The Abbess’s Prayers
Increasingly often now when the sisters file into the Oratory to perform the Offices they find the Abbess there before them. The Master, it is true, has always been at the top of their list, and his name has now been entered into the Paraclete’s necrology, as one of the souls they will constantly be praying for. And who should know better than the Abbess how much the Master needs their prayers! Their correspondence, Sister Sebastienne recalls each time she sees the Abbess rising from her place at the head of the tomb, their correspondence alluded often to the blasphemous character of their lovemaking and to the special pleasure they took in its blasphemy. From the moment the Master installed the Lady Héloïse and her sisters at the Paraclete, his chief concern had been that they pray for him. And is that not the hope of all the relatives of the sisters, and their reason for endowing them with gifts and rents and tithes and mills and harvest bounties? The sisters pray even for Fulbert, the uncle of the Abbess, the man who ordered the Master’s castration. And did not the Abbot of Cluny beg their prayers, and was that not the reason he brought the Master’s body? Because of all things, the sisters excel in praying? It is the reason they must take care always to perform the Offices perfectly. The perfect performance of the Offices makes their prayers more pleasing to God. By the time a novice makes her profession, this at least she understands. Of all things, they must know their raison d’être in the world.
The Abbess’s prayers, Sister Sebastienne thinks, must be superior to those of the other sisters. The Abbot of Cluny addresses her as “Your Sanctity.” In fact, before his visit, the Abbot wrote in a letter to the Abbess, If only our Cluny possessed you, or you were confined in the delightful prison of Marcigny, our daughter house, with the other handmaids of Christ who are there awaiting their freedom in heaven! But is the Abbess’s new radiance and ease in manner solely due to gratification in shortening the Master’s time spent in Purgatory? Sister Sebastienne has read the correspondence. She knows the Abbess is much more than greets the eye of the Abbot of Cluny. The Abbess’s apparent elation mystifies her.
10.
They go to bed so early in the winter. Halfway to Matins, Sister Sebastienne composes—in her head—certain she will remember it in the morning: Love that has been wakened knows no night. Her stomach is burning with gas; she can’t stop belching. At the evening meal they ate braised cabbage and onions with their coarse brown bread. Worse, Sister Sebastienne is exhausted in both body and mind from too many nights of scanting sleep, her eyes red and sore, her limbs cramped and aching. She must get her carmen written, for her body cannot take much more—of going without sleep, of constantly juggling Latin phrases in her mind, trying to get them to scan as they must.
To be sure, it is not just her stomach that burns! What she would like to make clear in her reply to her lover is that she burns as only women do—not with the dry heat Aristotle says is the normal healthy state of man, but with the passion of a woman—the steaming, liquid molten heat of shifting magma and flowing lava, lava that can be shaped into poetry not with the arid perfection of a monk playing games, but in the purest sculpting of a passion that erupts as a fluid and then cools into gleaming, smooth hard rock.
Sister Sebastienne listens to her sisters’ slow, even breaths. Sister Adele snores in her usual rhythm of explosive, toneless puffs. Their digestion of cabbage and onions has created its own winter fragrance, binding them in sharing, wordless, intimacy.
Sister Sebastienne reflects on the purpose that fires her brain: it is a matter, she intuits, of exalting the flesh, of putting its passion into words, which are themselves chaste, and making it soar. Solomon, reputed to be one of the wisest men ever to live, though not a woman, surely understood that. The thought makes Sister Sebastienne smile, and sends her drifting warmly, quietly off to sleep.
11.
The days grow very, very short, and what little light they afford is thin and gray with constant rain. And it is the dark of the moon, and everyone who is neither aged nor ill has the flowers. Every one of them is unusually cranky and irritable. The cramps in their bellies and the aches in their backs and heads impel them in a nearly constant stream to the Infirmarian. They are all so cranky, in fact, that when two lay sisters have to be rebuked for their exchange of sharp words over the washing of so many rags, no one is shocked by the raucous openness of their conflict.
