Traveling with Pomegranates (30 page)

Ann looks up and finds me staring at her. “No rush,” I call, and walk over to the empty tomb of St. Amadour and stare at the plaque without reading it. Thinking back on it, I’m pretty sure Ann believed, as I did in early adolescence, that she’d found the small, true light in herself. Then, like me, she lost it.

Perhaps she fought any urge to be a writer out of a need to separate herself from me and my path, the same way I separated myself from my mother and her path. When Ann went to college, I felt the invisible way she broke from me, in that way mothers feel barely discernible things. Even now, as we weave this new closeness, I do not mistake the separate core in her, her own nascent true self, and I watch how she protects it, even as she struggles to unfold it. Do her intuitions about writing come now because she has finally found enough of her separate self to entertain them?

In my case, losing the small, true light was more like turning my back on it and finding something manageable. Becoming a nurse seemed more doable and sensible. You graduated and took a board exam. When you said, “I’m a nurse,” you knew what you were talking about. You had
proof
. Nobody would register me as a writer. Would I be a writer if I never published anything? Would I be one even if I did? And the real question: how likely was it to happen? At eighteen, I couldn’t find the courage. I took all that passion and sublimated it into nursing. Until, at twenty-nine, it simply refused to go there anymore.

I wonder if that’s the perennial story of writers: you find the true light, you lose the true light, you find it again. And maybe again.

As Ann puts away her journal and pen, I recognize that what I’ve witnessed in her over the last year is the same restlessness and hunger that I felt at twenty-nine. The same sense of exile, the homesickness for one’s place in the world. Oddly, the desire to be a writer seems to be coming back to her not unlike the way it returned to me: gradually insinuating itself into her thoughts; her desire, once gone cold, heating again by degrees like popcorn in the microwave, with the slow
rat ta tat
and then the bombardment. Finally, at the bursting point, the desire must be said out loud. Like she did to me this morning as she sat on the bed. Like I did to Sandy at the breakfast table on the morning I turned thirty—“I want to be a writer.”

I watch Ann cross the terrace, stopping to look up at the fresco, and I think:
I have always sensed the writer in her
.

Now her dreams talk to her about it, seeming to say what I never did.

High atop a gilded bronze altar, the statue of the Black Virgin of Rocamadour is just over two feet tall. As I step into the semidarkness of the chapel, she’s the first thing I see: small, thin, her facial features strangely hawkish. She looks like a dark, old bird that has flown in from an open window and perches up there, watching me watch her.

Every chair is taken. Ann and I move along the side wall toward the altar rail, edging as close to the Black Virgin as we can. She is covered with blackly tarnished plates of silver, now cracked and peeling. Her hands are worn to mitts, her feet are mostly missing, and her walnut-wood face is split and splotched.

“She
looks
nine hundred,” Ann whispers.

The Christ child sits on the Virgin’s lap like a miniature adult. She rests her arms regally on the sides of her chair. Her back is erect and her chin lifted. She wears a crown, not a veil. She looks utterly self-possessed. Old. Bony. Authoritative. Powerful. A much fiercer version of Mary than I expected.

As I look at her, my throat tightens and I dig through my bag for the travel-size Kleenex. Just in case. I’m not sure what moves me about her, only that she’s beautiful to me.

Someone vacates a chair, and I sit down, staring at the flinty old Virgin until the tears really do start to leak. I rub them away and focus on the back of Ann’s brown hair. Ann’s fingers, I notice, are curled around the stubby piece of chain, and I wonder what she has decided about it. What I will decide about mine.

I look up at the vaulted ceiling, locating the iron bell that legend says rings on its own when the Black Virgin performs one of her miracles. Then, twisting around to inspect the back of the sanctuary, I find myself staring at a wall of bare rock and realize the tiny chapel has been built right against the cliff. The surface of the rock gleams here and there from the candles in front of it. As my eyes adjust, I distinguish fragments of chain and shackles dangling from the wall on iron hooks.

When I turn back to the Black Virgin’s peeling face, the teary impulse has gone. I gaze at her unguarded for a long while, aware mostly of how fearless she looks. Her boldness and strength break through, as does her aged wisdom. She is without any need to please, any need to act, or look, or be a certain way. It’s as if she’s done with that, and rests now in the solid center of herself, having arrived at her own condensed truth. She is herself. And that is all.

