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***
Panel Two: Cantigas de Santa Maria
Wayfarer, there is no way,
You make the way as you go …
Wayfarer, there is no way –
Only foam trails in the sea.
Antonio Machado (1875-1939)
And sometimes a grave traveller arrives,
Who passes like a flash of light through our hundred spirits
And, trembling, shows us a new technique.
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)
Song of the Brother
One
Long years were we together. Long years when we travelled as one body, a single form of many limbs. Ever did I ride at his side – swift across the plains or slow along a mellow stream or up a bony back of hillside, its crumbling track deep-sliced into the face of a cliff. All this we did together over long years, the fluid movement of our lonely shadow melting into shifting landscapes, lulled by the languor of the road. A single shadow, but not housing one mind or soul – for he led and I followed the track he laid. Wordless, our agreement, since the first, when I said I would stand by him. All those long years past, in an instant, the brief twinkling of an eye, I knew my destiny was bound to his. Till he found his rest, till he lay his head in a nest of peace. All this I knew from the first, and he too. Contract sealed by a faithful heart, I would his brother be.
I knew not what pulled him onward, forced his passage from the known to unknown. Our path held no meaning or logic and I wondered if he were guided, drawn, to this place or another by a voice, perhaps, a soft buzz in the ear. As dust rose in our wake over all the long years, I pondered the strange journey his inner guide led. And yes, at times thought to see the tug of an unseen hand at his breast, at times thought to witness with my waking eye the line it held, and his wince each time the hand tugged, pulled taut on a string hooked into his heart, which ripped and tore at his flesh.
It was his fate – to hear the unheard voice, to heed the unseen hand, to follow the line uncoiling before his dirty-heavy boots. His fate, and mine. I had said I would stand by him and so it would be. Till the line self-cut, till his place of rest found, till his bloody wound licked clean and healed.
Silent. Little would we speak, remarking only the minimum – the time of day or where to make camp, the state of provisions or what chance we had of work in the lands through which we passed. He would not beg. A pilgrim he may have become, but no beggar would he be.
There was a time when he imagined Santiago de Compostela the place of his pilgrimage and we followed roads north through Castile to meet the Camino way. Many we saw at their shuffling penance, shells about their necks to scoop a little ditch water or receive a crust of bread from a kindly maid. The lame and the poor, the sinners in chains, we passed them all on the road to Santiago.
Yet the closer we came, the more his head hung, the more his shoulders hunched. How far his fall since I had guided him over the passes, across the Vega, to bathe in warm waters but a day from the jewel in another’s crown with a boy’s grin on his face! Years had carved deep ruts in his visage, but nothing to the scars secreted on an innocent soul. And before we reached the walls of the holy city, the unseen hand wrenched him past.
He turned to me, shrugged within his dusty shroud of cloak and said: We shall make for the coast. Already I can smell salt on the air.
Ah, Galicia, you sea-lapped land of exile. On the shores of rocky coves, aboard the decks of fisher boats, the scent of salt became a taste on our skin, hair, pricking at eyes and burning cracked lips. We worked the ships which plied the coast with their sacks of flour and barrels of oil. At his labour, he always whistled a cantiga or hummed its refrain, or at times snatches of verse even left his tongue:
Carry me with all good speed
Away from this land’s demon
Heart, full of scorpions,
As my heart knows, being sore
From all their stinging poison ...
Alone, as a merchantman,
I’ll sail in search of a land
Where I know I can’t be stung
By black and vicious scorpions
Or by brightly coloured ones.
At song’s end his smile would be tranquil, a portion of his pain released, offered up to the wind and blown free like the foam atop waves which skip from crest to crest. But the stark light of day always receded. As soft moonlight bathed the sea and the sailors sang their night time laments of loves lost in depths won, he surrendered to melancholy like a ship becalmed:
Those who have never been in love
Can’t know the pain I feel, because
The pain of love makes one forget
All other pains, cruel and yet
As nothing next to the pain that exceeds
Even the deathly pain of sea.
A night came when I thought he would throw himself into the ink of infinity, there to drown his everlasting pain, end it for all time. But no, the unseen hand tugged, his heart cried aloud:
Damn the sea
That makes me grieve!
And heeding his guide, suffering to live, he went to the captain, asked we be put ashore. Said to me as land was sighted:
/> Come. Needs be we must ride on.
