The Historian

The Historian Page 11

As an adult, I have often known that peculiar legacy time brings to the traveler: the longing to seek out a place a second time, to find deliberately what we stumbled on once before, to recapture the feeling of discovery. Sometimes we search out again even a place that was not remarkable in itself  - we look for it simply because we remember it. If we do find it, of course, everything is different. The rough-hewn door is still there, but it's much smaller; the day is cloudy instead of brilliant; it's spring instead of autumn; we're alone instead of with three friends. Or, worse, with three friends instead of alone.

The very young traveler knows little of this phenomenon, but before I knew it in myself, I saw it in my father, at Saint-Matthieu-des-Pyr¨¦n¨¦es-Orientales. I sensed in him, rather than read clearly, the mystery of repetition, already knowing he had been there years before. And, oddly, this place drew him into abstraction in a way no other we'd visited had done. He had been to the region of Emona once before our visit, and to Ragusa several times. He had visited Massimo and Giulia's stone villa for other happy suppers, in other years. But at Saint-Matthieu I sensed that he had actually longed for this place, thought it through over and over for some reason I could not excavate, relived it without telling anyone. He did not tell me now, except to recognize aloud the curve of the road before it finally ran up against the abbey wall, and to know, later, which door opened into sanctuary, cloister, or - finally - crypt. This memory for detail was nothing new to me; I had seen him reach for the right door in famous old churches before, or take the correct turn to the ancient refectory, or stop to buy tickets at the right guardhouse in the right shady gravel drive, or recall, even, where he had previously had the finest cup of coffee.

The difference at Saint-Matthieu was a difference of alertness, an almost cursory scanning of walls and cloistered walkways. Instead of seeming to say to himself, "Ah, there's that fine tympanum above the doors; I thought I remembered it was on this side," my father appeared to be checking off views he could already have described with his eyes closed. It came over me gradually, even before we had finished climbing the steep, cypress-shaded grounds to the main entrance, that what he remembered here were not architectural details, but events.

A monk in a long brown habit stood by the wooden doors, quietly handing brochures to the tourists. "As I told you, it's a working monastery still," my father was saying in an ordinary voice. He had put on his sunglasses, although the monastery wall threw a deep shade over us. "They keep the crowds down to a dull roar by letting everyone in for only a few hours a day." He smiled at the man as we approached, then stretched his hand out for a pamphlet. "Merci beaucoup - we'll take just one," he was saying in his courteous French. But this time, with the intuitive accuracy the young turn on their parents, I knew even more surely that he had not merely seen this place before, camera in hand. He hadn't just "done" it properly, even if he knew all its art-historical coordinates from his guidebook. Instead, something, I felt sure, had happened to him here.

My second impression was as fleeting as my first, but sharper: when he opened the pamphlet and put one foot on the stone threshold, bending his head too casually to the words instead of to the beasts in relief overhead (which would normally have caught his eye), I saw that he hadn't lost some old emotion for the sanctuary we were about to enter. That emotion, I realized without breathing between my intuition and the thought that followed it - that emotion was either grief or fear, or some terrible blend of the two. Saint-Matthieu-des-Pyr¨¦n¨¦es-Orientales sits at a height of four thousand feet above sea level - and the sea is not as distant as this walled-in landscape with its wheeling eagles would have you believe. Red-roofed and precariously high at the summit, the monastery seems to have grown directly out of a single pinnacle of mountain rock, which is true, in a way, since the earliest incarnation of its church was hewed straight down into the rock itself in the year 1000. The main entrance to the abbey is a later expression of the Romanesque, influenced by the art of the Muslims who fought over the centuries to take the peak: a squared-off stone portal crowned by geometric, Islamic borders and two grimacing, groaning Christian monsters in bas-relief, creatures that might be lions, bears, bats, or griffins - impossible animals whose lineage could be anything. Inside lies the tiny abbey church of Saint-Matthieu and its wonderfully delicate cloister, hedged in by rosebushes even at that tremendous altitude, surrounded by twisted single columns of red marble so fragile in appearance that they could have been corkscrewed into shape by an artistic Samson. Sunlight splashes onto the flagstones of the open courtyard, and blue sky arches suddenly overhead.

