Lasher (84 page)

I do not remember when I realized that the winter had ended, or that we had traveled out of it, that we were along the coast of Italy, and that when I looked out the little barred window I saw the sunlight falling down gracefully on green hills and cliffs of indescribable beauty. At last we docked at a thriving city, the like of which I’d never seen.

Then the most remarkable thing befell me. I was taken by these two men, who still would answer no question from me, and left at the gate of a monastery, after the bell had been rung.

A small parcel was thrust into my hands.

I stood there dazzled by the sun, and then turned to see the monk, who had opened the gate for me, looking me up and down. I wore still the fine clothes from London, but they were very soiled now from the long journey, and my beard and hair had grown very long. I had nothing with me but this parcel, and in confusion I gave it to the monk.

At once he unwrapped it, removing the ragged linen and leather from it, and then he held it and I saw that it was a large parchment letter which had been folded over in quarto.

“Come in, please,” said this monk in a kindly manner to me. He glanced at the unfolded parchment. Then he rushed away, leaving me in a still and beautiful courtyard filled with golden flowers, and warmed by the midday sun. I could hear singing in the distance, the melancholy mournful sound of men’s voices like those of the monks of Donnelaith. I loved the
singing
. I closed my eyes and breathed the singing, and the perfume of the flowers.

Then several monks came into the courtyard. Those in Scotland had worn white but these men were in coarse brown and had sandals on their feet. They surrounded me and kissed me on both cheeks and embraced me.

“Brother Ashlar!” They all addressed me, more or less in one voice. And their smiles were so warm, so filled with love that I began to cry.

“This is to be your life now. Don’t be frightened anymore. You will live and thrive in the love of God.”

I saw then the unfolded quarto which one held in his hand.

“What does it say?” I asked in English.

“That you have dedicated your life to Christ. That you would follow in the steps of our founder, St. Francis, that you would be a priest of God.”

Then came more tender words and embraces from these men, who were utterly unafraid of me, and it came to my mind: they don’t know anything about me. They don’t know how I was born. And inspecting myself—my hands, my legs, my hair—I thought, except for my height and my long locks I might as well be one of them.

This puzzled me.

Throughout the evening meal—and they fed me much better than they fed themselves—I sat silent, not certain of what I should do or say. It was quite obvious to me that I could leave this place if I wanted. I could go over the wall.

But why should I do it? I thought. I went into the chapel with them. I joined in their song. When they heard my voice, they nodded and smiled and touched me with approval, and I was soon lost in the singing, and staring at the crucifix again, the very same symbol, Christ nailed to the Cross. I don’t say it like this to sound simple. I say it to make you picture it, as I saw this, this tortured body, afflicted, beaten, crowned with thorns and shedding blood. Jack of the Green, burnt in his wicker; driven through the fields by those with sticks.

A great swimming happiness came over me. I made this bargain with myself. Stay for a while. You can always run away tomorrow. But if you run, then you have lost this place, you have lost St. Ashlar.

That night, when they put me in my cell, I said, “You do not have to lock it.”

They were surprised and confused. They had not intended to do so, they said. Indeed, they showed me—there was no lock.

I lay there, remaining of my own free will, dreaming, in the warm night of Italy, dreaming, and from time to time, I heard them at their chapel song.

In the morning, when they told me it was time to go to Assisi, I said that I was ready. We would walk, they said, for we were Franciscans, and we were of the Observant Franciscans who were true to the spirit of Brother Francis and we would not sit on the back of a horse.

B
Y THE TIME
we reached Assisi, I had come to love these friars with whom I was making the journey, and to understand that they knew really nothing about me except that I wanted to be a priest. I was dressed as they were for this journey, in a brown robe, and with sandals, and with only a rope about my waist. I had not cut my hair yet, and I carried my fine clothes in a bundle, but I looked very much like one of them.

As we walked along the roadside, these priests told me the tales of St. Francis of Assisi, the founder of their Order—of how Francis, the rich one, had forsworn wealth and become a beggar and a preacher, tending the lepers, of whom he was mortally frightened, and so loving to all living things that the birds of the air came to settle on his arms, and the wolf was tamed by his touch.

