Authors: Thomas Gifford
“Talk to him.” I shrugged, felt the calm, distant eyes regarding me with an almost academic interest, as if nothing were meaningful enough to truly engage his attention. “Can you help me?”
“I hardly know the answer to that, Mr. Driskill. Help is not something we deal in here. Help and hope, abandoned within these walls. Let me tell you who we are, let me talk to you, Mr. Driskill, so that you will know what you have found here at St. Christopher.” He drummed his fingers preparatory to an explanation I knew better than to interrupt, “We are a kind of foreign legion of monks, only nineteen of us, who never leave, who will
… never
… leave this place, and a few who come and go from time to time. We pray, we wait to die, we are
ignored by Rome. Sometimes a man like your Etienne LeBecq will come here on retreat, to purge the evil he senses in himself. All of us here have faced the evil in ourselves, perhaps like the man you seek. Many of us are dying—incurable illnesses of one kind or another, illnesses we choose not to treat … maybe of pure despair at man’s condition. I am the abbot of the dead, Mr. Driskill, and of the forgotten.”
The monastery had been founded during the twelfth century, or so the story went, and in the abbot’s view it might well have been so. Founded by the Cistercians, or more accurately by a radical bishop who felt that the Cistercian reaction against the lords of Europe—the monks of Cluny—had not gone far enough. As the Cluniacs had grown more and more worldly, had seen their political and economic power multiply, the Cistercians had sought to flee that world of privilege. A monk pledged to poverty was not intended to live in a world of riches, so the Cistercians withdrew. But their credo—to work—frustrated the need to remain impoverished. Under their tillage, remote and barren valleys and hillsides flourished. The conundrum was impenetrable. Work and poverty seemed incompatible. In 1075 Brother Robert and seven monks from the monastery of St. Michele de Tonnere fled to the forest of Molesme. But by 1098 their efforts had produced a kind of earthly success that frustrated his hope to create a true monastery. Shortly thereafter another group made the perilous journey to Africa, into the silence of
the
northern desert, where no crops would grow, no wealth and power could possibly accrue, and built this monastery, calling it St. Bernard. Why it had become St. Christopher, and when, the abbot did not know.
There in the heat and the rankest poverty, far from any of Europe’s worldliness, the asceticism of the monks flourished. Fanaticism, self-denial, an almost unprecedented zeal for the rejection of the flesh, became the rule by which they lived. And they did not live long. Seldom did one reach the age of thirty. More often they failed quickly, were dead in their mid-twenties. “Leave your bodies without these gates,” they importuned the young.
“Only souls enter here. The flesh is good for nothing.” Likewise, nothing that was welcomed in the world was welcomed within these walls. No knowledge, no art, no literature, nothing that might normally give a man’s life meaning. No work. Nothing. Nothingness. They waited in the desert for the world to end, believing that only through their own sublime goodness, prayer, and irreducible emptiness might the world of man possibly endure.
“In the end—it was less than half a century, not a long time, Mr. Driskill, in the end they were all gone, dead, bleaching in the sun, not mourned, not even noticed by the Europeans. After all, there was no one left to carry back the tale … it was generations before anyone from Europe came here again and found what bits of record-keeping survived.” The abbot swatted at a fly. Brother Timothy seemed to have fallen into a doze on a stool in the corner. The abbot had been talking for a long time, as if he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to communicate with someone from the outside world. Beyond his initial questions he seemed devoid of curiosity about my life: he was far more intrigued with recounting his own story, savoring it, taking its measure, evaluating its madness as he spoke.
“The monastery stood empty then, preserved by the heat and the lack of humidity, for hundreds of years. Think of it, Mr. Driskill … centuries without a prayer, without a single monk, cleansed of all humanity by the passage of time and God’s own elements.” He smiled thinly, wet his lips, went on, a born storyteller trapped in a world without an audience.
Finally the lost monastery—Hell’s Monastery, or, The Inferno it had become in legend—came under control of the papacy. It was used as a remote place where inconvenient monks or priests might be sent with the relative certainty that they would die in the attempt to get there. In any case, they would never come back. Some of them—the real hermits who wanted the supreme test, who wanted the satisfaction of renouncing everything—begged to come here, came on their own, just wandered off in hopes of reaching the place somehow.
