The Submerged Cathedral Page 10

  But the greatest shock for any of them, he knows, is the silence – by order of the abbot and St Benedict. Of having your own tongue stilled inside your mouth, the better to listen for God.

  So. It’s this that brings each one in time to Brother Anthony’s infirmary door, and he tends to them, as they stare about at the white beds and the grey curtains, the smell of Epsom salts finding their nostrils. He shuffles between them, offering bed rest and tea and hot-water bottles, and then they realise they have the chance to speak. For austere conversation is permitted with him, the infirmarian, but by this time the silence has woven itself in with the shock, and often it is only when they have recovered and he is opening the door for them to leave that they want to tell him their stories, those lives peeled off them before they entered here.

  But once they know it’s possible, they store their speaking up and deliver it to him with their ailments. He does not ever tell them he’s heard all their lives before, from other flat-faced boys just like themselves.

  Obedience, humility, perseverance. Shovelling shit over the fence from the dusty earth of the sheep yards, Martin does not know why he is here, does not care. It is a relief to be told: walk there, wear this (a flapping dress, absurd, he does not care), sing this, sleep, eat.

  He shovels each raked grey pile into the barrow, hitches his habit up to move, lifts another shovelful of pebbled sheep shit. In this mindless repetition he thinks he is supposed to pray. The idea is ludicrous. He lets his brain fall still.

  If he tries to think of his arrival here – a week ago, a month? – it is as some watery delirium, or dream. A leather chair, the abbot’s hand. Perhaps he cried. Later, being led to one narrow iron bed in a row of twenty, then one space in the choir-stall among the rows of others, one refectory chair, one plate, one cup.

  There were the months after Jocelyn left. When all he could think to do was walk into the bush and disappear. And then, with the entire supply of the surgery’s morphine and some opiated instinct, a train trip south, then west. Occasionally, out through the windows over those rhythmic days and nights, he stared into a stunned Hereford’s glossed, resiny eyes, its turned head looming from the dark. He had walked into a pub, legs moving as though he had been months at sea. The weeks in the town, the morphine running out and crying into the sheets for Jocelyn’s sleep-flung hand over his hip.

  And now there is the silence, as he kneels and works and walks and sleeps.

  Anthony watches him, knows the buried baby is what haunts this Martin’s mind, kneeling there in the yellow-lit chapel or stalking out across the paddocks. They have all heard how he was found up on the ridge that day, incoherent by the unknown baby’s grave. And Anthony has seen him since, returning across the flats in the early mornings. When Martin is absent from the abbey, Anthony knows it is that old child’s grave at which he kneels to offer his Psalms.

  We are all lonely, brother.

  In the beginning, Anthony knows, their heads are bursting full of words, and in church the Psalms come rushing out, all words and noise, all need and desire and relief.

  Anthony thinks he can see the shape of their need in the first weeks, and it is all shaped like women. They scandalise themselves, they find the Psalms have hips and breasts and they arch backwards into prayer that smells of women, is soft as women. And they think it is any woman they want, but in the infirmary Anthony sees their faces when they’re released into a dreaming sleep, and they’re each crying for their own mother.

  When Anthony arrived here in 1930 he felt the Irishmen’s cold gaze on him and their brimstone hearts harden against him. But standing there on the porch with his bag heavy at his shoulder he turned and looked around him at the scraped land, at the sky bluer than any Irish air, and he thought, This is my country; and he stared those old men down, and set his bag on the cold verandah stone.

  He liked to work with the sheep, it reminded him of home, and then he liked to walk in the frosty dark to Vigils still caught in the slow web of sleep. Then he learned the sign language and learned to trust those peaceful things coming into him, he thinks from the Virgin, and he is able to believe now in the love of God almost all the time.

  A bout of influenza, then pneumonia, had brought him to the infirmary in ’42 and kept him here for three months. Where he began to learn the rhythms of old Ignatius’s bottles and herbs and when and why he used them. After which the old man kept him there in training.

