No. 1
“Thanks, I’m fine here.”
“Beer?”
“Yes.”
“Budweiser?”
“No, thanks, it tastes like dishwater, as my wife used to say. I’ll have a Sapporo.”
As soon as I said that, I remembered who he was, and corrected myself:
“My ex-wife, I mean.”
Then, I added:
“I hope you didn’t call to have my blessing.… You were quite mysterious on the phone.”
He waved his hand dismissively. I took a good look at him: early forties, slightly balding academic with the expression of an honest, intelligent dog—I could tell what Alma saw in him: a reliable pet one could count on at the end of a hard day’s work.
“OK,” I said. “Because, as far as I’m concerned, she and I are history. Or maybe you wanted to see with your own eyes what you’re up against. You must know that our lover’s past is like an invisible mountain standing between us and them. You know it’s there, but you can’t give it a shape, you can’t touch it. And it drives you crazy. Believe me, I know. So you wanted to see the mountain. Here it is. Take a good look. Keep in mind that I’m fifteen years older than when I met her. I’ve put on quite a few pounds. And my hair isn’t what it used to be. But then, she, very likely, isn’t what she used to be, either. Men used to stop in the street to gawk at her. It’s not simply that she was beautiful; she looked as if she came from another planet. Does she still have that dreamy look? She used to stare for minutes like that into the distance.… Before our marriage it made me want to hug her, she seemed so vulnerable, but after, well, after, it’s all very different. Have you been married before? No? Never?! Well, good luck. Everything that is touching and charming before becomes unbearable after. I mean, I come home after a day’s work, and she’s there, in her armchair, staring at the wall. And she isn’t staring for ten minutes; she could sit like that for hours. Without moving. No wonder she had an attraction for monks.”
“How did the two of you meet?”
“You mean, she never told you the story? Well, then, let me entertain you. At the time I worked as an electrician at the university. One day I got a call to come fix the VCR in the Languages and Literatures Department. The classroom was empty, and the desk in the middle had a TV and a VCR on it. It was a hot day, so, before starting to work, I took off my T-shirt and secured my hair with a bandana. I had shoulder-length hair then, not like now. So, there I was, with one hand inside the TV, the other holding some wires from the VCR, and my chest bare—need I mention that I used to work out every day?—when I heard a voice coming from the other end of the room. It was the voice of someone who had just woken up, sleepy and hoarse, vaguely masculine, coming from far away. It scared the bejesus out of me.
“‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘Who’s there?’
“The next thing I saw was a wild mesh of long, spiraling dark hair rising above a desk and a creature getting up and moving toward me with the superb idleness of a jungle queen, carrying all that hair on her shoulders and on her back, all the way down to her waist. She came up to me, and I could see that her eyes, dark as her hair, had a spark that reminded me of one of those tribal people seen on National Geographic.
“‘I think I fell asleep,’ she said. ‘Did the class end?’
“‘The class? Which class?’
“‘French 202. Are you the teacher?’
“‘Me?’
“For a second it crossed my mind to say, yes, yes, I’m the teacher. I am whoever you want me to be. Instead, I said:
“‘No, nooo.… I’m the electrician.’ And I pointed apologetically at the machines on the desk.
“‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I guess that’s why you go around bare-chested. It must be part of the job description.’
“She didn’t sound sleepy any longer, and was sizing me up quite shamelessly. I told you that at the time I worked out every day, didn’t I? Pushups and weights, at least an hour a day. There was plenty to look at, if I may say so myself.
“‘What’s your name?’ I asked.
“‘Alma.’
“‘Alma?! As in soul?’
“‘Yes, but don’t be fooled. It’s a misleading name. I have no soul.’
“‘Of course you don’t. You can’t have what you are.’
“In retrospect, I have to agree with her—about the soul. I suppose you don’t agree with me—yet. Just you wait until you’re married.”
“I’m not so sure there will be a marriage,” the man replied, and I noticed, for the first time, how dismal he looked.
“May I ask what happened? I don’t want to pry, but since you invited me …”
He then began to babble in the most incongruous way, so I had to ask him to calm down because I couldn’t understand a thing. “What do you mean I’m the only one who can help you?” I asked, but instead of clarifying things, he grew even more confused and confusing. Of that gibberish, all I got was that as “No.1,” I was the only one who could help him. Eventually, it dawned on me that Alma called me No.1 because I had been her first husband.
“Ha! Well, I guess that’s better than being No. 2 or 3. Is that what she calls the other two?”
“Yes,” he confirmed.
“No, really?! I suppose that would make you No. 4. That is, if … But I don’t understand how I can help you. I haven’t seen Alma in ages.”
He explained—if that stammered mumble could be called an explanation—that what I knew about Alma could “shed some light on the mystery of her disappearance” and help him in his search.
“If you say so.… I’m not one to believe in revelation through words, though.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that one can talk about something until the cows come home, but it doesn’t follow that things are any clearer just because we wrap a lot of words around them; if anything, that should obscure them even more. Talk is the superstition of our times, and everyone believes in it.”
“Have you read Freud?”
“Have I read Freud? Of course I’ve read Freud. You people in academia think one needs a degree in order to read anything. And I had my share of academic study, too. Two years in college was all I could take. It was after we got married.”
“Was it Alma who wanted you to go to college?”
“No. It was chance. About six months into our marriage I got caught by the campus police smoking pot, and I was fired. One joint and I got the boot. Speaking of which, you wouldn’t happen to have a cigarette with you, by any chance, would you? I just finished mine.”
He didn’t, but a sickly-looking fellow with an unshaved mug who was seated at a nearby table (kind of made you want to quit smoking just by looking at him) did, and he generously offered me one.
