The Book of Shadows (55 page)

There then recommenced that game of comparison that I, spurred by the succubus, had begun in the bath with Roméo. In Avignon, blessedly, there'd be no disruption.

Most marked in my memory is the weight of her breasts, so much fuller than mine. And the curve of her hips, so much more pronounced. But in truth, it was she who set to work with diligence, and without embarrassment—and she told me all she learned: “Ah, but it feels adequately deep and…and you've been with a man, haven't you? I can tell.” There is intimacy, yes; but then there's
intimacy
—which is to say I did not tell Arlesienne about Father Louis and the night he'd come to me. Rather, writhing beneath and before and behind her, doing what I was told, I let her work on. “And this little devil is not little at all. I tell you because it's the question every man asks, and I suppose you're no different in
that
way.” She asked if I was dry. “Do you bleed?” came the question a second time. And when finally I understood, I said, “Yes. On occasion. But not with what I understand to be regularity.” This she thought interesting, but she said nothing more; instead, she lowered her mouth to my…offerings, and took them as a connoisseur would.

“Lucky, indeed,” mused she as we lay, some time later, spent, in that narrow bed. I had so many questions to ask, so many things to say…and so I spoke not a word. Already I was recollecting events just passed, acts committed by and upon me. All I did manage to say—I admit it—is that I wanted more. “Perhaps some other time,” laughed a tired Arlesienne, adding, “What you are, primarily, my friend, is young; and I am exhausted.” She stood. She asked for my help in retrieving her clothes from the four corners of the room. She asked me to help her dress, and that was
not
the least erotic moment I spent in her company.

Finally, I followed her to the door, and there we stood, she dressed and me not. “Hear this,” said she, fixing my gaze, “I find you beautiful. I do.” I thanked her, for I believed her. And then, one hand on the door's latch, the other extended, palm up, she added, “And my advice to you is this: never do for free what it is you do best.” I invited her to help herself to my money, and I cannot say how much she took. I will say only that I valued the lessons learned from Arlesienne far more than the coin they cost me.

At parting, I asked if I might see her again. “
Hélas,
no,” said she. “I leave at dawn, or earlier, if
les acteurs,
whom I am due soon to meet, dissuade me from sleep altogether.” And with a final kiss and the twin wishes of
“bonne chance”
and
“courage,”
Arlesienne left me.

From the window, I watched her. And glad I was when she turned to…No. It was not a wave she offered, not at first, but rather a salute of strength—a raised and clenched fist, teamed with the warmest of smiles. And then, only then, the gentlest of waves.

The last thing I remember of that night is looking down through the wavering glass of my second-story window, toward the square into which Arlesienne had disappeared, out over the full river, up the broad dark mass of the Palace; and up at the faintest of moons, wondering what powers it might possess and hoping—hope which I expressed aloud, in a godless prayer—that those powers might augment mine when finally we arrived at the crossroads. I did not sleep well, for I dreamed wakefully of Arlesienne.

The seventh day, the day of the deed, dawned sunny and bright.

I woke early, determined to see the sights. Surely we were near enough the crossroads that I could spend some time exploring? (In truth, I wanted to return to the café, wanted not so much to start a new day as to resume the night.) Apparently, it had rained quite heavily while I'd slept, and my hostess, at breakfast, upon learning of my intention to explore a bit, asked flatly, rudely, if I'd never seen mud before. Mud was all I was likely to see around Avignon, said she, as the river had risen in the night to meet the falling rain. (“The devil Rhône!” exclaimed she.) “Nevertheless,” said I, “I shall have a walk,” and at this she let go a snort and set three soft-boiled eggs before me.

The mountains of the Ardèche were sending torrents down their slopes to further raise the levels of the Rhône and its tributaries. I would learn from a traveler, present at breakfast, that river water had risen to the base of the city walls of nearby Vaucluse, where the quay was completely obscured and the surrounding country seemed but a vast lake of molten silver. Avignon, even after the night's rain, had fared a bit better. I could and did explore its streets, finding only the minority impassable.