Two
Easy, to lose track of time and space on the road. No structure to the map we wrote, nothing bound us to landscapes through which we passed. Blurred, all these borders crossed, these rivers forded, each bearing names that we knew not.
My brother had no lust for the busyness of inns, their comings, goings and commerce transacted. We frequented monasteries whose brothers asked no questions of weary wayfarers, noting only the expression on a face, the look in an eye, as a mark of character. Early one summer we crossed the Pyrenees, slept on stone flags in a hall of French pilgrims who trod the path south toward Santiago.
One of their number asked our destination, what salvation we could possibly seek by a northerly route. My brother shrugged and turned back to his mead.
We shall know when we find it, I said.
The Frenchman jagged a thick slab of goat’s cheese with his knife and held it up before our eyes.
Heed this, he said. The cloud of unknowing is as dense as this cheese. Your knife must be sharp and your thrust into it hard. He grinned and took a bite. It is said you can pierce the cloud with the sharp knife of love. Only then God rewards your hunger.
We journeyed on, cut a course through Aquitaine, the midi-Pyrenees, crossed the gorges of the Ardeche and found the Isere where she joined the Rhone on its way to the sea, following her sweet waters upstream, pulled by his unseen hand deep into a valley on the western edge of the alpine chain.
Snow fell that October morn. Great heavy flocks which sought not to leave space but wafted in a no-breeze about our faces, onto our tongues. Only a few weeks before the passes would be covered and our path lost in the drifts of time. Without delay we sought refuge with the order of St Bruno, the silent ones, cradled in the Chartreuse massif. We knocked at the hermitage door and the prior, Brother Michel, heard our petition.
Yes, we could stay and work the fields with the lay brethren, sleep by their fire in return for our labours, he said. Yes, we could observe Sunday mass from beyond the choir gate, but must keep our voices hushed.
He did not advise continuing our journey till late the following spring. Our isolation is complete each winter, he said.
Everything echoed in that place. A closed door, a dropped plate, fingers trailed in a holy font – all boomed out their presence. I came to know the monks by the manner of their gait, the firm striders, the weary hobblers. Too infrequently could I look upon faces bowed in prayer or hooded by cloak. But later I knew those who worked the farmyard with us, tilling the land with a smile, a nod, a twinkling eye.
Soon enough I found my own peace in that place. Meditation-of-a-kind, simple tasks in service of the brothers, we harvested last crops from a fast-freezing ground, plucked fruit from low-laden trees, milked patient cows or frivolous goats, churned butter and ripened cheese.
Alas, sweeping the courtyard was not among my pleasures, a heavenly host of leaves which came, came and came again. Each day they found the cobwebbed corners of the yard, twirled and skated, lip-lifted on a coquette’s breeze. And my lament of same too audible for the quiet of this place.
A lay brother chuckled at my frustration, said: Think of these visitors of a wind ago as our friends who remind us to fruit the soil with their gift.
He was right, of course. I heaped multitudinous barrowloads of the crackly harvest to the garden. I tossed pungent dung-rich mulch with a long-handled fork, dug great wads of the mixture into fallow beds and prepared the soil for its long winter sleep. Soon enough these gifts of last wind had brought me healthful sweat and I rested on my hoe, wiped a gritty brow, till a small voice inside said:
Shhhh.
I stood quite still. A slim cloud trailed overhead, delivering up her soft load of snow. Crystal powder floated between heaven and earth, translucent glitter caught in the sun’s smile. Tiny discs of delight swirled about, buoyed by God’s breath, stilled for just a moment in the singular dance of Many with and of the One.
My brother came and stood beside me, his own work abandoned in the face of the sky. And said: This is one of those magical days God gifts us each now and then to remind us why we are alive.
I nodded. No answer was worthy of the moment but the fragment of scripture we both knew well:
I was a hidden treasure and wanted to be known. So created the world that I could be known.
Each Sunday we took our places beyond the choir to silently observe the order’s ritual. Bell rope pulled, candles lit, incense tossed and a ribbon of monks entered intoning the rites.
Glory to the Father, and to the Son,
And to the Holy Spirit.
As it was in the beginning,
Is now and will be forever. Amen.
My brother trembled beside me. Whether from heart strings tautened by the unseen hand or the white-knuckled resolve to surrender to His will, I could not tell.
God for us is refuge and strength
Ever at hand in time of distress.
