The Cross and the Black Read online

  Chapter Five

  Beyond the Pont de la Daurade and its arched abutments, the high rose walls of the L’Hopital de la Grave, past the monastery estates of the Feuillants, a Cistercian order whose members ate and slept on the floor, and the city walls and its surrounding moat, there the sun slipped to its rest. There fomented a chaos of creed against creed, Catholic against Protestant. The second in line to the French throne the Duke of Anjou had yet to die. The Protestant prince, Henri de Navarre, would not yet proclaim his right to the French throne. For now, peace was assured as the setting sun, and Claude was grateful for his bounty of fish—hard won from a fishwife with a diarrheic mouth.

  A long line of fishermen boats unrolled the sights of drenched wood and tarred hues on the eastern bank of the Garonne. Barges pregnant with things Claude would never own floating by. The river had floated worse presents. Twelve years ago while Claude was tending sheep in the Pyrenees Mountains, students and maids dumped four thousand corpses of Protestants into the river. Toulouse reaffirmed its status as the most Catholic city in France, a strange status given that it had once been a stronghold of the Cathar heresy. Then in that time of maimed truth and idolatry, the river shimmered red with the blood of heretics as the Church and North Frenchmen subjugated the city for truth. After defeat, the people of Toulouse learnt they said their yeses wrong, saying the Occitan ‘oc’ instead of the French ‘oui’. The river had no thoughts on identity or truth; rather it cried with a gnawing stench of dumped offal, human effluents from holy and unholy places, and run-off from the dye works and tanneries.

  Toulouse, despite its mephitic river, was still the city most in God’s favor, a view the black-robed Jacobin caterwauling at the Daurade church square never failed to remind the passersby. His eyes were like cracked eggshells. His tonsure looked thornier than Christ’s thorns. Over the chatter flinging names across the square, “Jean… Jean-Louis… Jean-Baptiste….” the friar preached to his audience of three, something about the Black Virgin and milk tears, a summer of dust and plague. “God, God, God. Sin, sin, sin,” he yelled, he wailed, he jumped for a mind-clenching moment; still those barbaric choruses of Jean’s defeated his rondo of God and sin

  “Maman, why does he yell so?” a child said.

  “Hush. He gives the good word.”

  Claude had since been deaf to the monk and lost on the young porter hauling cargo from a barge. The porter’s sleeves were folded far back into the shoulders, and his hose had been rolled up to the thighs as he had earlier being wading in the water. Lost and undone, Claude flailed in the far away dreams unfolding over the man’s angular jaw.

  A random moment of silence layered over the square, and the voice of the friar rang clear, “Verily, I beheld the Black Virgin shedding tears. She hears all. She sees all.”

  Claude cringed and winced at the thought of the Our Lady peeping down from heaven, observing his lips crimp ignominiously and the direction of his gaze, which was fixed now upon the sweat-polished arms of the porter.

  He felt shame enough to shift his weight onto one foot then another … up in the sky, the clouds looked like the holy eyes of the Blessed Mother. He grunted, forced his eyes away from the knave, and began his way back home. But the friar had been waiting, pointing a trembling black flag of a finger at him.

  “Your rot, your filth deceives no one. She is aggrieved. Terribly aggrieved. God sends his Angel of Death for you.”

  Claude tried to laugh it off, but his throat knotted and his lips burned. The friar continued to pound his crucifying nails. The crowd grumbled whispers. This morning and last night and tomorrow morning and tonight: sin, sin, sin. Black hands, a mind defiled. His ears grew hot with accusations.

  The smell of the earthy river and the reek of fish ravaged in his nostrils, and decay glided down his bitter throat. He clasped at the wicker bag of fish, stepping back in preparation to flee. Something bumped into his back. He spun around, startled, and panted hard.

  A little girl glared at him. Black hair, freckled cheeks, a fragrant open flower… a black lily. The mother’s eyes narrowed, her lips tight, recriminations as thick as her furrowed brow… a black lily. A man chewing a stalk, certainly no flower, still a black lily. Everywhere faces stared eyeless and guiltless. Claude’s eyes circled wide and high to the rose window of the church, the niches housing saints earthen and guiltless; his gaze skipped from black hat to black hat till his vision was a pastiche of daze and grey.

  Feet scuffled against cobbled ground.

  Claude jerked around to its source: nuns with wimples as massive as cathedrals. The horde parted the crowd and pressed for the church door. A cool breeze nipped at his earlobes, and he exhaled a long breath of calm. 

  The friar insisted on the Blessed Mother’s doleful hobbies, and the jaws of self-judgment would snap at Claude again, but he clenched his fists and glared studiously as he marked one by one the physical traits that deemed the friar unattractive. Oc, the index finger that was missing a nail, the flea-ridden robes hiding a useless manhood, lips that drooped to the left, even in gaping and in shouting. The one blind eye that never blinked or focused on anything. Just another rogue who could use a tight hole. Anger flamed anew, and he made for the strip of light lining the road, which skimmed off to sanity.

  His concerns for God were mostly cosmetic but with just enough seriousness not to land too deep in hell. Admittedly, he did not think too much on the conversion rate between sin and hell depth. But he knew the Virgin did not cry for him. God did not hear him. The friar was just an unraveling spool of Lenten hysteria.

  Yet, Claude’s chest glowed a dull heat, and everywhere on le Grand Rue black lilies bloomed.