Women in the Wall by Julia O'Faolain Page B

persuade.
    “This is an image of heaven,” I told her.
    “How do you imagine heaven?”
    “As ordered, unchanging. Like your convent.”
    “Do you think it wrong to withdraw and seek one’s own salvation?”
    I said I didn’t see how it could be, she that she had often worried about this. Before founding the convent she had run an alms-house and a hospital.
    “But I gave up. I decided the good we could do was hopelessly limited. How could it be just to cure one sick person and refuse hundreds? Yet that was what we had constantly to do. It made us angry. It made us unable to pray. Then, too, I decided that since men’s bodies live only a short time and their souls forever, I would do better to pray for their souls than to bring their bodies a wretched and partial help. Sometimes I think this world is hell. I would believe it but have been told it is a heresy.”
    There was a coherence about her which made me aware of how hesitant and diffuse my own life was. She began to talk about the impermanence of matter—hardly a discovery but this fact was so physically real to her that it became so to me. Radegunda is the most physically compelling person I have met. When she picks a flower as she did next—some blue flower, a large luscious thing with a golden centre—and says “This flower will fade,” it begins to wilt. Suggestion? Hypnotism? Miracle? I don’t know. I saw the great soft, almost animal thing—it had furry purple protuberances like a hound’s dewlaps—shrivel and dry.
    “Look,” she said. “I could hate beauty. It is a mockery, a comforting lie told to a sick man since it will wither in his hands. It is like the grain we mix with poison to kill slugs. I would truly hate it if I did not see it as as an image of permanent beauty. If I didn’t see this flower as a reflection of a heavenly flower, I would crush it.”
    Her voice was cold, almost bitter. The shadows in her face were the colour of the flower. Her own beauty was at that most poignant stage: almost gone, returning at brief moments to flood and replump her face. Like an after-image. A turn of her head and it had disappeared. It was surely growing rarer in its returns. I looked at the flower. Had she been vain? Her intensity had worn out her body before its time.
    “Have you”, I risked, “no appetites?”
    “They are my torments. I stifle them. I delight in tormenting them as they would me. They come from the devil.” She laughed. She could have been describing a sport.
    “Don’t you enjoy life at all?”
    “Oh, indeed. This life is a trial. One must face one’s trial with gallantry. Here we live our life gaily but without becoming attached to it. The balance is delicate.”
    She gave me a great foaming splash of smile, spontaneous and humourless. I looked at her suspiciously.
    “Gaily? Is the convent gay?”
    “Very. Stay with us and you’ll see. My nuns are my plants. I delight in their growth. When our community expands, I am almost sorry since it means we know each other less well. But it is a sign of our success. And we can’t refuse women who need to come here. You know what dangers women face in Gaul today! I don’t mean sin!” A shrewd narrowing of the lips. “One can commit that in a convent. I mean quite brutal dangers.”
    I forget the rest. She has made this speech so often since, I may even be remembering things she said some other time to a new batch of novices or to some visitor. Radegunda is a balanced person. Her life is neatly divided into the mundane and the transcendent. Mine is not. Listening to her I found her rejections of the body had the effect of conjuring it up for me in its quintessential fleshiness. As if I had been reading Ausonius’s lament for his roses, my limbs tingled for some speedy mortal embrace. Curiously, she had, without meaning to, performed the same trick as he. By reminding me of the death-laden canker common to all human flesh, she had set my own exhilaratingly on fire. The