Storm Glass (16 page)

“Possibly … but maybe it was just an excuse. Maybe he really
didn’t
want to see her. The poor girl … she was in love with him, I expect. He was probably God to her.”

“Maybe
he
was in love with
her
… did that ever occur to you? Maybe that’s why he stayed away.” Her husband glances down
to the end of the room. “Look who’s Coming,” he says. “Our desk clerk is not only a gardener and a priest, he is also a waiter.”

The next afternoon Clara decides she will not visit the basilica after all. She would rather read in the rose garden than gaze at frescos.

“Later,” she tells her husband. “You check it out, tell me about it.”

Postcard views and skies are outside the walls of the hotel as usual, and now the closer, more exaggerated colours of the roses. It is hotter than the previous day so the priest has abandoned his collar. Clara notices that he has a perfect mole situated right in the centre of his throat. A sort of natural stigmata, she decides.

The chapter entitled “The Door of the Dead” fascinates her. She is reading it for the fourth time. It seems that the ancient houses in Assisi often had two doors; a large one through which the family normally came and went, and a smaller one, elevated above the ground, through which the dead were passed, feet first in their coffins. Chiara, on the night she went to meet Francis in the woods, decided to leave the house through the second door.
She wanted to get away secretly
, the book states,
and she was absolutely sure she would meet no one on the threshold of that door
. With the help of a minor miracle on God’s part she was able to slide bolts and move hinges that had been rusted in position for fifteen years. Then she jumped lightly to the ground and ran out of the village.
Never again would she be able to return to her family
, the chapter concludes,
Chiara was dead. Chiara was lost. Chiara had passed over into another life
.

Clara wonders if the priest, who is working directly in front
of her, has also passed over into another life, and whether, if this is so, the roses look redder to him than they do to her. Whether he lives a sort of
Through the Looking Glass
existence.

She adjusts the angle of her chair. He is working close enough now that their shadows almost touch. A vague sadness stirs near Clara’s heart, stops, then moves again. Restless lava shifting somewhere in the centre of a mountain.

Her husband has decided that they will stay at Hotel Oasie for the remainder of their vacation. He likes it there. He likes Assisi. He is moved by all of it; as much, he says, by the electrified confessionals in the basilica as by the Giottos. He claims that the former are like the washrooms on a jumbo jet in that they have automatic
occupied
and
vacant
signs that are lighted from behind. He is amazed, he continues, at how easily the Italians have adapted their highly superstitious religion to modern technology … the lighted tombs, the electric candles in front of religious statues, the
occupied
signs. This amuses and pleases him. He will write a sociological paper on it when they return to North America.

She isn’t listening to him very carefully because she has fallen in love, just like that, bang, with the gardener, waiter, desk clerk, priest. She has, by now, spent four long afternoons with him in the rose garden and he has never once looked her way. Unless, she speculates, he looks her way when she is absorbed in
The Little Flowers of Santa Chiara
, which is possible. On the third afternoon she made up a little rule for herself that she would not lift her eyes from the book until a chapter was completely finished. In that way she has balanced her activities. Ten minutes of reading followed by ten minutes of studying the
priest. This means, of course, that he is never in the same location after she finishes reading “The Door of the Dead” as he was after she finished reading, say, “A Kiss For the Servant.” She is then forced to look around for him which makes the activity more intriguing. One afternoon, after finishing the chapter called “Infirmity and Suffering,” she looked up and around and discovered that he had disappeared completely, simply slipped away while she was reading. Almost every other time, though, she is able to watch him collect his tools, place them in the wheelbarrow and walk towards the potting shed. And this makes her grieve a little, as one often does when a lengthy ritual has been appropriately completed.

“Did you know,” she asks her husband angrily at dinner, “Did you know that he wouldn’t even let her come to see him when he was
dying?
I mean, isn’t that taking it a bit too far? The man was dying and she asked if she could see him and he said no … not until I’m
dead.”

