Women in the Wall (9 page)

“I shall come for you there”, he promised, “as soon as Leudast has left. You know, of course,” a look of wavering complicity, “why he’s here?”

“Yes.”

“I”, said the bishop bitterly, “am between two fires.”

“One is the devil’s,” Radegunda told him. “But you are unsure which. You distrust my resolution! You think that what
I
take for God’s call may be a female whim!”

There was a sound from the room they had just left. The bishop made a silencing gesture, lifted the tapestry and withdrew.

Radegunda was now in a corridor one end of which led to the basilica, the other to the inner apartments of the palace. Behind the tapestry she could hear the count’s voice raised in vehement, half-jocular reproach. Then her own name.

To the right was the way to the basilica. On the left, she caught sight of a small lamp burning before a reliquary: the bishop’s private oratory. She went in, stood before it and tried to pray. But her limbs were trembling. Her temples hammered. Pulling a stool against the wall, she sat and leaned back. Had Clotair sent Leudast? Surely not? His remorse should be good for a few more weeks. Days anyway. No. News of her arrival had most probably leaked out of the bishop’s kitchens where her attendants were undoubtedly eating and talking their heads off. It had reached Leudast who would feel it his duty to stop the queen running away from his lord and hers. A king with horns, even mystical ones, was a diminished king. Or was his coming here sheer coincidence? Radegunda’s mind blackened. She was hungry, tired, uncomfortable and beset by an obscure distress. Whatever had brought him, Leudast’s irruption in the place and at the moment when she was seeking sanctuary was surely a warning! His smell lingered in her nostrils. She had caught a whiff of it as she passed him and been reminded of Clotair’s. King and count were the same sort of meaty man who eats and drinks heavily and whose hair, skin and mouth smell even when freshly rinsed. Knowingly or not, Leudast was Clotair’s emissary, an emissary from the world and the flesh.

She stood up and walked back to the reliquary. It was gold
cloisonné
ornamented with geometrical motifs and could not be more than a few generations old. The pagan
lares
would once have stood here. She held out her hand to the casket and felt the power of the dead saints whose relics were inside move like a current up her arm.

She left the oratory. As she passed the tapestry covering the entrance to the atrium, the count’s voice arrested her. He was shouting and must have been walking up and down, for the sound ebbed and returned. She heard her own name, then: “Come down from heaven, bishop, you and I know…” She could not catch his next words. Suddenly his voice boomed so close that she could feel her heart jump. “…especially while the king is bound for Germany … political consequences. The lords will agree with me. Every man Jack … His legitimate queen. Not a concubine. If you try anything on we’ll surround the building and carry her off. What’s more, we’ll …” Leudast lowered his voice, whispered something, then finished with a roar of laughter.

Radegunda ran towards the basilica as fast and silently as she could. Her way led through the sacristy, a small room filled with coffers. She paused here and, drawing the entrance curtain carefully behind her, proceeded to turn the keys in the coffers one after the other and to lift their lids. The first was full of sacred vessels, gold chalices, ciboria and the like. She closed that and tried another. It was full of vestments. A third held rough, sackcloth habits of the sort worn by public penitents on Ash Wednesday. Radegunda quickly pulled off her outer garments and put on one of these then walked into the basilica. A small boy was lighting tapers before the high altar. Radegunda called him but he took no notice. She walked over, pulled his arm and showed him a ring which she had not thought to remove.

“It’s gold. Would you like it?”

The boy gaped. Dressed in sacking, her face still dirty from the journey, she did not, she realized, look like someone capable of distributing such largesse. Besides, wouldn’t possession of a gold ring be beyond such a boy’s coveting? But she had nothing else.

“I’ll give it to you,” she said firmly, “if you take a message to Bishop Medardus and bring me back his reply.”

“Who says the bishop will let me in?”

“Tell him Queen Radegunda sent you.”

Again the stare: slow, suspicious, servile. The boy shifted his feet and gave her the passive glance which numbs fear and conceals—what? Nothing perhaps, a waiting, a calculated passivity which soaks inward from the look on the face so that appearance becomes reality. The boy was a church serf, an orphan or the son of serfs; he could not easily be moved to cause trouble or present himself at the bishop’s house. Radegunda made up her mind quickly. She went back to the sacristy, dressed once again in her own clothes and returned. She arranged her face and displayed the jewellery which she had
concealed
from caution during her journey. She called to the boy:

“Now do you believe I am Queen Radegunda? All right then. Take this ring and show it to the bishop’s doorkeeper. Tell him the queen sent you and tell him to say this to the bishop.” Leaning so that her face was on a level with the boy’s, she pronounced very slowly and clearly, “Tell him that if he does not make haste the bull will have eaten the clover.”

