The Secret Language of Stones

Chapter 13

Ma chère,

Here in the dark, as the kerosene burns, I try to summon your perfume and pretend I smell it instead of this stink. All around us, all the time, lives are lost. Every minute of every hour of every day and night. We steel ourselves from what we do as we carry the wounded out of danger, getting their blood on our hands, our boots, our uniforms… as we ship them off to the temporary field hospitals or, worse, send them back home for burials. We try not to think of the dead who we have no choice but to bury here on the battlefield.

Breathe, breathe, I tell myself, when the enormity of the loss overwhelms me. When I think of the achievements the world will never know. What great novel will never be written because its author was blown up. What wonderful painting that could have brought such joy will never be painted because its artist has expired after losing too much blood.

We march on roads and through fields that have become cemeteries. Nothing picturesque and peaceful like the ones we have at home. There are no graceful cobblestone paths here. No stained glass windows in artful mausoleums.

There is no romance in the impromptu graveyards at the front. Nothing like Père-Lachaise in Paris. If I were home, I would escort you there today. It is a perfect place to ruminate on love. Shall you go for me?

Take the metro, of course-Père-Lachaise is too far to walk. Before the war, there were always tourists visiting the famous resting place… but since then, other than sad funeral parties burying a soldier, the mysterious memorial park is rarely crowded.

After walking through the refined wrought iron gates, turn right. Père-Lachaise is laid out like a small town with street signs clearly visible, so if you ask the caretaker for a map, you should have no trouble getting about. Lofty trees shade the allées. Flowers bloom, bees buzz, birds fly, squirrels and rabbits and cats make the cemetery their home. There is much life there in the land of the dead. Just as there is here at the front.

The first tomb I want you to visit is on avenue Casimir Périer, the same name as the tiny street in the 6th arrondissement, but here it is in the seventh section. You will see it from a distance for it is one of the tallest monuments in the area. Not as high as the leafy trees offering shade, but soaring nonetheless, the way well-designed High Gothic structures do.

When you arrive, pause to take in its melancholy grandeur. Then stroll around its perimeter, peer inside its open arches at the two stone effigies, lovers sleeping side by side on their funeral biers.

Peter Abelard was a twelfth-century philosopher and theologian at the cathedral school of Notre-Dame. Considered the boldest thinker of his time, he was quite famous. Héloïse, the niece of a secular canon named Fulbert, was a young woman renowned for her brilliant prose writing, who spoke Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Yearning to learn even more, she persuaded her uncle to hire Abelard to teach her.

At thirty-nine, despite his fame and popularity, Abelard remained chaste. Héloïse, in her early twenties, was as well.

The great meeting of their minds led to a meeting of their souls and eventually their flesh, even though the political and religious climates of their time forbid their being together.

Abelard wrote he was “all on fire” for Héloïse and decided “she is the one to bring to my bed.”

Despite knowing sex was a sin, neither could resist and they met in secret, insatiable, they both wrote, exploring each other with a passion that until then they’d devoted solely to their intellect.

“My hands strayed more often to her bosom than to the pages, love drew our eyes to look on each other more than reading kept them on our texts,” Abelard wrote.

And then Héloïse became pregnant.

“Oh, how great was the uncle’s grief when he learned the truth, and how bitter was the sorrow of the lovers when we were forced to part!” Abelard wrote.

To protect Héloïse, Abelard took her to Brittany. There, they wed in secret and she went to stay with the nuns in a convent in Argenteuil while Abelard returned to Paris to make amends. But Héloïse’s uncle, believing Abelard had cast off his niece, greeted him by having him brutally beaten and castrated.

Compared to our time, the Middle Ages were so unforgiving. So patriarchal. Humiliated, Abelard resigned as a teacher and became a monk. Héloïse, believing she was without other options, gave up her child and became a nun. And yet their love didn’t wither, didn’t die.

For the next twenty years, Héloïse and Abelard continued to meet spiritually and emotionally in letters, pledging their love for each other over and over.

I emerged from the subway and, seeing the green trees ahead, experienced a mild surge of anticipation and dread. Why, of all the columns, had I chosen the one that sent me to visit the place I feared the most?

Reaching the tall wrought iron gates, I stopped. The deafening noise assaulted me. I didn’t hear one voice. Not one set of words but a symphony of screaming. A horrific song of pain and sorrow and sadness. Much worse than I’d feared.

Quickly I stepped back, away from the gates. So frustrated, I wanted to cry. Why did I need to hear all this? I wanted to follow Jean Luc’s column, that’s all. Just take a walk. Would I not be able to?

Anna had reassured me the practices I was doing would help me learn to control my powers. But I needed a solution now. I tried something she had recently suggested.

Reading through some old texts, Anna found a description of a mystic, who, in order to hear long-gone voices, missed messages, and forgotten words hanging in the atmosphere, slipped into an unfocused state akin to daydreaming. Therefore, in order to stop hearing them, she suggested I needed to be totally focused on the present. A tiny pinprick of pain might be enough of a distraction to keep the noise at bay.

I pressed one of my fingernails into the fleshy part of my palm. A bit deeper, and then deeper still until it actually hurt, and then I stepped back inside the gates of Père-Lachaise. Solemn silence greeted me. With some nervousness, I took a few steps farther. The dead were not calling out. At least not yet.

This technique, albeit painful, was preferable to the horror in my ears.

In the distance, three women with a large bouquet of flowers walked toward me. I let them pass, and then, opening the sheet of newsprint, I continued reading Jean Luc’s column, wondering how many other women had come here with his words in hand. How many others had taken this same pilgrimage?

Yes, I’ve told you an unhappy love story. Not to make you cry, but rather to offer hope. Separated, love doesn’t tear, doesn’t break; bonds can grow stronger.

