Women in the Wall (7 page)

Am I the last?

What a responsibility? Should I flame? Grow
incandescent
? Overblow like a ripe rose reddening the earth? Die—when I do—in a spasm of passion or smoulder wetly like this wet-peat age?

If Radegunda heard me! “Pagan posturings!” she would say.

I should work on my acrostic: nothing pagan about that. It’s the subtlest I’ve devised and will consist of four holy proverbs—which should please her—placed two aslant, one vertically and one athwart to form two superimposed crosses so cunningly concealed in a poem that they might pass unperceived if not picked out in coloured inks. That’ll impress the patrons! “An astounding piece of work, Fortunatus! Unique. The ancients themselves never …” “Oh spare my blushes, my lord bishop,” (or duke? Why not send it to Lupus? Or the kings?) “it is a trifle, merely a token of my profound and heartfelt etcetera. The cross, they say, is the ladder to heaven and so I have sent your lordship (or majesty) two. Not that your lordship needs …” Flourish and reflourish. Meanwhile my fingers are frozen. Skin sticking to the pen. Rub. Shake. Swing. Pull. Have a drink of mulled wine. Oh these lonely, lonely nights! To think I was once gregarious!
In
taberna
quando
sumus
. I had, have, a nice voice. But who would sing alone? Alone, all alone and with enough lamp-oil to see the night through. Few men around here can afford that—but then few suffer from insomnia. Does that make me Fortunatus or infortunatus? Old question. Radegunda too is probably awake but praying—and so not alone. I perhaps should pray but am always afraid of boring God. “Arrogance,” says Radegunda. “Humility,” say I but acknowledge that the boundary-line is thin. “Words don’t matter,” she says and I disagree. For me words matter more than anything. I cannot cope with what cannot be put into words. Like her experiences. Her trances which she describes as “beyond words”. But can anything human be “beyond words”? “Yes,” she says and to some extent I believe her. I believe she does come in contact with a life source, the godhead perhaps, anyway a level of reality unreached by the rest of us and which she can’t describe. What I cannot accept is that
I
‚ with her help, may not manage eventually to grasp and describe it. I harry her, pressing for precision about these forays, these edgings into the
undefinable
. I wait. I am like a cartographer questioning some sun-stunned mariner who has been lost off the map, trying to chart the contents of a raving mind, appalled but stimulated by the news that there are wastes about which
nothing
is
known
—in cartographer’s terms—and that
I
may be the one to draw the first map. She needs me to write her life. I shall ensure that when it is finished she will be more revered than any saint who has not had the benefit of my promotion. Careless of the world’s opinion, she won’t appreciate this. Others will: my patrons and perhaps even God.

I knew within an hour of meeting her that I was meant to stay and be her biographer. That was two years ago. There were practical reasons too but they were merely clues to a destiny I had already somehow divined. I told her and she offered me this house. “Destiny” was the word to sway her. Not my sort of word at all. As though it had been put into my mouth. Everything did seem to happen without my taking much initiative. It wasn’t even my own idea to come here. It was King Chilperic’s, her stepson. Odd go-between!

He’s a truly nasty piece of goods, a memorable monster: epic, ruthless and, when I first saw him, visibly bloody. His finger-nails were packed with it. A smear was drying on his beard. He’d been hunting and his appearance startled me into a Virgilian quotation about black and flowing gore—not the most tactful greeting to a multiple murderer. As soon as I’d said the words I wished I’d swallowed them. But he was pleased and the quote—a well-worn one from a
florilegium
of pagan writings for Christian readers—struck the court as betokening
astonishing
learning on my part.

“We Franks”, he told me, “are heirs to the whole
Gallo-Roman
system and that includes poetry. I’m a bit of a poet myself but I don’t delude myself as to my talents. Latin isn’t my first language. Now you are a godsend. Ravenna’s loss will be Soisson’s gain. Write me an ode.”

He gave me a purse of gold
solidi
and I wrote an ode in praise of all the qualities it might have been appropriate for him to possess. He was flattered but possibly bored by such a list of—even fictional—virtues.

“I think you should meet my stepmother,” he told me. “An extraordinary woman. Very holy. You’ll have to go to Poitiers. I’ll give you an escort. Our roads, unfortunately, are unsafe. One can’t see to everything at once. We are plagued by civil wars. My brothers are most rapacious. I sometimes wish my father had strangled them at birth. He killed his nephews so as to prevent civil war in his own time but had no thought for mine. Unforesighted. But, as you know, Rome had a lot of civil war so we needn’t feel ashamed.”

