‘Now turn round, you’re not allowed to see.’
When his quill touched me, light as a wing, I had a dreadful desire to laugh, but I controlled myself.
‘Don’t move. Remember you’re a stone now; you’ve got to keep still.’
I obeyed. I almost managed to forget the sensation, by turns unpleasant and gentle, of being licked by an army of insects. My breathing became so soft that I could have been dead, imagining myself sent to heaven, with my feet in the air, among the army of saints who decorate a row on the arches of those curved porticos you see everywhere at the entrance to churches. Or could I be a monster, crushed beneath some foot? At the Last Judgement, I would be both vice and virtue.
‘Very good, William.’
His voice came to me from another world. He probably talked like that to the pages of his books. Then he began circling round me, a joyful faun, a dancing priest, and I no longer found it difficult pretending to be still. With my feet firmly planted on the ground, I didn’t know where my breath had gone and it would have needed a thrust from a sword to bring me back to life.
‘Now you can look. But be sure to move very slowly. Don’t forget you were a stone.’
My heavy head slumped forward: the tip of my breast was an initial letter painted in gold, and across the whole of my chest I could see letters of a language which, from upside down, looked as if it belonged to a race of barbarians. I looked particularly at the images that hung down me: at my sides, which were covered by intertwining foliage in which a squirrel or an egret was hiding; at my neck, from which the column of a temple of Solomon rose up; and the base of my stomach, where a woman swathed in veils was offering herself upon a bed with sky-blue sheets studded with gold stars. Her lips were the colour of blood.
‘Do you recognise her?’
‘I am dark but comely . . . If I have the Song of Songs on my belly, what have you painted on my back? The Apocalypse?’
He was putting away his materials.
‘Don’t try to look. There’s nothing evil there, but I’ve hidden a little secret patch, on your own body, so that you may remember that even the body can’t teach you everything. One day you will be allowed to know, but not before I tell you.’
Although he was speaking a little ironically, there could be no doubting his seriousness. I moved so that I could see my page move, prompted by the invisible hand that was my body, my muscles, my breathing, my own heartbeat. I am black, but comely, O daughters of Jerusalem . . . He snuffed out the candle with his fingers. Dawn came. I picked up my tunic and I got dressed: the Song of Songs disappeared in the folds of my gown.
‘It’s very strange, my friend, to be a book written by you and whose last words are still secret . . .’
‘Every book is like a pilgrimage or a man’s life: the reward comes at the end.’
The street itself, at daybreak, where I stretched my legs among the cats, was a book in the process of being written; the street was a line that snaked between the houses, gardens and vines, along which my flaxenhaired friend, with his rainbow fingers and ink-stained nails, walked beneath a stormy sky.
‘I am weary,’ said Abelard, ‘and I am old: I shall soon be forty.’
‘The acme! The floruit!’
‘You may mock. The time that a generation of men has passed, I have spent in arguing. As far back as I remember, when I was at my first school, in Nantes, I was no taller than a box hedge and I was arguing with my first masters about Latin declensions . . . Along the entire length of the Loire, at Angers, at Saumur, then at Loches with that devil Roscelin, and at Laon with old Anselm, I was still arguing . . .’
‘You’ll die arguing.’
He struck the table.
‘Indeed, I will not!’
Two or three days had passed since his confession – if that is what that soldier’s demand for booty can be called. I avoided his lectures and held my breath. I knew very well that the miracle of Heloise’s absence would not last.
He picked himself up again and grew more mellow.
‘Seriously, William, don’t you think it’s time for me to take a woman?’
‘Do you want to get married?’
‘Me? You must be joking! It would wreck my reputation, undermine my career, preclude my . . .’
‘You see.’
‘But taking a woman is not the same as getting married. Taking a woman is . . .’
‘What about her? What will be left of her once you’ve taken her?’
‘She will be educated and the most perfect of women.’
‘And ruined for ever, you know very well.’
‘She will go back to the convent. What else can she hope for? She has nothing but her beauty . . .’
‘I thought you didn’t find her beautiful!’
‘Everyone makes mistakes. Nothing, I said, apart from her beauty and her mind. In other words, nothing. And who do you think she would have after me? The king’s butler?’
There was so much quiet and cheerful scepticism about him and, as always, such perfection of reasoning, that it bordered on innocence. Confronted with this paradox, my heart swelled: I was so happy under his guidance that in spite of myself he was persuading me to share his beliefs, and in so doing to become the instrument of my own suffering. But I had no idea what lay behind this: seeing only my own loss, I was growing blind to his.
His eyes had not left me – they were plunged deep into my turbulent heart and they were indifferent to what they saw there. It hurt me to see her leave even though she had never been mine; it hurt me to have hung my hopes on a few words which she may not even have uttered. And yet I felt dizzy at the thought of being involved with a man who was wiser and knew more than I did, but who above all desired in a way that I thought I was incapable of.
‘Find her for me,’ he said at last.
Squeezing me gently on the shoulder, he got up and left without waiting for my reply. I remained where I was, feeling subdued, gazing at the fire.
VII
I knew that Heloise’s uncle said Mass every Friday evening at the chapel of Saint-Julien, where the apse opens out at the far end of the Close, above the Seine, as if suspended between sky, stone and water. People said it was the very place where the saint’s boat had landed, with the leper aboard, and that sometimes Jesus returned at night in the guise of a beggar to contemplate men and to grieve over the fact that they were not better. Over the years the rock had subsided and the nave was inclining: if it tilted any further it would end up slipping into the Seine, dragging along the saints, the just and those who were not.
With its unusual nave, its low vault, the paucity of light and that very humble way it had of suggesting that men should huddle together, it was a chapel dating from the time of the first Christians – not one of those splendid vessels such as Cluny, not the great mountain that was being built at Chartres – but a simple boat that listed while the disciples doubted and Jesus slept; you could weep all alone in there and no one would hear you apart from the God of the humble and the afflicted, the God of the wretched whom one entreats in a low voice.
I stood in the darkness listening to Mass, allowing the spirits of generations past, who had been born and had died here, to permeate through me, mingling in my memory the prayers of both the dead and the living.
Fulbert’s words – he’s a heavy, plump man whose eyes, which are as blue as those of his niece, express unexpected anxiety – droned away inside my head without my being able to understand what they