They came to die in a kind of ultimate spasm of arrogance, a complete, contemptuous rejection of the world.
The darkness was seeping in at the narrow windows, along with the chill of the desert evening that seemed to come rolling across the wastes like a cloud of mist. The abbot had stopped talking. I wasn’t sure how long we sat in silence. He was watching me as if expecting a reaction. But he was prepared to wait a long time.
“So why did you come here?” I asked.
I thought he hadn’t heard me, until he leaned forward, braced his elbows on the table, and made a basket of his fingers. He watched his hands as if proving to himself that they were steady, without a tremor. Still in control.
“The only discipline we have here,” he said almost in a whisper, “is that we impose on ourselves. We have a few hermits who stay in the desert much of the time. Most of us speak, a few don’t. But the fact is, we’re a very thin strain, weak links, we are all hiding from something here, we have no illusions about perfecting our relationship with God. We have no illusions about the states of grace. No questions about being justified. We have just stopped short of the one last sin of murdering ourselves. Why? Mainly, I suspect, because we are afraid of what awaits us on the other side … or wherever. We hide, we hide in fear and shame because that is what we have become, creatures of fear and shame.”
His tone lacked any emotion that might have laden the words he spoke. The chill I felt made my flesh crawl and my back hurt, and it had nothing to do with the dropping temperature. I felt as if I had found the geographical equivalent of the emptiness I saw yawning in the silver-haired priest’s eyes.
“I came here,” he said gently, “because I deserve this place. I earned it. I saw evil in my monastery, years ago in the Dordogne, sodomy and corruption of all kinds, so I took God’s sword into these hands. I had a vision in my cell … I watched them from the corner of my eye when we were in the chapter house reading the Rule. They befouled the place. I went to their cells in the middle of the night, found them locked together, and I
put an end to their corruption with my own hands. My cassock was stiff with blood.… I left on foot—in a daze—and no one came after me.… Two years later I had made my way to this place.… Unaccountably, years later, Pius XII took notice of me, letters were sent and received, and I was named abbot.”
He didn’t say a word about LeBecq until we had concluded a sparse dinner in the dining hall. I was too tired to press the issue or even to notice much of my surroundings. The aspirin on an empty stomach had provided me with at best a fuzzy perspective. But my back pain had eased and the hole in the dike had not come unplugged, thanks to Brother Timothy.
“Come,” the abbot said, “the night air will do you good. Then an early bed. If you don’t mind sleeping on a dead man’s pallet.” He almost winked at me.
“What is that supposed—” But he had stood up and was leaving the table. I followed him.
It was cold outside. We walked in silence beneath the pop-art moon in a black sky. It looked like a hole seen from the inside of a great metallic orb.
“I know your Etienne LeBecq, of course,” he said.
“I thought you might.”
“He’s come to us from time to time for many years, a rather reclusive man, but I’ve spoken with him in reflective moments. A strong faith, made me feel a weakling. We would speak of the Church and its role, how each of us has a job however unexpected it might be. He never knew it, but he was a great comfort to me when I have questioned my faith … his belief in our Church abided, Mr. Driskill. But somewhere deep inside himself he carried a terrible secret. What? He never told me.” One of the dogs had followed us out into the night and had begun to sniff and dig at the sand in the valley between two of the rolling dunes. “He was here a few months ago, only for a night or two—I forget. Time means nothing here. He came and went, he didn’t ask questions. Sometimes he seemed to try to hide from his soul.… As for information, I cannot help you, Mr. Driskill. If he had a past or future, I know nothing of them. We have no worldly goods here, nothing to call our
own … nothing, that is, but our individual pasts. Most of us have no future but what you can see. But our pasts, we guard them most jealously. If a man’s past has been a happy one, then why would he be in this place? And if it has been unhappy or wicked … no one wants to speak of it.”
The dog had dug with increasing fervor, had gotten below the top layer of sand.
