Bella... A French Life (24 page)

Now, the mare is cantering. A narrow, shallow stream, blue because of the distance, is ahead. The horseman, sitting up and leaning forward, is one with the mare. Before reaching the stream, the mare quickens her pace with three short strides. Next, mare and man are airborne, flying like some giant prehistoric bird. Once, on the other side of the stream, the horseman starts to pull back gently on the reins.

I step on the Merc’s accelerator.

Lionel Ritchie is still singing.
Say you, say me; say it for always…That’s the way it should be… Say you, say me; say it together…Naturally…
 

The horseman, again holding the reins with just one hand, waves goodbye to me with the other.

-0-

I pull up close to the mount’s Porte du Roi, the main entrance.

There are few cars parked here on the causeway - the
digue
- in front of the fortified gateway. The night’s rain has probably persuaded those who were going to come here to Saint Michael’s Mount today that the mount will be wet and windy.

One side of the gateway is ajar as it always is when the mount is open to visitors and behind it I can see Grande Rue. Several tourists, overdressed in anoraks, woollen bonnets, scarves and boots, are studying menus already on display outside restaurants, while others are choosing postcards from stands outside souvenir shops.

A young monk, dressed in the long, loose, black tunic and the black apron of the Benedictines, his feet in brown open-toe sandals, comes walking towards me. I know his face, but not his name. He walks past me, his open-toed, open-heeled, sandaled feet wet, obviously from having stepped into puddles of rain water. He passed without having acknowledged the smile I offered him. I look back and see him walk fast along the causeway: I can see a wicker basket hangs from around the back of his neck. He must be on his way to a shop on the mainland and will be returning with the basket filled with provisions.

Gertrude’s mother, Mrs Yvette, no longer with us, used to cook for the monks and Gertrude tells a story of what a healthy appetite they have. Each Easter, the forty days of fasting of Lent over, her mother had to cook them her special of bread-crumbed monkfish baked in the monk’s outdoor wood-fired clay and stone oven. A monk always accompanied her to the fishmonger in the nearby town of Saint-Malo to ensure the specimens she was going to buy had large and strong teeth: the monks made necklaces with the teeth for the souvenir shops to sell. It was before I had come to settle here, so I can only repeat what Gertrude tells us, and she says the tourists loved those necklaces. Today, Mrs Yvette in her grave, the monks cook their own meals so those monkfish necklaces are no longer to be found here on the mount.

Le Presbytère’s winter guest having gone to Paris for the day, I will lunch on the mount. It is still only eleven o’clock, so first I will climb the steps up to the abbey.

I know Grande Rue’s shop keepers and restaurateurs.

Edwige, her wrinkled eighty-year-old face always smiling, is standing outside her souvenir shop.

“Miss!” she greets me. Never
doc
for which I am always thankful. She has been in my life from when my parents opened the guest house.

She greets me with two kisses on each of my cheeks.

“I’m going to call it a day,” she says.

She is going to retire to an old-age home in Rennes.

“Will you not miss the mount, Edwige?” I ask.

“The mount, yes, but not the stupid tourists. These days they want everything for nothing.”

Hortense and Joël, her mentally challenged son, wave to me from the inside of their souvenir shop. I can see Joël wants to come outside, obviously to talk to me, but his mother, who is unpacking painted plates from a large carton on which is printed  the words
Fragile – China,
sternly shakes her head. She points to the carton and he retrieves a plate from it which he places on a shelf behind him. On the picture painted on the plate, the mount is surrounded with a very blue sea on which tiny boats with red sails bob. Below the mount, in gilded lettering are the words,
Le Mont Saint Michel
.

Waiters in black trousers, white shirts and shiny black patent-leather shoes are laying the tables in the restaurants. Red is the favourite colour for table cloths in the cheaper restaurants. White linen is that of the expensive ones, their matching napkins folded into lilies and placed on the porcelain side plates. Where the cloths are red, the napkins are of white paper and folded into pockets which hold the knife, fork and a spoon. “Paper napkins save on the laundry bill,” as Frascot always says.