“So then, I thought, why not try college? I was still young, twenty-six years old. There was still time to become a physician. That had been my dream ever since I’d been a kid. Plus, I like change. Alma used to say that I had the attention span of a two-year-old. That was after the marriage; before, she admired me for not dwelling for too long on anything. She said she was happy I wasn’t like one of those professors who spend their entire lives writing articles on ‘The economy of frustrated desire in the footnotes to the posthumous works of Whatshisname …’ Frustrated footnotes, my foot! Of course, later, she would have liked me to become one of those professors. Her chief complaint was that I kept changing my mind and couldn’t stick to a choice. It’s true that I switched majors a few times. I started with biology because that’s what my student advisor suggested, but then, when I saw how many courses were offered and how infinite the possibilities were, as they say in those uplifting commercials, I thought, Why confine myself to something so narrow? So, I changed my major to philosophy, because that has always been my natural inclination. And I would have stuck to it, but one of my professors convinced me that I had a mind for political science, and what can one do with a major in philosophy, anyhow? So I switched to political science. Have you ever met a student in political science?”
He shook his head.
“Well, I have, and you wouldn’t believe it, these people haven’t heard of books. I mean, all they read is articles, and now and then a bestseller by some politician. I was suffocating. I thought, what’s the closest field to political science in which people are a little more literary? So, I switched to journalism. Little did I know that … Yes, thank you, I’ll have another beer. Well, long story short, journalism didn’t work out either, so I moved on to anthropology. By then, Alma had turned into Socrates’ wife, if you know what I mean, nagging me all day long, blah-blah-blah, nonstop. You’d never imagine, looking at that royal face of hers, what depths of vitriol are hidden behind it. I’m sorry to shatter your illusions like this, but you’ll thank me later. I’m telling you this just so you know what you’re getting into. I told you, she and I are history. I know you don’t believe me a hundred percent, but it’s the truth. No, don’t deny it, I’ve been there. Besides, given her record, I can’t blame you for being suspicious. I wouldn’t trust her for a second. Even now, when I think of the Monk, and what an idiot I was, I feel like punching him. Did she ever tell you what an ugly trick they played on me?”
Silence, then, that same motion of the head: no.
“No, hard to believe! Could it be that she isn’t very proud of what she did?
“It was the first summer after she graduated, and she wanted to go to Europe. Of course I wanted to go, too, but at the time I was in a tight spot. I had just started a business and had gotten a loan, and was a little nervous about spending too much on a vacation.”
“What business?”
“Well, that’s another story. I’m not sure it would interest you.”
But he insisted, so I told him the story. About a year earlier I had dropped out of school. School had been a waste of time, and I came to realize I wasn’t going anywhere with it. What good is a diploma, anyway? I had worked as an electrician for five years without any certificate or training and did just fine. True, I almost got electrocuted a few times and, at the beginning, every time I repaired something I’d get a call two days later because the damn thing had broken again—little did they know that it had never been fixed in the first place—but, you wouldn’t believe it, no one suspected a thing. And you know why? Because people are so trustful in the order of things it would never cross their minds that someone might want to break the rules just for fun. If someone tells you they are an electrician or a plumber, you trust that they are, indeed, an electrician or a plumber. I am not using the word “plumber” gratuitously—I worked as a plumber, too.
Long story short, at the time I was no longer an electrician. Or a student. As I said, I had started a business, a funeral home. I have always been fascinated with the way people deal with death. As a matter of fact, I had done quite extensive research on the topic, and at some point I was even thinking about writing a book. Did he know that in Romania there is a village, Sapînza, whose cemetery, called “The Merry Cemetery,” makes fun of death? He didn’t. All the tombstones are inscribed with rhymed epigraphs supposedly honoring the deceased, when, in fact, they are making fun of them. Listen to this:
“Here lies a troubled fellow,
A mentally disturbed Othello.”
Or:
“His flask was closer to his heart
Then any friend or a beloved.”
I thought I could adapt the spirit of Sapînza to our desire for a clean death—“aseptic,” as Alma used to say—and use it in a way that would make people feel less frightened by death. All modern societies are afraid of death, but they exorcise their fear in different ways. Our way of exorcising it is by pretending it doesn’t exist, when, in fact, the only fact that matters in life is death. It’s our only certainty. So, I modeled my funeral home on this idea, and called it “The Joy of Dying.” You know, as a counterpoint to “joie de vivre.” I painted the walls of our lobby a bright turquoise, like in Mexican crafts, and put knickknacks on display, including skulls and skeletons of brides and grooms in wedding attire. And a few quotes about death on the walls from Montaigne, Shakespeare, and the like.
At the beginning, there were quite a few journalists who came by and wrote articles about us, and that brought some customers in, but not for long. Most of the time the only people that came in were the curious kind, folks who just wanted to see with their own eyes what they’d read in the papers, as if we were a museum, not a business.
“What did Alma think of all this?”
“By that time,” I said, “our relationship had gotten pretty sour. She, generally, has a negative attitude, as you may know by now. She would always emphasize the negative side of things. When I showed her the finished lobby, she pointed out that we still didn’t have a place to cremate the bodies, as if I didn’t know that. But I wanted us to be more than just a place that would dispose of corpses; I wanted us to offer a space for celebration. So, I designed a wake room where the embalmed corpse would be placed so the family and friends could see it one last time as they celebrated the life of the deceased with champagne and appetizers. I painted that room a peach color with a narrow frieze under the ceiling reproducing medieval images of Hell. I thought it was funny, but apparently not everyone thought so. You can’t make fun of Hell in this country. How could you when eighty percent of people believe in angels? I’m not sure what the percentage of people who believe in the Devil is, but it’s probably lower. Alma didn’t think it was funny either. She doesn’t believe in angels, but she does believe in the Devil.”
