A Provençal Mystery (2 page)

She: Sister, you were silent at group confession. It is not possible that you consider yourself completely free from sin.

I: I could not remember a sin to confess.

She: Sister, answer me properly.

I: I do not know what to say, Reverend Mother. In my life I have been guilty of many sins, like all imperfect humans. Yet no recent sin of mine occurred to me.

She: Consider the sin of pride.

I: I know my station, and I do the work well.

She: You see?

I: But my pride is not excessive.

She: You were not committed to flagellation during the discipline yesterday. I saw. You lacked enthusiasm. You were not engaged in our task.

I: I cannot.

She: Search your heart.

She spoke as if she knew what was in my heart. Mother Fernande often acts as if she knows more than she actually does. Like Peter the fisherman, she fishes among us to catch our sins. A silence fell between us.

She: If you will not admit your sin of pride to me, then you must admit it to the Lord.

She raised her hand to stop me from answering.

She: Add some knots to your whip. Consider your duty to God. We must humble ourselves before Him.

I: Yes, Reverend Mother. I will obey, but it seems to me that the discipline does nothing for my soul. Perhaps I am spiritually stupid.

She: Perhaps you are.

She was red in the face and wagged her finger at me, and the sleeve of her habit flapped back and forth. She had seen through me. I threw some weeds into my basket.

She shook her head and grasped the crucifix as if it were a tiny sword.

I: I will examine my soul, Reverend Mother.

She: Don’t be impertinent. I see impertinence in your expression.

I: I will try not to be.

She shook her head, then turned on her heel to walk to the dark doors of the convent. Sitting up on my heels, hands covered with dirt, I watched her go. Don’t step on a toad, Mother, I thought to myself, then continued weeding the basil. I should not even have thought the old saying, but it came into my mind unbidden.

A loud bang. The archive door slamming against the wall. It jerked me out of Sister Rose’s world.

Chapter 2

Sister Agatha stood framed in the doorway, enormously present in her voluminous black habit. It was as if a spotlight shone on her. I could feel myself blushing with pleasure to see her. Agatha would understand my excitement at finding the diary. And I could trust her.

With her sidekick Madeleine Fabre trailing behind her, Agatha strode past Chateaublanc’s big desk. Chateaublanc ran his fingers through what was left of his moussed grey hair, so that several strands flapped out of their combed rows on his bald spot. As usual, he smiled half-heartedly at Agatha. She gave him a little ironic half-wave. I had once wondered if they had gone to high school together—he had the attitude of an anxious, pimply suitor. But I had known right away that it couldn’t be because Chateaublanc was at least fifteen years younger than Agatha, and, after all, Agatha was a nun. Even though she made little of it at the archive and asked us to address her simply as “Agatha,” her commitment to her vocation was absolute.

She came to a halt in front of the table where I sat in the back of the room. “And what has you so excited, my friend?” she asked in French. Her voice, resonant and gritty with its Proven
ç
al accent, resounded in the high-ceilinged room.

“Excited?” I replied, also in French. “You think I am excited?”

“I see your very large smile. Don’t tease me.” A big grin wreathed her face, framed in a white wimple.

I held the diary out to her. "Have you seen this? A seventeenth-century diary. It’s a marvelous thing."

Agatha took the diary from me, seemed to pretend to read a few lines, then folded it shut, put it down, and covered it with her plump but wrinkled hand. In a soft voice that I didn’t know she had, she said, "I've never read it.”

“Strange,” I replied. “If anyone would know about it, you would. This Sister Rose was from your order. How about you, Madeleine?” I glanced at Madeleine who was, as usual, dressed in a chic costume: a tangerine-colored dress and an inky black wool jacket with geometric designs worked in gold thread.

“I haven’t found any diaries here,” Madeleine said.

I heard evasiveness in her answer, but Madeleine was always evasive, wasn't she? I  didn't know her well, only that she lived at the convent in some secular capacity and looked to be in her mid-twenties. I suspected that she had been one of the girls saved from “the bad life” by the nuns as was their order’s mission, but I knew better than to ask, and I knew I was engaging in stereotyping even to think it.

