Submission (13 page)

‘You must go – truly, you must. It’s just twenty kilometres away, and it’s one of the most famous shrines in the Christian world. Henry Plantagenet, Saint Dominique, Saint Bernard, Saint Louis, Louis the Eleventh, Philip the Fair – they all knelt at the foot of the Black Virgin, they all climbed the steps to her sanctuary on their knees, humbly praying that their sins be forgiven. At Rocamadour you’ll see what a great civilisation medieval Christendom really was.’

Certain phrases of Huysmans about the Middle Ages floated vaguely through my mind. This Armagnac was absolutely delicious. I was about to answer Tanneur when I realised that I was incapable of expressing a coherent thought. To my great surprise, he began to recite Péguy in a firm and measured voice:

It’s hard to understand other people, to know what’s hidden in their hearts, and without the assistance of alcohol it might never be done at all. To see this neat, elegant, cultured, ironic old man declaiming poetry surprised and moved me.

He shook his head in resignation, almost in sadness. ‘You see, in the second stanza, to heighten the poem, Péguy has to bring in God. Patriotism alone isn’t enough. He has to connect it with something stronger, to a higher mystery, and he makes the connection very clear in the next lines.’

‘The French Revolution, the republic, the motherland … yes, all that paved the way for something, something that lasted a little more than a century. The Christian Middle Ages lasted a millennium and more. Marie-Françoise tells me you’re a specialist in Huysmans, but to my mind, no one grasped the soul of medieval Christianity as deeply as Péguy – for all his republicanism, his secularism, his support of Dreyfus. And he understood that the true divinity of the Middle Ages, the beating heart of its devotion, wasn’t God the Father, wasn’t even Jesus Christ. It was the Virgin Mary. That, too, you can feel at Rocamadour.’

I knew they were going back to Paris the next day, or the day after, to pack up for their move. Now that the ‘broad republican front’ had formed its coalition, the results of the run-off were no longer in doubt, and neither was their retirement. After I sincerely congratulated Marie-Françoise on her culinary talents, I said goodbye to her husband at the door. He had drunk almost as much as I had, and still he could recite whole stanzas of Péguy by heart. I had to admit, I was impressed. I wasn’t really convinced the republic and patriotism had ‘paved the way’ for anything but a long succession of stupid wars, but in any case, Tanneur was far from senile. I wouldn’t mind being that sharp when I was his age. At the bottom of the steps that led to the street, I turned and said, ‘I’ll go to Rocamadour.’

It wasn’t peak tourist season yet, and I easily found a room at the Beau Site Hotel, agreeably located within the medieval citadel. The restaurant had a view overlooking the Alzou: the site was, in fact, impressive and received plenty of visitors. After a few days watching wave after wave of tourists from all four corners of the earth, each tourist different, each the same, camcorder in hand, roaming amazed over the jumble of towers, parapets, oratories and chapels that climbed the side of the cliff, I felt as if I had somehow stepped out of historical time, and I barely noticed when, on the evening of the second electoral Sunday, Mohammed Ben Abbes won by a landslide. I had drifted into a dreamy state of inaction, and even though here the hotel Internet worked fine, I wasn’t especially worried not to have heard from Myriam. In the eyes of the owner and his staff, I was a type: a bachelor, rather cultured, rather sad, without much in the way of distractions – all of which was an accurate description. In the end, I was the kind of guest who never gives you any trouble, which was all that mattered.

I’d been at Rocamadour for a week or two when finally I got her email. She had lots to say about Israel, about the special atmosphere she felt all around her – extraordinarily dynamic and lively, but with an undercurrent of tragedy. It might seem strange, she wrote, to leave a country like France because you were afraid of hypothetical dangers, only to emigrate to a country where the dangers weren’t the least bit hypothetical. A Hamas offshoot had just launched a new series of attacks, and practically every day some bomb-wearing kamikaze blew himself up in a restaurant or on a bus. It was strange, but now that she was there she understood: since Israel had always been at war, the attacks and the battles seemed inevitable, in a sense, natural. They didn’t keep people from enjoying life, at any rate. She attached two photos of herself in a bikini on the beach in Tel Aviv. In one of the photos, a three-quarters rear view of her running towards the sea, you could really see her arse and I started to get a hard-on; I wanted to touch her arse so badly my hands tingled with pain. It was incredible how well I remembered it.

Closing up my computer, I realised that she hadn’t once said anything about coming back to France.

Early in my stay I fell into the habit of visiting the Chapel of Our Lady. Every day I went and sat for a few minutes before the Black Virgin – the same one who for a thousand years inspired so many pilgrimages, before whom so many saints and kings had knelt. It was a strange statue. It bore witness to a vanished universe. The Virgin sat rigidly erect; her head, with its closed eyes, so distant that it seemed extraterrestrial, was crowned by a diadem. The baby Jesus – who looked nothing like a baby, more like an adult or even an old man – sat on her lap, equally erect; his eyes were closed, too, his face sharp, wise and powerful, and he wore a crown of his own. There was no tenderness, no maternal abandon in their postures. This was not the baby Jesus; this was already the king of the world. His serenity and the impression he gave of spiritual power – of intangible energy – were almost terrifying.