On one such day as the season of Advent approached, he could not be drawn from the chapel at end. The monks departed, the candles were blown out, the lay brothers cleared away the vestiges of communion. But my brother’s lips still moved.
Some time later I found him outside the prior’s chamber, and followed him into the cloister yard where, beneath an apple tree, he confided his news.
I have asked to join the order, he said.
I was not especially surprised. Perhaps this is what he had sought all along, a sacred place in which to find solace from all that had been.
How long till you know? I asked.
He reached into the tree, plucked a fruit overlooked a month or more ago from a nook near its gnarled and knobbly trunk and bit deep into the chilled and sleeping flesh.
For some months I will be a postulant, he said. Come spring we will see if I am worthy to take the oath.
Then I will wait with you until spring.
You are my rock, he said and passed me the apple.
I saw little of him those months, a glimpse of a shaved head beneath a heavy hood, or a voice raised in song at chapel. Yet once a week, when the monks were permitted an hour of conversation, to wander the garden or beyond the farmyard wall, he sought me out to enjoin a brisk walk up toward the ridge where we had first caught sight of the hermitage nestled in her alpine meadow.
Bare and forbidding were her pastures now, grasses frost-burnt and the rubble slopes beneath cragged cliffs no longer softened by gentian, verbena or calendula. A few hardy pines stood sentinel to our passage now as we added stones to the cairn at the pass with a prayer for all wayfarers.
Here he sat, looking out across waves of mountain ridges stretched to the horizon, and told me of his apprenticeship. He used words like faith, hope and love to describe his learning, and smiled. The smile of one touched by God’s grace. I was at peace to see him thus. After snowmelt next spring I would journey on alone.
Long and hard, a winter in that place, crowding us in, smothering us in the belly of the peaks. Soon enough our brisk walks gave way to quiet murmurs beside a tepid stove and once Christmas passed, it seemed he entered a deeper space of private communion into which I could not intrude.
Shovelling metres of snow piled in vegetable beds kept me busy and as Easter approached, there was again warmth in the sun’s kiss. The mood of the lay brothers lifted as high as the ridges, but in such a state of thankful being, to hear of his collapse was a shock.
You must come! Brother Michel insisted. He has suffered a crisis of the soul. Perhaps your presence can soothe his fevered sorrow.
He lay upon a simple board in the infirmary, eyes wide, breath shallow, staring skyward.
I touched his hand. Brother, I whispered.
He gripped my wrist, turned haunted eyes toward me. What of the peace, the bliss I had seen not some months past?
Hoarse-throated, he said: He has left me, forsaken me. My sin is too great!
There was nothing I coul
d say. Nothing except the one Truth. It is no sin to love.
They gave him a draught, presently he slept, and Brother Michel drew me to the window to watch stars travel the night sky.
The kingdom of heaven is not lost if we do not see its light, he explained. The Cross remains steady even as the world turns. To suffer a dark night of the soul is not uncommon – we can stumble through fear. And fear leads us back into the halls of memory, where we remember sin and forget salvation.
I stayed with my brother all night to draw a cooling cloth across his brow and hush the fitful murmurs of his sleep. He had climbed, climbed to be near his God but had suddenly become afraid, and had stumbled, fallen. The unseen hand had tugged this time, up, up, up, but he had lost his balance and fallen from void into void.
Oh, how I wept! My own heart ached with his pain, but all I had left was prayer. Prayer, dear God, that he would return from the abyss. So I could stand at his side once more.
Dawn approached, he settled at last, and I sought my own bed till the sun blinked midmorning beneath closed eyes to beckon me out into a melting world. Taking a wicker basket onto my back, I set off to prune the orchard in the meadow beneath the farmyard wall, all the while praying for the soul of my brother.
Several fine days I worked in this antechamber of Eden before Brother Michel came, my prayers answered, and next morning we congregated in his postulant cell. My brother knelt before the prior while I sat at the small table beside his cupboard bed. In the shadow-filled half-light of a cloud-heavy day he was little more than a grainy bare-headed apparition of fists clenched beneath a clean-shaven chin.
In our order, Brother Michel began, God commands that we leave everything behind and follow him. Even speech, even words.
I have no truck with words, my brother answered, and verily could I taste the bitterness of his pill.
In silence, we move beyond words to a space where nothing dwells, Brother Michel said. No thought or language, only a feeling uprisen from the heart of the fullness of God’s love. Our order is the most contemplative of all holy orders. And perhaps that is too contemplative for you.