The Priest's Madonna (29 page)

She had held this belief long before her son was born, and though she had seen doctors and priests, no one could convince her of the impossibility of such a thing. According to her fervid imagination, her family had descended from the Merovingian kings, who had, in turn, descended from the man they eventually claimed as their messiah. And the female progenitor of this line, according to Jeanne Catherine, was Marie Madeleine, the bride of Christ.

“Apparently, the other members of her family found Jeanne Catherine’s notions pleasantly ludicrous. They called her eccentric, imaginative. And the delusion might have remained a benign fantasy had she not given birth to a son.”

When her son was born, Madame continued, Jeanne Catherine believed him to be the reincarnated Christ. She celebrated his birth as the Second Coming. Upon his death—he was thrown from a horse when it reared and then trampled beneath its feet—she lost all hope, all semblance of sanity. She spent nights scrabbling at the graveyard dirt, trying to unearth her son’s body. “He’s suffocating!” she cried to the silent dark, for she was certain he would be resurrected, and would wake trapped in his coffin. She broke fingers with her frantic digging, disturbed the villagers with her wails, and grew ill from so many nights without sleep. Finally, hoping to cure his wife, her husband reinterred the child in the tomb beneath the church and then ordered it sealed.

Jeanne Catherine’s condition only worsened. She grew incoherent, sometimes speaking in a babble that she claimed was Aramaic. She began to confuse herself with Marie Madeleine, insisting that she had to get to the tomb, that the Lord was waiting for her there. Her husband locked her in the castle. He escaped to Toulouse, where he had many business interests, but he left his daughter, Anne Marie, with strict instructions not to allow her mother to leave the castle. Anne Marie followed his instructions to an even greater degree than he had intended, for she never left the castle either, even after her mother’s death. She died unmarried, leaving behind a vast library.

I was quiet, my fingers pressing the cold dirt of Jeanne Catherine’s grave. The story, though outrageous, seemed to corroborate what I already knew. “So all those books?” I asked. “They weren’t your father’s?”

“Some were. But most were Anne Marie’s,” Madame admitted. “The previous owners kept the library intact, and passed it on to us.”

“But how did he know all of this? Did he know Jeanne Catherine or Anne Marie?”

“He never met them, no. But he corresponded with Anne Marie. He was sorry for the division in our family, and wrote to her in an effort to heal it. Anne Marie wrote back, intrigued by the fact that he was a scholar.”

I nodded, growing accustomed to the new information.

“My curiosity about Jeanne Catherine took on a new urgency after my father’s death. The claims she made possessed me, the possibility of their truth. Understand, Marie, that in my mind Jesus was not God, but a man—a great man, a charismatic rabbi, but a man nonetheless. And why not a father? All the Jewish men I knew, including our own rabbi, were fathers, were even commanded to be fruitful by God. Why not Jesus? Of course the task of tracing his lineage, if it existed, through two thousand years was unwieldly to say the least, if not altogether impossible. But my grief blinded me to practicalities. I wanted revenge. If the bigots who killed my father could learn that they had killed a descendant of the very man they worshipped … I came to Rennes-le-Château with revenge on my mind.”

She continued, faster now, apparently finding some relief in the telling of her story. “I learned all I could when I first arrived, diving into Anne Marie’s library, reading histories and genealogies, listening to legends from the oldest residents of the village. They were the ones who told me about the Cathars, the Visigoths, the Merovingians, and the network of caves that I never succeeded in finding. I tried to convince the priest at the time to reopen the tomb, but he would have none of my stories. He was suspicious of me. Everyone was. Philippe humored me at first, but as I pressed on he grew more distant, more inclined toward the villagers’ point of view. They all assumed I was following the same road to madness as my ancestors.”

“But what did you think finding the tomb would prove?” I asked. “You didn’t know about the book.”

Madame nodded. “What, indeed? I might have found the casket of Jeanne Catherine’s son. But that would prove nothing. It
was
madness, Marie. I was descending into madness. I had begun to have recurring dreams of a child traveling through tunnels, transported on the back of a galloping horse. This child, I imagined, was my ancient ancestor, the ancestor of my father’s great-aunt, the child of Jesus and Marie Madeleine.”

A new light suddenly cast its brightness on us from above. We looked up: candles had been lit in the church. Madame looked frightened.

