crime. His empty sockets were horrible to look at, and he sat in the filth of the gutter, with his arm
outstretched, begging for coins. Some small boys were tormenting him for their own amusement; they pinched him and slapped him while he raged at them and tried in vain to catch hold of them, which
of course only made the game even better.

Simon saw himself there: blind, grovelling, wretched, tormented by the Evil One for jest.
I must stop this
.

He caught one of the wretch’s tormentors by the ear and reproved the lad in the name of the Church. He found a few coins in his purse and gave them to the beggar. He was no doubt a thief
– or had once been – but had paid his terrible price, and Simon had no stomach to see him suffer more. He would not survive much longer in the street anyway.

He returned late to the monastery, as the bells rang for vespers. He was tardy and received the reproving glances of his brothers.

The Devil remained his companion all that night both in the chapel and in his bed. He weaved moist dreams of Fabricia and unclothed her in his sleep. He felt her breath on his face, sweet as
strawberry wine; her hair smelled of summer, and his arm was around her waist, which was soft and yielding. Finally, in some ragged scrap of dream, he saw her lying naked in a cornflower field, and
tried to go to her. But someone pulled him away. A man’s voice called his name.

It was Brother Griffus shaking him awake to attend matins and lauds. His hand went guiltily to his groin. He pulled on his robe in the darkness, desperate and aching and ashamed.

The candles wavered in the draughts of the dark choir, illuminating the sacristan’s bible, throwing long shadows of his cowled brother monks and the carved saints above their heads. The
ranks of the holy stood against him in the gloom.

His lips moved with the words of the psalms and responses while he felt her warm breath even in that cold, dark chapel, tasted the salt of the sweat at the nape of her neck. It was just a dream
but his memories of it were as vivid as if it were real; so real that he believed that at that very moment she, too, was sitting upright on her pallet bed, seeing his face as clearly as he saw
hers. Impossible to imagine that he could conjure such an intimate moment and that she had not felt it also.

After the service he returned eagerly to his cell, hoping a swift return to his moist and salty dream, and to Fabricia Bérenger. But a dream is not a place; he could not go back. Instead,
he lay awake through the long night and begged God to take away his temptation, then reminded himself that every soul is forged in the fire. How could he be spared what every man must endure if he
is to save himself?

What was he to do? If he did not go back, it would signify that the Devil had won. If he did, his soul would be in mortal danger. Might he yet prove himself worthy to his God? He tossed and
turned until the first greasy light of dawn inched across the floor of his cell. A new day was never so welcome.

T
HE PRIOR WAS
a good man, in Simon’s estimation. He was stern in his discipline and strict in his habits and brooked
no lewd behaviour at the monastery. He decided to go back to him. The next morning he went to his cell, fell on his knees and asked him to hear his confession.

The prior sat on the stool behind his writing desk, and his grey and moist eyes regarded Simon with the weariness of age; near fifty years of listening to men’s tiresome complaints of the
Devil.

‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.’

Father Hugues laid a cool hand on his tonsured head. ‘What is your confession, Brother?’

The words choked him. How could he tell him the truth? Just a portion of it then; he had seen a woman in the square and entertained lustful thoughts. That was enough of it, for now.

‘You have prayed?’

‘I do nothing else.’

The prior sighed. ‘You are a young man, Brother Simon. The vow of chastity is not easy. Even the blessed founder of our Rule, St Benedict himself, was not immune to such pollution. There
are many ways that the Devil finds to a man’s soul, but a woman is the most powerful of his agents. This is why men must cloister themselves in monasteries, for all women are lascivious
creatures.’

‘What am I to do?’

‘When St Benedict was a young man he secluded himself from the world in the desert, so that he might free himself from its temptations. But even there he was haunted night and day by the
memory of a woman he once saw, like you, in the marketplace of his town. The more he fought against this image of her, the stronger her picture became in his mind, until he could think of nothing
else. He was about to succumb and return to the city and surrender to its worldly pleasures, when he saw a thorn bush close by. He threw off his clothes and flung himself into the bush and wallowed
there. His flesh was torn into strips and there was not a place on his body that did not bleed or did not cause him to suffer. But these sacred wounds cured the ungodly desires of his flesh and his
soul.’

Simon felt the blood drain from his face. He had himself considered harsh medicine for his ills, harsher than even the saint had imagined. Perhaps that was truly the only way.

That night he prayed with his brother monks in the darkened chapel at the office of compline. He shivered with cold. In the high gloom of the choir, the cowled prior led them in their nightly
hymn.

He longed for faultless perfection. Instead he heard only the discomfiting laughter of God’s fallen angel. He must drive himself harder; he must do better than this.

E
VEN THROUGH HIS
childhood Simon had contemplated his own death. He lived in terror of what would happen on the dread day
he gave up his final breath for the walls of every church bore lurid depictions of Judgement and hell.

And yet, with Fabricia Bérenger he had acted as if there were no Devil and no damnation. He followed the prior’s advice, pulled down his robe and attempted to quench the unholy
fires that burned in him with a whip. The thongs of the scourge were embedded with iron tips.

The first strokes were timid, his hands shaking so badly he dropped the scourge several times. But he persevered, and as the whip tore the first stripe on his shoulders he cried out as if
racked. He took a deep breath to steady himself.

His hands were slick with sweat and he wiped them on his robe. He was determined that this should be done. He would give to God his pain and like Benedict he would prevail. He beat himself over
several hours; he beat himself until the blood flowed freely down his back and dripped on to the floor.

But when he finally collapsed exhausted on the stone, all he could think of was Fabricia Bérenger; he imagined the soft touch of her lips on his, the warmth of her breath on his face,
whispering consolation to him through his agony. He was no longer a monk. He was just a man.

His distraction became cause for comment in the priory. There were protests to the prior about his laxity at chapter; his students complained that his lectures were rambling and
ill prepared.

Whenever he could he slipped secretly away to observe the mason and his family; he soon came to know their habits as well as he knew his own. It was not a difficult task for they were only
three, and Anselm had no servants. He learned that the mason left the house each day at first light, while each morning, just after terce, his wife went to the market. From then until sext Fabricia
was at home, and unattended.

A change in the air, unexpected, a brief return to warmth, the last before winter. Today he did not need his cloak. A warm wind blew from the south rolling in from the salt pans
and the sea. Everywhere in the streets people remarked on it. An aberration; the autumn turned on its head.

When he reached her house he did not knock, but went straight in. Fabricia was at her loom, spinning wool into twine. She looked up in surprise.

‘My father is not at home,’ she said.

Simon had rehearsed a speech but now could not think of a single thing to say to her. He just stood there, one hand opening and closing into a fist at his side.