Pressing the ring into the child’s hand, she made him repeat the message.

*

[
POITIERS
A.D.
569]

Fortunatus has been questioning me. Again. I answer. Sometimes innocently. Sometimes with caution. Either way I see my past take shape in his mind, held fast there like the fish which froze last December in our pond. I tell him this and ask: what if the fish, under the pressure of the fall which feeds the pond, had been about to explode when the ice enclosed it? Your gloss is the ice. I don’t recognize my life in your
Life
, Fortunatus. He brushes this off. He wants to write an edifying book and tailors my past for his purpose. He doesn’t tell me the shape he intends to impose on it but his questions tell me what it is: sanctity. When I first understood this I was outraged. Now—an exercise in humility—I have resolved to let him do it. After all, why should
my
truth matter to
anyone
but God? Maybe—a knife-thrust of despair—there have been no real saints? But people need to believe there have. Still, each time Fortunatus has been questioning me, I return to my memories like a housewife to possessions which have been disarranged.

He leaves out the play with costumes—too wily for a saint—when, like a circus actress, I played myself, the great and glittering queen, so as to cow the little serf into doing what I wanted, then changed promptly back into the haircloth habit in the hope of cowing the bishop. It smacks a little of comedy and Fortunatus doesn’t like mixing genres. He has gone off now with the scene
between
me and Medardus neatly set out on his tablets: an encounter between two saints. He may be half right. Medardus was a holy man: shrewd and possessed of some fortitude although in his dealings with me it took some time to show itself. Since his death he has been credited with a number of miracles. Perhaps I saw him at his worst? He was afraid of Clotair and Leudast, devoted to order and knew little of marriage. I remember how long he kept me waiting in that basilica. I was by the high altar dressed in the habit and determined not to move until he came. I knew he must come sooner or later to celebrate benediction, but he did his best to tire me out. I could not be sure he had got my message but I knew he knew I was there and what I was up to, for small boys and old women and junior clerics of every description kept pressing their noses against the grille of the
rood-screen
then trotting off in the direction of his palace. It was considerably past the hour established for the ceremony when he turned up with Leudast and several ruffians pushing behind him. I was half frozen for the habit was loosely woven and draughts whistled through it. I was afraid to let go of the altar lest Leudast try to have me dragged from the sanctuary, yet it felt like ice. It was a great slab of cold marble and my bones were paining with the cold. I had by then no particular certitude that God wanted me there. I only knew I could not bear to return to Clotair and that only the Church could protect me if he chose to get me back. Earlier, I had been sure of God’s approval, but there, in the cold, my certitudes began to run out. I began to think I was mad to try and goad a bishop into defying a king. Mad to believe any one woman’s existence mattered. Mad above all to spend one more moment in that cold. If only I could be warm. My mind numbed. My God, I kept saying—and that was
all
I was saying to God—if only I were less cold!
Cold
: the word anaesthetized thought, anaesthetized fear and even the impulse to leave and get warm. I simply clung on there, my teeth clattering like shaken dice, my body rippling with shudders. I had been tired already by the journey from Soissons and by hunger, for I had refused to eat until Medardus would agree to consecrate me. I was saddle-sore, too, and my bladder was swollen. The cold held my flesh like iron pincers. It held me there—maybe it was sent by God? When Medardus turned up, it numbed my fear of Leudast who came up behind the bishop shouting to the people that the bishop was trying to steal their king’s wife from him and shut her up in a
monastery
. A crowd edged up the nave. Weapons were drawn and, at one point, the count’s men were trying to pull the bishop backwards while he clung to the rood-screen and tried to edge past it into the sanctuary of the presbyterium and the altar itself. He told me later that he was not doing this with any idea of consecrating me as deaconess. All he hoped for was to reach the altar so as to address the crowd from a position of relative safety. Of course the count’s men had no intention of letting him do this. It was while this scuffling was waving back and forth that I remembered the words I had planned earlier and brought them out loud and pat as a prayer: “Oh bishop!” I shouted and all the people began to yell: “It’s the queen! Let her talk! Silence for Queen Radegunda.” I waited for their silence, numb still and stiff as the fish in its frozen pond. “Bishop,” I recited, “if you hesitate to ordain me and show more fear of this violent man”, I pointed at Leudast, “than you do of God, know, Shepherd, that you will be asked to render an account of the soul of your abandoned sheep!”

