Father Stephen used to tell me that the Ulysses of a thousand wiles and the heinous Ulysses were actually the same man and, by extension, all men. He knew the animals and the stars, the courses of rivers and the composition of the love potion from which Tristan had drunk. He told me love stories and he would say (though in a low voice) that at certain hours of the night, in rivers and forests, in churches and solitary places, Love was at one with woman and with God. As regards religion, he had a preference for superstition and accounts of miracles; he even used to say that these were the only things he believed in. He didn’t care for the great mysteries.
Knowing his tastes, peasants and poor monks from our part of the countryside would come and relate their stories, telling him about swarms of devils and armies of angels, of voices from heaven. He collected them in a little book and I sometimes helped him fold the pages.
We roamed along our English lanes, and my feet felt the softness of our hills and our hump-backed bridges. He took me to our squat country churches to see the ancient relics: the sword which a certain lord, upon his return from the wars, had sunk into a stone as he made a vow never again to resort to violence; the face of a prostitute that had been carved into the wood of the cross when she vowed to sin no more. Furthermore, he had strong hands with which he soothed pain, and he had the rare ability to be patient and say nothing when people spent too long recounting their tribulations to him.
When I was twelve years old, he was discovered dead, his legs broken, his eyelids sewn shut. Such violence and mystery were not in keeping with this good man who was not in the least corrupt, and whose only crime had been to love the warmth of a woman’s body too much.
I would not be a priest.
All I was good for was living in my dreams.
At the age of sixteen I told my father that I needed a horse and wanted to see the world. He gave me several gold sovereigns which were stolen from me after just a few days . . . Take nothing for the journey: neither staff, nor haversack, nor bread, nor money; and let none of you take a spare tunic . . . I was seasick on board a ship, imagining they were abducting me to sell me as a slave to some Moors (such nightmares afflict you on pitch-black nights when your heart is down). I crossed France without stopping, and I studied in Rome with a monk who knew Augustine by heart. I remember the bewildering melancholy that seized me when I heard him say these words: My childhood died a long time ago, but I, I live . . . I witnessed a sect of Pythagoreans who ate nothing but grass and met at night to talk in low voices about the true significance of numbers.
Although my father hadn’t given me a horse, I found some along the way, as well as dogs, unicorns and all sorts of wondrous animals that I recognised, but whose names I didn’t know. I spent a year in Salerno with a woman physician who tended bishops and princes from all over Europe. We travelled by boat and slept on a blue island with white rocks where only birds and snakes lived. She showed me her gifts and invited me to share them. She gave me a golden chain which some minor king had bestowed on her. When I told her that I was leaving, a sad expression came over her brown eyes (she had brown skin, too, from which I used to lick the salt, and those eyes would close, and there was a rumbling sound in her rising breast when I entered her, and afterwards, resting and perspiring, I would see that sweet smile that made her whole body unwind, and mine as well). Then she recited these ancient and very simple lines, which made me want to look away:
Go and be happy, for nothing lasts.But always remember how much I have loved you.
I went.
I wore out my arse on ships’ benches, on horses’ saddles. I had some leather shoes that turned up at the ends and made children in villages laugh – women’s shoes! – and I walked barefoot over sharp stones.
I scoured the earth. I knew the shores as well as the open sea. I knew how light the air and the heart feel when you reach the summit.
I read few books, remembering that Socrates mistrusted them but that words are our only means of learning. I liked the rigid expressions on the faces of men who believed that they knew all things, and I liked to frequent taverns and drink a light white wine that simplified all thought.
I travelled through Spain, to Cordoba, where I acquired a little Arabic and some Hebrew, as well as new names for God: Elohim, Allah the Merciful, the terror of the Infidels. I discovered that there were other holy books, and no doubt still more across the seas and beyond the mountains.
In order to eat, I served others and took unexpected pleasure in allowing myself to be mistreated. And I taught and I sang; I could play the rote, as well as the three-holed eastern flute, the sound of which made children mill around me, clapping their hands and asking for more. I also picked fruit and corrected Latin verbs with rather more gentleness than had been used on me. When I arrived in a remote place where men spoke with pebbles in their mouths and disliked strangers, I took out my flute; then I sketched the walls of a house, an oak tree and a church on a tablet. In this way people realised that I came from a place where there was a house, God and trees. Their expressions grew less impenetrable and I was given bread and goat’s milk, and sometimes a glass of a wine thick as blood, which I had to drink with a smile.
Others spoke to me readily. You don’t need to try too hard to blot out people’s memories of you: you just have to ignore the first question they ask. They are so full of themselves and so certain that they are unique that they then open their hearts freely and allow their bellies to be tickled passively, like dogs. On some evenings, it makes you want to scream. But the soul does not reap its rewards until the last.
I learned of my father’s death when I was in Venice, gazing at the lagoon and contemplating boarding a ship and, contrary to his wishes, going to war at last. For I was sick of all these new experiences the world offered, all these universe builders. I wanted to watch my face as my tears fell in the green water. I caught a brief glimpse of myself with perfect clarity; and then my features disintegrated in the little waves, and what I had learned about myself sank for ever.
My headaches as well as my sorrows deserted me.
I went to visit my father’s grave and, without knowing why, planted a tree a few feet away. It was a comfort for me to see that I was looked upon as a stranger in my own village too. To make of the whole world a place of exile, to be at home everywhere.
I re-embarked on a quiet ship full of pilgrims, who sang as they made their way to Sainte-Foy de Conques.
I grazed my hands pulling on their oars and hoisting their sails. We sang to the glory of God and even to the beauty of women. At sea, when the moon is full in the dark sky, all routes become one: at the whim of the wind, the soul submits.
They were not seeking miracles or begging favours. Others might build churches; at the risk of their lives, these people were offering their songs to the glory of God.
They never volunteered the notion that I might join them; in a moment of vanity which was probably the result of seasickness, I think this secretly upset me.
I left them on the sandy shore, lifting their gowns above their white ankles to avoid the sea, hopping about like frogs and laughing like children.
As I departed along a path that passed behind the dunes before disappearing into the woods, tears were streaming down my cheeks. I wasn’t even sad. It was simply that I knew I could never participate in the happiness of others; I would be the one who arrives too early or leaves too late, the one who is not called or who, when invited, wakes up in the middle of the night knowing that the party is over.
II
I arrived at Fontevrault abbey having followed the course of the Loire. Some devout but prudent pilgrims had advised me against the place: the order was the creation of a lunatic. His heart aflame with promises, Robert of Arbrissel ventured into brothels to make his conversions and slept naked among the nuns, who were virgins or young widows. The worst part of it, they would tell me, was not so much that there was a priory for men and another for women within the same walls – which in