Father of Lies: 1

1. Madeleine - The confession of the girl

In the night, I think of him.  His hands on mine.  His beautiful face at the beginning - and then later, after it was broken.

When they sent me away because they didn’t know what to do with me, he was the only one who listened.  Money couldn’t protect me.  Nor could status.  When you’re a wild girl, the only place for you is the convent.  Or at least that’s what my mother said.  “She’s fourteen and she’s gone bad already.  You need to sort her out.  You need to save her.”

So behind the convent’s high stone walls, in the shadow of the walnut door, I was locked up so I could learn my lesson. And Father Gaufridi came to teach me.

But in Aix-en-Provence in the summer time, it was other lessons I learned.  The perfume of the lavender rose up on the warm, evening wind and seeds from the sunflowers in the surrounding fields sometimes landed on the books I was supposed to be studying. We’d blow them from the pages at the same time as each other and as we did so, our breath mingled.

Perhaps, as with most things, the before was the best time, when potential was all.  The brushing of fingers, the flick of tongues between teeth. The pauses when eyes locked and quickly looked away.

When what was bound to happen finally did, it was a late summer evening.  The air was oppressive and heavy with rain.  The mistral wasn’t blowing yet, but you could sense its imminence in the crazy draughts that gusted through the open window into the small library where Father Gaufridi was teaching me the names of herbs and plants for healing.

Afterwards. I had to wash the spots of blood from my white habit and in the water, the spots bloomed like heavy, summer roses.  I felt no shame at what we did. Shame seemed to me, to be light and silly.  What I felt was grounded; by the certain weight of his body on mine.  By the cool of the flagstones under my back.

But he didn’t come after that. Not ever again.  Not for lessons on plants, nor to hold me, or to save my soul.  I’d look for him across the fields into the woods, smelling autumn’s wood fires and the manure on the fields, but he never came; and soon after, I was sent back to my family’s manor near Marseille.

As I turned fifteen, the grounded feeling I’d had transformed into something else.  Something harder and more substantial. Like cold, dense lead.  I began to talk - telling my mother, telling the maid, the visiting doctor - telling everyone what Father Gaufridi had done to me.

I smashed a crucifix and said he’d given me a green devil as a familiar. I described the demons that flew around my head.  Beelzebub, the fly with his stench of envy.  Asmodeus, the three headed provoker.  Ruiner of beauty.  Astaroth, rider of the dragon and keeper of the serpent.

As I talked, I danced and laughed, I sang love songs and spewed out froth and bile.  My mother had the servants tie me to a chair and my hair hung over my face like twisting snakes.  The old priest from our village tried to calm me and I spat in his eyes.

I repaid his concern with talk of the sabbats Father Gaufridi had made me attend.  Of how we’d danced in mountains and caves and the deep, deep forest.  How we’d conversed with animals in the night and gathered the wisdom of black cats and crows.  I described my flights through the air to feasts with no salt where I copulated with demons and goats.  I made him come close and I whispered in his ear how the devil made me empty my bowels and crack my bones.

When they could hear no more, I knew they were going to find Gaufridi, to hold him to account for what I accused him of.  I sat, bound and exhausted in my chair, pretending to sleep.

But in my head, was my true confession. The one that said I loved him. The one that said I felt so sad he didn’t come to see me again after that one time.  How the colours of him in my mind were all the purple and yellow and blue of summer.

On the night of my confession, the moon was in its last quarter before it disappeared altogether, leaving the sky bereft.  Tonight, I think of him and I too mourn the passing of the moon.

*

http://www.abctales.com/story/noo/father-lies-2

http://www.abctales.com/story/noo/father-lies-3