Читать книгу Farewell My Only One - Antoine Audouard - Страница 15

Fiet amor verus,Qui modo falsus erat. Love that once was false will become true. OVID, The Art of Loving 8:2

VI

Arnold and I had left Saint-Lazare for the mouth of the Bièvre: there was a priory house there belonging to Cluny that had been put under the gentle jurisdiction of Peter the Child, and his only duty as far as the abbey was concerned was to send back reports on the follies of the Parisian masters.

The house particularly welcomed those pupils of Peter Abelard who were rather more than pupils, those who did not pay, those whom he used to take drinking, those who would desert him like all the others when times changed.

Without Abelard saying as much, perhaps without his even being aware of it, I felt that we were enjoying the benefits of a discretionary benevolence that allowed him both to teach in the Close and to be startlingly unconstrained in the words he used.

I used to enjoy spending time in the warehouse that opened onto the street, storage rooms in which a stone sculptor kept his statues while waiting for them to be painted. If I wished to be on my own, I would sometimes go and sleep there, clinging with one hand to St Sebastian’s arrows, the keys of St Peter or St Augustine’s book, dreaming or having nightmares while surrounded by actual biblical characters.

Amid all this sanctity there were a few profane subjects. Having spent so much time among statues, my hands had cupped the drooping breasts of a statue of Niobe mourning her children and seeking consolation. But here as elsewhere it was not wise to form attachments: no sooner had you confided in a prophet or an angel, or entrusted your fate to a king, than the following day he was sent into exile in some church or other.

At night, among this gathering, I seemed to see imperceptible movements which I tried to catch with one eye, but which always eluded me. Did these stone people touch one another or make love once the creatures of flesh and blood had at last left them in peace? It appeared unlikely – only the spirit still illuminated their lives. Clasped in Niobe’s arms, however, I did feel that with a few centuries’ patience she might have been mine.

Peter’s friends had accepted me from the moment I joined them; this may have been kind-heartedness, but it might also have been casualness; I believe it was simply that the master had chosen me and that there was nothing more to be said.

Arnold spoke to me about his dreams: I feared for his purity which would later be his downfall, and I was alarmed by what he remembered from the lessons – not logic or reason, but fire to enflame his fury. I noticed that he was often in conflict with Cervelle, that ageless boy with the ugly but intelligent face, who used his mind to put an acceptable distance between himself and the world. Cervelle never spoke of what he believed in, he never admitted that he was frightened or in love; of all of us, he was the only one whose mind was sufficiently agile to drive Abelard into entrenched positions on rare occasions. Christian had a luminous faith and sweetness about him; although he lived an angelic life, he did not believe that the body was the enemy of the soul.

Peter the Child was wholly good.

When the master asked me to stay behind, the others withdrew without saying anything. After the lesson he took me with him and we would wander off to the Isle of Jews or the Isle of Cows and laze about together on a sandbank. During the night he dictated his notes for future treatises and tried new arguments or fresh analogies on me; I would reply and encourage him, timidly to begin with, then with increasing boldness. Watching the assurance with which, in front of everyone, he subsequently developed what we had attempted by trial and error, I felt a pride in my heart at having been singled out.

One day, Cervelle, with his customary irony – sardonic and ungenerous, but always fair – began calling me John. When, pretending not to mind, I asked him why, he sniggered:

‘Are you not the disciple whom Jesus loved?’

‘I must have her,’ said Abelard slowly, separating each word.

Tears, which I immediately held back, welled up in my eyes.

‘William, I need her,’ he repeated as if in a dream – and there was no need for him to utter her name. I knew.

Heloise had sometimes come to listen to him. As far as I knew, they had not exchanged more than three words.

A sort of routine had become established between her and me that I found impossible to break: we would walk together a little at the end of the lesson before she disappeared, giving the excuse that she could not keep her uncle, the canon, waiting. Whenever I was with her, the words that I had promised myself I would say the previous night vanished, and I was left speechless as a mule.

She told me about her life in snatches: she described her vast childhood home, at Montmorency, surrounded by vineyards, and the gut-wrenching pain she experienced when as a girl she was sent away to board with the nuns at Argenteuil. She remembered that on the morning of her death, her mother, Hersende, had put a flower in her hair: in the evening the flower was no longer there. She spoke of Dido, of Cornelia, and of the heroines whose destinies rent her heart and seemed, without her understanding why, to conjure up her own fate. Her Latin was elegant and classical – images sprang forth effortlessly from her lips. She had chosen her friends: she could express the music of Virgil or the almost vulgar enthusiasm of Catullus, the elegance of Horace, the sadness of Ovid. She did not speak about Abelard – and I never questioned her.

