It was going to be a dry summer, I thought. Without rain, harvests would be bad; forage meager. The early blackberries were already burnt to a gray fluff on the stems. The vines too were stunted by drought, the grapes hard as dried peas. I pitied those who, like Lazarillo’s players, traveled the road in the wake of such a summer.
The road. I saw it in my mind’s eye, gilded with sunlight, strewn with the shards of my past. Was it really such a bad road? Had I suffered so much during those traveling years? I knew I had. We had endured cold and hunger, betrayal and persecution. I tried to recall those things, but still the road ahead of me gleamed like a path over quicksand, and I found myself remembering something LeMerle had once told me, in the days when we were friends.
“We have a natural affinity, you and I,” he had said. “Like air and fire, combustion is our nature. You can’t change the element you are born to. That’s why we’ll never leave the road, my l’Ailée; any more than fire can choose not to burn, or a bird leave the sky.”
But I had. I had left the sky, and for many years I had barely even raised my eyes to it. I had not forgotten, however. The road had always been there, patiently awaiting my return. And how I wanted it! What might I give to be free, to have a woman’s name once more, a woman’s life? To see the stars from a different place every night, to eat meat cooked over my own campfire, to dance-maybe to fly? I did not need to answer the unspoken question. Joy leaped in me at the thought, and for a moment I might almost have been the old Juliette once more, the one who walked to Paris.
But it was ridiculous. Leave my life, my comfortable cloister; the friends who had given me refuge? The abbey was hardly the home I had longed for, but it provided the essentials. Food in winter, shelter, work for my idle hands. And leave it for what? For a few dreams? For a hand of cards?
The path, half-sand beneath my heavy boots, dragged at my feet. I kicked at it angrily. The explanation was simple, I told myself. Simple and rather stupidly obvious. The hot weather, the sleepless nights, the dreams of LeMerle…I needed a man. That was all. L’Ailée had had a different lover every night, choosing as she would-smooth or rough, dark or fair-and her dreams were scented and textured with their bodies. Juliette too was a sensual creature: Giordano scolded her for bathing naked in the rivers, for rolling in the morning grass, and for the secret hours she spent with his Latin poets, struggling with the unfamiliar syntax for the sake of the occasional taut glimpse of Roman buttock…Either of them would have known how to dispel this malaise. But I-Soeur Auguste, a man’s name and an old man, at that-what do I have? Since Fleur there have been no more men. I might have turned to women for comfort, like Germaine and Clémente, but those pleasures never appealed to me.
Germaine, whose husband cut her face fifteen times-once for every year of her life-with a kitchen knife when he found her with another girl, hates all men. I’ve seen her watching me. I know she finds me beautiful. Not like Clémente, of the Madonna face and filthy mind, but enough to please her. She sometimes watches me at work in the garden, but never says a word. Her light hair is cropped shorter than a boy’s, and beneath the ungainly brown robes I can guess at a slim, graceful figure. Once, Germaine would have made a fine dancer. But something else is spoiled besides her face. Six years after the incident she looks older than I, her mouth pale and thin, her eyes almost colorless, like brine. She tells me she joined the convent so that she would never have to look at a man again. But she is like the sour apples and the dried-pea grapes, yearning to flourish but starved of rain.
Lovely, spiteful Clémente sees it and makes her suffer, flirting with me as I go about my duties. In chapel she sometimes whispers words of seduction, offering herself to me as, behind her, Germaine listens helplessly, stolid in her suffering, her scarred face impassive.
Germaine has no faith, no interest in religion of any kind. I spoke to her once about my female God-I thought it might appeal to her, hating men as she did-but she seemed as indifferent to that as she was to the rest. “If such a thing ever was,” she told me dryly, “then men have remade her. Why else should they want to lock us up and to make us ashamed? Why else should they be so afraid?”
I said that men had no reason to be afraid of us, and she gave another sharp laugh. “Oh no?” She put her fingers to her face. “Then why this?”
Perhaps she is right. And yet I don’t hate men. Only one, and even he…I dreamed of him again last night. So close I could smell his sweat and his skin, smooth as my own. I hate him, and yet in my dream he was tender. Even with his face in shadow I would have known him anywhere, even without the moonlight that gilded the scorched flower on his arm.
The sound of birdsong awoke me. For an instant I was there again, before Épinal, before Vitré, with the blackbirds singing outside our caravan and my lover watching me with all of summer in his mocking eyes…
For a moment only. A sly succubus crept into my heart as I lay asleep. A ghost. There can be no part of me that still wants him, I tell myself.
No part at all.
It was long past noon when at last we arrived at the abbey. I had taken off my wimple, but even so my hair was damp with sweat, my robe clammy against my skin. Fleur trotted beside me, Mouche dangling from one hand. There was no one in sight. Given the heat, this was not unusual, for many of the sisters, in the absence of authority, had taken to sleeping at that time, leaving what rudimentary duties they still performed until after Nones and the cooler evening. But when I saw the fresh horse dung by the abbey gate and the tracks of carriage wheels in the dust I was suddenly certain that what we had been expecting had finally happened.
“Is it the players coming back?” asked Fleur hopefully.
“No, sweetheart, I don’t think so.”
“Oh.”
I smiled at her expression, and gave her a kiss. “Play here for a while,” I said. “I have to go inside.”
I watched her as she ran duck-footed along the path into the cloister, then turned toward the Abbey, feeling as if a great weight had been taken from me. At last, then, this uneasy, unsettled time had come to an end. We had a new abbess, a guiding hand for us in our aimlessness and fear. I could picture her already. She would be calm and strong, though no longer in the first blush of youth. Her smile would be grave and tranquil, but with the touch of humor necessary to lead so many disaffected women toward peace. She would be kind and honest, a good mainland woman, unafraid of hard work, her brown hands callused but deft and gentle. She would enjoy music and gardening. She would be hardheaded; experienced enough in the world’s ways to help us fend for ourselves and yet not too ambitious, not embittered by her knowledge but still able to face the world with simple joy, simple wisdom.
Looking back in amazement at my own simplicity, I realize my fanciful picture owed a great deal to memories of my own mother, Isabelle. Her remembered face has altered a little since I last saw her, I know. Only the eye of love could recall her as I do, so sweet and so strong, her beauty crystallizing in my mind so that she is far lovelier than Clémente or the Holy Mother herself, though I cannot quite remember the color of her eyes, or the contours of her strong brown face. I put my mother’s head onto the shoulders of our new abbess before I even set eyes on her, and the relief I felt was like that of a child left too long in charge of a task too great for her, who, at last, sees her mother coming home. I began to run toward the strangely quiet building, my hair flying and my robes pulled up around my knees.