Somewhat impatient, the man asked me to return to the story about Alma and her vacation. I explained that she’d wanted to spend the whole summer in France visiting monasteries. Actually, she’d gotten the idea from me: the previous summer we’d been together in France for about ten days, and since we were very low on cash, I suggested we sleep in monasteries. I asked the man if he’d ever done that. He hadn’t. It’s really a cheap way of traveling, I said, since most French monasteries have an adjacent building where they host tourists for a small fee, and for another fee they feed you, too. The level of comfort and the quality of the food vary, depending on the place. Some are like youth hostels, others like two-star hotels. Some accept either women or men, and others, both, but again, it depends on the place and the religious order. The Benedictines are the most welcoming. If you can convince them that you are a young soul seeking spiritual nourishment, they will let you sleep in the convent itself and eat with them. You have to attend all that religious spectacle of course, five or six times a day, or however many times a day they pray and sing: laudes at daybreak, messe at noon, vêpres in the afternoon, and complies after dinner.
“Thanks,” I said to the waiter who had approached. “I’ll have another beer. Same, yes.”
“What’s the name of the place?” asked the man.
“Which place?”
“The monastery.”
“Oh … Vézelay. It’s, actually, a basilica about two hours and a half from Paris. Vé-ze-lay. Doesn’t it sound like a bell—a long drawn-out sound across the grassland in the countryside? You can visualize the cows moving slowly under the gradually setting sun with their bells jingling: vé-ze-lay, vé-ze-lay. And yet there weren’t any cows there. It was a small town, not a village. The main street crossed the entire town, sloping upward alongside boutiques, restaurants, and wine-tasting rooms. It was the end of June when we went there, but it felt like fall, and we couldn’t stop shivering in our light summer clothes.
*
When we set out to explore the town there were only a few tourists ambling along purposelessly, like us, most of them old. A wine tasting room with its doors opened seemed to invite us inside, so we went in. There was no one there. The room was cool, and its white walls were covered with wine racks storing dozens of bottles. In the center was a large, heavy walnut table with two bottles on it—one of white and one of red wine—and two glasses. There was something monastic about the whole setting, in spite of the obvious pleasure-seeking goal behind it. Maybe it was the white silence permeating everything, or maybe the vague feeling that the ultimate aim here was not pleasure itself but the submission to some kind of age-old ritual. The bottles and the glasses stood there expectant—they were expecting us. We called out to indicate our presence, saying Hello and Bonjour, and then, again, Helloooo, but there was no answer. Alma wanted to leave, but I was no fool. I proceeded immediately to reendow the bottles and glasses with their original purpose by pouring half a glass of white into one and half of red into another. I don’t know whether it was the secret pleasure of consuming something that wasn’t ours, or whether that wine was touched by divine grace, but never have I tasted anything close to it, neither before nor after. It tasted like nectar stolen from the gods. As the liquid traveled from your mouth to your stomach, your body was filled with a tangy sweetness when tasting the red, and a dry coolness when tasting the white. It was in drinking that wine that I understood what communion must really mean for those who believe in it. I felt as if my body was losing its outline, spilling into the outside world, and the outside world was pouring all its contents into my expanding body. When we finished those bottles, I began to explore the rows of wine along the walls, but Alma, who could cool off a volcano with her calculating and controlling mind, insisted that we leave.
“Can’t you see that we were invited here by a higher order?” I asked.
“Since when do you believe in a higher order?”
We were both a little unstable on our feet, but, luckily, the table was there for us.
“One doesn’t find such wine twice in a lifetime. We can’t just walk away!”
“Can’t you just enjoy something, and stop like a normal person when you reach your limit?”
“Maybe you’ve reached your limit. I haven’t.”
“Fine, you can stay here and I’ll go. But I’m not going to bail you out if they throw you in jail. Besides, there is plenty of wine in the hôtellerie’s cellar.”
As she walked out the door, I thought that maybe she was right, after all. To be honest, it was the thought that our hôtellerie—that’s how they called the place where we stayed, “a guest house”—stood on top of a wine cellar that convinced me to abandon the wine tasting room, but not before I grabbed a dusty bottle of red from a nearby shelf. Alma was already about fifty feet away when I stepped out holding the bottle and shaking on my feet. I called her, but she refused to answer. The sun had already set, and the main street was almost deserted, so I wasn’t afraid of witnesses, and I kept calling her name, Almaaaaa … She pretended she didn’t know me, so we both zigzagged our way up that slope, all the way to the top at the hôtellerie. By the time I arrived there it was already dark, and I found her waiting for me with that grin of an unsatisfied wife that was now her default expression.
Our room was on the fourth floor of the hôtellerie, an old edifice adjacent to the twelve-century basilica of Sainte Madeleine, with long corridors whose walls of compact gray stone kept the air cool at all times. Besides the coiling stairs between the floors, there was nothing distinctive about the building. The toilet we were told to use was opposite our room, which would have been quite comfortable had it not been for the wave of cold air that hit you when you opened the door. The room itself was small and very much like a dorm room, with the beds so narrow that if you moved you fell on the floor. Actually, that night I did fall at least twice. And if you wonder whether my wife came to my rescue, no, she didn’t move a finger.
“I hope you broke something,” she mumbled.
