Ah, yes, the mill. Oh, the count, he liked his projects. And when he gets an idea in his head—ooh là!
Sugar?
But not a bad man, for an aristo. He had raised money for the church’s new roof. His wife had been very devout. Yes, he was un peu bizarre, the count, but generous.
As for the, er, communauté, of course the café owner had his doubts about it, to say nothing of the kinds of people who would be showing up at the mill. But, bon, enfin, as long as they weren’t Dutch. I wasn’t Dutch, was I?
Another coffee? No? Perhaps something to eat? Nothing? Eh ben, merci beaucoup alors. And if I ever needed a ride back to Auxerre, I should just call. He and his wife operated a taxi. Of course, that is, if the garçon from the community, Jean-Marie, couldn’t take me. A good kid, that Jean-Marie.
I said I would be grateful for a ride.
Bien! If I could wait just two seconds, he would find a card somewhere here behind the counter.
No, I said. I would be grateful if I could get a ride this morning. To Paris.
This morning? To Paris?
Yes, this morning, if the taxi was available.
Comme ça? Just like that? With nothing? No baggage? Rien du tout?
Eh ben alors, he’ll call his wife to take over the café, and we’ll be off.
THIRTY
That is how I left, Father: a morning walk, a coffee, a little small talk, and the long gray road to Paris. The road had sought me out, I thought, like a penetrator cable hoisting a downed pilot up through jungle canopy. All through the long drive, the café owner smoked without ceasing, lifting his hands from the steering wheel to light another cigarette, filling the tiny Peugeot with a cloud of smoke and furious gesticulation, railing against “ces foutus arabes,” “ces socialos pourris,” the bloody Arabs, the rotten Socialists. You will say, Father, that I had sold myself to the first trader. You will say that no one was hauling me to safety, that I had hitched a ride instead to the kingdom of shame. And yet (I am certain of this) what I felt in the moment was only relief, not the transient relief of retreat, but the shuddering, bone-deep release of moral acquittal. Nothing could be clearer. I had had no choice, no choice whatsoever, but to withdraw myself.
Béatrice had been precisely right with respect to the facts in question. Miriam had what my colleagues would call a history, a history of suicidal depression, probably with psychotic features. How many times had I myself written out the DSM code for it, 296.34, on bills or insurance forms? And Miriam had known from the beginning that I was a psychoanalyst. Her friend Mathieu had introduced me as one. With those givens, I would have been for her, inevitably, a figure, an iteration of earlier professionals: the psychologists, the group therapists, the social workers, the prescribing psychiatrists, the unnamed Monsieur le Médecin. I would have signified for Miriam a component in that great machine that had lifted her up and shaken her free from oblivion. The machine had thrust its tube down her esophagus, voided her stomach, then pumped it full of activated charcoal. The machine had netted her in tubes and wires and bladders, easing her upward like a salvaged ship until she broke, streaming, from the depths of her coma. It had peered into her eyes as they fluttered open to the fluorescent glare of a world she had done everything possible never to see again.
Béatrice had been precisely right: I was a citizen of that fluorescent, treacherous world, but she had been wrong—just as precisely—about what this meant. For her the fact of love meant that I should stay with Miriam, and because Béatrice was a religious, under vows herself, staying certainly meant the formalization of love’s obligation. How could it not? For her it was a given that love should seek a home for itself, a dwelling. As for the type of dwelling, that was only of secondary concern. It could be marriage, hermitage, church, monastery, or a lay community established on the banks of the Yonne. But here was the problem: The order could not accept a postulant so recently rescued from hopelessness. How could it be certain that such a postulant’s embrace of monastic life was not on a hidden level another attempt to escape existence? The order must be vigilant against those who would confuse it for an afterlife or underworld. In Miriam’s case the order’s moral obligation was to restore her to the world, not lead her into withdrawal from it. The fledgling lay community on the Yonne could be such a restored world. While it would be ordered on Benedictine principles and dedicated to the work of God, it would remain independent, governed by its members and ventilated with the liberties of the secular world: the freedom to come and go, to marry, to raise children. This would have been the case that Béatrice had made to Miriam as her spiritual advisor.
And how did I fit? The possible roles I could occupy seemed at once various and elusive. My presence wasn’t in any real way required, was it? Had I been a stipulation of Miriam’s? Had she said she would not consider joining the community unless I could be persuaded to join too? I would not believe it, could not believe that the sweet transience of our time together had transformed itself into the vision of an unlimited future. How could she and Béatrice share the fantasy that I too was not only free but willing to embark on such an uncertain project? Was the Miriam I knew even capable of such a thought? But then again, hadn’t Béatrice informed me that the Miriam I knew was in fact a Miriam I had invented? Was this new Miriam, the real Miriam, capable of imagining that I—not a believer, not a Christian—would willingly surrender myself to