Build here and build high
had said Archangel Michael to Aubert, Bishop of Avranches, and Aubert had done as instructed, and, now, there are nine-hundred steps from Grande Rue to the abbey. Often, have I climbed these steps and today I will do so again. Once a monk, seeing me out of breath as I was climbing, told me to zigzag up the steps and I will not become out of breath and certainly the climb will not exhaust me. Today, this is what I do. Right. Left. Right and left again. Japanese tourists coming up from behind me start to zigzag too. Some of the women begin to giggle. Perhaps they think I am playing the fool, or worse, I am drunk.  If they are capable of giggling, I think, they do not have to copy my zigzag technique. At around the six-hundredth step several of the Japanese stop climbing and begin to take photographs of the granite marvel ahead of us.

I continue zigzagging, going up and up.

I know a stone bench in one of the abbey’s many vaulted chambers and this is where I will sit for a while before I descend for lunch. I will not be stopping to rest because the zigzag way really does not make one tired but for a few minutes of contemplation.

To my delight, the Japanese are nowhere in sight.

-0-

The chamber where I choose to sit is long and narrow and along one wall stand six stone benches. But for a woman, old as I can tell from her shrunken frame and bent shoulders, because her face I cannot see it being hidden under a black mourning veil, I am the only one in here. Centuries ago, in the wall behind me an embrasure had been chiselled to hold cannon. Before sitting down, I had stood at the embrasure, the rough stone cutting into my elbows, and looked at the sea in the distance, at this sea between France and England, a dull grey, and motionless at this hour of the day.

Against the wall, to my right, under an arch, hangs an icon from two long iron chains which have been affixed to the high vaulted ceiling. On the icon Mary is cradling baby Jesus in her left arm. She is in blue, wearing the traditional kerchief of the Orthodox Jewish woman that she was. Baby Jesus, usually naked on an icon, is in a green long-sleeved dress and a brown cloak. On the haloed Mary and the haloed Jesus’ left drifts Archangel Michael, wings and sword aloft as here on the mount, and on their right drifts Archangel Gabriel holding a three-bar cross. The two archangels are gilded as is the frame around the icon.

The old woman gets to her feet and shuffles past me. She does not look at me. She is wearing bedroom slippers:
in this weather?
She reaches the icon and kisses it and next disappears through an archway to her right.

From somewhere above the abbey drifts three bell strokes. Almost immediately another three short strokes ring out. It is twelve o’clock on my watch and a monk must be sounding the noon Angelus. I wait for the third and final triple ring for confirmation. At its first stroke, a dove flies through the embrasure and with wings fluttering circles around the icon and, as the old woman has just done, it disappears through the archway on the right, its wings dipped, ready to land.

I sit very still.

As I child I adored the sound of bells ringing, and once, Miss Matigot asked my classmates and I what we wanted to be when we were grown up, and my answer was, “Miss, I am going to be a monk and I will ring the bells on the mount.” Her reply was a smile and nod.

Inside the main gateway of our Sainte-Marie-sur-Brecque cemetery there hangs a copper bell, green with rust, from an iron crossbar attached between two granite rocks. The bell, and no one in the village can remember a time when it was not there, is only ever rung to announce a burial: three times three tolls if a man is to be laid to rest, and three times two tolls for a woman.

Father Pierre had tolled that bell for both my mother and father, the clanks resonating over the tombs.

-0-

I get up and walk from the chamber.

The Japanese from earlier reappear and begin to descend the steps down to Grande Rue with me. No need to zigzag now. One of the Japanese men points at me and next at his camera. I point at his camera and next at myself and I nod. He points to where I must stand: he wants the sea as background. His ‘thank you’ to me is a slight bow, his right hand lifted in front of him. Oddly, Le Presbytère has never had a Japanese or Chinese guest.

The usual bustle reigns on Grande Rue so I decide to skip lunch. The sky, a glowing blue because the day is after all not windy and wet, I turn off into a narrow footpath which winds between bare rocks. Behind me, towers the abbey, and Archangel Michael is brandishing his sword. As always.

