The Gregorian plainsong of the monks was something else entirely, sound too but of a different order, of alien substance, as if silence had been compressed to a liquid state and was, at intervals, poured out smoking on the stones of the chapel floor. No, I am wrong. It was not beautiful like that, unbeautiful rather, galvanically so, as a body’s nakedness is electrifying, not because it is beautiful but because it terrifies, flooding the onlooker with his unchecked hungers. It was as though those simple melodies were the product of millennia of stripping away: whoever composed them, whatever they meant to say, all dissolved, even the meaning of the texts dissipated over centuries of usage, nothing left but the starkness of a distilled longing.
Do you understand, Father, what I am trying to say? Do I understand, haunted as I am even now by the fleeting glimpse of Miriam’s nakedness as she slipped beneath my sheet, or the image of her wedged against the dashboard, hand gripped behind her knee, pulling it back, knuckles white as she came? How can I explain to you what I have since come to believe—that all artifice, even the ancient artifice of the monks’ plainchant, labors to hide an awful nakedness, a nakedness as of a body dumped in a ditch, the nakedness of a girl motionless in the cold water of her bathtub?
That is the nakedness I am speaking of. Who hasn’t seen it somewhere? Just the other day, in the subway, it was there: a lunatic woman, carapaced in parkas, overcoats, cardigans, and what looked like a pair of ski pants, wrestled her bags through the closing doors, shouting something about “little machines! little machines!” She fell silent and I forgot about her, but then there was an abrupt commotion, a flailing at the far end of the car, and I saw that she was entirely naked (except for her galoshes), each nipple hedged in whiskery hairs, her sex hidden by the slack pouch of her belly. “Little machines!” she shrieked. “These fucking little machines!”
That is how it seemed to me, the plainchant of the monks: exposed, unbeautiful, unbearable. Of the readings in church I remember nothing. I remember speaking with no one. What I remember is the nakedness of the plainchant, that volatile distillate penetrating everything. It suffused everything, along with the smell of the place, the crumbling dank of the cloister, the boxwood acrid and effluvial in the garden, all mingled with the ardor of her body, redolent under my sheet or splayed in the hot car.
—
On the way home after the week was over, we had driven a good hundred kilometers before either of us spoke, or rather, before Miriam spoke.
“So,” she began, “do you see now what my ticket is?”
I didn’t see.
“At the monastery. That is what I am becoming,” she said.
“A celibate man?” I said. “You had me fooled.”
“No,” she said, “I am becoming a religious.”
Still I didn’t understand, thinking that by religious she meant simply a religious person. Nothing about her seemed religious. Though I had observed her precise, habituated participation in the round of worship with the monks, the idea of her belief seemed unreal, not false, just unreal. My hobbled French, however, was incapable of communicating any part of this. I said only, “You, religious?”
“But,” she said, “only when I am done with you. So that is my ticket,” she said. “You have yours. America. New York. Your patients. This is mine.”
“But what is it?”
“You wouldn’t want me,” she said, “cheating on God forever, would you?” She explained that religieuse meant a monastic, a monk or a nun. Then she added, as an afterthought: A religieuse was a kind of pastry. “They are very delicious,” she said with a smile. “I will make you eat one.” And we were silent again, all the way up the autoroute to the périphérique.
And then in some way I can never explain, it was all over. Between that day years ago and this moment there is no distance. There is no distance between the crunch of gravel under the monk’s foot and the beating of my typewriter against this page, no distance between Miriam’s profile in the car and Clementine’s as she slept on the pillowless expanse of a crib mattress, just as there is no distance between Clementine’s face as it was then and as it was the day I saw her, rounding the corner with her friend, that day I received the first photograph of Jessica Burke in the mail.
Not very long after Clementine’s and my return from France, a patient of mine, a woman in her sixties, announced in a session, “I cannot tell you…I think it is impossible for you to understand, how quickly they go, the years. It is sickening.” I remember the interpretation I made because, quite frankly, I was proud of it, and I credited it (and myself) with having brought the patient to the threshold of a breakthrough. It was clear to her, I had said, it was undeniably, irrefutably true for her, that I would never, could never, understand her malady. In fact (I went on) that belief was her malady, her conviction that no one would ever or could ever understand her, that she could not be reached, touched…
And yet, now, I have come to believe that she was right: I could not possibly understand; I was too young. Now, however, with the past so much longer than the future, I see finally what she meant: the closer you are to the end, the shorter the distance you know you have traveled. The road does not stretch out behind you, but folds up, the point of origin gaining on you with every step.
Maybe this is a commonplace. Maybe anyone