  From this infirmary he has watched the tides and circles of the novice year. It moves on, the shock disappears, their faces turn brown with work in the sun, their forearms grow sinewed, and lustful thoughts subside.

  The only fullness left there then is the wish still to talk. Sometimes Anthony thinks that this is what becomes of desire in a monastery: all need turns into only the desire to speak.

  So they read the Psalms.

  I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels.

  In his student days, when morphine was only for pleasure, Martin liked to take a tiny amount and then walk around the steep edges of the Pittwater beach. He is reminded of it in the cloister, on the third day of the fast in this, his first year. Of the way that clear, slow glaze had formed over his vision, the seaweeded rocks becoming blood splotches beneath the water.

  He is enjoying this wandering of his mind, those images, lost for so long, returning desiccated, but somehow more intense.

  He is interested too in the physiology, and the illusory psychology, of the fast. The lightheadedness, the tilting of the room if he moves too quickly. The intensification of the senses over the days, so that he can smell laundry soap on the clothes of Anthony where he sits reading, though he is eleven feet from the open window, inside the infirmary. This hypersensitivity disconnects Martin from himself. Watching, he wonders if this is what it feels like to die, this effervescent, aerial stroking away from the physical, sensory world. When the senses are so sprawling, so easily released, sent out like streamers or homing birds, returning with a distant scent, the sound of scraping mud from boots on the neighbouring farm … and then he knows it, in the short hard spaces of concentration, as delirium. What he imagines as some kind of god takes visceral, sculptural form, and almost, once, speaks. And Martin can even attempt what he thinks might be prayer: it is like swimming in green water. Cool, easy, progressive, nearing something clear and sharp.

  This ease will sink rapidly away when he once again has that electrical weight, the massive bulk – of bread, or pea – on his tongue. But it is as though the deprivation of food sets the fuse for every sense but hunger, which only lies dully, unrecognised, at the base of all the other fissuring, hissing and popping machinations of the nerve endings.

  And, inevitably, Jocelyn. She comes singing into his body, all fern-frond hair and smooth eucalyptical limbs, all dank, androgynous arousal, rising from the coastal rainforest or the marshes of western New South Wales. She is cross-continental, bicoastal, vampiric as she comes to him on these yellow plains.

  He dreams then that she is in Spain, makes her flamenco and castanet like a clacking souvenir doll. His tongue is sticking to the roof of his mouth. He drinks water carefully, moves slowly, in stages as though learning for the first time to move, tests his weight on his hands, the balls of his feet, gets down to kneel. Prays her, stumbling, from his mind.

  After these decorated hallucinations the cool clarity of the infirmary comes to him as relief. Washed out, still a little lightheaded, it is a comfort to rejoin the conscious presence of another human being and the stark wooden light. Martin breathes deeply as he lies there, but keeps his eyes open, not wanting a return, yet, to those shifting images.

  ‘St Bernard prescribed prayer and love alone for the sick,’ the infirmarian, Anthony, tells him, screwing the lid on a jar. Then laughs softly, a guttural sound. ‘I don’t know how well that worked,’ he says. Then sniffs his fingers.

  The football dressing-room smell of lini
ment recalls for Martin his university days again. Another roomful of men.

  ‘St Bernard thought there was nothing but trouble in medicine. That to seek relief from disease in medicine was in harmony neither with our religion nor with the purity of the order. Odd, do you think?’

  Martin is still stunned by the sound of the man’s voice, its confidence, its volume. He nods, not hearing the words, only their noise, the sharpness of the loudly spoken air outside the chapel. He himself has not spoken for weeks, only responding to another novice’s unlawful, urgent whisper with nods or shrugs.

  Now he traces back, follows Anthony’s speech about Bernard, the Abbey of Cîteaux built on a swamp. About the prohibited study of medicine. Martin imagines his university professors laughing to see him here, sitting under the clumsy hands of a halfwit man-nurse administering wives’-tale poultices like a child slapping mud pies. Shaking their heads at his wasted years in the lecture halls, the anatomy lab, the hospitals.