“Lunch at Café Minette, Dory? As usual?” Agatha said.

“Of course.” I reached for the diary and pulled it from under her hand. She seemed reluctant to let it go. “I need to copy it,” I said, wondering why I was explaining myself. “I want to take a copy home and pore over it.” I wondered at their flat reaction and felt disappointed by it.

“
Il y a un enfer pour les curieux,
” Madeleine said.

“There’s a hell for the curious?” I asked.

“
Oui.
Yes.”

“What are you saying?”

“That's for you to figure out,” Madeleine said. “Perhaps if there’s a hell, there’s a heaven, too. For the incurious.”

“It's like 'curiosity killed the cat. Satisfaction brought it back,'” I said.

“Madeleine collects them, those old sayings,
les proverbes,
” said Agatha, then she winked and put her hand on mine as she had on the diary. It was soft, heavy. I felt both that the hand was loving and that moving out from under it would be difficult. Madeleine shook her head, raised her eyebrows, and made that French grimace called a moue, a pursed-lip expression of delicate disgust. She was a master at it.

“Problem, Madeleine?” Agatha asked, smiling and leaning her head towards her.

“Not at all,” Madeleine said.

“Why, then, do you make such a face? Like a little child?”

Madeleine put her hand over her eyes and shook her head.

The photocopier, a balky antique, stood at the back of the room. In my fanciful moments, I thought it glowered at the readers, daring them to make it work. At times, I even thought it winked at me in a malevolent way. I dug in my jeans pocket for my stash of one-franc pieces, and counted them. I had five. If I placed the diary sideways, I could copy at least half the pages. I went to the machine and started to feed it. It hiccupped. I leaned against it and looked over the room as I waited for it to spit out the first copy.

The room smelled of musty documents, coffee, floor wax, and underarm odor at war with Chateaublanc’s strong flowery eau-de-cologne. I heard the genealogist couple whispering "
Mariage
!" to each other as they searched through notarial records. From the tone of their voices, I knew that they were not finding what they were hoping for—evidence of nobility, even minor nobility. Why is it, I wondered, that the French, who love revolution and equality, are so fascinated with aristocracy? But didn’t Americans venerate their own revolution? And didn’t they tend to worship British royals—at least the
young
royals—and very rich Americans? Besides, I had my own fascination with genealogy. It was what had brought me to graduate school.

Before I could further examine my thoughts, a draft of old, cold air hit me in the neck, and I turned to see Griset, the archive go-fer, coming from the storerooms, once prison cells, across the hallway. Small, dark, always the ladies’ man, he winked at me as he wheeled the cart holding stacks of boxes and leather-bound books to the front of the room. Though smoking was prohibited in the archive, a Gauloise, the last butt end, was attached to a corner of his lower lip as usual.

The copier was silent; no copy had been ejected from its stubborn insides. I pushed the button again. The machine clicked, whirred, and went dead so I gave its side a little slap. I really wanted to kick it hard. Griset hurried over. He was good at reading body language. “The machine does not understand punishment,” he said in thick Proven
ç
al-accented French. “It is of low intelligence.”

“Perhaps it understands
tendresse
, then. Can you fix it?”

The copier stood dumb with no LED lights to give a clue as to what was wrong with it. Griset stared at it as if it were his adversary. Then he sighed, opened up the front, and stared inside.
“No paper jam,” he finally said. “It needs an expert. I will call.”

“I must copy this document,” I said, lifting the lid to pick up the diary. “It’s a diary by a nun. Did you put it at my place?"

He reached out his hand, his short fingers stained with nicotine, and I reluctantly entrusted the diary to him. He read the first page and turned the document over, looking, as I had, for the archive stamp. Then he shrugged—very Gallic. "I have never seen this before. But I’ll check the records. Perhaps it has been misplaced.”

