Amandine by Marlena de Blasi Read Free Book Online Page B

was watching him from where I crouched, weeding potatoes
,
he turned to grin at me. “I was thirsty,” he said. His performance had been just for me. I hated him, and I hated you more. I hated you almost as much as I loved you. I love you, Maman. I tried to stop loving you. Sometimes I feel as though I’m older than you. Like I’m the mother. The one who understands. I understand that you thought, that you hoped you could keep him if only I were away. Out of sight. Isn’t that how it was? “Solange, Papa and I have been talking. About your spiritual life, I mean. About your future.” And so I went. But I had come back. Did you really want me to go away again? Did you still choose him? And will you send Chloe away, too? And Blanchette? Is that how you’ll keep him, Maman? Don’t you understand that he’s already gone?

CHAPTER VII

    B UTTRESSED, ARCHED, PILLARED—A MEDIEVAL CHURCH RE-DRESSED for the Renaissance is the Carmelite convent of St.-Hilaire. Once a granary, then a fortress, it stood neglected for a century or two before its fragments were restructured into a grand villa. For these last forty years since its reformation into a religious house, it has seemed to the villagers a grotesque, a breach upon the peace. Twenty-seven brides of Jesus and their abbess pray, meditate, and work in the convent proper, while seven more cultivate the spiritual and secular educations of thirty-six girls, aged five through seventeen, in the convent school and dormitory. Retired from his offices in a nearby parish and residing alone in a remote wing of the convent, the Jesuit priest Philippe celebrates holy mass before his feminine congregation each morning at five, interprets and illumines doctrine for the teaching sisters, lectures morality to the upper classes, is father confessor, absolver of sins, and legendary estate
vigneron
.

    The unshakable progress of days in the convent begins when Sister Sabine from Toulouse—eyes red from sleep, feet bare, and still adjusting skirts and veils about her short, pendulous figure—stands in the pitch-black corridor along the sisters’ cells at 4:30 A.M . An accidental Spanish dancer masquerading as a nun, Sabine flings her right arm high above her head, rips the dark with the fierce click of wooden castanets, and, in a rich mannish voice, shouts:
“Ave Maria
. Rise and worship our Mother and her Son.”
    Situated on the plateau’s northern descent is a hamlet of red-roofed, stone houses, tall and narrow as small ships and raised up in the shape of a horseshoe. Here abide the
metaires
and their families who work in the vineyards, the adjoining fields—convent lands all. Nearby are dairy barns, hay barns, granaries, winemaking sheds, a distillery, a meeting hall, a washhouse, a communal kitchen. An ocher stone chapel and a churchyard cling to a small shank of land farther below while, on the valley floor, a larger village sits along the Lez. Its quick waters lick the sorrel edges of the riverbanks, where old men fish and children cheer flotillas of leaf-sailed boats. Here there are shops, civil offices, town houses, the small red marble-faced church of St.-Odile. A public park with a carousel.
    As though the Carmelites’ trafficking with God were a private business, the villagers and the
metaires
in the hamlet are rarely blessed with the benevolence of their holy sisters on the plateau. One might say that, in this case, benevolence, rather than descending from the top, is carted upward, pushed and pulled in wagons and bundled on muleback, along the chalk white roads from the bottom. Hunters leave birds—still warm, heads askew, piled in a brown canvas bag—haunches of venison and wild boar, while others leave strings of tiny, still-breathing river fish, foraged mushrooms and grasses, fallen chestnuts, a tin pail of wild berries. These are gifts from the farmers, often poor, and extraordinary to the convent’s “half portion” of the farms’ bounty: jute sacks of flour and