The priestly waiter serves the pasta. Clara watches his brown left hand approach the table and withdraw.
“Scusi,”
he says as he places the dish in front of her. She cannot accuse him of never speaking to her. He has said
Scusi
in her presence now a total of seventeen times and once, when a meal was over, he looked directly into her eyes and had asked, “You feeneesh?”

Now she stabs her fork deliberately into the flesh of the ravioli. “Moreover,” she continues, “that little book I am reading has next to nothing to do with Chiara … mostly it’s about Francis … until he dies, of course … then it’s about her dying.” Forgetting to chew, Clara swallows the little piece of pasta whole.

“Well,” says her husband, “at least Giotto included her in some of the frescos.”

“Hmm,” she replies, unimpressed.

Clara gazes at the priest and her heart turns soft. He is staring absently into space. Imagining miracles, she decides, waiting out the dinner hour so that he can return to his quiet activities. Evening mass, midnight mass. Lighting candles, saying prayers. Does he make them up or follow rituals? Are there beads involved? Does he kneel before male or female saints? Any of this information would be important to her. Still, she would never dare enter the church she has discovered at the end of the hall. In fact, with the exception of the basilica with its electrified confessionals and famous frescos, she has not dared to open the door of any church in town. They are spaces that are closed to her and she knows it.

“Have you ever felt that a church was closed to you?” she asks her husband.

“Of course not,” he answers. “After all, they are not only religious institutions … they are great public monuments, great works of art. They are open to all of us.”

Clara sighs and turns her eyes, once again, to the priest. The way he is carrying the crockery back to the kitchen, as if it were a collection of religious artifacts he has recently blessed, almost breaks her heart.

It is her fifth afternoon in the rose garden. He is there too, of course, pinning roses onto stakes. “Crucifying them perhaps,” she thinks vaguely, lovingly.

By now she knows that this man will never
ever
respond to her, never
ever
speak to her; not in his language or hers—except
at meal time when it is absolutely necessary. Because of this, the sadness of this, she loves him even harder. It is this continuous rejection that sets him apart. Rejection without object, without malice, a kind of healing rejection; one that causes a cleansing ache.

The ache washes over her now as she watches him stand back to survey his labours. She loves the way he just stands there looking, completely ignoring her. She is of absolutely no consequence in the story of his life, none whatsoever, and she loves him for this. She has no desire for change; no mediaeval fantasies about being the rose that he fumbles with, the saint that he prays to. She wants him just as he is, oblivious to her, causing her to ache, causing her to understand the true dimensions of hopelessness, how they are infinite.

She turns to the chapter in the book called “The Papal Bull.” This is an oddly political section and her least favourite. It concerns the legitimization of the various Franciscan orders including Santa Chiara’s Poor Sisters; the legitimization of lives of chosen self-denial. At this point Clara is finding it difficult to concentrate on what the Pope had to say, finds it difficult to care whether it was legitimate or not.

She is surprised, when she allows herself to look up, to find the priest’s gaze aimed in her direction. She prepares to be embarrassed until she realized that he is, at last, reading the title of her book.

“She wanted words from him,” Clara tells her husband later. “Words, you know, spiritual advice. You know what she got instead?”

“What?”

“She got a circle of ashes … a circle of goddamn ashes! The book tries to make this seem profound … the usual, he put a circle of ashes on the convent floor to demonstrate that all humans were merely dust or some such nonsense. You know what I think it meant? I think it meant that regardless of what Chiara wanted from him, regardless of how bad she might have wanted it, regardless of whether or not she ever swallowed a single morsel of food, or wore hair shirts, or humiliated herself in any number of ways, regardless of what she did, all she was
ever
going to get from him was a circle of ashes. I think it meant that she was entirely powerless and he was going to make damn certain that she stayed that way.”

“Quite a theory. I doubt the church would approve.”

“God, how she must have suffered!”

“Well,” he replies, “wasn’t that what she was supposed to do?”

