“She raised her head slowly and stared at me, as if reminding herself what year it was. ‘She’s asleep.’
“I found myself, strangely, resisting the urge to go into the bedroom and check on you. ‘Darling, what’s the matter?’ I put the book away and held her, but she shook her head and said nothing. When I finally went in to see you, you were just waking in your crib, with your lovely smile, flipping over on your stomach, pushing yourself up to look at me.
“Soon Helen was silent almost every morning and cried for no apparent reason every evening. Since she wouldn’t talk to me, I insisted she see a doctor, and then a psychoanalyst. The doctor said he could find nothing wrong with her, that women were sometimes blue during the first months of motherhood, that she would be fine once she got used to it. I discovered too late, when a friend of ours ran into Helen at the New York Public Library, that she had not been going to the analyst at all. When I confronted her with this, she said she’d decided that some research would cheer her up more, and had been using the babysitter’s time for that instead. But her mood was so low some evenings that I concluded she desperately needed a change of scene. I took a little money from our hoard and bought airline tickets to France for early spring.
“Helen had never been to France, although she’d read about it all her life and spoke an excellent schoolgirl French. She looked cheerful on Montmartre, commenting with some of her old wryness thatle Sacre Coeur was even more monumentally ugly than she’d ever dreamed. She liked pushing your carriage in the flower markets, and along the Seine, where we lingered, turning through the wares of the booksellers while you sat looking at the water in your soft red hood. You were an excellent traveler at nine months and Helen told you it was only the beginning.
“The concierge at our pension turned out to be the grandmother of many, and we left you sleeping under her care while we toasted each other at a brass-railed bar or drank coffee outside with our gloves on. Above all, Helen-and you, with your bright eyes-loved the echoing vault of Notre Dame, and eventually we wandered farther south to see other cavernous beauties-Chartres and its radiant glass; Albi with its peculiar red fortress-church, home of heresies; the halls of Carcassone.
“Helen wanted to visit the ancient monastery of Saint-Matthieu-des- Pyrenees-Orientales, and we decided to go there for a day or two before returning for Paris and the flight home. I thought her face had brightened considerably on the trip, and I liked the way she lay sprawled across our hotel bed in Perpignan, flipping through a history of French architecture that I’d bought in Paris. The monastery had been built in the year 1000, she told me, although she knew I’d already read that whole section. It was the oldest surviving example of Romanesque architecture in Europe. ‘Almost as old as theLife of Saint George, ’ I mused, but at this she closed the book and her face and lay staring at you hungrily where you played on the bed beside her.
“Helen insisted that we approach the monastery on foot, like pilgrims. We climbed the road from Les Bains on a cool spring morning, our sweaters tied around our waists as we grew warmer. Helen carried you in a corduroy pack on her chest, and when she got tired I carried you in my arms. The road was empty at this season, except for one silent, dark-haired peasant who passed us on his horse, going up. I told Helen we should have asked him for a ride, but she didn’t answer; her low mood had returned this morning, and I noted with anxiety and frustration that her eyes filled with tears from time to time. I knew already that if I asked her what was wrong she would shake her head, shake me off, so I tried to content myself with holding you tenderly as we climbed, pointing out the views to you when we turned a bend in the road, long vistas of dusty fields and villages below. At the summit of the mountain the road broke into a wide estuary of dust, with an old car or two parked there, and the peasant’s horse-apparently-tied to a tree, although the man himself was nowhere in sight. The monastery rose above this area, heavy stone walls climbing the very summit, and we went up through the entrance and into the care of the monks.
“In those days, Saint-Matthieu was much more a working monastery than it is now, and it must have had a community of twelve or thirteen, leading the lives their predecessors had for a thousand years, with the exception of the fact that they gave the occasional tour to visitors and kept an automobile parked for their own use outside the gates. Two monks showed us around the exquisite cloisters-I remember how surprised I was when I went to the open end of the courtyard and saw that sheer drop over outcroppings of rock, the vertical cliff, the plains below. The mountains around the monastery are even higher than the summit where it perches, and on their distant flanks we could see veils of white that I realized after a moment were waterfalls.
“We sat a while on a bench near this precipice, with you balanced between us, looking out at the enormous noon sky and listening to the bubbling water in the monastery cistern at the center, carved of red marble-heaven only knew how they’d hauled that up here, centuries before. Helen seemed more cheerful again, and I noted with pleasure the peace in her face. Even if she was still sad at times, this trip had been well worthwhile.
“Eventually Helen said she wanted to see more of the place. We put you back in your sack and went around to the kitchens and the long refectory where the monks still ate, and the hostel where pilgrims could still sleep on cots, and the scriptorium, one of the oldest parts of the complex, where so many great manuscripts had been copied and illuminated. There was a sample of one under glass there, a Matthew open to a page bordered with tiny demons goading one another downward. Helen actually smiled over it. The chapel was next-it was small, like everything else in the monastery, but its proportions were melody in stone; I’d never seen the Romanesque like this, so intimate and lovely. Our guidebook claimed that the rounding outward of the apse was the first moment of the Romanesque, a sudden gesture that brought in light across the altar. There was some fourteenth-century glass in the narrow windows, and the altar itself was perfectly arrayed for mass in red and white, with golden candlesticks. We left quietly.
“At last the young monk who was our guide said we’d seen everything but the crypt, and we followed him down there. It was a small dank hole off the cloisters, architecturally interesting for an early Romanesque vault held up by a few squat columns, and for a grimly ornamented stone sarcophagus dating from the earliest century of the monastery’s existence-the resting place of their first abbot, said our guide. Next to the sarcophagus sat an elderly monk lost in his meditations; he looked up, kind and confused, when we entered, and bowed to us without rising from his chair. ‘We have had a tradition here for centuries that one of us sits with the abbot,’ explained our guide. ‘Usually it is an older monk who has held this honor for his lifetime.’
“‘How unusual,’ I said, but something about the place, perhaps the chill, made you whimper and struggle on Helen’s chest, and seeing that she was tired I offered to take you up to the fresh air. I stepped out of that dank hole with a sense of relief myself and went to show you the fountain in the cloisters.
“I’d expected Helen to follow me at once, but she lingered underground, and when she came up again her face was so changed that I felt a rush of alarm. She looked animated-yes, more lively than I’d seen her in months-but also pale and wide-eyed, intent on something I couldn’t see. I moved toward her as casually as I could; I asked her if there’d been anything else of interest down there. ‘Maybe,’ she said, but as if she couldn’t quite hear me for the roar of thoughts inside. Then she turned to you, suddenly, and took you from me, hugging you and kissing your head and cheeks. ‘Is she all right? Was she frightened?’
“‘She’s fine,’ I said. ‘A little hungry, maybe.’ Helen sat down on a bench, fished out a jar of baby food, and began to feed you, singing you one of those little songs I couldn’t understand-Hungarian or Romanian-while you ate. ‘This is a beautiful place,’ she said after a minute. ‘Let’s stay for a couple of days.’
“‘We have to get back to Paris by Thursday night,’ I objected.
“‘Well, there is not much difference between staying here for a night and staying in Les Bains,’ she said calmly. ‘We can walk down tomorrow and catch the bus, if you think we need to go so soon.’
“I agreed, because she seemed so strange, but I felt some reluctance even as I went to discuss this with the tour-guide monk. He applied to his superior, who said that the hostel was empty and we were welcome. Between the simple lunch and simpler supper they gave us in a room off the kitchen, we wandered the rose gardens, walked in the steep orchard outside the walls, and sat in the back of the