And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon: and the dragon fought and his angels; And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven ...

And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him …

Revelation 12, verses seven to nine.

I sit down on one of the rocks, one I always come to sit on. Near me, perching on another of the rocks, a gull emits a high-pitched screech. “Would it not be nice if we can be little birds so we can fly across the sea?” I one day said to my father. “Do we have to be just little birds, Bella?” he replied. “I want us to be seagulls. We will be seagulls. We will flap our powerful wings and fly off on a journey which will take us across all the oceans of our world to lands we do not even know exist.”

“Don’t fill the child’s head with wishful thinking, Rody,” my mother reprimanded him.

Bella must know that man is bound to earth, she added. Bound to the earth like goats and sheep and donkeys.

Indeed, Mother, and to the innards of the earth we return.

-0-

After my father’s burial I came here to the mount, took this footpath here and came to sit on this rock, ‘my’ rock as I think of it.

Rodolph Wolff was a Protestant, but his post-war experience in France having robbed him of his childhood faith, he had told my mother on more than one occasion he did not want a religious funeral.

“You can just throw me away,” he used to joke.

Having received my mother’s telephone call that my father had passed away, I immediately set off for Sainte-Marie-sur-Brecque. On my arrival, my mother’s brothers, their wives and children and even a couple of grand-children were already gathered at Le Presbytère, the guest house’s paying guests doing their best to remain out of sight. Marius and Marion still to arrive - they had left the girls with a friend in Paris - I, not wanting to be obliged to make conversation with those uncles of mine, drove down to the mount. It was a mid-summer day, a Monday, and business on Grande Rue was brisk, but I was in search of silence, so I took the footpath to this rock. After my father’s burial, I, again seeking silence, came to sit here once more.

My father’s burial was dignified.

“We cannot bury Mr Wolff without even a prayer,” Father Pierre told my mother.

The priest had just then learnt from her she wanted to respect my father’s wish not to have a funeral service.

“My husband was a Protestant,” she feebly offered the priest as reason for such a wish.

“What will the villagers think of us?” asked one of my uncles.

The pallbearers, provided by the undertakers, carried my father’s coffin from the guest house to their hearse parked under the copse of trees out front. At the cemetery, Father Pierre, having tolled the bell at the gate three times three, we stood around the freshly-dug hole in the ground, the coffin resting on ropes and which would gently lower it into the grave. A little way behind us stood four burly gravediggers in blue overalls, impatiently tapping their cracked fingers with the earth-filled fingernails, against their spades: they were eager to get their day’s work done because their wage was a mere pittance.

“We are gathered here today to return the body of Rodolph Wolff to its rightful master: God our Father,” began Father Pierre.

At that time, twelve years ago, he was still a young man with black hair and firm skin.

Following those words of his, a sigh - perhaps it was from my mother because the priest was not honouring my father’s wish of keeping religion out of his burial - rose in the air.

Next, one of the mourners coughed.

It was a dry, artificial cough, which might have come from Marius as his way of telling our mother not to be angry at Father Pierre.

As for the priest, he, unperturbed by the interruption, opened the small leather-bound Bible which he was holding, flipped through it, and, also coughing, but a genuine cough filled with mucus, a shiny drop of it landing on his lower lip, swept his eyes over us.

“First Letter of John, Chapter 3, Verse 1,” he said.

He began to read.
See the great love the Father has bestowed on us that we would be called children of God, and that is what we are.
 

Again, he coughed, but without leaving a mucus deposit on his lower lip, and neither on his upper.

“… children of God,” he repeated.

He spoke slowly, emphasising every word and looked towards my uncles, all of them dressed in black suits and wearing black ties.

Yet again, Father Pierre flipped through his Bible. Who had given him that Bible, I wondered? A loving, proud mother at his First Communion? A sad mother at his ordainment as a priest, crying silent tears because he will never give her a grandson or granddaughter?