In the middle of her seventh afternoon in the rose garden, after she has finished reading a chapter entitled “The Canticle of the Creatures” (which she practically knows now by heart), and while she is studying the gestures of the priest who has moved from roses to vegetables, Clara decides that her heart is permanently broken. How long, she wonders, has it been this way? And why did it take this priest, this silent man who thinks and prays in a foreign language, to point it out to her? This is not a new disease, she knows suddenly. It’s been there for a long, long time; a handicap she had managed to live with somehow, by completely ignoring it. How strange. Not to feel that pain that is always there, by never identifying it, never naming it. Now she examines the wound and it burns in the centre of her chest the way her mother’s mustard plasters used to, the way molten lava
must have in the middle of Vesuvius. Her broken heart has burned inside her for so long she assumed it was normal. Now the pain of it moves into her whole body; past the pulse at her wrists, down the fronts of her thighs, up into her throat. Then it moves from there out into the landscape she can see from the garden, covering all of it, every detail; each grey, green olive leaf, each electric candle in front of each small pathetic tomb, every bird, all of the churches she can never enter, poppies shouting in a distant field, this terrible swath of blue sky overhead, the few pebbles that cover the small area of terrace at her feet. And all the air that moves up and down her throat until she is literally gasping in pain.

Pure eruption. Shards of her broken heart are everywhere, moving through her bloodstream, lacerating her internally on their voyage from the inside out into the landscape, until every sense is raw. She can actually see the sound waves that are moving in front of her. She wonders if she has begun to shout but then gradually, gradually isolated sound dissolves into meaning as her brain begins its voyage back into the inside of her skull.

“Meesus,” the priest is saying, pointing to her book. “She is still here, Santa Chiara. You go see her … you go to Chiesa Santa Chiara … you go there and you see her.”

Then he collects his gardening tools, places them in his wheelbarrow, and walks purposefully away.

She goes alone, of course, two days later when she feels better and when she knows for sure they will be leaving Assisi the following morning. She is no longer in love with the priest; he has become what he always was, a small brown Italian busy with kitchen, clerical and gardening tools. The heartbreak, however,
which preceded and will follow him is still with her, recognized now and accepted as she stands across the road from the Church of Santa Chiara watching a small cat walk on top of its shadow in the noonday sun.

Inside the door total darkness for a while, followed by a gradual adjustment of the eyes to dark inscrutable paintings and draped altars and the slow movements of two nuns who are walking towards the front of the church. She follows them, unsure now how to make her request and then, suddenly, the request is unnecessary. There, boom, illuminated by the ever present electricity, is the saint, laid out for all to see in her glass coffin. “She is, you see,” one of the nuns explains, “incorruptible. She is here seven hundred years and she does not decay because she is holy.”

Clara moves closer to see the dead woman’s face, now glowing under the harsh twentieth-century light, and there, as she expects, is the pain. Frozen on Chiara’s face the terrifying, wonderful pain; permanent, incorruptible, unable to decay. The dead mouth is open, shouting pain silently up to the electricity, past the glass, into the empty cave of the church, out into the landscape, up the street to the basilica where images of the live Chiara appear, deceitfully serene, in the frescos. It is the heartbreak that is durable, Clara thinks to herself, experiencing the shock of total recognition. Everything else will fade away. No wonder the saint didn’t decay. A flutter of something sharp and cutting in Clara’s own bloodstream and then she turns away.

Before she steps out into the street again she buys a postcard from one of the nuns. Santa Chiara in her glass coffin, as permanent as a figure from Pompeii in her unending, incorruptible anguish.

Clara places the card in an inside pocket of her handbag. There it will stay through the long plane ride home while her husband makes jokes about the washrooms resembling Italian confessionals. It will stay there and she will clutch the leather close to her broken heart; clutch the image of the dead woman’s mouth. The permanent pain that moves past the postcard booth into the colours of the Italian landscape.