Great pictures were made in my mind as they talked; I saw the face of Francis, an amalgam perhaps of the radiant green-eyed Franciscan priest in Scotland, and their own innocent visages; or perhaps it was a mere ideal invented by some part of me which had already developed—to make pictures and dreams.

Whatever it was, I knew Francis.

I knew him. I knew his fear when his father cursed him. I knew the joy when he gave himself to Christ. I knew, above all, his love when he addressed all creatures as his brothers and sisters, and I knew his love for people we saw all around us, the peasants of Italy working in their fields, the townspeople, and those in the monasteries and manor houses which gave us gracious shelter by night.

Indeed, the happier I became, the more I was beginning to
wonder if my birth in Britain had not been some sort of nightmare, a thing which could not have happened at all.

I felt I belonged with these Franciscans. I belonged with St. Francis. I had been born out of place. And if to be a saint meant to be like Francis, why, I was overjoyed. All this seemed natural to me. And it brought peace to me, as if I were remembering a time when all beings had been gentle, before something terrible had come.

Everywhere that we went we saw children, working in the fields with their parents, playing in the village streets. When we entered the high city of Assisi, it was filled with children of all ages, as is any city, and I understood without being told that these were small human beings, infants on their way to adulthood. They were not the dreaded little people, my enemies who would kill me from envy—that bitter gleam of knowledge which had only served to terrify me with no further understanding of what it meant. Ah, how beautiful were these merely unfolding humans, who grew slowly, taking year after year to attain the height and abilities which I had acquired during and right after my birth.

When I saw the mothers nursing, I wanted the milk. But I knew it was not a witch’s milk. It wasn’t that strong. It wouldn’t help me. But I was grown, was I not? I had become taller even on my journey. And I seemed to all the world a strong and healthy human of some twenty years.

Whatever my thoughts on all this, I resolved to reveal nothing. Rather I stepped out of myself, amongst those around me. I was charmed by the countryside, the vineyards, the greenery, and above, the soft light of the Italian sun.

Assisi itself was at a great elevation, so that from many promontories, one could see the surrounding country in all its soft splendor, so much more inviting than the threatening snow-covered peaks and cliffs which had surrounded Donnelaith.

Indeed, my memory of events in Donnelaith was becoming confused to me. If I had not learnt to write within the next few weeks, and not recorded everything in a secret code, I might have actually erased from my mind my origins. They certainly came to seem vague as time passed.

But let me return to the moment. We entered the gates of Assisi at midday. At once I was taken into the Basilica of St. Francis at the opposite end of the town—a grand edifice, though nothing as cold as the Cathedral in Donnelaith. Indeed
the place had not pointed arches but rounded ones, and its walls were alive with wondrous paintings of the saint, beneath which was the shrine of the saint, to which the faithful came in droves as they had done for St. Ashlar in my home.

Hundreds proceeded to walk round the tomb of the saint, which bore no effigy of him, and was massive, and to lay hands on it, and give their kisses, and to pray loudly to St. Francis, to beg him for cures, for solace, for his special intercession with the Good God.

I too laid hands on the sarcophagus and made my prayer to Francis, who had for me now a personality, a figure wrapped in color and romance. “Francis,” I whispered to the stone. “I am here. I am here to become a friar but you know that I have been sent to be a saint.”

There was a surge of pride in me; no one knew the secret. That I would one day return to Scotland with the precepts of Francis, and possibly save my people as the good Father there had told me I must do. I was destined through humility to achieve great things.

But I saw this pride for what it was. “If you are to become a saint, you must do it truly,” I thought to myself. “You must imitate Francis, and these friars and the other saints of whom they have told you—you must forget that ambition. For a saint cannot have the ambition to be a saint. A saint is the servant of Christ. Christ may decide that He wants you to be nothing! Be ready for it.”