But the thing that caught my attention as soon as we entered was the sound of trickling water, unexpected and lovely in that high, dry place and yet as natural as the sound of a mountain stream. It came from the cloister fountain, around which the monks had once paced their meditations: a six-sided red marble basin, decorated on its flat exterior with chiseled relief that showed a miniature cloister, a reflection of the real one around us. The fountain's great basin stood on six columns of red marble (and one central support through which the springwater rose, I think). Around its exterior, six spigots burbled water into a pool below. It made an enchanting music.

When I went to the outside edge of the cloisters and sat down on a low wall there, I could look out over a drop of several thousand feet and see thin mountain waterfalls, white against the vertical blue forest. Already perched on a peak, we were surrounded by the looming, unscalable walls of the highest Pyr¨¦n¨¦es-Orientales. At this distance, the waterfalls plunged downward in silence, or appeared as mere mist, while the living fountain behind me trickled and dripped audibly without pause.

"The cloistered life," my father murmured, settling down next to me on the wall. His face was strange, and he put one arm around my shoulders, something he rarely did. "It looks peaceful, but it's very hard. And wicked, sometimes, too." We sat gazing across that gulf, which was so deep that morning light hadn't yet reached the chasm below. Something hung and glinted in the air beneath us, and I realized even before my father pointed to it what it was: a bird of prey, hunting slowly along the pinnacle walls, suspended like a drifting flake of copper.

"Built higher than the eagles," my father mused. "You know, the eagle is a very old Christian symbol, the symbol of Saint John. Matthew - Saint Matthieu  - is the angel, and Luke is the ox, and Saint Mark of course is the winged lion. You see that lion all over the Adriatic, because he was Venice's patron saint. He holds a book in his paws - if the book is open, that statue or relief was carved at a moment when Venice was at peace. Closed, it means Venice was at war. We saw him at Ragusa - remember? - with his book closed, over one of the gates. And now we've seen the eagle, too, guarding this place. Well, it needs its guards." He frowned, stood up, and swung away. It struck me that he regretted, almost to tears, our visit here. "Shall we take a tour?"

It was not until we were descending the steps to the crypt that I saw again in my father that indescribable attitude of fear. We had finished our attentive pacing through cloisters, chapels, nave, wind-worn kitchen buildings. The crypt was the last item on our self-guided tour, dessert for the morbid, as my father said in some churches. At a yawning stairwell he seemed to go forward a little too deliberately, keeping me behind him without even raising an arm as we stepped down into the hold of the rock. A stunningly cold breath reached up for us from the earthy dark. The other tourists had moved on, finished with this attraction, and left us there alone.

"This was the nave of the first church," my father explained again, unnecessarily, in his thoroughly ordinary voice. "When the abbey grew stronger and they could continue building, they simply burst into the open air up there and built a new church on top of the old." Candles interrupted the darkness from stone sconces on the heavy pillars. A cross had been cut into the wall of the apse; it hovered, like a shadow, above the stone altar, or sarcophagus - it was hard to tell which - that stood in the apse's curve. Along the sides of the crypt lay two or three other sarcophagi, small and primitive, unmarked. My father drew a long breath, looking around that great cold hole in the rock. "The resting place of the founding abbot and of several later abbots. And that completes our tour. All right. Let's go get some lunch."

I paused on the way out. The urge to ask my father what he knew about Saint-Matthieu, what he remembered, even, came over me in a wave, almost a panic. But his back, broad in a black linen jacket, said as clearly as spoken words, "Wait. Everything in its time." I looked quickly toward that sarcophagus at the far end of the ancient basilica. Its form was crude, stolid in the unflickering light. Whatever it hid was part of the past, and guessing would not unbury it.

And I knew something else already, without having to guess. The story that I would hear over lunch on the monastic terrace, a tactful drop below the monks' quarters, might turn out to be about someplace very distant from this one, but like our visit here, it would certainly be another step toward that fear I had begun to see brooding in my father. Why had he not wanted to tell me about Rossi's disappearance until Massimo had blundered into it? Why had he choked, white, when the ma?tre d' of the restaurant had told us a legend about the living dead? Whatever haunted my father's memory was brought out for him vividly by this place, which should have been more sacred than horrible and yet was horrible to him, so much so that his shoulders were squared against it. I would have to work, as Rossi had, to collect my own clues. I was becoming wise in the way of the story.