"It’s not the sort of thing that gets lost." I heard my voice rise. “It’s very important.”

"
Doucement
,
doucement
," he said, giving me the French equivalent of “Take it easy,” which literally means “sweetly.” He leaned toward me. I smelled Gauloise. "Don’t agitate yourself.”

"I’m not agitated. I am happy!"

He smiled, and the smile revealed his nicotine-stained teeth and creased the crows’ feet around his eyes. "A happy agitation, then, if that pleases you, Madame Red,” he said. I wasn’t fond of his nickname for me, even though I knew it showed affection for one of his favorite readers. It was too reminiscent of the teasing I had undergone as a kid because of my hair—Carrot Head or Brillo-Head.

“I'll ask Chateaublanc about it,” I said.

“Don’t,” Griset said.

“Don’t? Why not?”

“It is a bad idea. He might take it as a criticism,” Griset said. He took a folded paper from the pocket of his old, shapeless jacket. “Anyway, Chateaublanc is not happy with you. This fax came for you.”

“He agreed . . . ,” I said, wondering how long ago the fax had clattered off the machine in the storerooms.

“But, he says, so many!”

“I’ll buy him a case of fax paper.”

“That should appease him. He likes you anyhow.”

“Truly?”

“Like me, I think he has a liking for women with a bit of
grossesse
.” I grimaced. I hated the word for its sound, even though I knew it just meant weight to the French. However, Griset knew how I felt about it.

I held out my hand for the fax. I knew who it was from and what it would say, so I folded it up and put it in my jeans pocket. I wasn’t about to read it and spoil my mood. How had Magnuson known that faxes would annoy the archivist, further hampering my work? Could I suggest that he use email from now on? In my dreams!

Griset’s gaze left my face, where it liked to linger, and moved to the front of the room. Chateaublanc was staring at him, then back at me. His hooded, sky-blue eyes seemed young in a face whose deep folds chronicled more than a half-century of frownings. Griset nodded at Chateaublanc in acknowledgment, but before he moved, he ostentatiously took a little puff on his half-dead cigarette.

Just the existence of the unread fax made me put aside the diary and pick up H42. My paper on the social backgrounds of nuns, which I had to finish if I wanted to have a chance of getting tenure, was due by the end of March.

First, though, I looked up the entries for 1652, where I found Sister Rose—there she was in April: Anne Berthold, age 16, daughter of Charles Berthold, goldsmith, and Marie Durant, deceased, entered as a novice. She was real. At least one piece of evidence to authenticate the diary.

Then I went back to my work copying names and dates into my laptop, and as I did, I imagined a nun, old, venerable, sitting at a table, record book laid out in front of her. I imagined a novice, coltish and awkward, answering the questions put to her. The novice knows that she is entering the doors of the convent for life, expecting never to come out again; she will be in the company of the nun and the other sisters forever. The novice wonders if she will measure up, and the old nun makes a judgment about her but says nothing.

I typed, hearing the clicks as I entered the names and thinking of how the nun’s pen must have scratched and spluttered as she performed the same task.

By the time I reached the name of Barbe Blanchard, age 17, it was 11:50. At noon, the archives closed for a two-hour lunch, as is the delightful custom in southern France. Chateaublanc hefted himself up from his chair, key in hand, ready to lock up. I closed the book, put on my ski jacket, and threw my briefcase over my shoulder. I left my laptop behind, knowing it would be safe in the locked room. With the other researchers, I walked into the hallway, down past the little reference room where archive inventories were kept, past the bathroom, and crowded into the tiny elevator to descend to the ground floor.

Outside, water had frozen overnight in the drain spouts of the Papal Palace. The columns of ice from spout to saucer were dripping as they thawed in air that seemed just above freezing. Shivering, I hurried down the wide stone steps, hollowed by the feet of countless pilgrims, to the wide cobble-stoned plaza below. My breath came cloudy in the frigid air. I was glad I had worn my thick but ratty blue sweater under my ski jacket. In the wind shutters banged. Wind-blown light danced.