It was short and sharp: the sort of speech that sticks in people’s heads. I knew that. After all, I had spent fourteen years as a king’s wife. I knew how speeches are made. But I couldn’t have altered it if I’d needed to. I was numb. I just drew it out like a refrain or lesson learned by rote. It would have to do. It did.

When I had said my say, my mind went black. I noticed no more until Medardus was laying on his hands and reciting the prayer for consecrating a deaconess: “Oh God, Creator of man and woman, who didst not disdain to let your only son be born of a woman …”

After that, power surged into me. I felt warm and strong and it was many months until it left me again. The people had saved me. They had turned on the count and he had had to give in to them. At once I called one of my servants and sent for a gold belt I had brought in my luggage and demanded that it be broken up there and then and the gold sold so that its price might be distributed among the poor. I laid several jewelled garments as an offering on the altar and, later, in the course of my journey to shrines which lay on the way to my villa at Saix, near Poitiers, I offered up the rest of my wardrobe.

[
A.D.
569]

Leaving his roomful of refractory papyrus, Fortunatus came on a cold morning after an insomniac night, to the convent garden. A moon, thin as a tide-sucked shell, was fading. So was the frost. Frills survived on cabbages and on the polls of earth-clods. Their bared fronts recalled the tonsure favoured by Celtic prelates who shaved their foreheads. Romans preferred to wear a central bald patch ringed with hair commemorative of the crown of thorns. The frost was Celtic. Fortunatus remarked on this to Agnes whom he met on her way from matins. Joking. Childishly. If one was expected to amuse—which he was: it was his function at the convent—and wished for once to keep off piety and always—my God, since hers was
for
God—sex, what was there left but childishness?

“Odd”, said he, going on as he had begun, “that the black night’s track should be white. Look at that frosty script. Messages? A code if we could only crack it?”

“You think”, said she, “that there are acrostics in nature like the ones you put in your poems?”

Tart! Disliked his whimsy.

“Why not?” Challenged. Surely a Ravenna scholar could dazzle a provincial nun? “If this world”, he urged argumentatively, “is—as we believe—the shadow of a more real one, mustn’t its shifts and shapes be clues to old, lost meanings? Felicities perhaps from the time before it fell? Memories of Eden?”

Agnes did not take this up. She was anxious about ink supplies for the copying room. “Mundane concerns!” She gave him a grin whose irony struck him as uncertainly directed. At herself? Him?

He wouldn’t have this. Scribes, he reminded her, were engaged in a ghostly warfare. Copying the word of God. “They preach with their fingers, speak with their hands. Their pens wound the devil with every stroke. Each word is a missile. You”, he teased, “are a general! Ink is your artillery.”

She laughed. The wind, with its multiple airy snouts, snatched at her heavy skirt, nuzzling the body
underneath
. He watched the bunching, recalcitrant cloth. Her hands beat at it until a gust threw a great wad of the stuff between her knees. She stumbled and he, with a laugh of pleasure, alive suddenly to the element’s complicity, caught and set her back on her feet.

“It’s like being at sea!”

Smell of hyacinths. A glassy sky had been scraped clear by this combing wind. Her habit, fluttering rakishly like ripped sails, swelled yet made her look unsteady.

“Agnes!” Her cheeks were bright with cold. Behind her, a willow’s red, tensile limb cut the air. He flung a flourish of words at her, convinced that she was sharing his excitement.

“I’m cold!” She cut through it. Her hands were clasped tightly around her chest. “What are we doing here?” She shivered. Hadn’t been listening. She looked, he saw as they moved towards shelter, as though she were
calculating
how much soap she should order from the serf women on the estate. She was probably doing just that. Soap, honey, wax for candles, shingles, wool … Her face had a crabbed look like a steward’s memo tablet. Fortunatus felt absurd. Honey and candles were pressing concerns. Real. He wanted to touch the solid stuff of her sleeve. Once more. His fingers tingled. Perhaps he could pretend to brush something off it?

“You were saying”, she reminded him politely, “about the Garden of Eden?” They had reached a doorway.

“Was I?” Was she remembering the kitchen-garden where he had lusted after her? Months ago. Of course not. She hadn’t noticed. Had been thinking of beans. She would imagine the Garden of Eden, he thought savagely, as laid out in bean-rows. A stupid woman. Angrily, he clutched her wrist.

“A beetle!”

Full of scallions, garlic and mustard for our first parents to season their salad with! He squeezed her wrist roughly.

“Don’t kill it!”

He removed his hand.

“They say”, she said, “that when we can make sense of every mystery, it will be the end of the world.”

“Who?”

She shrugged. “People. Some saint maybe? It could be a warning against being too clever. That was the first sin, wasn’t it? Eating the apple of knowledge?”

