‘You must, brother. You are obliged by obedience.’
‘Brother Robert,’ the nurse brother spoke openly, after running a handkerchief over his sweaty bald head in an attempt to contain the tremble in his voice, ‘wants to die. And what’s more, Father …’
As he made the handkerchief disappear into the folds of his habit, he explained the secret that the father prior didn’t yet know because the Reverend Father Maarten — the abbot who had signed Brother Robert’s entrance into the novitiate of the Cistercian Community of the Strict Observance in Achel, right beside the cool, limpid waters of the Tongelreep, which seemed like the perfect place to sooth the torments of a soul punished by the sins of others and its own weakness — had wanted to take it to his grave. The abbey of Saint Benedict in Achel was an idyllic spot where Matthias Alpaerts, the future Brother Robert, could learn to work the soil and breathe air that was pure except for cow manure, and where he could learn to make cheese, to work copper and to sweep the dusty corners of the cloister or any other room they told him needed sweeping, surrounded by the strict silence that accompany twenty-fours of each day for those Trappist monks, his new brothers. It wasn’t at all difficult for him to get up each day at three in the morning, the coldest hour of the night, and walk, his feet stiff with a cold his sandals didn’t fend off, to pray the Matins that brought them hope of a new day and, perhaps, of a new hope. And then, upon returning to his cell, he read the lectio divina, which sometimes was the hour of torment because all his experiences came flooding back into his mind without any pity for his destroyed soul and God fell silent each day, as he had when they were in hell. Which was why the bell that called to the Lauds prayer sounded to him like a sign of hope, and then, during the convent mass at six, he stared as much as modesty allowed at his lively, devout brothers and prayed with them in unison saying never again, Lord, never again. Perhaps it was when he began his four straight hours of farm work that he was closest to happiness. He murmured his terrible secrets to the cows as he milked them and they replied with intense looks filled with pity and understanding. Soon he learned to make cheese with herbs, which was so aromatic, and he dreamed of delivering it to the thousands of congregants and telling them the body of the Lord, he who wasn’t able to distribute communion since he had begged them to respect his wish to not receive even minor orders because he was no one and he only wanted a corner to pray on his knees for the rest of his life, as Friar Miquel de Susqueda, another fugitive, had when asking to be admitted into Sant Pere del Burgal a few centuries earlier. Four hours amid the cow manure, hauling bales of grass, interrupting his work to pray the Terce, after washing his hands and face to get rid of the odour and not offend the other brothers, he would enter the church as if it were a shelter against evil, and pray the Sext with his brothers at midday. More than once the superiors had forbidden him from washing the dishes each day, since that was a task that every member of the community without exception had to take part in, and he had to repress, out of holy obedience, his desire to serve and at two in the afternoon they returned to the refuge of the church to pray the None and there were still two hours of work that weren’t devoted to the cows, but rather to mending terraced walls and burning weeds while Brother Paulus milked the cows, and still he had to wash up again because it wasn’t like the brothers who worked in the library, who at most had to rinse their dusty fingers when they finished their labours and perhaps envied the brothers who did physical exercise instead of being indoors wearing down their eyesight and memory. The second lectio divina, the afternoon one, was the long prelude that culminated at six with the Vespers. Dinner time, during which he only pretended to eat, gave way to the Complin: everyone in the church, in the dark, with only the faithful flame of the two candles that illuminated the image of the Madonna of Achel. And when the bells of the Saint Benedict monastery rang out eight o’clock, he got into bed, like his brothers, with the hope that the next day would be exactly the same as that one, and the day after that as well, forever and ever.
The father prior looked at the nurse brother with his mouth agape. Why did the reverend father abbot have to be away just then? Why did the General Chapter have to be celebrated precisely on the same day that Brother Robert had fallen into some sort of prostration that the nurse brother’s limited knowledge was unable to pull him out of? Why, God of the Universe? Why did I accept the post as prior?
‘But he’s alive, isn’t he?’
‘Yes. Catatonic. I think. If you say get up, he gets up; if you say sit, he sits. If you say speak, he starts to cry, Father.’
‘That’s not catatonic.’
‘Look, Father: I can handle wounds, scrapes, dislocated or broken bones, flu and colds and stomach aches: but these spiritual ailments …’
‘And what is your recommendation, brother?’
‘I, Father, would …’
‘Yes, what do you recommend I do?’
‘Have him seen by a real doctor.’
‘Doctor Geel wouldn’t know what to do with him.’
‘I’m talking about a real doctor.’
Luckily, Father Abbot Manfred, at the third meeting of the General Chapter, commented worriedly in front of the other Brother Abbots on what the Prior had told him over the telephone, in a frightened, distant voice. The Father Abbot of Mariawald told him that, if he considered it opportune, they had a doctor monk at their monastery who, despite his extreme humility and completely reluctantly, had acquired a reputation even beyond the monastery. For ailments of both the body and the spirit. That Brother Eugen Müss was at his disposition.
For the first time in ten years, since the sixteenth of April of the Year of Our Lord nineteen fifty when he had managed to enter the abbey of Saint Benedict of Achel and had become Brother Robert, Matthias Alpaerts was going beyond the lands of the abbey. His hands, opened on his legs, trembled excessively. With tiny frightened eyes he looked through the dirty window of the Citroën Stromberg that bounced along the dusty road leading away from his refuge and brought him to the world of the tempests he had wanted to flee forever. The nurse brother occasionally looked at him out of the corner of his eye. He realised that and tried to distract himself by staring at the nape of the silent chauffeur’s neck. The trip to Heimbach took four and a half hours, during which the nurse brother, in order to break the stubborn silence, had time to mumble, along with the hoarse noise of the car’s ailing carburettor, the Terce, Sext and None, and they reached the gates of Mariawald when the bells, so different than those at Achel, Lord, were calling the community to their Vespers.
It was the next day, after Lauds, when they told him to wait, seated on a hard bench, in a corner of the wide, well-lit corridor. The German words, scant and respectful, of the nurse brother had echoed in his ears like cruel orders. The nurse monk, Brother Müss’s assistant, accompanied by the nurse brother from Achel, disappeared behind a door. They must want a report first. They left him alone, with all his fears, and then Brother Müss had him enter the silent office and they sat with a table between them and he begged him, in quite good Dutch, to explain his torment to him, and Brother Robert scrutinised his eyes and found that his gaze was sweet and then the pain exploded and he started to say because imagine that you are at home having lunch, with your wife, mother-in-law and three little daughters, your mother-in-law with a bit of a chest cold, the new blue-and-white chequered tablecloth, because it’s your eldest’s birthday, little Amelietje. And after saying that Brother Robert didn’t stop talking for an entire hour without taking a breath, without asking for a glass of water, without lifting his gaze from the polished table and without noticing Brother Eugen Müss’s sad expression. And when he had explained the whole story, he added that that was why he went through life with his head bowed, crying over my cowardice and searching for some way to make amends for my evil until I had the idea of hiding there where the memory could never reach me. I had to return to speaking with God and I sought out entrance into a Carthusian monastery, where they counselled me that what I was attempting was not a good idea. From that day on I lied and at the other two places where I knocked on the door I didn’t mention the reasons for my pain or express it. In each new interview, I learned what I had to say and what I had to keep quiet, so that when I knocked on the door of Saint Benedict’s Abbey in Achel I already knew that no one would put up obstacles to my belated vocation and I begged, if obedience didn’t demand otherwise, that they let me live there and fulfil the humblest tasks in the monastery. Ever since that day I again began speaking, a bit, with God and I have learned to get the cows to listen to me.