I accepted the escort. I was coming as far as Tours anyhow where I had vowed to visit St. Martin’s shrine to thank the saint for curing a bad case of ophthalmia which at one point had looked like costing me my eye. Poitiers was close. The escort would be useful. Under the protection of the kingdom’s chief murderer, I would be safe from the knives of lesser ones. I was learning how Gaul is governed. Even disorder has its order—the only one future generations may know. Mine is perhaps uniquely cursed in that it retains a memory of true, institutional order, without any hope of its revival. Like the Garden of Eden, order was and was taken away: a sour and godly trick. All gone now. Illiteracy obliterates memory. The last image of the Roman experience survives in the language—Latin—and even that is crumbling like a weedy aqueduct, gnawed at by epidemics of prepositions which subvert its syntax as termites do timber.
I
root them out of any text I can, just as I would destroy the termites.

Another glass of wine. It’s sweet, warm and dulls the devils of the mind. Odd: warmth and sweetness, the most scarce of all sensations in a Gaulish winter are the very ones God chooses for reaching Radegunda. When she has fasted for days she tastes honey on her tongue and when she has been kneeling on cold flags gets a feeling of heat about the heart. Or are these lazy metaphors? I’d like to lick her tongue with mine. Find out what she means by “a taste of honey”. In the gospels God is the Word but comes to her as a sensation. Another sign that language is collapsing. I dedicate my middle age to shoring it up. My letters to our half-literate bishops are lessons. I send them flattery in careful prose, hoping that when they’ve sucked out its sweetness, some sense of its form may stick in their skulls. “Gaul”, I wrote to Bishop Felix of Nantes, “need never envy the Orient the rays of the rising sun since she is illumined by the rays of your glory …” Extravagant? Yes, but his schemes for irrigation and
land-reclamation
are
impressive. “Pray make of my unworthy limbs a footstool”, I begged Bishop Martin with rather less cause, “and lean your weight on my chest.” He sent me some excellent wine and papyrus in exchange. Several patrons are better than one, which is another reason why I didn’t stay with Chilperic but came all the way across Gaul to here, rattling my bones on a wooden waggon. A ghastly journey: I saw ditches rank with filth, carcasses of animals in various stages of decomposition, abandoned infants, beggars dead from exposure, pagan shrines surrounded by every sort of idolatrous rubbish including some stinking horses’ heads set on poles and picked at by daws. Water was suspect, food inedible and I was obliged to wear three different relics to keep off disease. At the inns we heard stories of ritual cannibalism. The economy seemed to have broken down. Murrain was widespread—hence the dead cows—and cured by rubbing oil stolen from church lamps on the cattle’s heads. For poverty there was no cure. Life seemed an increasingly poor gift.

At one point while clip-clopping down that knobbly spinal column which is the Roman road from Orléans, I began to hallucinate from fatigue and the flow of tree trunks dazzled and confused my eye like the riffled pages of a book. The sun dissolved in a brownish mist pierced by rays which seemed to assemble with the trees in shapes of giant weaponry, flying ships, Babylonian towers innumerable storeys high. I had a sensation of speed, light, a scission of sensibility and—most horrifyingly—of impermanence. It was a vision of hell, I decided, as the shapes changed, reshaped and changed again. Change and impermanence are, after all, the very properties of the devil.

For the last two days of my journey I was raving with fever. I arrived—I’ve been told since—pale as a parsnip and gaunt as a cormorant at Radegunda’s door. Certainly I was in a receptive state. She fed me and flattered me, telling me how she had always preferred poets to all other guests when she was still King Clotair’s wife.

“Not that any who came were of
your
stature!”

Chilperic’s letter—out of vanity?—had promoted me.