  The infirmary smells of carbolic acid and Dettol, has the metallic sound of kidney dishes and shoe squeaks on linoleum. The first time he came in here it was a home-coming of the senses, but he dreamed of the baby for nights afterwards. Of that moment, the slippery weight in his hands, over and over.

  Anthony washes his hands at the sink in the corner, waiting for Martin to speak, this sallow young man, quicker-eyed than most. Anthony has noticed that Martin watches his movements too closely, like an examiner.

  He has noticed, too, across the yards and at mealtimes, that Martin has seemed not to take to the sign language. The other novices learn quickly enough the monastery’s ancient language of the fingers. The hands of some move in the air like smoke, like dancing steam. There are even jokes, curled with deft fingers when the novice master’s back is turned. It’s only strictly meant for work. Help me, or stop. It is not the language men carry in their hearts; but their hearts’ language is supposed to be kept for God.

  The young monks finger sentences to one another across the cloister, behind the covers of books when they’re filing in for the reading, the Lectio Divina. In the garden, and beyond, fluttering fingers across paddocks and from beneath tractors and across the snufflings of pigs in the sty. Desperate dances of fingers to reveal their selves to one another.

  Except for this Martin, this young man floating upwards out of his delirium and dehydration, carefully watching everything, walking the perimeters, but leaving unlearned the language of the hands.

  Once during Anthony’s early years he heard a boy cry out Take me home, this cry, Mama, bring me home, and under-blanket stifled sobs and sobs to follow. But in the morning he saw the young brother’s face had set to stone from grief. It was as though all need had flowed out of the boy in the night and now he was ready to wait for God.

  Later it was tuberculosis, not the Holy Spirit, that descended into the boy and dwelt there, and by the time it came to the end he was simply tired out with waiting. His twenty-four-year-old eyes watched past the rites read him by the abbot, heard the wheeling of that white cockatoo screaming into his morning dreams, and Anthony knew it was the bird’s shriek, not the peace of God, which went with that boy into death.

  It was the first burial Anthony saw here, the lowering of a friend wrapped only in his habit into the stony grave.

  When Ignatius died ten years later, Anthony had washed the old man’s body and, as he moved him a last, leftover breath had come out, as though to say Do not cry, I am here. But it was only physiology, that exhalation, not life. And Anthony had sat by the bed until morning and held Ignatius’s dead hand in his, thinking, I cannot go on.

  Ignatius, who had taught him about healing scabs and setting bones and bringing down fevers and liniments for a scald. Who taught him more than his own mother did about love, about love.

  For a year or more, he could kneel and pray only to Ignatius, could not believe in anything less substantial. In the infirmary, everything had been touched by the old man’s hands.

  He could pray only one prayer then, one sentence – from the Song of Songs, but in Anthony’s mind it was only ever in Ignatius’s phlegmy voice:

  Set me as a seal on your heart, for love is stronger than death.

  He moves across the dark linoleum to the young Martin, lying there in the narrow white bed. Who wanders the ridge when he should be working, who fasts without permission, who is bloated up with grief. Anthony holds him out a cup of tea, sets it down on the bedside cabinet.

  And as he leans he whispers, ‘Do not cry, I am here.’

  The young man, this Martin, stares at him and then under his breath mutters something Anthony cannot hear, but he knows it is meant like a slap to his face. He holds Martin’s hand in both of his for a moment, then smoothes the bedclothes.

  Love is stronger than death.

  Twenty

  WHEN MARTIN HAS recovered from his fast he moves back into the dormitory, away from the smells of disinfectant to those of farts and bedclothes, to the snoring and the scratchings, the grunts and wheezes of forty sleeping men. And to those things not spoken of in the confessional: the dark urgent breath of a young man drowning in lust and loneliness, the whimpers of dreams.

  In the dormitory he misses the clean light of the infirmary. He had begun to enjoy watching the infirmarian’s hocus-pocus each day, his little bottles, his handfuls of herbs, as though antibiotics have not been invented. His breathless leaning over the mortar and pestle like some jowly apprentice. Martin does not dwell on that moment’s warmth in the man’s rough hands over his.