Yes, that’s what my wife said. But the next morning I was as good as new, I just had a bad aftertaste in my mouth, as if I’d eaten dog meat, while she, on the other hand, could barely stand up. I let her go to the basilica to attend the religious service and repent, and I went looking for Frère Ivan—our hôtelier—to ask him to give me a tour. At first he was apprehensive—he even mentioned a robbery that had happened not long ago—but when I told him I was a student in European history and was writing a paper on French monastic life, he mellowed and agreed to the tour.
Frère Ivan wasn’t very talkative. As we made our way down the stairs, I did all the talking, hoping that if I drowned him in my babble, he wouldn’t have time to get suspicious and change his mind. When we finally reached the first floor, I asked him whether the Fraternité—that is, the brothers—produced anything of their own, the way most monasteries do—say, honey, soap, cookies, candies, or … wine. At this, Frère Ivan’s face lit up and he began to talk. They produced a spiritual magazine, he said. In fact, they were considering expanding its distribution to their brothers from across the ocean, and they were examining the possibility of having some of the essays translated into English. Was I interested in helping them, by chance?
I swallowed up my deception, but thought that I shouldn’t throw away the opportunity to bond with Frère Ivan.
“I’m sure I could help you in some way,” I said decisively but vaguely. “Let me think about it.”
As I uttered this, I noticed an arched wooden door at the end of the hall, and asked him where it led.
“It’s the door to our cellar,” he answered casually, and was about to move on.
“Oh, the cellar. That reminds me … Part of my paper is about the monks’ domestic life and, come to think of it, it would be quite interesting to include the cellar in it. Would you mind …?”
Frère Ivan made a gesture as if to indicate that he didn’t care one way or another, though he didn’t understand why anyone would be interested in something as innocuous as a cellar. At the door, he pulled his ring of keys out of the large pocket of his ankle-long cassock. It was a huge ring with maybe fifteen keys on it, some of them three inches long. After he found the key to the cellar, and the door opened with a long screech, we descended the three or four uneven stairs at the entrance. The only source of light came from the open door, so we had to make an effort to see. It was even colder there than in the rest of the building, yet, as soon as I stepped in, I felt my body opening up to a hospitable warmth. I have no idea how many bottles could have been in there, but there were a lot more than in that tasting room. It was a small, uninviting space with parallel rows of wine racks dividing it like cubicles in an office, with the bottles, old and covered with dust, popping out of them, waiting to be plucked like ripe fruit. There were cobweb laces running between the racks, and the air was damp and stale. And yet stepping in there felt like coming home. I could have stayed there forever, inhaling that stale air and touching those … those holy chalices in which blood-thick, fermented grape juices had been poured and transubstantiated into a divine elixir. We stayed there for less than a minute, but it was long enough to notice a smaller, wooden door at the other end, through which a ray of light came in.
“Could we go out through that door?” I asked.
“No. That opens onto the garden.”
As soon as we were out of there and Frère Ivan locked the door, I let him go back to his monkish ways, and I went straight to the kitchen. I took a corkscrew and a flashlight, and for a second I considered also grabbing a glass, but in the end I decided against it. With the corkscrew in my pocket and the flashlight in my right hand, I exited the hôtellerie and followed its angular outline until I found myself in the unkempt garden behind it. There was a big chestnut tree in the middle with a bench underneath and a cobblestone path starting next to it, snaking its way between grass and some pale, withered flowers. I spotted the little wooden door behind a flight of stairs leading down. I was prepared to face resistance and was already imagining various ways of forcing the door, when I noticed a latch in the upper right side. I barely touched it, and the door opened almost gracefully, with no resistance at all. I turned on the flashlight and stepped inside, closing the door behind me. I hadn’t experienced such an exhilarating feeling since I’d been a child, engaged in mischief with the other boys in the neighborhood. Patches of light moved jerkily from rack to rack, following my nervous movements. I decided I first needed to create my setting, and began to look for something on which to sit. Eventually, I found a small wooden crate with empty bottles in it, took the bottles out, and used it as a chair. Now, the fun could begin. The Search. The search for what? For the Holy Grail, of course. For the bottle that among all those dozens or hundreds of bottles contained in it that divine combination of grapes, Time and Sun, in perfect proportion. I was in no hurry, so I spent about an hour examining dozens of bottles, and reading their yellowed labels on which someone had written, with a ballpoint pen, “Merlot, 1979,” or “Cabernet Sauvignon, 1985,” or “Pinot Noir, 1975.” It was a 1985 Pinot Noir that I ended up choosing, and I wasn’t sorry, though it didn’t equal the experience from the day before. All the same, the hours spent in that dark, cavernous space, surrounded by cobwebs and spooky shadows, were among the best in my life. I’ve had quite a bit of fun in my life, but, believe me, nothing compares with an exquisite bottle of wine, and when I say, “exquisite,” I don’t mean something you can find in a supermarket or the neighborhood liquor store.
After I finished the Pinot Noir, I consulted my watch and saw that it was well past dinner time. Alma was surely wondering where I was. I considered going to our room and inviting her to my hiding place, but realized immediately that she wouldn’t go for it. She would very likely get hysterical, I thought, and threaten to tell on me. Better to take advantage of the situation on my own. So I opened a second bottle. By the time I finished, it was very late, and going back to the room no longer seemed like an option. Besides, I was quite comfortable in my new surroundings in spite of the lack of furniture. True, my chair was a little austere, but with my jacket on it, it felt almost soft. My eyes had gotten used to the dark, and I could easily find my way around. The bottles now seemed like lost friends I had rediscovered after we’d been separated and gone our own ways, and my eyes teared up at the sight of them. In fact, my strained eyes spotted, cuddled up in a corner, my best childhood friend, Mike, the same as he was when I’d last seen him. I opened my arms and walked toward him, drunk with happiness. I hugged him and hugged him until he got tired of my grip, and vanished. Then I grew sad, very sad, and opened a third bottle, aware all the while that someone—but who? I couldn’t remember—was waiting for me. This knowledge gnawed at me, though it was a muddled awareness, only strong enough to stop me from thoroughly enjoying myself. And then I fell asleep.
