Читать книгу Farewell My Only One - Antoine Audouard - Страница 8

Prologue

Fontevrault, 1164

Today, during Matins, one of our brothers fainted. The sound of his head striking the stone echoed over the abbey while we were singing Yahweh has sent me to bind up hearts that are broken, to proclaim liberty to captives. I, too, was feeling weary and a fever was spreading waves of icy heat over my limbs and through-out my body.

As two lay brothers led Brother Guy away, we let the peace of the psalm sink into us. I did not weep; my sorrow was lighter than my burden. Even when we heard Guy’s cries as we crossed the Close, no head turned and we sang, with one voice, one heart.

In spite of the cold, more than one of us was sweating beneath his cowl.

As we made our way from the church back to the priory of Saint John, the wailing abated. The light of the full moon bathed us, as we lay in our bunks, in the colour of cemeteries. Then we heard them: they were no longer the wrathful cries of a thousand devils fighting for possession of a soul, but the sobs of a humble man suffering, as we all do.

I prayed for you, Guy, my brother. But I was thinking of myself.

As I was leaving the chapterhouse this morning after Terce, I asked the prior for news of Brother Guy.

The prior said nothing; I was on the point of repeating my question when he gestured with his hand in the direction of the well. Guy was standing there alone, looking much calmer. A golden light flickered about his fair hair and shone on his shoulders – he was not someone who belonged to our age of stones and rain, but to some ancient book, a prophecy come true. I went over to him and, when he saw me, his eyes glazed with a look of unspoken supplication. I smiled at him.

‘Did you feel as though you were not alone last night?’ I asked.

He swept his hand over his face as he sometimes does when chasing away flies and phantoms.

‘I see wonderful things,’ he murmured in that low, tremulous voice which seemed to belong to someone much older.

The sun had just passed over the nave of our church, the air was full of a promise that would not be fulfilled, and yet there was still some of that joy within me too. I smiled.

‘Not so much arrogance, little brother. I’m telling you, you’re not alone.’ I lay my hand on his shoulder and squeezed it. This gesture, with which Abelard used to subdue me, was now mine. But I would not use it to control or constrain.

I returned to the scriptorium while Guy continued to gaze up at the sky.

The prior found me with the quill of my pen crushed against my scroll of parchment and my head cradled in my elbow. He glanced at the fire burning in the hearth.

‘All this heat and no one to enjoy it,’ he muttered without any bitterness.

He’s a peaceful and seemingly good man who will become abbot as long as no bishop meddles. His nose, eyes and mouth are all squashed untidily over his flat face, and yet there is something truly gentle about this ugliness. One of his legs is stiff, which always makes him look as if he is running, even when he walks.

‘Are you copying?’

I nodded. He asked nothing else. He really must not find out what is concealed beneath my reserved bearing, my stern, scholarly face and my hours of study.

He went out without saying another word.

I penned a few more words – the last. I tightened the sheepskin leather straps that hold the parchment together. I rolled it up inside the rough cloth bag which I slipped beneath my cowl. I stood up and my bones creaked like an old boat.

I knew what I still had to do, I knew every detail of what had to be done up to the moment of my death, and even after.

That evening, after Vespers, I would speak to that innocent, Guy. I would trust him with my secret.

In the midst of the silent night there is no silence. The monks snore, the monks talk and cry out, the monks wrestle with angels and with devils, the monks wail over their childhood nightmares. Only a storm can quieten them and, unfortunately, storms do not occur every night.

My body felt as light as my soul and I wandered about among my brethren as if I were haunting them. I knew where Brother Guy’s bunk was; my hand brushed lightly against him and he opened his eyes. ‘Come, my brother, my friend, the time has come.’ He got up and followed me.

We went down into the Close and left the priory by the east door. We walked in the moonlight, which flooded the abbey in a grey light. There, where as a young clerk I had watched the carpenters erect a wooden ceiling, the stone cupolas rose up like so many skies.

Guy, who was behind me, asked no questions – when I approached the altar and knelt down, he merely shivered slightly.

In the nave, at the height of a man’s arm, almost at the southern corner of the transept, there was a stone that I knew had never been securely fixed. But when I touched it with my hand it did not budge.

Guy heard the cry of surprise that escaped from my lips; he saw me pushing, grumbling and perspiring. I turned to him with tears in my eyes.

Without saying a word, he too attacked the side of the stone with his hands and his fingernails, both of us scraping away at it together, cutting our fingers and scratching our skin, our flesh mingling with the limestone.

The stone did not shift. It was not enough to believe in miracles. When we stopped, out of breath, Brother Guy wiped his hands over his face and on his cowl. We gasped and collapsed on top of one another.

‘Do you see?’ he asked eventually in his low voice.

I didn’t see. He pointed to a cavity, to a length of stone that we had been unable to loosen – one of those putlogs into which scaffolding beams had been placed during the course of construction.

With my hands I indicated the size of the cavity that Guy had discovered. I ran my fingers over the contours and at the same time I thought of it as the Jerusalem that awaited me in my dreams.

In one quick gesture, I took the bag with the scrolls from around my neck and I placed it where it was meant to fit, in this recess where no one would ever find it. No one? I looked at the simpleton, the fool. He helped me replace the stone: he took the dust mixed with blood from the ground and swallowed it. He wiped his lips. No one? The simpleton, the fool would hold his tongue. And if he did talk, nobody would listen to him.

I was weak and unsteady on my legs.

And this is how the monks would find us when the first rays from the east light up the altar – an old man dying in the arms of a child with eyes that are too bright.