Of course, I headed straight to the café. Waiters shoveled sand onto the rain-slickened pavers of the
terrasse
. In a corner, bent over a copy of
Le monde illustré,
sat a woman who was not Arlesienne. And though I took every turn in the expectation of suddenly seeing her before me—this despite what she'd told me of her plans—Arlesienne did not appear, and the sights of Avignon suffered her absence.

Indeed, I don't have many observations worth recording here, which is not to demean the place, but rather to attest to my distraction, which was extreme…. Finally, the day had come. The day of the deed. We were quite near the crossroads now and that very night the new moon would rise.

Among all that water—the risen water, the
worry
of water—it was my mind that skipped like a stone from thought to thought to thought. Arlesienne, of course, and lessons newly learned, but also…Well, I knew nothing of sailing, had never even been on a boat; yet soon I would take to the ocean. I was scared by all I'd read in novels of port cities and the nature of sailors. To me every sailor was a pirate. Surely I'd never pass among them as a man.

I was concerned most, that early morning in Avignon, about my practice of the Craft.

With these and other worries crowding my mind, I took to the still-empty streets and the role of tourist, which I'd play as best I could.

By the light of day the Palace was…was less impressive. Bald, plain, ugly, and so simply
defensive;
and built on a fourteenth-century platform of “principles that have not commended themselves to the esteem of posterity,” as an Englishman, well-met in the shadows, put it. Indeed, what I remember most vividly of that, my matutinal visit to the Palace, is the Englishman, for with him I spoke English for the first time outside of a classroom or the privacy of my mind.

Indeed, from that morning in Avignon, much of what I'd see in the South took on a funereal cast, seemed but the deadened marriage of rock and ruin…. This, perhaps, is owing to the nature of our impending mission…. Funereal, indeed.

…I proceeded to cross the river and walk on for some while, muddy up to the knee, into Villeneuve-les-Avignon. Not much to commend that place either—again, the fault is mine—save for the huge round towers of its citadel and its long broken stretches of wall. Farther from the river, the place came to seem half-populated—and
that
half of the population comprised children, old women, and dogs lazing in the early sun. There were no streets to speak of. The unattractive houses seemed to have fallen here and there; they lay scattered about, crooked on the uneven ground, like the shriveled pits of fruits fallen from the vine, lifeless and hard. Lest I sound too harsh, let me add that as I walked through that place I saw beyond it an unflooded field of lavender, which cheered both Villeneuve and myself.

Crossing the river again, I encountered a flock of nuns in gray robes and red capes. They moved in procession. Each smiled at me in her turn, and those smiles—had I not been so anxious—might have been enough to render me melancholy for what remained of the day.

Back in Avignon before midday, I hired a much more agile conveyance and paid its driver well to take me out into the surrounding countryside. We headed into watery Vaucluse—I had to insist, and come up with more coin; I had also to suffer the constant sighing of my driver, whom I did not like, and who opined at one point that what I needed was not a driver but a gondolier.

Eventually we achieved higher ground, and I saw about me the famed landscape of Provence. It was odd to have risen from the sodden, if not flooded lowlands to this arid landscape, lacking the tall trees and hedgerows I'd known all my life. Here there bloomed only heath and scattered, scented shrubs, an occasional stand of cypress in the distance; and everything, including the almost painfully stunted, gnarled olive trees seemed to hunker low to the ground, as if crouched in fear of the sun or the sea or the coming mistral. Everywhere there rose up huge outcroppings of rock.

I had the driver stop and I stepped down from the two-wheeled rig that, behind a horse of suspect fitness, had carried me up, up to higher and drier ground. The driver seemed content to sit back, tip his hat against the lemony light of early afternoon, and wait for sleep to overtake him, which I've no doubt it quickly did. As for the old nag, well, it seemed a kindness on my part to let it stand still—and I hoped it would be standing,
still,
upon my return. I walked off, intent on exploring a bit on foot.

I walked in my new and ruined boots, soaked through, the drying mud like cake on the leather, over the uneven terrain, the gray-green slopes of stone and shrub.