When I woke up, I was lying on the cement floor. A ray of pale light was struggling to peek through the small wooden door. I looked at my watch—7:30. I must have slept there all night, I thought, and tried to get up. My body hurt as if I’d been splitting wood for a week or had been training for the Olympics, or as if a housewife had hammered it like a piece of raw meat. I stood up, wailing in pain, picked up all the incriminating evidence—the corkscrew, the flashlight, and my jacket—and left.
In our room, Alma was still asleep. I knelt before her bed and kissed her hand. She twitched and turned on her back, then slowly opened her eyes. They were red and swollen, as if she’d been crying. I began my apology, “I’m sorry …” She blinked, raised her head all the while massaging it with her right hand, propped her back on the pillow and, adjusting her body to a comfortable sitting position, gazed at me through half-closed eyes, as if I were a worm she was about to crush. “You pig …” she began. “I’m sorry,” I repeated. “You animal …” And before I could say again, “I’m sorry,” I felt a shower of small fists all over my body. I let her get it out of her system, and then tried to get my side of the story in.
We left Vézelay later that day.
“But what was the point of telling you all this? Oh, yes, how Alma got the idea to spend a whole summer in French monasteries. That was the next summer.”
“Would you like another beer?” he asked.
“Sure.… I’ll have whatever you have—as long as it isn’t Budweiser.
“Yes, the next summer. I could tell she was happy to go by herself, and, frankly, I wasn’t too upset, either, we both needed some time away from each other. Plus, I wanted to concentrate on my funeral home business, and figure out a way to move forward. Yes, the next summer Alma went back to France by herself, and wrote me long letters that I read so many times I knew them by heart; not that I missed her, no … Rather, I had a foreboding; I could tell something was in store for me, I could smell it between the lines full of detailed descriptions of the monasteries, the abbeys, and the nuns, descriptions on which I gorged with the sick joy of a patient who knows he has cancer and wants the doctor to confirm he’s right.”
She began her trip, I recounted, with the Monastery of the Immaculate Conception in Rouen. Aren’t these Catholics funny? The “Monastery of the Immaculate Conception.” It would have been even more ironic if she had met him there—but no. It wasn’t there. This was a convent—Benedictines. I don’t know what she told them, but they let her sleep in the cloister. She probably pretended to be Catholic, though I’m sure she didn’t fool anyone. I don’t think she even knows how to make the sign of the cross properly. Well, maybe by now she knows, after having been married to a monk, but at the time, when she attended mass, and the priest distributed the communion wafers to the faithful, and it was her turn, she just stood there, watching his hand move higher and higher with the wafer further and further from her mouth, and the hand’s owner increasingly irritated. “May God be with you!” he said, as he watched her with expectant eyes. She too watched him, with her mouth open, having the confusing feeling that he was expecting an answer from her. Exasperated, she said, “OK, then,” grabbed the wafer from his hand, and placed it in her mouth. Then, pushing aside the wine chalice—she wasn’t going to drink from the same receptacle dozens of other mouths had drunk from—she turned her back on him and left.
She narrated this anecdote in her first letter, speculating that she must have done something wrong, because the priest’s eyes were shooting daggers. But in spite of this inauspicious beginning, she attended almost all the religious services for a whole week, even the laudes. And she isn’t an early riser, to put it mildly. When we were together, there were days when she’d get up at eleven. I asked him if she still had the same morning habits, and, not surprisingly, he confirmed that yes, she had. People change less than one might think.
At any rate, at the monastery she did her best to change. She had always claimed—laughing—that her true vocation was a monastic life. I think her “vocation” was more like a devilish perversity, the perversity that inspired her to seduce a man who had devoted his life to God.
At this point he interrupted me, remarking in a rather quarrelsome tone that it was not she who’d seduced him.
“What are you?” I asked, without even trying to conceal my scorn. “A child? A fool? Of course she seduced him, and if she told you otherwise, she’s a liar, and you are … But, after all, what do I care? It’s your life.
“Where was I? Yes, the Monastery of the Immaculate Conception. The nuns gave Alma a small room in the cloister, similar to the one we had in Vézelay, only warmer, with the toilet and the shower next door. The room was equipped with a rundown table on which a Bible and a sheet with the hours of religious service had been placed, and a crucifix above the table, exactly as in our room in Vézelay. What was different was the monastery’s produit d’artisanat, that is, the craft the nuns specialized in! And as luck would have it, the Benedictines of the Immaculate Conception specialized in madeleines—you know, that delicate, leaf-shaped shortcake from Proust that has the gift of bringing back memories. In fact, the main reason Alma—with whose sweet tooth you may be familiar—had chosen this monastery was the madeleines. She spent about three hours a day in the basement with the nuns packing madeleines in little plastic bags tied up with golden ribbons, and you can imagine that some of those treats were sacrificed every now and then to her impatient palate. The entire building—and it was an enormous, old one, dating back to the seventeenth-century—was constantly suffused with vanilla and powdered sugar aromas.