‘It’s unreasonable,’ I eventually said to my master.

‘You’re talking about reason?’

A strange paralysis gripped my heart and mind and made me incapable of uttering simple words. This object you’re playing with, just as you do with the Categories of Aristotle, has for the past fortnight been the blood pumping through my veins, the air that I breathe . . . This woman, whom you want to take away from me and who does not belong to me is, nevertheless, mine . . . You are my master in all matters, you know what I know better than I do myself, but you are taking away what you have given me, and worse still – you are stifling me, crushing me, draining my life away . . .

I had said nothing. Only that wretched remark ‘It’s unreasonable’, which made no sense at all and, more to the point – as I knew only too well already – would only provoke him.

It was only later that I became aware of everything that silence signified – and that ultimately my fate, my wretchedness and perhaps my good fortune were contained there in their entirety.

I did not see Heloise in the days that followed. I did not know what to expect, what to fear. If she went away, I would be protected from my master’s unbearable threat; if she came no more, my love would be fixed in an absence, in a dream. And yet, of course, as I waited for her, I retained neither much logic, nor much grammar.

We were a noisy group, happy but chaotic, and after our lesson we never tired of continuing to argue and discuss things as we crossed the square in front of the cathedral, jostling some of the shopkeepers as we turned into the Jewish quarter before passing the Petit Pont, where some new masters had already installed themselves, attracting the curious with strange syllogisms.

With Arnold, I instigated rebellious tactics to eliminate the transgressions of this base world; with Christian, I spoke about Heloise – not, God forbid, my silent passion, but about the curious attachment the master had developed for this girl whom he did not consider beautiful.

‘He will have her,’ said Christian fatalistically. ‘We must just pray that she doesn’t cut his hair while he’s asleep.’

I did not laugh. He noticed it.

When the others went to bed the three of us often stayed up late discussing our hopes and our fears; we still drank the thick, tepid ale – or else that bitter Étampes wine which went down without one noticing. That was when we were all excellent friends.

One night, when Arnold had finally fallen asleep, stretched out like a bearskin rug in front of the fire, Christian and I went for a walk among the statues. We were drunk of course. More than ever, it seemed to me that we were in the midst of a forest of stone, two figures who could have been struck motionless and dumb at a wave of the hand – that was how Christian would become a prophet and I an apostle.

For a long time he made me talk about my wanderings and about the people I had come across – the wise men and the warriors, those who were born under a magic constellation, those who had come back from the world of the dead. I told him about Courtly Love and the tournaments, the perfumes of Spain, and about waiting for the Lady.

‘Do you still want to know what I do?’

‘I’m no longer so sure.’

‘You’re right. It’s best kept a secret. I don’t know it myself.’

He looked at me solemnly.

‘All sorts of people dwell within me and sometimes, when I’ve finished drawing an initial, I feel furious that the universe is not mine so that I can celebrate the glory of God and the greatness of man.’

‘Nothing more?’

He pummelled me with his fists and we could not stop laughing.

‘Come on now,’ he said when we had calmed down, ‘close your eyes and trust your little brother Christian!’

He slipped off my gown and my tunic and he placed his hands on my bare shoulders.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Don’t be frightened,’ he whispered, ‘I’ve actually been to Sodom, but it was as an angel . . .’

‘Can I open my eyes now?’

‘If you promise me you won’t be afraid.’

I wasn’t frightened. I was simply shivering because of the cold. By the light of a candle he laid out his colours, his quills and his brushes. I watched him, eyes riveted, as he prepared this pagan ritual.

‘Now turn round, you’re not allowed to see.’

When his quill touched me, light as a wing, I had a dreadful desire to laugh, but I controlled myself.

‘Don’t move. Remember you’re a stone now; you’ve got to keep still.’

I obeyed. I almost managed to forget the sensation, by turns unpleasant and gentle, of being licked by an army of insects. My breathing became so soft that I could have been dead, imagining myself sent to heaven, with my feet in the air, among the army of saints who decorate a row on the arches of those curved porticos you see everywhere at the entrance to churches. Or could I be a monster, crushed beneath some foot? At the Last Judgement, I would be both vice and virtue.

‘Very good, William.’

