Women in the Wall by Julia O'Faolain Page A

of seeking order. But when she showed me the convent, I saw she had managed to create order in practice. Its perfection actually pained me. It was so calm, so pleasantly predictable, the sort of haven in which I would have dreamed, if my dreams had been good ones, of living. The nuns wear white robes and clogs, eat sparingly so as to keep down the passions of the flesh, drink watered wine and perry. Everyone helps with the housework. She herself, she told me, worked in the kitchen garden. She was not the abbess. Agnes was, her spiritual daughter. A pretty young nun came in: Agnes, asked about my journey and my comfort, then left. A drift of some fragrant herb stayed behind. I was still faintly feverish with images of that foul rattle-bone journey still humped in my inner eye: a mental stew of bad memories . One: vomiting bad food from some inn into a ditch whose porridgy waters suddenly confronted me with an eye, a single one only a hand’s span away from my vomiting face. I had to finish then, seized by convulsions, hold on to a bush to keep from falling in. When I stood up it was still there, nakedly unlidded, staring at me. Too big to be human. A horse’s, perhaps, which someone had gouged out for some whim or pagan practice? Wiping my mouth with a dockleaf, I stumbled back to my waggon. I suppose there was nothing to it really. A horse’s eye? But it kept returning, suspended in front of my own, enlarged, staring at me: the anthropomorphic eye of Savage Gaul. Pagans, I remembered hearing, had been buried with their horses. King Clovis’s father had. Why? I asked my escort but they shrugged. Said they were Christians, didn’t know, spat, mumbled. Their Latin was primitive. One said something in German dialect and the rest laughed.
    Suddenly—from the refuge of the convent—going back with those men was horrible to me. I didn’t want to spend another night in their company or on those mangling roads.
    “This,” Radegunda was saying, “is our hortus , our kitchen-garden. We have laid it out on the model of a Roman villa’s. I think we have every plant here that you would find there. This is where I work so you must allow me to be a little vain.”
    She showed me myrtle, wallflower, lupins, tansy, fennel, dill, burdock, mint, chervil, spurge and a hundred other plants. The paths were straight and weeded, the stone benches clean. A nun brought honey-cakes and perry. Through a window I could hear a psalm. When it stopped I could sense feminine presences moving somewhere out of sight in silent conformity to some unchanging time-table.
    “This”, I told the nun, “is a poem you have created here. It scans beautifully.”
    She had been joking with me before, playing the hostess as she likes to do. She can often be silly. It is a release, I think, a relief after the concentration of prayer. Now she gave me a sober look from those odd German eyes of hers which are often unfocused as though the focus were somewhere beyond reach. I already knew she saw visions. I had heard stories about her at court and along the way in unreliable inns where they talk with equal  credulity about strygae whose powers can only be destroyed if one eats their hearts and about miraculous cures effected by saints. I must say I had been repelled and had not really been looking forward to meeting Radegunda. But there is nothing of the village freak in her. She has a German intensity but is as cultivated as a Roman matron. Only that curious blue of her eyes, reflected in the hollows of her cheeks and brimming in the shadows thrown by her veil, distinguished her from one. I was reminded of those heretics who believed that light was gathered in the bodies of saintly people whose virtue managed slowly to eliminate all the darkness within them until, ultimately, they rejoined a realm of pure primeval felicity and light. There is a transparency about Radegunda. Bluish veins show through her skin and one could see, looking at her, how the heresy might