“Please,” I whispered. “We still have time. It’s just Monsieur
le curé,
preparing for the Mass.”

She hesitated, listening for any threatening sounds. Then she went on. “My reasoning, you must understand, Marie, had become very confused. I was convinced that that child had traveled with her mother from the shores of ancient Israel to Gaul. And then, that she—for I imagined the child to be female—had been separated from her mother, taken away and given a new name, for her own safety. In my increasing delusion, I came to believe that the girl had been brought here, through the network of underground passageways, to Rennes-le-Château.

“If I could find the passageway, then I might find evidence of the child’s existence, though what that evidence might be, I could not say. It was madness, all of it, and yet the images—the child on the back of that horse, the close grit of the tunnels—had so captured my imagination that I could not rid my mind of them.”

How my sketch must have startled her! I felt a pang of guilt.

She went on. “My marriage began to deteriorate. Philippe wanted children but I was too frightened. I feared a child might cause me to lose my mind utterly. There were days, Marie, whole days that I spent as if I were Jeanne Catherine herself, living in the mental world I had imagined for her: trying to reshape the past through her eyes. I pored over my books, piecing together the information I found in the genealogies, histories, and legends, struggling to make her claim true, struggling for proof. But I came up with nothing, other than what I could imagine. Only a vast despair that seemed to swallow me up every time I took a breath.”

“Oh, Madame,” I began, wanting to say too much at once. I marveled at her strength, to have survived such an ordeal, and to be here, in this shit-strewn cemetery at midnight, telling it to me. And the story! How appealing, to imagine that our village might have been the haven for such a child—even to imagine that such a child might have lived! What a world might be born if such a thing were true! And yet how fanciful and unlikely, and how impossible to prove.

She continued. “I decided, once and for all, to reject it. To put it out of my mind. I read. I gardened, I traveled a bit—I did what I could to distract myself. When I met you, Marie, I was glad, for I saw in you a friend. Another curious mind.”

“Me, too,” I said. “I was glad, too.”

“I think I even imagined I might someday be able to relate to you all of this—all that I am telling you now, and together we could put it aside, relegate it to where it belonged: to the realm of curiosity and imagination, perhaps, of things to wonder over, instead of where it had forced itself: into a position of charioteer, the rein-holder of my mind.

“But,” she said, with a deep sigh, “when you came to me with your sketch, I became very afraid. I could not help but think of it as proof of Jeanne Catherine’s tale. I felt myself spiraling once more into my terrifying obsession. So I fled—I went back to Paris, where my mother was. I begged her to take me in. She had never forgiven me for abandoning her and for marrying Philippe, but seeing my desperation, she relented. A blessing.”

“Oh. Yes,” I said. I was still too stunned to formulate a response. “And your aunt?” I asked tentatively.

“An excuse,” she said. “She died many years ago.”

She smiled graciously at me, but I was mortified. “Dear Madame, what pain I caused you. Forgive me.”

“You couldn’t have known, Marie. I don’t blame you.”

I managed a weak smile. Then in the same instant we both remembered what had brought her back to Rennes-le-Château.

“And then Philippe,” she said miserably, and began to weep. “Oh, Marie. What a mess I’ve made. What a horrible, horrible mess.”

“You haven’t made it,” I said, taking her hand. We stood and stumbled into an awkward embrace.

“We get so stuck, don’t we? We think we’re pioneering, blazing a trail, but in fact, we’re just lurching down the path that’s already been chosen for us. All we can do is put one foot in front of the other.”

I did not know how to answer that, so instead I let her weep in my arms, her thin frame shaking with each sob. I held her fast, as if I could tether her to the earth, keep her from floating upward into the ether of her grief.

The sound of voices startled us. Madame blew out the lantern and we stood listening, the cemetery illuminated only by the church candlelight. People were gathering for midnight Mass. We moved away from each other, embarrassed suddenly by the force of our emotions. I thought of my family and of Bérenger: they would be wondering where I was.

I moved toward the cemetery entrance. Madame did not follow. She was near the stone wall, fingering one of the woody vines.

“I don’t want to be seen,” she said.

The church bell tolled, making my heart leap.

As I watched, she hoisted herself up the wall, using the vine as her support. Arm over arm, lithe as a child she climbed, planting her feet against the stones, until, remarkably, she reached the top. She looked down at me from her height. Her face shone like a pale moon among the trees. “Good-bye, Marie,” she said.

