Fantastic Metropolis

Sister Sebastienne creeps soundlessly and precisely through the choir. No passage is as familiar to her as this one, though without a sister going before her and another following it feels larger and alien. When she reaches the nave, she stands silently in the darkness that makes her invisible. She stares, but does not understand what she sees. A man, naked, is standing near a brazier of glowing coals, set only a foot or so from the tall, thick candle that is always kept burning at the foot of the Master’s tomb.

Sister Sebastienne hears the Abbess say, “As I wrote to you years ago, nothing is less under our control than the heart.” Sister Sebastienne looks around for the Abbess, and then realizes that that lady is lying—also naked!—on her back, on the tomb itself, her skin nearly as colorless as the marble, only tinged here and there with a rosy flush. A memory comes to the sister of a passage in the Master’s letters to the Abbess, a passage both vivid and icy, telling the Abbess that on her death she must be sewn naked into her shroud, as a superior’s special example of humility to her flock.

“The power of our love is plain,” the Abbess says. “That you rise from the dead, with your manhood intact, itself always rising to greet me, to claim me, to take me, is proof enough! This miracle of the flesh is your gift to me. And yet you never cease trying to deny it! That you should come to me like this, so perfectly—as it is written, And the dead shall be raised—incorruptible! And the maimed made whole!”

As she speaks, the Abbess rolls gracefully off the tomb to her feet—her breasts, the sister sees, full and firm as one never imagines of a nun’s—then moves swiftly to kneel before the man, twining her arms around his waist, pressing her head against his round, hairy belly, stroking him boldly, passionately, possessively.

“This is blasphemy, blasphemy,” the man says angrily. “All the worse that I myself taught you to blaspheme. This madness must end! You keep my soul from purgatory and would drag me to hell with you! All your talk of miracles mocks God! ”

Sister Sebastienne is astounded. This is the Master? But she saw him once, briefly, when she was a novice. He was emaciated, gray, ill—nothing like this full-fleshed, vital man! She wonders, irrelevantly, whether he had been sewn naked into his shroud, having once been an abbot himself.

The Abbess’s voice is soft but exultant. “You are my God! You made yourself my God. I worshiped you! I still worship you, and will always do. And so I do not mock God—not my God. Though maybe yours—which is nothing to me.”

The Master’s voice grows hoarse. “It is said, truly, that there is nothing so monstrous as a woman’s lust! What you do, what you are, is monstrous. Renounce this, I command you! And release me from your monstrous will! ”

The Abbess rocks back on her heels and looks up into his face. Sister Sebastienne, heart pounding, glimpses the Master’s member, engorged, ruby-eyed, trembling. A wave of heat flows over her. She feels as though she is suffocating.

“Mon coeur, mon coeur,” the Abbess says. Her voice, sweet and low, is a tender murmuring, relentless and wholly without gentleness. She laughs softly and strokes the Master’s member. “When you renounce this,” she says, “when you renounce this miracle of the flesh.”

The Master groans and sinks to his knees. He takes the Abbess’s face between his hands. “If you love me, obey me,” he says, his hoarse voice breaking with emotion.

The Abbess places many and many kisses on his face. The moist, sucking sound of them thrills the sister. The Abbess sighs. “Though I’m no Briseis, I’ve always obeyed you even when I knew it was wrong. When I first gave myself to you, all the times I blasphemed with you, when I married you, when I took the veil, when I kept silent about what you from the beginning called my ‘old complaint’—always I obeyed you, to keep your love. I told you, and you knew it, that I would do anything to keep your love, give up anything, even the hope of salvation. And now you would have me obey you, to fling that love away? ” The Abbess embraces the Master and rains even more kisses on his neck and eyes, his cheeks and lips. “Give up a love that has triumphed over the grave? Never, and never, and never! You are physically as you were the day you walked into my uncle’s house. Our bodies are of an age now, my dearest. When I weary of love as you did, ask me then, my darling. Now love me again, I command you, before the bell is rung for Matins.”