Lost

  So why not deed it to me, since your life is worth nothing?

  Gervasa was not being ironic, not Dr. Laura or Dr. Ruth or Dr. Oprah. She meant it. When you lose all, there is nothing to relish. The sun comes up as it does right now, streaking the land with buttery blandishments, gray-blue shadows; a few birds wheel high in the sky, suggesting the nearness of the sea. Every hour past present and to come emerges out of this very moment, here on this road barreling toward a headland: every last sensation of life has accelerated toward this day and is derived from it, somehow. But birds can wheel all they want; all they do is define the emptiness of the sky. The whole planet spreads out from this Renault Elf, corrupt and formidable and regenerative, wrinkling into Himalayas and Alps and Andes, rocking with Atlantics and Pacifics, pocked with Aleutians and Azores and Falklands and Cyclades, sectored into time zones, blanketed with weather, gripped in space, lost in admiration of itself, and none of it has the power to charm anymore. Not the smallest swallow on that ledge, pecking a crumb. She’d as soon kill it as look at it. The magic world, the world of childhood, was dead.

  “There was so much promised us, as kids,” she murmured at last. “It was all lies and adults should be shot. There was a poem—you won’t know it. Grandma used to rock me to sleep with it.

  “How many miles to Babylon?

  Three score miles and ten, sir.

  Can I get there by candlelight?

  Yes, and back again, sir.

  “Poetry is all charms and promises. The impossible journey made possible. In poetry maybe you can get to the holy city and back again, even before it’s time to sleep. But it’s not really true. You can’t get anywhere but to the slow understanding of how, every day, you die, until there’s nothing left to die and you are dead.”

  Then change with me. All you do with your life is lie.

  Winnie could think of no argument against this. By trying to lie about who she was, she had been bounced by Forever Families out of the informational meeting.

  The land, looking north, began to seem hurrying, rushing to meet the sea that must be just beyond. The terrain dipped and rose. On either side of the road, the last several miles of approach were sentineled by big tatty Alpenhuis hotels and souvenir shacks, though the local stone was still the color of golden pears, and the poplars shook their branches in the strengthening wind. Then, at last, looking like a Byzantine monastery from this distance, only brown, the color of dung and wet bark, Mont-Saint-Michel.

  Gervasa had paid no attention to the charms of Normandy. She had made no mew of pleasure at being on home territory. Now she began to be more alert, as if she could sense the age of this holy site. Perhaps it was not so much place as time in which a creature could sense being at home.

  And how much of Mont-Saint-Michel was as it had been in 1350? At least some of it, no doubt.

  From a distance, an island joined by a causeway, Mont-Saint-Michel looked more remote and spectacular than Notre Dame, or the Agia Sophia, or St. Peter’s. Perfect, tiny, spectacular, like a child’s sand castle writ large, all one color in this light. Winnie parked. Hers was the first car in the visitors’ lot. She walked the sands up to the gate. She, who knew herself incapable of anything approaching religious feeling, was relieved to see that the entire rock wasn’t peopled by mendicants, clerics, and pilgrims, but shored up and buttressed by the needs and pleasures of commerce.

  A center street wound and zigzagged up the hill. Houses, some dating from the late Middle Ages, were crammed on every inch, one rooftop craning over the other to see out, toward the mainland or the sea. And the ground floors of every building featured plate glass and open windows and outdoor shelving. The houses were gutted in the service of floor space for shops, crêperies. Selling plastic junk, holy nothings. Winnie stopped and bought a guidebook in English at a shop just being opened by a sweet-faced red-haired boy about ten, who smoked a Gitane and spoke polite and perfect English.

  “I shouldn’t be offended,” said Winnie. “If I don’t believe in the Church, or any of this, why not make a buck off the site? The Church surely sold indulgences here. This is a different kind of indulgence, I guess.” Still, she was glad she was so early, and didn’t have to dodge crowds rocking from one stall to the other.

  She took her time. The incline was steep. She stopped halfway up, to catch her breath, by a graveyard decorated with flowers and Christmas trees. In the spirit of the season, some sort of fake snow had been trained to adhere to the branches of real trees. But the air had a kind of winter warmth to it, and the snow looked idiotic.

  She read a bit in the guidebook, to postpone restarting her climb. Mont-Saint-Michel, she saw, was originally called Mont-Tombe, from the Low Latin word tomba, meaning both mound and tomb. Well, they got that right, she thought. How many ghosts does this place have? Is this as good a place as any, in this foreign and unwelcoming world, to give myself over?

  She rose. From this height she could see other tourists arriving. The parking lot was beginning to look busy. Visitors were making a slow progress up the hill, but she was ahead of them, and at this hour she was still alone except for the residents going about their work of opening for business. She drew a deep breath. “Are you happy?” she said to Gervasa.

  Gervasa didn’t answer. Winnie assumed the concept was beyond her, and maybe, really, the expectation of personal happiness was one of the especial sadnesses that democracy had ushered in.

  On she went. A Wednesday morning in mid-December, a bit ahead of the tourist traffic that no doubt would flood the place come the solstice and Christmastide. Winnie paid forty francs to get into the chapel and mounted dozens of more steps to look at a room the color of toast. If Gervasa were religious, she might have thrilled to be back in a sanctified zone again, but she made no comment. Biding her time.

  Then up yet more steps, arriving at last at a lofty enclosed garden, where the light was welcomed in a fresher way. A cloister aerie, with an actual lawn, almost as high as one could get if one was not about to scale the buttresses or the leaded roofs of the chapel.

  No one else was here.

  Roses, red and white, rustled in a small wind. Silver king in the garden, boxwood in good trim, and the grass in its rectilinear inset richly, improbably green. A space as close as you might ever get, Winnie guessed, to featuring all landscape pleasures at once: the wind buffeted in, but lightly; the sun stroked the stone and pooled on one corner of the grass. You were safe in a fisthold of the strongest stone, yet you could move to the three arches that looked out over the sand and sea, feel the pleasure of height. You were higher than the birds, whose wings flashing with sunlight made a dancing punctuation of the view of the rooftops below.

  The village fell so steeply beneath that Winnie might have been in a helicopter over it.

  And still, there was nothing to love, no way to wrench anything from this. There was language to talk about it, sure, but that wasn’t the same as love.

  Will you do it? Will you exchange places with me? Give me your life?

  “If my life means little to me, it can hardly mean more to you,” she said. “Not that I mind if you have it. But what you need isn’t my life, since you can’t find in it what you want. What you need—”

  She looked around to see how it might be done.

  “I could just leap through this glass. Then, think how in between things you would be: in between the earth and the sky, the water and the wind. Neither in Babylon nor home again. I could just die, and if I die”—she started to laugh, for when had this hoary old line ever been said as a charitable offer?—“if I die, I take you with me.”

  An old priest pattered in with a breviary. He looked up at Winnie and heard her speaking. He probably thought she was saying her Matins. He bent down over his prayerbook again.

  “Why not?” said Winnie to herself and Gervasa both.

  Why not?

  Winnie went up to the glass and felt it with her hands. It was impossible to tell if it was Plexiglas or standard window
glass. Could she get far enough back to make a real running start at it? No half efforts now.

  She moved around the perimeter of the garden. If it was to be done, it should be done quickly, before the place grew more crowded. The elderly priest was keeping to his side of the cloister, turning up and down the walk so as not to interrupt her conversation. But, she saw, he was talking into a cell phone. He pocketed it as she came nearer to calculate the distance and speed it might take to break the barrier.

  “My apologies,” he said. English with a lovely soft accent. “Moments for prayer, even here, are never as many as one would like.”

  She didn’t answer. She felt Gervasa stiffen.

  “Do you suffer visions?” he asked.

  Don’t answer.

  “I don’t believe in visions.”

  He smiled, lifting a red satin ribbon with care and replacing it when the page was turned. “Neither did Saint Paul until he was halfway to Damascus.”

  Get away.

  “What a beautiful antique French you speak,” he said, but still in English, as if knowing French could not be her first language.

  I accept your offer. Do it now.

  “What offer is this?” said the priest. “Would you like to sit down on this bench and speak to me?”

  Winnie turned her head this way and that. The sky looked cold and ready beyond the glass. Gervasa wanted to spit. The priest said, apropos nothing, “At Christmastide, so our dear ancestors believed, the souls of the dead are freed from their torment. They can visit the living.”

  “You have no call to talk to me about such things,” said Winnie.

  “Christmas is coming,” said the priest. “I mean no more than that. You are the woman with the spirit in her, I think. I only mean to remark on that.”

  “How do you know about me?”

  He shrugged and put out his old leathery fingertips on her wrist. “Stay a while longer,” he said. As he spoke, a uniformed security officer, some sort of gendarme, came through the doorway, politely standing back until the priest had removed his hand. When he did, Winnie made an effort to wrench free and begin her long approach to a flight worthy of angels, and a fall the same. Before she could take three steps the guard brought her down onto the greensward as gently and perhaps religiously as he could, which wasn’t very.

  He rolled over her to keep her prostrate while a backup officer was summoned. She lay under the weight of his strong form. With respect to France’s great tradition of civility his face was turned from hers so, she thought, to protect her dignity. Her eyes blinked without tears at the clouds over the cloister garden. They shriveled and tore their edges, making a sound in the sky too terrible to be heard. A pale blue tinted with ocher showed through.

  Gervasa lay in shock within her, a frightened bird in its casing. Winnie imagined Gervasa entertaining the temptation to take her body hostage—with a final effort of will to make Winnie do what she’d promised, and deliver her incubus into a fuller death. But that, indeed, would be murder, a virus infecting a host to death, and would Gervasa’s restless soul find any grade of rest through such an exercise of power?

  With a pendulum motion of pain in her upper respiratory tract she realized that she had not been breathing, and now she was. The gendarme’s tackle had knocked her breath out. With breath came shame, regret, and the mortal and immortal childhood fear of having soiled her panties, a fear that with a little exploratory wriggling proved to be unfounded.

  The old priest continued on his cell phone and then snapped it shut. He motioned the gendarme to crawl off Winnie. The security person was young and blushing from the contact, Winnie saw. Don’t mind me, I’m an old sow next to you, she thought, but corrected herself. Well, good. Mind me a little, as you clearly have. I’m not so old that I can’t make you uncomfortable.

  This thought made her cheerful, at least for a moment. She sat up.

  With Winnie’s breath returned, taken in frosty gulps—it was cold up here, now that she’d stopped climbing—the claw-tongued opinions of Gervasa began to publish themselves aloud again. The speech was no longer coherent. Winnie could not understand the language. It was as if a few of the connections had been knocked loose. The priest attempted to kneel by Winnie, perhaps to pray for an evacuation of an unclean spirit, an exorcism even, but Winnie was glad to see that arthritis gripped his knees too firmly. He had to stand up as he flipped pages in his breviary.

  “They’ll be here within the hour,” he said then, in English.

  “Who?” Winnie squeezed out the single English word while Gervasa, in her ranting at the priest, at Winnie, had paused to gather steam.

  “Your companions. Your family.”

  She didn’t know who he meant. She thought: I am going to look up and see Ozias Rudge himself in his greatcoat and pince-nez, stepping down from the haunted omnibus to collect me and take me home. But only another gendarme arrived, an older, stockier one, who when summoned had not had the younger partner’s vigor at sprinting up steps. Between them they lifted Winnie to her feet and in a modified frog-march escorted her from the garden. The priest followed, watching where he put his brogans.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Down.”

  For the first part of the descent, the parade was difficult. The halest of tourists had already achieved the chapel, ponying up forty francs to gawk at its Gothic solemnity. “La Merveille,” said the priest, as if sensing Winnie’s discomfiture through Gervasa’s braying commentary. “Built in the 1200s, four centuries after the first chapel was consecrated here. A Benedictine glory.”

  Winnie managed to say, “You live here?”

  “I make an extended visitation for purposes of prayer and devotion. Less a reward than a penance, sometimes,” he said, rolling his eyes at the families in sweats and running shoes, noisily pawing through postcards and memorabilia at the shop in the chapel’s antechamber. Gervasa’s protests were causing heads to turn. Several visitors, yielding to the mood of the place, blessed themselves ostentatiously as they passed. Perhaps to have mercy on Winnie, the priest led the party past a sign that said Interdit and through an oaken door on massive iron hinges.

  “We take the private passage, and wait until your family arrives.”

  They had entered a stone corridor lit with high, arrow-slit windows, and passed along to the top of a staircase with splintery wooden rails. They descended into the bowels of the building, or into the stone of the Mount itself. The way was lit by timid lightbulbs at unhelpful distances apart.

  Then Gervasa fell silent, so utterly that for an instant Winnie wondered if she had escaped, or fled. Winnie had the feeling of a gong struck some moments ago, a quiver, a disturbance in the air. It was Rudge/Scrooge on the doorsill, eyes inward, hand to his brow, leaving a room and not seeing where he was headed next. “What is in there?” she said, stopping in her tracks, nodding her head at a door set in a crude archway.

  The priest shrugged and put the question to the gendarmes, who growled in response. He then interpreted. “A stairway to some crypts. Nothing of note.”

  “Let me see.”

  “You have no right to ask.” But he didn’t sound offended, and after a grudging negotiation with the escorts and a glance at his wristwatch, he pushed open the door.

  Another set of steps, cleanly swept, at the foot of which had been erected a makeshift table, an old door set on sawhorses. A table lamp worked off a long rope of extension cords looping toward some electric socket in the dark distance. Above a huge cup of coffee bloomed the face of an old nun. Hunks of bread floated in the coffee and crumbs stuck to her airy mustache. She was dressed in the traditional garb and looked pearly skinned, as if she’d been born an infant nun and raised down there like a mushroom in the caves. Her skin was blued by the light of the screen of a Powerbook, working on a battery pack, and a few tomes with rotting leather spines lay open on top of one another.

  More negotiation. The priest reported, “She is Soeur Godelieve Bernaert of Louvain, Belg
ium. She is the Hound of Hell. Ask her what you will.”

  “May I pass?”

  Winnie expected an objection, but there was none. The sister leveled herself to her feet and fortified herself with a dripping hunk of bread. Then, rasping like an asthmatic, she collected a commercial-strength flashlight from a shelf and led the priest, the guards, Winnie and Gervasa down a sloping corridor in which occasional random steps were cut. She moved slowly, shining the light backward for their safety; she seemed to know this passage like a mole. She showed no fear of taking a wrong step.

  At the end of the corridor were four or five archways. Soeur Godelieve spoke in a monotone, as if for several decades she’d given tours every hour on the hour.

  “An . . . ossuary?” said the priest, reducing the speech to a phrase. “Is that the word?”

  Winnie put her hand out. An old iron beam wedged into the floor was leaning outward, like the trunk of a riverside tree. It supported another beam, more thinly hammered, that ran five feet each way along the ceiling, holding it up.

  “Maybe my ancestor did this.”

  “If you have an ancestor who is a Benedictine monk, we would rather not know it,” said the priest.

  Winnie said, “May I?” The priest, the nun, the gendarmes, Gervasa: no one objected. She ducked her head through the second of the five archways, feeling her way in all the varieties of dark.

  “We are very close.”

  They were very close.

  Before the nun could bring the light around to a helpful angle, Winnie had found the far wall, five feet in—just deep enough to have room to rotate a shrouded corpse stiff with rigor mortis. She ran her hands up and down the dry stones. She felt the ruts and edges of carven marks before the light arrived, but then it did. She saw rude crosses carved in the wall, done, she imagined, with hasty chisel strokes, by monks or artisans or servants eager to make their retreat from what once must have been a malodorous tomb.