I finally found myself in a sort of hollow, a sun-flooded dale. I sat beneath an olive tree, the branches fanning just overhead, and removed my boots. I lay back and listened to the silence, which ceded first to the close hum of bees and then, farther off, the whistling of an unseen shepherd and the bleating of his sheep. What a sweet lullaby it seemed.

And, nestled in a hillside hollow in Provence, on a late summer afternoon, recumbent under the shade-giving branches of an ancient olive tree, I wanted to sleep—for neither the night with Arlesienne nor the whole way south had been restful—but I could not. I did, however, lose myself, in thought if not sleep. I took to staring at one particular white rock, larger than those around it, one side of which seemed sculpted by wind, by rain, by sun, and by Time, and my thoughts soon veered off in a particular direction.

That rock reminded me of something I'd seen. A church. A church quickly visited, somewhere, as I'd made my way confusedly south. I'm almost,
almost
certain that it was the cathedral at Bourges that came to mind; I cannot swear to it. I was suffering a
confusion
of cathedrals. What I remembered then, on that hillside, the scents of thyme and rosemary released by the bruising hooves of those distant sheep, was this:

A tympanum I'd seen at a certain cathedral—I'd stood under it for some time, staring up at its arched, sculpted surface where it spread over the cathedral doors. I stood staring up as tourists and pilgrims and the everyday faithful of that city—again, I
think
it was Bourges; but it may have been Tours, where Madeleine startled me so—the faithful moved around me, into and out of the cathedral through three huge sets of wooden doors. I stood as still as those statues nestled into niches carved along the cathedral's inner walls. It struck me, that particular frieze.

Yes, I'd stood staring up a long while at that sculpted work—but only days later, hillside in Provence, the next moon the
new
moon…only then did I
understand
what it was I'd seen carved into that pale stone.

What I saw—as clearly as a stain spreading over that whiteness, rising up as sure as the river water—was a tympanum as wide as the outstretched arms of five men; at its arched center it stood as tall as two men. It depicted, simply, the battle for a single soul. But in its art there lay much, much more.

In my memory there are three bands of imagery: a center strip across the whole depicts a stern Christ with outstretched arms standing in Judgment; above Him an angel band whirls about; beneath Him, in a roiling mass, writhe the faithless and demonic.

The angels were winged, with sweet human faces. The lower band of the tympanum was crowded with men and beasts of the medievalists—indeed, most of the beings depicted were horrible hybrids, contorting in the flames to which the Judge of the Quick and the Dead had recently condemned them. (The sculpture seems a thing alive to me now, not static at all.) Among the damned I could discern representatives of the “faithless” races of man: Hebrews, Cappadocians, Arabs, Indians, Phrygians, Byzantines, Armenians, Scythians, Romans…all of them in stereotypical dress, and so easily identified. (There were others I did not know, of course.) Of greater interest, though, were the carved inhabitants of the medievals' imagined,
lower
worlds, their greater damnation evident in their consignment to the region beneath the faithless men, beneath the rings of flame. Here were centaurs: men to the navel, at which point they devolve into asses; Scylla, or women marked by the features of wolves, of she-bears, of dolphins; single-legged men all covered in hair; Cyclopses; Pygmies; men without mouths; headless beings with eyes on either shoulder and mouths atop their hearts; women with cows' tails and cloven feet and lips at the tips of their breasts. But what interested me most was the middle panel, the one wherein Christ was depicted at work, in Judgment.

On either side of the standing Christ—his arms outstretched, as though He
casts
souls this way and that—there were ranged three angels, each holding an instrument of the Passion. It was the angel nearest Christ who held a scale, lest the dim among the Faithful not understand the scene depicted. In powdery, cloud-like plumes, undetailed, the “good” were seen ascending en masse, a single swirling soul. Others descended into tall flames. But there, there at the center of the scene, kneeling between Christ and the angel holding the scale—…yes, there knelt a girl, her hands folded contritely, as if to attest to her powerlessness. Her face was beautiful, though without expression. It was clear: she awaited Judgment. And from behind Christ's stony robe there peered a lesser devil—horned head, hooked nose, with one hairy goat's leg creeping forth—intent on securing the girl's soul for Satan.