I know suddenly what moves me about the Black Virgin of Rocamadour:
She’s the Old Woman
. It comes with some surprise, as if the bird on the altar has just pecked me on the forehead.

Old Woman I meet you deep inside myself
. May Sarton’s line. That had started it all, the whole inquest, giving words and an image to my first inexpressible urge to become a new self after fifty. I’ve been searching for the Old Woman ever since reading the line. Now, I cannot help but feel that I’m looking at her.

The chain links I handed out form a winding trail along the marble altar rail. Most of the group has left the chapel, headed for the small Museum of Sacred Art nearby. In front of me, Ann rises from her chair and, after a quick nod over her shoulder at me, disappears into the back of the chapel, I suppose to light a candle.

My thoughts wander to the Black Madonna in my novel—the figurehead with her fist in the air, a heart on her chest, a moon at her feet. Of course, it would come back to her. The chapel is like a quarry, inviting those who wander into it to mine their own Black Virgin. I wonder if that’s part of what I’ve been trying to do in the novel. To dig her up for myself. The last scene I wrote before leaving home was one in which Lily creeps through the pink house late at night, slipping into the parlor to see the Black Madonna. She presses her hand against the Black Madonna’s painted heart. She says: “I live in a hive of darkness and you are my mother.”

Sitting in the shadowy stillness, I could almost laugh at how the Black Madonna has gotten herself such a prominent role in my pages, how she has been curiously mixed up with the novel from the beginning, from the moment I stood before the icon of the dark-skinned Mary in the myrtle tree in Greece and spilled out my prayer . . . my admission: I want to be a novelist. In a way that I’m only beginning to understand, the Black Madonna is slowly becoming like a muse to me—the personification of the dark, old voice of the soul.

Yet I’ve been slow to trust what is inside me—this new well of images, story, characters, and language. I haven’t wanted to confess to myself how plagued I am with skepticism. I’ve finished seven chapters of the novel, roughly half of it—believing in the work while simultaneously doubting the whole thing. Some of that is simply part of writing, but too much of it comes from enfeebling notions I have inside about my creative abilities, remnants of inadequacy that go back to my childhood, with its commanding old fear that I would not live up to expectations, that I would disappoint. How humbling to sit here, wanting to believe the fear has been unplugged and find it sputtering determinedly on like a rundown generator in a back room.

A couple of times since arriving in France, I’ve entertained the unreasonable thought that when I get home, I should just print out the half-novel, package it up, and send it off to the literary agent I met three years ago—the only agent I’ve ever met—who has probably forgotten she ever met me. The thought comes to me again now, but who sends off half of something? And the idea of someone besides Ann reading it, of it being out there, in the world, makes me squeamish.

I get up and deposit my piece of chain on the altar rail, knowing what I would like to be free of: the part of me that dares too little and fears too much. The terrible voice that pipes up: you
can’t
, and the next minute,
don’t
.

As I leave the chapel, I glimpse Ann lingering still in the back, and it is only because I pause to wait for her that I see the nun striding in in her big black shoes, heading straight for the altar rail, toting a handbasket. Ann and I watch from near the doorway as she gathers the pieces of chain the group has littered all over the place. I cannot see her face, but I envision her lips pressed together making the
tsk, tsk
sound. This is her job. Keeper of the Chapel. Custodian of Offerings. Cleaning up after the messy pilgrims. Another day, another basket.

She scoops up every last loop of chain, letting them drop noisily into her confiscated stockpile.
Clink. Clink. Clink
.

Just before she carries them away, though, she lifts the basket up toward the Black Virgin with a hasty genuflection. As if to say, here they are. Do what you can.

The Cathedral of Notre Dame in Le Puy sits on a large volcanic pinnacle. To reach the door on the western side, we trudge up a cobblestone street angled like a ski slope, then mount a stairway with so many steps I’m inspired to count them. These are the same steps that launched the First Crusade. We arrive at the top of them, huffing and puffing.

“My guidebook says there are one hundred and thirty-four steps,” I say to Mom. “I counted one hundred and one.” I look down the slope, able to see red-tiled rooftops
below
us. “How did we miss thirty-three steps?”

Perspiration has beaded across Mom’s forehead. She unwinds her black scarf from around her neck, revealing a light pink turtleneck.

“Hot flash?” I say.