She confessed she wrote verse herself. A mania, I decided. First Chilperic, now his stepmother. Well, maybe it was their way of seeking order. But when she showed me the convent, I saw she had managed to create order in practice. Its perfection actually pained me. It was so calm, so pleasantly predictable, the sort of haven in which I would have dreamed, if my dreams had been good ones, of living. The nuns wear white robes and clogs, eat sparingly so as to keep down the passions of the flesh, drink watered wine and perry. Everyone helps with the housework. She herself, she told me, worked in the kitchen garden. She was not the abbess. Agnes was, her spiritual daughter. A pretty young nun came in: Agnes, asked about my journey and my comfort, then left. A drift of some fragrant herb stayed behind. I was still faintly feverish with images of that foul rattle-bone journey still humped in my inner eye: a mental stew of bad
memories
. One: vomiting bad food from some inn into a ditch whose porridgy waters suddenly confronted me with an eye, a single one only a hand’s span away from my vomiting face. I had to finish then, seized by convulsions, hold on to a bush to keep from falling in. When I stood up it was still there, nakedly unlidded, staring at me. Too big to be human. A horse’s, perhaps, which someone had gouged out for some whim or pagan practice? Wiping my mouth with a dockleaf, I stumbled back to my waggon. I suppose there was nothing to it really. A horse’s eye? But it kept returning, suspended in front of my own, enlarged, staring at me: the anthropomorphic eye of Savage Gaul. Pagans, I remembered hearing, had been buried with their horses. King Clovis’s father had. Why? I asked my escort but they shrugged. Said
they
were Christians, didn’t know, spat, mumbled. Their Latin was primitive. One said something in German dialect and the rest laughed.

Suddenly—from the refuge of the convent—going back with those men was horrible to me. I didn’t want to spend another night in their company or on those mangling roads.

“This,” Radegunda was saying, “is our
hortus
, our kitchen-garden. We have laid it out on the model of a Roman villa’s. I think we have every plant here that you would find there. This is where
I
work so you must allow me to be a little vain.”

She showed me myrtle, wallflower, lupins, tansy, fennel, dill, burdock, mint, chervil, spurge and a hundred other plants. The paths were straight and weeded, the stone benches clean. A nun brought honey-cakes and perry. Through a window I could hear a psalm. When it stopped I could sense feminine presences moving somewhere out of sight in silent conformity to some
unchanging
time-table.

“This”, I told the nun, “is a poem you have created here. It scans beautifully.”

She had been joking with me before, playing the hostess as she likes to do. She can often be silly. It is a release, I think, a relief after the concentration of prayer. Now she gave me a sober look from those odd German eyes of hers which are often unfocused as though the focus were somewhere beyond reach. I already knew she saw visions. I had heard stories about her at court and along the way in unreliable inns where they talk with equal  credulity about
strygae
whose powers can only be destroyed if one eats their hearts and about miraculous cures effected by saints. I must say I had been repelled and had not really been looking forward to meeting Radegunda. But there is nothing of the village freak in her. She has a German intensity but is as cultivated as a Roman matron. Only that curious blue of her eyes, reflected in the hollows of her cheeks and brimming in the shadows thrown by her veil, distinguished her from one. I was reminded of those heretics who believed that light was gathered in the bodies of saintly people whose virtue managed slowly to eliminate all the darkness within them until, ultimately, they rejoined a realm of pure primeval felicity and light. There is a transparency about Radegunda. Bluish veins show through her skin and one could see, looking at her, how the heresy might persuade.

“This is an image of heaven,” I told her.

“How do you imagine heaven?”

“As ordered, unchanging. Like your convent.”

“Do you think it wrong to withdraw and seek one’s own salvation?”

I said I didn’t see how it could be, she that she had often worried about this. Before founding the convent she had run an alms-house and a hospital.

“But I gave up. I decided the good we could do was hopelessly limited. How could it be just to cure one sick person and refuse hundreds? Yet that was what we had constantly to do. It made us angry. It made us unable to pray. Then, too, I decided that since men’s bodies live only a short time and their souls forever, I would do better to pray for their souls than to bring their bodies a wretched and partial help. Sometimes I think this world is hell. I would believe it but have been told it is a heresy.”

There was a coherence about her which made me aware of how hesitant and diffuse my own life was. She began to talk about the impermanence of matter—hardly a discovery but this fact was so physically real to her that it became so to me. Radegunda is the most physically compelling person I have met. When she picks a flower as she did next—some blue flower, a large luscious thing with a golden centre—and says “This flower will fade,” it begins to wilt. Suggestion? Hypnotism? Miracle? I don’t know. I
saw
the great soft, almost animal thing—it had furry purple protuberances like a hound’s dewlaps—shrivel and dry.