“A metaphor!” said Fortunatus, hating metaphors and all deviousnesses which suddenly struck him as feminine. Oh for simplicity, solid things and the white tooth’s passage through crunchy fruit. Why had he come to the garden this morning? He felt angry with Agnes.

“It’s a warning,” she was saying, “anyway. Maybe God does not want his obscurities unriddled. I mean, look at Radegunda. She’s never had a clear revelation, has she? Yet she’s in touch with God for days at a time.”

“But the Christian meaning is for everyone.”

“The part we grasp with our minds. But the soul is more private than the mind. More lonely. So is the body. You’re a poet. Can you describe pain?”

“Hot. Tremulous. Shooting jagged rays through the flesh…”

She laughed. “If I’d never felt pain I wouldn’t know what you meant! You’re reminding me. That’s all. It’s like saying something tastes ‘as sweet as honey’! But supposing someone had never tasted honey?”

“Pleasing, a shock to the taste buds.”

“That could be pepper, cinnamon, any spice at all.”

“It could be a kiss.”

“Could it?”

“Yes.”

“That’s interesting. Well. I have to go and see the steward. God be with you, Fortunatus.”

“And with you.”

*

He waited in the hope of seeing Radegunda but was told she was busy. Fridovigia brought him some
oatcakes
and fermented pear-juice in a blue glass flask.

“Roman‚” she said, lifting it to the light. “Imported. Like yourself. The abbess’s parents had stacks of these. They liked Roman imports of all sorts.”

She grinned. Fortunatus was aware of a thought wending its way through her talk. She was sewing, waiting for him to finish so that she could take back the glass and flask. Servants had to be devious. Maybe someone like Fridovigia had invented metaphor? Fortunatus was amused by the fancy.

Suddenly she spat furiously. She had broken her needle. “Bone!” she exclaimed, crinkling up her eyes and aiming a moistened end of thread at a new one! “We have to use bone needles like peasant women!”

“Let me.”

He handed her back the threaded needle.

“God bless your eyesight. You have a fine sense of direction. Follow your eyesight, young man!”

“I’m not so young: thirty-nine.”

“Young enough. Who’s younger around here?”

“You mean ‘In the country of blind men the one-eyed are kings’?”

“Now you’re putting words into my mouth!”

She grumbled about the needles Radegunda had issued. “Won’t let us use metal ones. We must humble our pride, she says. Well, all I can say is it’s inefficient. The same thing with food. I’m waiting to hear we’re to give up wheat and live on maslin grain and turnip pottage. Maybe the only reason we don’t is because
she
’s never  heard of them! When the rich play at poverty it would make a cat laugh. There’s more waste here and less to show for it than in the estates of the abbess’s parents where I was brought up. The steward feathered his nest and still ran things more thriftily than here where the nuns take turns at burning the bread and turning the milk. Like little girls playing house. ‘It’s the principle that counts,’ says the foundress. Well, practice is worth a cartload of principle in my humble opinion! The joke is
she’s
the worst cook of all. But insists on taking her turn. ‘From humility’ if you please! Stubbornness is another word for it. It would make your heart bleed to see the nuns eating the messes she cooks up. Now Agnes is a good cook as you well know. I taught her and I learned from a great cook on her father’s estates. They had good raw materials of course. They had falconers and kept tame fowl: peacocks, pheasants, turtle-doves. Not that there’s any eating on tame turtle-doves. They pine when they’re kept in captivity. Pine away to skin and bone. I often think poor Agnes is like a captive turtle-dove. Not that she’d ever admit it. They always live in pairs,
turtle-doves
. If they don’t they pine worse. And poor Agnes is lonely. Have you noticed how thin she is?”

“Are wild turtle-doves better?” Fortunatus asked.

“Well they’re fatter. There’s more meat on them. But the danger with them is you never know on what they’ve been feeding.” Fridovigia’s talk kept time with the
impulsions
of her thumb as it forced the blunt bone needle through the cloth then pulled it out, in again, then out. “I knew a man”, she said, “ate one that had been feeding on hellebore. Now a little of that is a good cure for mental diseases but too much can kill you. Luckily, I was there and guessed what the matter was, so I got him to vomit up his meal. There are some”, said Fridovigia, “who could do with a dose of that same hellebore. For their own mental health.” Fridovigia’s needle moved like a tooth. White and venomous, it rushed through the openwork on the edge of her cloth, weaving frothy designs, loops and little raised crosses. “And for other people’s too,” she finished and broke the thread on her teeth.