“I still have the letters Alma sent me from there, which I remember quite well, and there is one in which she describes the sensuousness resulting from the contrast between the lightness of the sweet vanilla scent and the heaviness of the gray, cold slabs. I could picture her lingering in those halls and touching the stone with the reverence of a pilgrim who fetishizes nuns’ clothing. Those halls, by the way, were part of a rectangle; that is, the building was in the shape of a rectangle with its front side missing, and a flight of spiral stairs at each corner of the rectangle. I assume the design was clear and logical, but Alma, whose lack of a sense of direction you must be familiar with, felt as if she were in a labyrinth, and claimed that you could start using the flight of stairs at one end, and then, if you chose to cross the hall of a given floor, and then used the flight of stairs at the other end, you ended up moving in circles, as if the building were round. If she really moved in circles, then the building must have had also a front side; but if it didn’t have one, as she claims, then one can only move in circles if one turns around in the same spot—which she may have very well done, since once she spent an hour in a parking lot looking for her car.
“But Alma does have a particular sensitivity when it comes to touching and smelling, which was very likely at the root of her monastic phase,” I added.
“I don’t think it was simply a phase …” (the same antagonistic tone).
“You mean she still goes to monasteries?”
“Temples. Japanese temples.”
“Well, all the more reason to call it a phase. But one can’t deny that she’s perseverant: for a whole week, armed with a Bible in one hand and a songbook in the other—in French, no less—she sang with the sisters, who chanted, I believe, in the Gregorian tradition. In another one of her letters she gave me a long lesson on the specifics that give monastic chanting that otherworldly quality—for there is no doubt that its sustained monotone ‘takes one to a realm of mental peace akin to the sky’s pale blue, a realm with no passion and no pain.’ There was a time when I knew by heart Alma’s description of the sisters’ chanting. I still remember the songs because she brought back a tape purchased in the abbey’s shop, and in the first weeks after her return I had to listen to it over and over. She pointed out that while most music stirs and exacerbates our passions, and thus unsettles us, Gregorian music acts in the opposite way, quieting us down and soothing our senses, but not the way New Age music, for instance, does it. The latter imitates natural sounds and tries to reproduce nature’s peacefulness, while monastic music takes us away from nature, it lifts us to a place where nature doesn’t exist, where we don’t exist, and once we are up there, it proceeds to shake off the world like a shell of extraneous clutter, relieving us of our bodies and the objects that surround us, until all that remains is the world before creation, pure, light, and even. It is this evenness that, according to Alma, Gregorian music expresses. Well, I was never quite so taken by it as her, but I have to admit that it does calm one down—although in my case it ended up having the opposite effect. For years, after she left me for the Monk, the simple mention of Gregorian music made my blood pressure go up.
“I can picture my Alma—sorry, did I say, ‘my Alma’? I mean, our Alma, of course—seated on one of those uncomfortable wooden benches, eyes closed, livid forehead raised toward the arched ceiling, nostrils dilated by the burning incense, senses opened to that unadorned Paradise of unmoved stone. I think Alma is an aesthete of space, which is why she ended up marrying an architect—Number 3.”
“Speaking of No. 3, I am really worried because of him.”
“You mean that not everything is over between the two of them?”
“I’m afraid he might do something stupid. You know he’s very jealous.”
“So I’ve been told.”
*
One week with the immaculate nuns of Rouen: it would have driven me crazy. Not Alma. She used to say, “My dear, if you didn’t manage to drive me crazy, no one will!” After Rouen, Alma returned to Paris, and, a short train ride from there, to the Abbey Notre-Dame de Jouarre. Rouen had been sunk in grayness and covered by a veil of cold drizzle, as Normandy always is, so it was a relief to see the abbey with its surrounding edifices shine in the warm June light. The monastic domain of Jouarre is one of the biggest in France, and in the postcards reproducing it from above, like this one (I took the postcard from my pocket), one can see several big rectangles: in the back, at the left, the old Roman Tower and the church; at the right, the cloister, with its three sides enclosing the garden, and a glass enclosure on the first floor, like a hothouse or a glass verandah covering the cloister’s full length. The fourth side of the rectangle, the one in front, is the back wall of one of the guest dorms. Though Benedictines, the nuns of Jouarre don’t accept anyone inside the cloister, but they have more than enough space for guests and tourists—at least two very large buildings. The other guest dorm is at the left, right behind the abbey—“see this building? No, the other one, in the foreground. You may keep the postcard, I brought it for you.
“It was at Jouarre that Alma met the woman who would end up changing both our lives: Patrice,” I concluded. “Have you met Patrice?”
He hadn’t.
“But you must know who she is. After she got married to the Monk, Alma used me for a while as her confidant, and Patrice was at the top of her complaints’ list. ‘A jealous sister with a …’ How did she put it? ‘…with a perverted Electra complex, in which her brother has replaced the father figure’… or something like that. It was Patrice who invited Alma to the Saint-Martin Monastery in Ligugé, where she used to go every summer to see her brother. As in all the stories with a good punch line, Alma declined. At first.”
*
After a week at Jouarre, Alma took the train back to Paris, and from there again to morose Normandy at the Monastère de la Visitation in Caen, an order of the Visitandines nuns, and don’t ask me in what way they are different from the Benedictines. Even the buildings’ colors matched the weather: while the domain of Jouarre was painted a joyful light cream with red roofs, the one in Caen was a cold gray with dark blue roofs. The postcards sent by Alma represented similar architectural styles for the main buildings, even though the Jouarre Abbey is much older. The reason may be because the main buildings’ façades in both places go back to the eighteenth and the nineteenth-centuries, respectively, while other parts are from various other periods. The Roman Tower in Jouarre, for instance, is from the twelfth century, I believe. At any rate, it seems to me that the traditional style of most French monasteries is that of a rectangle with one of its sides missing. Another characteristic is that one of the three sides has another wing built perpendicular to it somewhere in the middle. Some monasteries and abbeys have a crypt with relics of saints, like the one in Caen. Needless to say, the sisters are very proud of these relics.