“He smells death,” the abbot said, going to the dog, gently shoving him away with his foot. He saw my quizzical expression. “Here is where we found the body of one of our older men. I spoke with him only briefly, but he was a talkative man, a bit of an old woman. Then one morning he was nowhere to be seen. A few days passed, I’d known he was near the end, I wanted to give him time to die as he chose … alone in the desert. He was babbling of green fields the last time we spoke. I’m sure in his mind that’s where he died, in those green fields. Then the dog found him … apparently he had walked over the dune, composed himself, and just let go. His choice. We respect a man’s choice. The dog found him half covered with sand, his hand sticking up, looking like a tiny gravestone. So we buried him today, as you arrived.” He scratched the dog’s floppy ears, rubbed his thin, moth-eaten hide. “Why did he die as he did? God’s will, that’s all we’ll ever know … he was the lucky one, he had a good death, Mr. Driskill.”
As he led me to the cell where I would sleep, where the late monk, fleeing from whatever secrets lay in the darkness of his past, had slept, he lit a candle. The shadows flickered against the walls of the tiny cell. A wooden cross above the narrow bed, the pervasive smell of sand and night. A blanket lay folded at the end of the bed. He surveyed the bare room. “Serviceable, if not luxurious, Mr. Driskill.”
When he turned to leave, I said, “One more question. Just a stray thought. About another man who may have come here and then gone. Maybe returning from time to time—”
“Yes?”
“I don’t know his name. I don’t know if he’s a priest
or a monk or even a layman like LeBecq. But you would remember him … tall, very fit but in his seventies I suspect, round gold-framed glasses, silver hair combed straight back from a point in front … remarkable eyes, no bottom to them …”
The abbot stood in the doorway, the shadows playing across his harsh features. He shared some of the fitness I’d just described and he must have been as old. But he, too, was timeless. I waited, watching him, watching a spider make its way up the wall and stop, as if to listen.
“Yes,” he said at last. “I know such a man. Brother August … but I know nothing of him. If he is the same man, he lived here for a long time, two or three years, impervious to the toll this place takes. Said very little. Attended to his prayers. Then—it was quite astonishing—the bandit who drives the truck to bring us supplies, this scoundrel brought a letter for Brother August … this is an unheard-of event, do you understand? A letter from Rome … and then the next day he was gone, rode away with the bandit in the truck.” He shrugged.
“I wonder, do we have the same man in mind—”
“Striking to look at,” the abbot said. “How can I say this? He was not like the others here. He wasn’t punishing himself, he was simply going about his business, as if he were conditioning himself for something. Amazingly strong man but with very gentle manners. An educated man. Sometimes he would go into the desert for days at a time, then return, without discussion, fit as ever … sometimes he seemed indestructible … no human frailty …”
“Yes. Brother August,” I said. “He is the man, I feel sure.” The abbot had the effect of making me talk in an unnatural manner. I couldn’t help it. I felt like a man reading lines. The news of Brother August had caught me unawares. I was struggling with the idea. Now I knew something about this man and it had come from out of nowhere. “When did he leave here?”
“Time,” the abbot mused. “Two years ago. That would be my guess.” He shrugged again at the idea of time and its measurement.
* * *
I lay awake for hours, thinking, now I know something about
him
. The mystery is not quite so deep and dark. Brother August. Two years in this hell, then someone in Rome had summoned him … sent him on his mission. Two years later my sister and Lockhardt and Heffernan are dead. A two-year journey from The Inferno to New York and Princeton. I was bone-tired but I kept turning over bits of information, looking up from the heavy work and seeing a glitter of the knife blade, a clue, a bit of unforeseen evidence. I was too tired and too amazed at the threads of the story, too curious as to what the threads would result in, what kind of tapestry—I was too weary and too excited to sleep but too weary to sort through the mountain of facts and implications that had been accumulating all around me. I finally slept an empty sleep and came awake slowly, shivering under the thin blanket. My back was pushing uncomfortably against the wooden frame of the bed. I twisted slowly around, trying to settle myself without pulling my bandage loose, refusing to open my eyes and admit I was awake. First I thought I heard something, a scuttling sound on the packed-earth floor. What kind of creatures roam the desert at night? The nervous reaction crossed my mind: if I had to get up, what might I step on? The scuttling stopped as if something knew I’d sensed its presence. It was nearly pitch-dark in the cell. A narrow slash in the wall let in a blade of moonlight which proved inadequate once I forced my eyes open. A curtain hung at the door with the night beyond.