“Madame!” I called out, suddenly afraid of losing her. “I’ll come visit in the morning.”

“No, Marie, thank you. It’s Christmas. You’ll have presents to open, your family to be with. Don’t worry, please. It’s done me a great deal of good, our conversation, seeing that stone. I’ll be fine.”

“Well—I’ll find the book, then,” I promised fiercely. “I’ll find it and bring it to you.”

But she gave no response, only slipped over the edge of the wall as quick as rainfall. I heard the thump when she reached the ground, a gentle rustle of leaves, and then silence.

It was a place to sing about, a word that left the mouth humming. Its name was a paradise for the tongue and breath.
Yerushalayim. Peace be within your walls, and security within your towers!

Miryam had visited every year at Pesach. They walked for a week, her father and uncles, her grandmother, mother and sisters, staying overnight in inns or the homes of welcoming strangers. The city’s visage changed as they approached: from a small tawny settlement in the bowl made by the surrounding hills to a glowing fortress glittering with marble palaces and the glorious Temple itself, rising above them as they climbed out of the valley to its gates. The gates themselves seemed to soar above her, as if they truly opened onto holiness—if she only kept her eyes upward, on the stone. For once she let her gaze fall to their feet, she saw misery thronging: the lame and legless, sitting on woven reed mats caked with mud and waste, the blind with their groping hands, the emaciated women clutching cow-eyed babies, the swollen-bellied children who sat listless in the dust. Once, she had asked her mother for a dinar to give, but when she turned toward the group, the beggars came alive, howling, shuffling, writhing like a basket of snakes as they reached for the coin. She ran back and hid her face in her mother’s legs, coin still in hand.

Above all, there were the smells. The acrid smoke from the perpetual fires of Ge Hinnom—where humans were said to have been sacrificed in ancient times—and which now were stoked with dog carcasses and the city’s rubbish. The animal scents in the market squares, where goats, oxen, pigeons, and sheep bleated, lowed, and cooed imploringly, and at the Sheep Gate, where the people brought their lambs for the sacrifice. The grease from the ovens, and, on the Day of Preparation, the stink of the fresh blood and offal that ran from the Temple to redden the ravines bordering the city. On that day, the Temple sent forth the thick odors of burning entrails and incense, while every home in the city smelled sublimely of roasting lamb, seasoned with marjoram and thyme.

Yerushalayim was where she saw Roman legionaries mounted on horseback for the first time, wearing their formidable cuirasses and red cloaks, their absurdly plumed helmets. And it was in Yerushalayim where she had glimpsed a criminal dragging the heavy beams of a cross through the streets, being prodded forward by soldiers as he made his final march toward the terrible hill of Gulgulta, the place of the skull.

That was the place where men were put to death. Children in Yerushalayim spoke of it—they threatened to “nail each other up,” or ordered their playtime enemies to spread their arms. Some bragged to have even seen the hill itself, the hanging bodies. Miryam had never seen it; her parents forbade her from venturing near that section of the city, which lay just outside the western gates. She had learned from the other children that the vultures pecked at the eyes of the dying men, and that dogs gathered at their feet to lick their blood as it dripped. Death came finally as a result of a protracted, agonizing suffocation.

But Yerushalayim was a place of extremes. Balanced against the horror of Gulgulta was the glorious splendor of the Temple. Soaring above the city on its hill, flanked by stone walls and terraces of olive and fig trees, its marble sparkled against the limestone like a diadem, and its cedar porticoes—where sacrificial animals could be bought and currency of all kinds could be exchanged—perched fastidiously above the thronging courts. Upon arriving in Yerushalayim, her family always went first to the Temple—not to enter the sanctuary, for to do that they first had to purify themselves, but just to see it. The fifteen speckled steps leading from the Court of the Gentiles to the sanctuary, the lofty colonnades that rose above the steps, enclosing first the women’s court, then the men’s court, and finally, beneath the tallest colonnade of all, the priest’s court, where the sacrifices were performed. Then, above that, there was the holy of holies, God’s dwelling place on earth, where only the high priest was allowed to set foot, and where he placed the daily incense offering. Moved to tears every year by the sight of it, her father prostrated himself, kissed the dusty ground before it, and sang the famous verses in his tremulous voice: