The Seal(94)
It caused Jourdain to laugh. ‘The love of nature, Etienne, the goddess which makes for us this day, this grass and sky and creek . . . Ahh . . . truly! This is a love most chaste!’ He leant back against the tree chewing on an apple and smiling and chewing again. ‘For I am not dead, yet do I find myself in Elysium.’
Etienne smiled to himself. ‘Elysium? What is this Elysium, something made up by your fancy?’
‘No! It is the abode of the blessed, Etienne. The paradise of the Greeks that exists at the end of the world where those who are chosen by the gods are sent. There they live without tasting death, to enjoy an immortality of bliss,’ he said. ‘There, Etienne, open your eyes, do you not see her?’
Etienne half opened his eyes and looked at the day.
‘There she walks, Demeter, among those Elysian fields with a basket of grain in her arms.’
‘No, Jourdain, I do not see her, this Demeter.’
Jourdain laughed. ‘Etienne, she is invisible to the eye, you may see her only in spirit, a goddess most loving and nurturing. She brings a good harvest and heals the sick. She is the mother known to have nursed the son of the King of Eleusis back to health by feeding him on the nectar and ambrosia of the gods . . . but she grew very attached to the young boy and decided to take him from his life and make him immortal by placing his feet in fire to burn his mortal nature away.’
He paused to take a bite of the apple.
‘And?’ Etienne asked, sitting up now since something had stirred his soul to attention. ‘And? Did he become immortal?’
‘Just as Demeter was holding his feet over the fire, Etienne, the young boy’s mother entered the room and the spell was broken.’
Etienne looked beyond the creek to the harvested fields and looked for the goddess once again. He did not see her. Instead his eyes fell over the earthly paradise and saw all of its deceptions. At once every faculty of his being told him that this was not his life, but the life of another man stolen. He was not made to be immortal. He had fallen asleep to his duty, which lay elsewhere among hardships and struggles. Not this life, of aimless days! Of rapturous, verdant ecstasies! The entire meaning of this struck him like a slap, and it made a shaking in his lungs and drove a pain through his heart. The ring upon his finger, so quiet and tame these months, called to him now, its voice weak but insistent. This, it said, was the simple thing: the deed accomplished and then to grow one with the ground, thereafter to see not Demeter upon this earth but Sophia in heaven where Michael awaited his arrival.
The pain in his heart moved its burning towards his hands. He got up. ‘We have been in a dream, Jourdain.’ He gasped for air. ‘We must go.’
Kneeling now, he acknowledged in the full daylight of his mind that it had been his weakness for the woman Amiel and not his love of pastural delights that had made him linger in this dream. As once he had mistaken her for the Sophia, he had mistaken her also for the goddess of nature, the soul of the world, and had become intoxicated with this love, whose disposition, he realised with shame, was not after all of metaphysical purity, but of physical proportions.
From the beginning the woman Amiel had come to his little room in the stables to tend to his wounds with capable, gentle hands. Then she noticed his ailment and made him an unction for the pain that leapt from his heart to his hand. As time passed he observed in her a knowledge beyond his own and a talent for listening to words lost in the soul of another – a dialogue that travelled the distance from eye to eye, heart to heart, without words and yet exact in its understanding. Now this communication stood before him like a new thing. Such exchanges, he now realised, left him bare and naked, they tore into him a soft violation more deep and intimate than the sin of the flesh since they went to the soul and the spirit which he had relinquished to Christ and which he placed on an altar during every quiet moment of prayerful contemplation. He was not, after all, a man to be made immortal! She could not burn his mortal nature away!
After his conversation with Jourdain, Etienne began the business of distancing himself from the woman Amiel and her suckling child that now smiled and laughed and tried to crawl to him as if he were its father. He distanced himself from the house with its warm hearth and the animals and their needs and the tangle of his sentiments whose precise nature he tried with all his will to purge behind an ill temper and a desire for solitude.
But despite this the communications continued: when she came out of the dwelling to bring scraps to the chickens or when she took herself to wash clothes in the creek. There occurred a pause between them so bottomless and empty that neither could fill it before it was snatched away by Jourdain with his good humour or the Norman with his work upon the anvil, or the Catalan whistling while he worked at weeding the garden bed. Etienne clenched to him his stubborn will and forced deafness to fall upon his spirit ears and still that void stretched forth from her soul to his and made a sound in him as if he were an instrument tuned to her silence.