I’m not supposed to believe in signs and auguries. All that’s in the past now, with the Théâtre des Cieux. But why see LeMerle, of all people, and after all these years? What could it mean? The shadow across my eyes had already passed and the players were coming to the end of their masque, bowing, sweating, smiling, flinging rose petals over our heads. They had more than earned their board for the night and supplies for their journey.
Beside me, fat Soeur Antoine clapped her meaty hands, her face mottled with exertion. I was suddenly aware of the smell of her sweat, of the dust in my nostrils. Someone clawed my back; it was Soeur Marguerite, her pinched face halfway between pleasure and pain, mouth drawn down in a trembling bow of excitement. The reek of bodies intensified. And from the sisters lined against the heat-crackling walls of the abbey came a cry both shrill and oddly savage, an aüü! of pleasure and release, as if natural energies, loosened by the heat, had brought a kind of insanity to their applause. Aü! Encore! Aü! Encore!
Then I heard it; a single raised discordant voice, almost lost in a fury of acclamations. Mère Marie, I heard. Reverend Mother is…then once again the distracted buzzing of heat and voices, then the one voice again, higher than the rest.
I looked around for the source of the cry and saw Soeur Alfonsine, the consumptive nun, standing high upon the chapel steps, arms spread, her face white and exalted. Few of the sisters paid her any attention. Lazarillo’s troupe was taking a last bow; the actors went round once more with flowers and bonbons, the fire-eater gave a final spurt of flame; the monkey turned a somersault. Arlequin’s face was running with greasepaint; Isabelle-too old for the part, and with a visible paunch-was melting away in the heat, her scarlet mouth smeared halfway to her ears.
Soeur Alfonsine was still shouting, straining to be heard above the voices of the nuns. “It’s a judgment on us!” I thought she said. “A terrible judgment!”
Now some of the nuns looked exasperated; Alfonsine was never happier than when she was doing penance for something. “For pity’s sake, Alfonsine, what now?”
She fixed us with her martyr’s eyes. “My sisters!” she said, more in accusation than grief. “The Reverend Mother is dead!”
And at those words a silence fell over all of us. The players looked guilty and confused, as if aware that their welcome had been suddenly withdrawn. The tambourin player let his arm drop to his side in a harsh jangle of bells.
“Dead?” As if it could not be real in this iron heat, beneath this sledgehammer sky.
Alfonsine nodded; behind me, Soeur Marguerite was already beginning to keen. Miserere nobis, miserere nobis…
Fleur looked up at me, puzzled, and I caught her in my arms with sudden fierceness. “Is it finished?” she asked me. “Will the monkey dance again?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”
“Why not? Was it the black bird?”
I looked at her, startled. Five years old and she sees everything. Her eyes are like pieces of mirror reflecting the sky-today blue, tomorrow the purple-gray of a storm cloud’s belly. “The black bird,” she repeated impatiently. “He’s gone now.”
I glanced back over my shoulder and saw that she was right. The crow had gone, his message delivered, and I knew then for certain that my premonition was true. Our time in the sunlight had finally come to an end. The masquerade was over.
2
We sent the players into town. They left with an air of hurt reproach, as if we had accused them of something. But it would not have been decent to keep them in the abbey: not in the presence of death. I brought their supplies myself-hay for the horses, bread, goat’s cheese rolled in cinders, and a bottle of good wine, for the sake of traveling theaters everywhere-and bade them good-bye.
Lazarillo gave me a keen look as he turned to go. “You look familiar, ma soeur. Could it be that we have met before?”
“I don’t think so. I’ve been here since I was a child.”
He shrugged. “Too many towns. Faces begin to look the same.”
I knew the feeling, although I did not say so.
“Times are hard, ma soeur. Remember us in your prayers.”
“Always.”
The Reverend Mother was lying on her narrow bed, looking even smaller and more desiccated than she had in life. Her eyes were closed, and Soeur Alfonsine had already replaced her quichenotte with the starched wimple, which the old woman had always refused.
“The quichenotte was good enough for us,” she used to say. “Kiss not, kiss not, we told the English soldiers, and wore the bonnet with the boned lappets to make sure they got the message. Who knows”-and here her eyes would light with sudden mischief-“maybe those English plunderers are hiding here still, and how then would I keep my virtue?”
She had collapsed in the field as she was digging potatoes, so Alfonsine told me. A minute later she was gone.
It was a good death, I tell myself. No pain; no priests; no fuss. And Reverend Mother was seventy-three-an unthinkable age-had already been frail when I joined the convent five years ago. But it was she who first made me welcome here, she who delivered Fleur, and once more, grief surprises me like an unexpected friend. She had seemed immortal, you see: an immovable landmark on this small horizon. Kindly, simple Mère Marie, walking the potato fields with her apron gathered up peasant-fashion over her skirt.
The potatoes were her pride, for though little else grows well in this bitter soil, these fruit are highly prized on the mainland, and their sale-along with that of our salt and the jars of pickled salicorne-ensures us enough revenue to maintain our little independence. That and the tithes bring us a prosperous enough life, even for one who has been used to the freedom of the roads, for at my age it’s time to have done with the dangers and the thrills, and in any case, I remind myself, even with the Théâtre des Cieux there were as many flung stones as sweetmeats, twice as many lean times as good, and as for the drunkards, the gossips, the lechers, the men…Besides, there was Fleur to think of, then as always.
One of my blasphemies-my many, many blasphemies-is the refusal to believe in sin. Conceived in sin, I should have given birth to my daughter in sorrow and contrition; exposed her, perhaps, on a hillside, as our ancestors once abandoned their unwanted young. But Fleur was a joy from the beginning. For her, I wear the red cross of the Bernardines, I work the fields instead of the high rope, I devote my days to a God for whom I have little affection and even less understanding. But with her at my side, this life is far from unpleasant. The cloister at least is safe. I have my garden. My books. My friends. Sixty-five of them, a family larger and closer in some ways than any I ever had.
I told them I was a widow. It seemed the simplest solution. A wealthy young widow, now with child, fleeing persecution from a dead husband’s creditors. Jewelry salvaged from the wreck of my caravan at Épinal gave me what I needed to bargain with. My years in the theater served me well-in any case, I was convincing enough for a provincial abbess who had never ventured out of sight of her native coast. And as time passed I realized my subterfuge was unnecessary. Few of us were impelled by holy vocation. We shared little except a need for privacy, a mistrust of men, an instinctive solidarity, which outweighed differences of upbringing and belief. Each one of us fleeing something we could not quite see. As I said, we all have our secrets.
Soeur Marguerite, scrawny as a skinned rabbit and eternally twitching with nerves and anxieties, comes to me for a tisane to banish dreams in which, she says, a man with fiery hands torments her. I brew her tinctures of chamomile and valerian sweetened with honey, she purges herself daily with salt water and castor oil, but I can see from the feverish look in her eyes that the dreams plague her still.