FAREWELL, MY ONLY ONE
FAREWELL, MY
ONLY ONE
Antoine Audouard
Translated from the Frenchby Euan Cameron
CANONGATE
First published in Great Britain in 2004 by
Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street,
Edinburgh EH1 1TE
Copyright © Antoine Audouard, 2000
English translation copyright © Euan Cameron, 2004
This digital edition first published in 2014 by Canongate Books
The right of Antoine Audouard and Euan Cameron to be identified as
respectively the author and translator of the work has been asserted
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This book is supported by the French Ministry
for Foreign Affairs, as part of the Burgess
programme headed for the French Embassy in
London by the Institut Français du Royaume-Uni.
The publishers gratefully acknowledge subsidy from the
Scottish Arts Council towards the publication of this volume.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ePub ISBN 978 1 78211 414 7
To my children:Marie, Alexandre, Hélène and Ulysse
In memory of Véronica Quaglioand Jean-Dominique Bauby
and to Susanna,my Only One
‘He who acquires wisdom, acquires grief; and a heart that understands cuts like rust in the bones.’
Bishop Possidius, Life of St Augustine
Contents
Part One: Nothing for the Journey
Part Two: The Assembly of the Lord
Part Three: The Beauty of Thy House
Prologue
Fontevrault, 1164
Today, during Matins, one of our brothers fainted. The sound of his head striking the stone echoed over the abbey while we were singing Yahweh has sent me to bind up hearts that are broken, to proclaim liberty to captives. I, too, was feeling weary and a fever was spreading waves of icy heat over my limbs and through-out my body.
As two lay brothers led Brother Guy away, we let the peace of the psalm sink into us. I did not weep; my sorrow was lighter than my burden. Even when we heard Guy’s cries as we crossed the Close, no head turned and we sang, with one voice, one heart.
In spite of the cold, more than one of us was sweating beneath his cowl.
As we made our way from the church back to the priory of Saint John, the wailing abated. The light of the full moon bathed us, as we lay in our bunks, in the colour of cemeteries. Then we heard them: they were no longer the wrathful cries of a thousand devils fighting for possession of a soul, but the sobs of a humble man suffering, as we all do.
I prayed for you, Guy, my brother. But I was thinking of myself.
As I was leaving the chapterhouse this morning after Terce, I asked the prior for news of