His voice came to me from another world. He probably talked like that to the pages of his books. Then he began circling round me, a joyful faun, a dancing priest, and I no longer found it difficult pretending to be still. With my feet firmly planted on the ground, I didn’t know where my breath had gone and it would have needed a thrust from a sword to bring me back to life.

‘Now you can look. But be sure to move very slowly. Don’t forget you were a stone.’

My heavy head slumped forward: the tip of my breast was an initial letter painted in gold, and across the whole of my chest I could see letters of a language which, from upside down, looked as if it belonged to a race of barbarians. I looked particularly at the images that hung down me: at my sides, which were covered by intertwining foliage in which a squirrel or an egret was hiding; at my neck, from which the column of a temple of Solomon rose up; and the base of my stomach, where a woman swathed in veils was offering herself upon a bed with sky-blue sheets studded with gold stars. Her lips were the colour of blood.

‘Do you recognise her?’

‘I am dark but comely . . . If I have the Song of Songs on my belly, what have you painted on my back? The Apocalypse?’

He was putting away his materials.

‘Don’t try to look. There’s nothing evil there, but I’ve hidden a little secret patch, on your own body, so that you may remember that even the body can’t teach you everything. One day you will be allowed to know, but not before I tell you.’

Although he was speaking a little ironically, there could be no doubting his seriousness. I moved so that I could see my page move, prompted by the invisible hand that was my body, my muscles, my breathing, my own heartbeat. I am black, but comely, O daughters of Jerusalem . . . He snuffed out the candle with his fingers. Dawn came. I picked up my tunic and I got dressed: the Song of Songs disappeared in the folds of my gown.

‘It’s very strange, my friend, to be a book written by you and whose last words are still secret . . .’

‘Every book is like a pilgrimage or a man’s life: the reward comes at the end.’

The street itself, at daybreak, where I stretched my legs among the cats, was a book in the process of being written; the street was a line that snaked between the houses, gardens and vines, along which my flaxenhaired friend, with his rainbow fingers and ink-stained nails, walked beneath a stormy sky.

‘I am weary,’ said Abelard, ‘and I am old: I shall soon be forty.’

‘The acme! The floruit!’

‘You may mock. The time that a generation of men has passed, I have spent in arguing. As far back as I remember, when I was at my first school, in Nantes, I was no taller than a box hedge and I was arguing with my first masters about Latin declensions . . . Along the entire length of the Loire, at Angers, at Saumur, then at Loches with that devil Roscelin, and at Laon with old Anselm, I was still arguing . . .’

‘You’ll die arguing.’

He struck the table.

‘Indeed, I will not!’

Two or three days had passed since his confession – if that is what that soldier’s demand for booty can be called. I avoided his lectures and held my breath. I knew very well that the miracle of Heloise’s absence would not last.

He picked himself up again and grew more mellow.

‘Seriously, William, don’t you think it’s time for me to take a woman?’

‘Do you want to get married?’

‘Me? You must be joking! It would wreck my reputation, undermine my career, preclude my . . .’

‘You see.’

‘But taking a woman is not the same as getting married. Taking a woman is . . .’

‘What about her? What will be left of her once you’ve taken her?’

‘She will be educated and the most perfect of women.’

‘And ruined for ever, you know very well.’

‘She will go back to the convent. What else can she hope for? She has nothing but her beauty . . .’

‘I thought you didn’t find her beautiful!’

‘Everyone makes mistakes. Nothing, I said, apart from her beauty and her mind. In other words, nothing. And who do you think she would have after me? The king’s butler?’

There was so much quiet and cheerful scepticism about him and, as always, such perfection of reasoning, that it bordered on innocence. Confronted with this paradox, my heart swelled: I was so happy under his guidance that in spite of myself he was persuading me to share his beliefs, and in so doing to become the instrument of my own suffering. But I had no idea what lay behind this: seeing only my own loss, I was growing blind to his.

His eyes had not left me – they were plunged deep into my turbulent heart and they were indifferent to what they saw there. It hurt me to see her leave even though she had never been mine; it hurt me to have hung my hopes on a few words which she may not even have uttered. And yet I felt dizzy at the thought of being involved with a man who was wiser and knew more than I did, but who above all desired in a way that I thought I was incapable of.

‘Find her for me,’ he said at last.

Squeezing me gently on the shoulder, he got up and left without waiting for my reply. I remained where I was, feeling subdued, gazing at the fire.