*

[
A.D.
587]

Stone. Grey with silver flecks, black spottings and saffron stains. When I look long enough at my stone slit where the light falls I see every colour. There are lichenous infusions, pre-growths which, over years, may come up as moss. To a mite such moss might be a forest, so there are estates in my wall whose pores are caverns to the mites. My skin is porous too, multicoloured and grows forests of pale hair. This has paled and thickened while I have been here. The wall too is changing. Damp leaves pale pockings and dilapidates the edges. When the rays of late and early sunlight hit it, they make rainbows on its uneven surface. As my wall grows softer, I grow bonier. We are becoming more alike.

“Good God”, we say. But is “good” good enough for God? If God is “good” and Radegunda is, are they the same?

Here in my wall, everything seems the same. The food they bring me tastes of stone. The water is stony and I too am half petrified, accepting, half dead already, like an animal in winter. I accept. I am choked with familiar thoughts, with sameness, filled up like a sewer or vault which, once filled, is level with the ground and inexistant. I want to exist. How? The bow accepts the arrow but fires it out. How? Movement of the mind is the last to stop. Stir it. How?

Live, Ingunda!

God then, let me say, is foul, unjust, evil, wrong, limited and unimaginative. There: I have denied him. Shall I be forgiven? Let repent? If he is just he will allow me to say he is unjust since in all justice the life I was loaded with was unjust. Agnes’s life was unjust. Fortunatus—I have no feelings about him. I want to turn things round but in him there is little to turn. Weighted neither on top nor bottom, like certain chess pieces, you may turn him about and he looks no different.

But God is evil, the devil good. There: I have asserted and assaulted and could believe it too. Why am I not upset? Shaken? Has God—who is good if he is at all—withdrawn all interest from me? Have I rubbed out my own self? I would have stoked a fire to flame in like
Radegunda
who burned with holy heat. I want my blood to drum, even madly, even unholily and with shame. I want to live. To feel, suffer, be—and I don’t. Why am I not upset, seared, terror-stricken, shamed, why? Is this my punishment? God has withdrawn himself. He denies me since I denied him. And I cannot repent or feel at all. God, let me feel, suffer as I did other times. Please, please, let me even desire strongly to do this. Oh, you are turning my mind and conscience too to stone. I shall be a stone and stonier no matter what I do. I am turning into this wall. Give me sorrow, pain. Anything.

God!

Devil!

Anyone! Someone! Interfere. Affect me. Answer. Send a sign. Anything. Send an ant or a woodlouse walking down my window-slit. Send the sound of rain. Wind. Do not leave me alone.

I am alone. A stone. Forgotten. A nothing. A vacancy. There is nothing out there.

Godevil! Devilgod! Strike. Answer! Is silence your answer?

No. It is my own silence.

Pale, pallid stone. Indifferent Ingunda. How long since I thought my last thought? Here I perch like a stuffed owl, unfit for visions even of mice. Was I wrong to choose this wall? But what is ‘wrong’?

ShitGod! Foul maker of shitpies who made me! Why? Why? I am shit made of shit by ShitGod for shit from shit for shit everlasting since all ends in shit the source and end of all.

I
want
to
repent
! I want to believe. Feel. Live. Pray even?

My nose is my only live organ. Everything smells. I cannot eat or very little but all night and day I smell. Smells of hell. We know smells of shit and sulphur come from hell.

Base nose! I shall break it. Against this wall.

I would still smell. The hellsmell is in me.

Save me. Anyone.

If only I could wash. Or burn. Or die.

I’ll bash my nose against the wall. Oh God. Oh God. Oh God. It hurts. It hurts. Hurts. Hurt.

But at least I
feel
again. At least that. Oh God, the hurt!

*

[
A.D
. 569]

Venantius Honorius Clementianus Fortunatus had formally begun his
Life
of
Radegunda
and was visiting the convent every day. As often as not, the foundress was unavailable but convent gossip was, if anything, a better source than she was. Sitting in the leafless rose-bower—it was spring—he wore a grey fur wrap, took notes and kept an eye on the nuns’ comings and goings.

“Psst!” he called to a novice who was emerging from the tower where Radegunda was in retreat. “Anything new?”

The novice jumped. Startled. Outsiders were not allowed within the convent precincts. Fortunatus had a dispensation granted him by several bishops and by the two kings who had a claim on Poitiers. These two, Sigibert and Chilperic, who would willingly have murdered each other—and were to die murdered by persons unknown—were united in their regard for the poet. For them his verse incarnated the last glory of Roman culture: an elusive form of loot which they paid for in solid coin and sundry privileges.