This superhuman image was a world away from the tortured, suffering Christ of Matthias Grünewald, which had made such a deep impression on Huysmans. For Huysmans the Middle Ages meant the Gothic period, and really the late Gothic: emotionally expressive, realistic, moralising, it was already closer to the Renaissance than to the Romanesque. I remembered a conversation I’d had, years before, with a history professor at the Sorbonne. In the early Middle Ages, he’d explained, the question of individual judgement barely came up. Only much later, with Hieronymus Bosch for example, do we see those terrifying images in which Christ separates the cohort of the chosen from the legion of the damned; where devils lead unrepentant sinners towards the torments of hell. The Romanesque vision was much more communal: at his death the believer fell into a deep sleep and was laid in earth. When all the prophecies had been fulfilled and Christ came again, it was the entire Christian people who rose together from the tomb, resurrected in one glorious body, to make their way to paradise. Moral judgement, individual judgement, individuality itself were not clear ideas in the mind of Romanesque man, and I felt my own individuality dissolving the longer I sat in my reverie before the Virgin of Rocamadour.

Still, I had to get back to Paris. One morning it hit me that it was already the middle of July, and that I’d been there for more than a month. The truth was, I had no pressing reason to go back. I’d received an email from Marie-Françoise, who’d been in touch with other colleagues: no news from the administration. We were all in limbo. In the larger world, the legislative elections had been held, with predictable results, and a government had been formed.

The town began to hold organised events for the tourists. Mainly these were gastronomical, but some were cultural, and the day before I left, as I made my usual visit to the Chapel of Our Lady, I happened on a reading of Péguy. I sat in the next-to-last row; attendance was sparse. Most of the audience was made up young people in jeans and polo shirts, all with those open, friendly faces that for whatever reason you see on young Catholics.

The alexandrines rang out rhythmically in the stillness, and I wondered what the patriotic, violent-souled Péguy could mean to these young Catholic humanitarians. In any case, the actor had excellent diction. I thought that he must be a well-known theatre actor, a member of the Comédie Française, but that he must also have been in films, because I’d seen his photo somewhere before.

He was a Polish actor, I was sure of it now, but still I couldn’t think of his name. Maybe he was Catholic, too. Some actors are. It’s true that they practise a strange profession, in which the idea of divine intervention seems more plausible than in some other lines of work. As for these young Catholics, did they love their homeland? Were they ready to give up everything for their country? I felt ready to give up everything, not really for my country, but
in general
. I was in a strange state. It seemed the Virgin was rising from her pedestal and growing in the air. The baby Jesus seemed ready to detach himself from her, and it seemed to me that all he had to do was raise his right hand and the pagans and idolators would be destroyed, and the keys to the world restored to him, ‘as its lord, its possessor and its master’.

Or maybe I was just hungry. I’d forgotten to eat the day before, and possibly what I should do was go back to my hotel and sit down to a few ducks’ legs instead of falling down between the pews in an attack of mystical hypoglycaemia. I thought again of Huysmans, of the sufferings and doubts of his conversion, and of his desperate desire to be part of a religion.

I stayed until the reading ended, but once it was over I realised that, despite the great beauty of the text, I’d have preferred to spend my last visit alone. What this severe statue expressed was not attachment to a homeland, to a country; not some celebration of the soldier’s manly courage; not even a child’s desire for his mother. It was something mysterious, priestly and royal that surpassed Péguy’s understanding, to say nothing of Huysmans’. The next morning, after I filled up my car and paid at the hotel, I went back to the Chapel of Our Lady, which now was deserted. The Virgin waited in the shadows, calm and timeless. She had sovereignty, she had power, but little by little I felt myself losing touch, I felt her moving away from me in space and across the centuries while I sat there in my pew, shrivelled and puny. After half an hour, I got up, fully deserted by the Spirit, reduced to my damaged, perishable body, and I sadly descended the stairs that led to the car park.

As I returned to Paris, as I crossed the toll gate at Saint-Arnoult, as I passed Savigny-sur-Orge, Antony, then Montrouge, as I turned off for the exit at Porte d’Italie, I knew that what lay before me was a joyless but not an empty life. It would be filled with minor assaults. As I’d expected, someone had taken advantage of my absence to steal the parking space that came with my apartment, and there was a trickle of water underneath the fridge. These were the only domestic incidents. My mailbox was full of various kinds of bureaucratic mail, some of which would require an immediate response. To maintain order in your bureaucratic life, you more or less have to stay home; go away for any length of time and you’re always likely to run foul of some agency or other. I knew it would take several days to get back up to speed. I performed some summary triage, throwing away the least interesting ads, keeping the targeted offers (the ‘three-day madness’ at Office Depot, the private sale at Cobrason), then I gazed out at the uniformly grey sky. I stood that way for several hours, now and then refilling my glass of rum, before I attacked the letters. The first two, from my insurance company, informed me that it was impossible to fulfil certain requests for reimbursement and invited me to send a new request with photocopies of the appropriate documents attached. This was the kind of mail I was used to, and generally left unanswered. The third letter, by contrast, held a surprise. Sent from the city hall in Nevers, it expressed its deepest condolences on the death of my mother and informed me that the body had been transported to the city coroner’s office, which I should contact in order to make the necessary arrangements. The letter was dated Tuesday, 31 May. I quickly flipped through the pile. There was one follow-up letter postmarked 14 June and another from 28 June. Finally, on 11 July the city informed me that, pursuant to article L 2223–27 of the General Local Authorities Code, the city had deposited my mother’s body in the common division of the municipal cemetery. I had five years to order the exhumation of her body and its reburial in a private plot, at the end of which time it would be cremated and the ashes scattered in a ‘garden of memory’. If I were to request this exhumation, I would be liable for the expense incurred by the municipality – one coffin, four bearers, the cost of the plot itself.