roads bore their tears, and the Loire had become the river of grief.
Christ’s champion was dead.
I could scarcely remain standing during Mass.
In front of the church, Bernard of Fontaines was preaching abnegation of the world, love of solitude and the beauty of the deserts. He was speaking about his vale of Absinthe, about Clairvaux. Five or six young men, noblemen with childlike eyes, stood beside him: they truly believed that honey can be tapped from rocks. They would follow him shortly.
Abelard left on his own.
As Robert’s coffin sank slowly into the ground, I left the abbey like a thief stealing relics. I felt very weak and very small. I forbade myself to imagine Brother Andrew’s expression when he discovered I was missing. His old hand would have to complete the life of a saint who was not and never would be holy.
Once outside the walls, I left the priory of St John quickly. The merchants were already offering single hairs from Robert’s head or the sandal that first set foot on the soil of Fontevrault. I risked being noticed in the crowd if my face wasn’t streaming with real tears: I fled in the direction of the Vienne, towards Candes – and thence to the Loire. I needed paths that widened into roads, streams that became torrents and rivers.
Dusk had already fallen, and at the church of St Martin the bells were ringing out the canonical hours. I would not be singing the office. I walked along narrow lanes in the lengthening shadows. I found a husk of bread, drank water from the stream and breathed the air of the birds.
I did not know why I walked up that hill and why my legs were no longer painful.
When I reached the top, the figure of a horseman almost sent me tumbling to the bottom.
It was Peter Abelard, swathed in his cloak, with his dark skin and clothing, his black eyes and his face darkened by the furrow on his brow, surveying the landscape and watching this little man climbing towards him.
He dismounted, tethered his horse and sat down in front of it. He smiled and hailed me with a finger.
‘So, you’re not with God’s flock?’
‘No.’
‘Then what are you doing? Were you following me?’
‘I think so.’
His chest heaved with laughter. His warm voice enveloped me. I felt drunk without having touched any wine. He opened his hand to me.
‘Let us sit down and talk.’
At first we did not speak. The moon cast silver beams over the stream. The breath of his horse warmed me.
‘Were you really following me?’
‘I was following you or I was fleeing, it depends . . .’
‘Do you know who I am?’
‘A master.’
‘What do you want from a master?’
‘Nothing, really.’
‘And yet you were following me. You should do what I do, friend: kill your masters.’
As the fires began to glow and the air grew cool, I didn’t ever want to leave this weary man who spoke like Jesus. I envied the solitude that weighed him down. I was ashamed of the words I wanted to utter as he stretched out his heavy body and tightened his horse’s saddle. He wrapped himself in his cloak.
‘You’ll have to make your own way, but you’ll know the reason why.’
‘And if I don’t want to make my own way?’
He did not reply. The shadow of his horse disappeared into the moonlit landscape. My heart was thumping.
I had found him, this master whom I did not seek.
III
I approached the town in crab-like fashion. My feet were hurting me badly and my coat was too big for me.
Just as I was reaching the top of a hill, a group of horsemen rode past, spattering me with earth. I heard them shouting: it was a prince returning home, accompanied by jangling soldiers and groaning prisoners; surrounded by his trusty barons, he was sure to have hung the wicked and made the poor seethe.
Once the ground had stopped shaking and the dirt had fallen off me, I realised I was in the town: I had stumbled over a pig.
Houses came into view and with them men, choked with fear and worry, traces of hope still glistening on their faces, running about as if they were drunk. It had not rained for three weeks. People walked with their mouths hanging open.
Sparkling silver and gold, the Seine could be seen from the slopes of the hill, together with its sandy little islands where supplicants sought refuge in troubled times. At dawn, a light rose from behind the pallid sun and a slight breeze skimmed the fronts of the squat houses; it slipped through openings, arches and windows, bringing with it an unjustified optimism despite the drought.
I had seen other towns, with vast clusters of wood and stone, that seemed to follow a divine plan. But here, in spite of forests of church towers that loomed up like masts, a very human madness prevailed, a filthy but marvellous confusion in which ruins and new buildings, areas of grovelling wretchedness and huge tracts of vines, all the havoc and enthusiasm of a new dawn, existed side by side without there being any clear line to distinguish them. It was as if a fire or an army of looters had ravaged the town, while at the same time and without stopping work, amid the noise and the streams of blood, builders and joiners, painters and stonemasons, working collectively and without guidance had, through some mysterious communal impulse, constructed new dwellings for the pleasure of the grandees or the glory of Christ. There were new bell towers complete with their bronze fittings, broken spires, ruined steeples, collapsed walls, scaffolding that seemed to reach to the sky, from which the walls of an apse could be seen soaring up, or the broken arches of a nave. As I was standing there speechless, admiring the layers of this miraculous disaster, a little man with a tonsured head tugged at my coat.
‘Have you a sou, friend?’
I turned out my pockets.
‘Nothing. Where are we?’
‘The church is known as Notre-Dame-des-Champs. That big farm and that wine-press you see down there were the Roman baths. They make wine there now. Are you a pilgrim?’
‘If you like . . .’
In disbelief he scratched the wound that adorned his skull like an insect.
‘What are you looking for here?’
‘I wander around towns in search of masters . . .’
‘This is a town with too many masters,’ he sniggered.
‘And you, are you a prince among thieves, or a thief among princes?’
He stared at me, intrigued.
‘Both, I imagine. I survive. I follow