But though I made this confession or admonition in prayer to myself, I was secretly confident. I am destined to shine like the image of St. Ashlar in the colored glass.

For many hours I remained in the shrine, almost drunk on the devotion of those who passed the big stone tomb. I felt their fervor almost as if it were music. Indeed, it was now clear to me that I was hypersensitive, as you would say today, not merely to music, but in general to all sounds. The shrill of birds; the timbre of people’s voices; the rhythms and accidental rhymes of their speech, all this affected me. Indeed, when I encountered a person who spoke naturally with alliteration, I was near paralyzed by it.

But what paralyzed me here in the shrine was the delirium of the faithful and the particular intensity of devotion which Francis himself had inspired.

That very day I was taken up to the Carceri, the hermitage where Francis and his first followers had lived their solitary
life. There were the first cells. There was the grand and beautiful view of the countryside. This was the place where Francis had walked, and prayed.

I had no thought now of ever leaving. What worried me was not the vows of poverty, chastity, obedience. What I feared was my secret pride, that this legend of St. Ashlar would eat at my soul, while in fact goading me on.

Let me now pause to make a most significant point. I was not to leave Italy, or this life of a Franciscan, for over twenty years. The exact count? I do not know. I never did. It was not thirty-three years, for that I would remember as the age of Christ.

I tell you this so that you will understand two things. That I do not rush to Donnelaith in this tale, for it is not time yet, and that during that time my body remained vigorous and quite limber, quite strong, and quite the same. My skin thickened somewhat, losing its baby softness, and my face gathered expressive lines, but not very many. Otherwise…well almost…I remained the same.

I want you to understand how happy I was in this Franciscan life, how natural it was to me, because that is to some extent the heart of the case I wish to make.

Christmas was a great feast in Italy, as it had been back in the Highlands of nightmare which I had so briefly seen. It became to me the most solemn and significant of all Holy Days, and wherever I was in Italy I went home to Assisi at that time.

Even before my first Christmas there, I had read the story of the Christ Child born in the manger and looked at innumerable paintings of it, and I had given myself heart and soul to the little infant in Mary’s arms.

I closed my eyes and imagined that I was a tiny baby, which I had never been, that I was helpless and yearning and innocent. And the feeling which came over me was one of rapture. I resolved to see Christ—a pure child—in every man or woman to whom I spoke. If I suffered a moment of anger or annoyance, which was unusual, I thought of the Christ Child. I imagined I was holding Him in my arms. I believed in Him utterly, and that someday when my destiny was fulfilled—whatever and whenever—I would be with Christ. I would kneel in the manger and I would touch the Christ Child’s tiny hand.

God, after all, was eternal—Child, Man, Crucified Savior, God the Father, God the Holy Spirit—it was all one. I saw this
with perfect clarity almost immediately. I saw it so completely that theological questions made me laugh.

By the time I left Italy, I was a priest of God, a renowned preacher, a singer of canticles, a sometime healer and a man who brought consolation or happiness to all he knew.

But let me now explain with greater care:

From the beginning, my innocent manner and my directness astonished everyone; they never guessed the real reason for it; that I was a child. That I feasted on milk and cheese seemed humorous to people. My speed at learning also drew love from everyone around me. I could write Italian, English and Latin within a short time.

Uncompromising saintliness took me body and soul.

There was no task too low for me to perform. I went with those who tended the lepers outside the gates of the town.

I had no fear of the lepers. I could have had it, I think, but I did not cultivate it, and therein lies a key to my nature. I seemed to be able to cultivate what I wished.

Nothing to date had severely repelled me, except hatred and violence. And this attitude remained constant during all my years on earth. I was either saddened by something or seduced by it. There was seldom a middle ground.

Indeed, I had a fascination with the lepers because other people were so frightened of them; and of course I knew how Francis has fought to overcome this, and I was determined to be as great as he. I gave comfort to the lepers. I bathed and clothed those who were too far gone with the disease to care for themselves. Having heard that St. Catherine of Siena once drank the bathwater from a leper, I cheerfully did the same thing.