  Oysters. Inexplicably, obscenely, and after all this time, he has a craving for oysters here in the weak winter morning’s sunlight. Ice still feathers the ground in the shade, and beads of melted frost pool on the sills where he is washing the library windows.

  Once at Pittwater they had borrowed a small boat and motored up the Hawkesbury to a tiny green beach and levered oysters from the rocks. At the edge where the bush met the sand they had sat together, prising and gouging at the ancient grey forms, bending their butter knives. Then the soft popping click as each one opened and the oyster, silver-green on the blind white shell. Taking one into his mouth to taste all the ocean rocks and beaches of New South Wales.

  She had lain on the blanket and he’d caught a whiting, walked to her holding the invisible line high in one hand, the fish arching and moving at the end of it. She’d been sorry for it, its distressed flapping. And he showed her the effortless death, the sudden blind butt between its eyes with the handle of the knife. He had gone back to cast the line again into the waves. When the fish was still she watched it closely, said it was ‘a beautiful silver thing’, wanted to take a photograph of it.

  But then it had revived, and begun flapping, half-crawling, on its side. She’d called him back to the poor thing, then looked away as he’d tried again to kill it, in the end ashamed, stabbing it roughly with a knife, gashed and blood-covered.

  That afternoon they sat among the trees in the falling dusk drinking beer from a bottle, and they stared around them, listening and watching the ticking undergrowth.

  He thinks the men here would say the presence that day was something sacred, that God was the reason for their silence there, being surrounded by Him. Martin had thought it was only the painted glass curtains of the bush, on and on, enclosing them. But now, remembering, he feels a shift, wonders if perhaps there was something holy there.

  But in the next second his fingers are only cold and sueded from the newsprint, and there is nothing sacred, he is only a window-washer in the cold light of this blighted farm. He is a tussock-puller, flagstone-scrubber, a drudge for somebody’s idea of a god, and in the evenings when he reads their holy books his eyes blur and layer the lines of type, the letters lift away from the paper and slide over one another, and he clenches his jawbone to stay awake.

  In the evenings Martin reads. He meditates on the words. What does it mean, to meditate? What does the word mean? He walks the spindly weatherboarded cloister aroun
d the darkening rose garden. Words rise up and spread out in his mind, their parts mixing and unscrambling like Scrabble squares. He thinks his intellect is failing him, falling into disuse.

  By the second year he craves a dictionary. Not the library Oxford, to which he sneaks in the evenings with his pile of remembered words. He can’t retain all the definitions in his mind, or return to them when he needs to. Or else the definitions are meaningless. Cloister: a covered walk, esp. of a monastery or church. Faith: confidence or trust in a person or thing. He wants a dictionary of his own, to own a dictionary, an elaborate, many-volumed, personal, only-for-his-eyes dictionary. Once he would have laughed out loud, and hard, at the idea of this being the thing to fantasise about for months on end. Not sex, nor cigarettes, nor brandy. Not coffee. Not the feel of money in your fingers. Not even speech, now.

  A dictionary that told you something of what you looked for.

  He is sick from wishing.

  There is a railway track through the property, and the men pause sometimes as they work, listening to the train at their backs, trying not to imagine the people inside, those wives and children they will never have. The lives they will not see, returning from simple journeys they will never make.

  In the paddocks at marking each year the lambs gather in nervous clutches with the sheep. The wind is icy across the flats and the iron cradle is freezing even through his gloves. What St Francis would make of it. Men in robes and working aprons, tackling lambs with all the weight of their bodies into the dry dust of the sheep yards, forcing them kicking and braying into the cradle for mutilation, the anxious mothers waiting beside the fence. The stunned lambs skittering drunkenly once thrown onto the grass, stumbling and bloody. A murderous scene, the men head to foot in blood, the medieval whine of the cradle, the shocked animals, tipped out as bloodied rubbish.