As you gaze at their tomb, Ma chère, think of their love and how almost eight hundred years later it still inspires. Think of us. Only separated for this short spate of time.

“God knows I never sought anything in you except yourself. I wanted simply you, nothing of yours,” Héloïse wrote.

Walk around the tomb, search for the symbols of love, of piety, of faithfulness, not so much to God as to each other.

Without trouble, I found the tomb, and when I reached it, I did as Jean Luc suggested. As I peered in, I released my finger, took away the pain. I wanted to hear Jean Luc’s voice explaining its significance.

Instantly a cacophony of voices greeted me. Not all alarming, not all intimidating or ominous, not all forlorn, but all overwhelming. I tried to hear Jean Luc in the din, but couldn’t pick him out. In my room under the Palais, there were no other dead to drown him out. But here there were too many.

It wasn’t my frustration or the two sleeping lovers on their bier that moved me to tears, but the sweet stone puppy with floppy ears asleep at Abelard’s feet.

Jean Luc’s column included another quote from Héloïse to read after I’d seen the dog.

Ma chère, don’t read the next quote from Héloïse until you’ve noticed the dog, the sculptor’s symbol of constancy.

“Let me have a faithful account of all that concerns you; I would know everything, be it ever so unfortunate. Perhaps by mingling my sighs with yours I may make your sufferings less, for it is said that all sorrows divided are made lighter.”

I pressed one hand to my chest, touched the talisman under my chemise. I’d learned the charm remained at my body temperature most of the time. Like any piece of jewelry, I wore it without noticing it. But when I thought about Jean Luc, when I reached for my amulet, it reacted-he reacted-almost immediately. The temperature change of the crystal affected me in a number of ways. I became more alert to the sounds in the ether, as if I could hear the air. And my body responded as any lover’s would, knowing the other was near. My breasts tingled and my womb clenched. As if preparing for lovemaking, my pulse quickened and my blood seemed to thicken. And the heat! The lovely heat that traveled from the skin where the talisman lay, down to the cleft between my legs.

Yes, even there, in the cemetery, touching the charm, feeling Jean Luc, I throbbed and closed my eyes and let myself dream for a moment that my lover was really near, coming to meet me. He would arrive and take me in his arms, and he would touch his lips to mine and I’d feel that same heat, but now it would be from his flesh and he would be real and my response would be met by a like response and there in the shadow of the ancient lover’s tomb he would press up against me and I would feel him, I would feel Jean Luc, and the pressure of his want all up and down the length of my body, and I would know what I wanted was what he wanted.

My reverie shattered with a lonely sound, a crow’s caw. I opened my eyes and looked up to see a large black bird against a background of gray clouds. The warmth was gone and I was conscious only of the dampness that promised yet more rain. The crow called again, circling me. I shivered. He seemed to be watching me as intently as I him. Looking back at the newspaper clipping. I read the next of Jean Luc’s instructions.

I think I will let the next grave find you. A little treasure hunt of sorts. Keep your eyes wide, Ma chère. Look for another symbol of the kind of love that, one day, I hope to prove you and I share.

Maybe because of the soft rain now falling, the solemn atmosphere, and the menacing crow, I was reluctant to venture deeper into Père-Lachaise. The shadowy cobblestone alleys looked sinister and unwelcoming. But I’d taken time off from the shop, and come so far. Certainly, the cemetery possessed its ghosts, but they wouldn’t harm me. I’d heard Adolphe Thiers, prime minister under Louis-Philippe, tugged at visitors’ clothes if they got too close to his tomb. And that strange translucent lights were visible to those who paid homage at the grave of Allan Kardec, the famous spiritualist, whereas nonbelievers were subject to the terrible scent of sulfur.

But I wasn’t there to disturb the inhabitants of the City of the Dead, and hoped they would all understand that as, accompanied by the crow, I searched out Jean Luc’s surprise.

I missed it at first and, when I reached the road marked Chemin Denon, went back and retraced my steps. There were tombs with broken bronze doors, fanciful angels atop gravestones, sorrowful statues of robed women weeping at the foot of a sepulcher. Nothing fitting the theme of Jean Luc’s column.

And then the crow cawed loudly and flew down to perch atop a solemn and simple casket-shaped stone memorial. From the distance, it appeared to be the least adorned gravesite I’d seen. Almost more interested in the bird than the hunt, I inched closer.

The rectangular coffin nestled between two larger tombs. Nothing about it commanded interest. There were no flowers, no trees, no plaque, only block letters carved into the front lip: Famille P. Legay.

The name meant nothing to me. I was just turning to go when the crow, with one last loud caw, took off, flying over my head and into a nearby tree. And that’s when I saw what Jean Luc wanted me to see. What the bird had hidden.

He’d been perched on the sculpture gracing the sepulcher, but with him gone I could see it clearly.

Rising as if out of each side of the stone came two sculptured arms from the elbow down, meeting in the middle, holding hands. A man’s arm and a woman’s arm made of bronze, once shining, now a sour verdigris color from years of exposure to the elements.

Extremely realistic, from the veins running up his arm to her manicured nails and lovely bracelet, the lovers’ hands were united forever above their tomb. Eerie, haunting, eternally clasped, the memorial was poignant and utterly magnificent.

None of the others, of so many who journeyed here because of what I wrote, found it. Only you.

“What a romantic you are, Jean Luc,” I whispered. “Sending me on a pilgrimage to an ancient lovers’ tomb to reassure me, to reassure every woman who read that column, about everlasting love. I wonder how it helped you deal with what you faced on the battlefield to remember this tomb. Yes, we live, and yes, we die. But our passions can survive beyond us.”