One night, Alma called me from Caen. It was really late, maybe two in the morning. She was crying. She said she was sick of monasteries and boring nuns, and tired of carrying suitcases, of taking the train and waiting for taxis in the rain, and she wanted to come home. And guess what I said? Ha, ha! Guess what I said? I said, don’t be silly, sweetheart, you just need to rest, and tomorrow everything will be all right again. And then I said, why don’t you call that woman, Patrice, and arrange to spend some time with her? Yes, that’s what I said. Isn’t life a joke? Who knows, if I hadn’t said that, we might still be married today. If I hadn’t said that, we might not be here today because Alma would still be my wife.
“I wouldn’t count on that,” the weasel mumbled. I was pondering what the appropriate response to that was—to ignore him or punch him in the nose—when he began to rant against “brides who run away before the wedding” and “women one can’t trust,” and then he asked:
“How can a woman disappear just like that without a word?”
I was beginning to suspect that there was something more there.
“What woman are you talking about?”
“What woman? Alma, of course. Who else?”
“You mean, she’s disappeared?”
“Disappeared. Vanished. Gone.”
Little by little I got out of him that Alma had gone away without a word about a week earlier, and he still hadn’t heard from her. She’d done that before, but not for longer than two or three days.
“Why didn’t you say anything so far?! Have you talked to Nora?”
No, he hadn’t talked to Nora, he wanted to see me first. I told him that she was the one he should talk to.
“Well, I guess that’s the end of my story,” I added. “The next day Alma called Patrice, and then went to that monastery near Poitiers where she met the Monk. And one year later we were divorced.
“What more do you want to hear? OK, I’ll tell you more, if that’s what you want. Yes, I’ll have another beer.
“Alma never told me what happened at the Abbey of St. Martin in Ligugé. Nora did. Of course, I myself met the Monk a year later. Nora claims that at the time the Monk looked like a cross between Richard Burton and Christopher Reeve. Maybe that’s how women saw him. Personally, the only thing I saw was those intense blue eyes. Otherwise, he was rather unremarkable and definitely in need of a good workout. The most interesting thing that Nora said was what had triggered Alma’s interest—because you always wonder, what, why? She said that when Patrice introduced them, Alma was intrigued by the Monk’s indifference. Like all beautiful women, she was used to being looked at, and the Monk was the first man she’d ever met—besides the gay ones, of course—who seemed utterly unmoved by her charms. Not only that, but he practically looked through her, as if he didn’t really see her. It was as if he belonged to a different race. He lived in a different realm, and in that realm her power was cancelled.
“Alma, as you probably know, is very stubborn and curious. She cannot accept that something might be beyond her grasp, and seeing that she had no power over this man—something in itself incomprehensible—she proceeded to use all the weapons at her disposal to make sure her power hadn’t disappeared. Of course, I’m only speculating, but I’m pretty sure I’m right. Nora put it differently. She said that what Alma wanted was to understand the essence of that Other Power the Monk had given himself to, a power so strong it annihilated her own. I don’t know how long it took her to claim victory, whether he acted like an innocent lamb she just led by the nose, or whether he participated willingly in the charade, pretending to explain the abbey’s history to his guest—there was plenty to explain, after all, as St. Martin de Ligugé is the oldest monastery in the Western world. She stayed there for almost a month, and after that phone call, all I received from her was this postcard—yes, you may keep this one, too—and a letter in which she described in great detail all the nooks and crannies of the new place, but not a word about the monks. I’ve learned a lot about the double cloister and the abbey’s architecture, if you’re interested. The cloister, by the way, is the long hall linking the various parts of an abbey. You can see that this one is ‘double’ because it’s divided into two lanes by a row of stone columns, which crosses the hall from one end to the other, where a wooden Christ agonizes eternally on the wall, and from there to another, perpendicular end with yet another agonizing Christ. The stone columns, whose upper parts fan out toward the arched ceiling, run alongside the huge windows facing the inner courtyard, through which one can see the well-kept garden with its trimmed bushes and shrubs, as the sun penetrating through the windowpanes casts shadows of the pale columns on the floor’s pastel tiles. In this hall one occasionally spots the gray, rushed fluttering of a monk’s cloak on his way to his cell or the church. So, are you going to ask me if this is where my wife and her Monk met every day for a whole month? Frankly, I have no idea. But I can imagine him telling her stories about Saint Martin, how Saint Martin had come to that very spot almost a thousand six hundred years ago to be a hermit, and then a basilica was built, and then destroyed, in the good old European tradition, and then rebuilt around the year one thousand. And like all the other cathedrals, monasteries, and abbeys, this one too went through its periods of enlargement, shrinking, additions, and other changes over the centuries. The double cloister is, apparently, from the nineteenth century. Those who say it’s the oldest monastery in the Western world simply mean that somewhere in that construction there is a sixteen-centuries-old stone. It’s the same way here when we say that someone is a Native American even if he is only one-sixteenth Native American.
“At any rate, I’m sure this story contributed to Alma’s infatuation. Half of ‘falling in love’ is context. How can you beat a blue-eyed monk hiding in a fourth-century abbey where Rabelais himself had once worked as a secretary for the prieur? Well, but none of this makes any difference now. I’m sorry for the Monk, though. He really had it rough. Imagine: sixteen years as a monk, then a woman comes along and steals you away from what was your life’s calling, and then, a few years later, she drops you like a hot potato. And for whom? For … Well, but what’s the point of rehashing all this now? Let me finish this beer and I’ll take off.
