Yet there must have been wealth enough lavished upon it once, for there is good marble flooring in the church and the one unbroken window is of marvelous design, but since then, the winds across the flats have eroded the stone and tumbled arches on the west side so that in that wing, barely any of the remaining buildings are habitable. On the east side we still have the dorter, the cloister, infirmary, and warming room, but the lay quarters are a shambles, with so many tiles missing from the roof that birds have taken to nesting there. The scriptorium, too, is in sad disrepair, although so few of our number can read, and we have so few books, in any case, that it hardly matters. A chaos of smaller buildings, mostly of wood, has sprung up around the church and the cloister; bakehouse, tannery, barns, and a smokehouse for drying fish, so that instead of the grandiose place of the black friars’ intention the abbey now appears more like a rough shantytown.
The lay folk do much of the common work. It is a privilege they pay for in goods and services as well as tithes, and we repay our side of the bargain in prayers and indulgences. Sainte Marie-de-la-mer herself is a stone effigy, now standing at the church doorway on a pedestal of rough sandstone. She was discovered ninety years ago in the marshes, by a boy searching for a lost sheep: a three-foot lump of blackened basalt crudely carved into the semblance of a woman. Her breasts are bare and her tapering feet are tucked beneath a long featureless robe, which in the old days led folk to call her the Mermaid.
Since her discovery and laborious transportation into the abbey grounds, forty years ago, there have been several miraculous healings of folk who have appealed to her, and she is popular among fishermen, who often pray to Marie-de-la-mer for protection from storms.
For myself, I think she looks very old. Not a Virgin but a crone, head lowered in weariness, her bowed shoulders glazed from almost a century of reverent handling. Her sagging breasts, too, are noticeably burnished. Barren women, or those wishing to conceive, still touch them for luck as they pass, paying for the blessing with a fowl, a cask of wine, or a basket of fish.
And yet in spite of the reverence shown by these islanders, she has little in common with the Holy Mother. She is too ancient, to begin with. Older than the abbey itself, the basalt looks as if it might be a thousand years old or more, speckled with shards of mica like fragments of bone. And there is nothing to prove that the figure was ever supposed to represent the Holy Mother. Indeed, her bared breasts seem strangely immodest, like those of some pagan deity of long ago. Some of the locals still call her by the old name-though her miracles should long since have established her identity as well as her holiness. But fisherfolk are a superstitious lot. We coexist with them, but we remain as alien to them as were the black friars of old, a race apart, to be placated with tithes and gifts.
The Abbey of Sainte Marie-de-la-mer was an ideal retreat for me. Old as it is, isolated and in disrepair, it is the safest haven I have ever known. Far enough from the mainland, the only Church official a parish priest who could barely read Latin himself, I found myself in a position as humorous as it was absurd. I began as a lay sister, one of only a dozen. But out of sixty-five sisters, barely half could read at all; less than a tenth knew any Latin. I began by reading at Chapter. Then I was included in the services, my daily tasks reduced to allow me to read from the big old Bible on the lectern. Then Reverend Mother approached me with unusual-almost timid-reserve.
The novices, you understand…We had twelve, aged thirteen to eighteen. It was unseemly for them-for any of us-to be so ignorant. If I could teach them-just a little. We had books hidden away in the old scriptorium, which few were able to study. If I could only show them what to do…
I understood quickly enough. Our Reverend Mother, kind as she was, practical as she was in her shrewd, simple fashion, had kept a secret from us. Had hidden it for fifty years or more, learning long passages from the Bible by heart to conceal her ignorance, feigning weak eyesight in order to avoid the ordeal. Reverend Mother could not read Latin. Could not, I suspected, read at all.
She supervised my lessons to the novices with care, standing at the back of the refectory-our improvised schoolroom-with head to one side, as if she understood every word. I never referred to her deficiency in private or in public, deferring to her on minor points upon which I had previously briefed her, and she showed her gratitude in small, secret ways.
After a year I took vows at her request, and my new status permitted me to take full participation in all aspects of abbey life.
Good Mère Marie, I miss her. Her faith was as simple and honest as the land she worked. She rarely punished-not that there was much to punish in any case-seeing sin as proof of unhappiness. If a sister offended, she spoke to her kindly, repaying the transgression with its opposite; for theft, gifts: for laziness, respite from daily tasks. Few failed to be shamed by her unfailing generosity. And yet she was a heretic like myself. Her faith skated perilously close to the pantheism against which Giordano, my old teacher, used to warn me. And yet it was sincere. Careless of the more complex theological issues, her philosophy could be summed up in a single word: love. For Mère Marie, love overrode everything.
Love not often, but forever. It’s one of my mother’s sayings, and all my life it has been the story of my heart. Before I came to the abbey I thought I understood. Love for my mother; love for my friends; the dark and complex love of a woman for a man. But when Fleur was born, everything changed. A man who has never seen it may think he understands the ocean; but he thinks only of what he knows; imagines a large body of water, bigger than a millpond; bigger than a lake. The reality, however, is beyond imagining: the scents, the sounds, the anguish, and the joy of it beyond any comparison with previous experience. That was Fleur. Never, since my thirteenth summer had there been such an awakening. From the first instant, when Mère Marie gave her to me to suckle, I knew that the world had changed. I had been alone and had never known it; had traveled, fought, suffered, danced, fornicated, loved, hated, grieved, and triumphed all alone, living like an animal from day to day, caring for nothing; desiring nothing; fearing nothing. Suddenly now everything was different: Fleur was in the world. I was a mother.
It is a perilous joy, however. I knew, of course, that children often died young-I had seen it happen many times on my travels, of sickness, accident or hunger-but I had never before imagined the pain of it, or the terrible loss. Now I am afraid of everything; the reckless Ailée, who danced on the rope and flew the high trapeze, has become a timid creature, a clucking hen; clinging to safety for the sake of her child, where once she would have ached for adventure. LeMerle, the eternal gamester, would have scorned that weakness. Stake nothing that you would not lose. And yet I can pity him, wherever he is. His world has no oceans.
This morning, Prime was barely observed: Matins and Lauds, not at all. I am alone in the church as dawn breaks, a milky light brimming through the roof above the pulpitum, where the slates are fewest. A thin rain is falling and the overspill chimes a little three-note scale against the broken gutter. We sold most of the lead the year we built the bakehouse; exchanged bad stone for good metal, bread for the heart of the South Transept, the belly for the soul. We replaced the lead by clay and plaster mortar, but only lead lasts.
Sainte Marie-de-la-mer looks down with round expressionless eyes. Her other features are blunted with time; a huge stone woman, squatting effortfully as do the gypsies in childbirth. I can hear the sea borne across the flats and the cries of birds through the open door. Gulls, no doubt. There are no black birds here. I wonder if Mère Marie can see me now. I wonder if the saint hears my silent prayer.