“When Alma returned, it was clear something was going on. She was distant, and soon I noticed that she was receiving mail from France. This was still before email—at least, we didn’t have it. And then, one day, no doubt inspired by a story she’d heard from Patrice about how the latter’s mother had dumped her husband (‘Jacques, I am leeeving you’) she greeted me with, ‘I’m divorcing you.’ Just like that! I’m sure she’d rehearsed that in front of a mirror. I didn’t think it was funny. I almost hit her. She may have told you that I broke all the porcelain in the house, but that’s not true. I only broke the porcelain we’d received at our wedding. But I would have gladly broken her neck. In the end, she left me and filed for divorce.”
“Did you meet the Monk?”
“Yes, sure I did. Maybe I wasn’t very … civil at first. I was still angry, but, eventually, I forgave them. And we—the three of us, I mean—were more or less on friendly terms until that funeral.”
“What funeral?”
“You mean she never told you?! Well, that was quite a memorable funeral. It was three years or so after they got married. The Monk’s mother—who was also Patrice’s mother—died of cancer, and the Monk was devastated. He was incapable of dealing with the funeral himself, so Alma told him not to worry, she’d take care of it. And she came to me, since at the time I still had my funeral business, which was going better than ever. And I said, ‘Just leave it to me.’ And meant it. I wanted to organize a ceremony that would capture the essence of a person’s life in a way that was consistent with the spirit of our enterprise, a way of seeing death not as frightening, but as something one can joke about.
“And so I asked Alma to make me a list of what the deceased had liked most in life, and she did. I remember: snow, cigarettes, twenties’ fashion and style, red roses, Gregory Peck, Nat King Cole, a cloudless sky. I painted our event room sky blue with white snowflakes on it, and hung Gregory Peck photographs all over, including one in which we replaced Lana Turner with a young image of the deceased in which she was looking at Greg with sultry eyes and a half-open, glossy-red mouth. I ordered a beautiful oak coffin, lined it with sky-blue silk, and placed the deceased inside. We dressed her in a twenties’ black dress with white pearls and a black wig with shoulder-length straight hair and bangs. I placed in her hands, near the heart, a red rose, and wanted to insert a long cigarette in her rouged mouth, but it was hard to open it, so I took out our skeleton—Tim, we called him—and made him stand near the coffin with a cigarette in his grinning mouth, and tied a rose around his genitalia. On the floor, all around Tim and the catafalque, I scattered red rose petals. It was all so cool I almost wished I could change places with the dead woman. Believe me, it was a scene to behold. And then, we placed a table against the Eastern wall, draped it in light blue silk, scattered some more red rose petals on it, and put bowls and plates of humus, bagels, lox, cheese, crackers, and cookies on it. And another table against the Western wall with champagne, red wine, and crystal glasses. It was all very nice, but a little conservative, so we decided to spice it up by hanging strips of colored paper from the ceiling with little plastic skeletons and skulls at their ends. And standing by the door was a young boy with a scythe and a wicker basket full of special-ordered Chinese fortune-cookies, which the guests were supposed to pick up and open to retrieve messages such as ‘Next year on this day you’ll be struck dead by lightening,’ or ‘Your daughter will give birth to a three-eyed monster,’ or ‘Your hemorrhoid will grow as big as an orange,’ or ‘Your progeny will die of plague and syphilis.’ We had a lot of fun with those.… It was our pièce de résistance, but unfortunately our guests didn’t seem to appreciate it. Imagine a room swinging in the languid rhythm of Nat King Cole’s ‘Unforgettable,’ and a throng of guests entering with hesitant steps, the way people do in such occasions, as if they were afraid to wake up the deceased, and being offered at the door a fortune cookie, which they take with an intrigued expression. Imagine these guests walk about under the colored paper with skeletons and skulls, some of them going up to the coffin, others to the Eastern table, and others to the Western table, now and then one of them remembering that they are holding something in their hands, and absentmindedly breaking up the cookie, extracting the tiny white strip of paper, and then hiding it in their pocket with an expression of utter bafflement. Oh, those faces! You should have seen those faces reading those fortune cookies! It was truly unforgettable.
“The problem was that the Monk didn’t have a sense of humor. He entered the room grave and stern, holding his fortune cookie away from his body, as if afraid of being contaminated, and, as he took in the scene around him, his face grew progressively dark and his body stiffened. Then, he advanced toward the casket with his eyes wide open as if about to pop out, kneeled in front of the catafalque, took the wig from the deceased’s head, and threw it on the floor in anger. All the whispers and the murmurs in the room ceased, as everyone watched in silence. He then attempted to lift the corpse, but without much success, and, with a voice strangled by fury, asked for help. Someone rushed to help him, and together they carried the corpse toward the door. In the ensuing commotion and confusion, some of the guests left, expressing their outrage in low voices, while others stayed without daring to move, as if hypnotized. I saw Alma run up to the Monk and whisper something in his ear.
“‘I won’t allow my mother’s body to be desecrated!’ he yelled.
“‘But you can’t take it out in the sun!’ she pleaded.
“In the end, she convinced him to bring the corpse back to the catafalque and to clean up the room. They took down all the Gregory Peck photographs, and relieved poor Tim of his rose and cigarette. By the time they finished, most of the guests were gone. Alma gave me a look; you know, one of those looks. We didn’t speak for years after that. They never paid for all the expenses I’d incurred. The Monk sent me a check for about a third of the bill, and a note saying I should count myself lucky he wasn’t suing me. The unpaid bill was the last drop in the full glass of debts I had, and soon afterward, ‘The Joy of Dying’ folded.
“Well, time for us to go now. Looks like this place is closing.”
