Chapter Sixteen
At around six o’clock on Saturday night I sat at my usual table in the Lyrique, awaiting Martine’s arrival within the half-hour. Yes, she’d finally responded to my five or six recorded messages (“Allo, Martine, this is Gustave, give me a call at 337 7797”; “Allo, Martine, this is Gustave, give me a call at 337 7797;” “Allo, Martine,” etc.); no, she hadn’t been avoiding me. Swearing she’d never look at a Pakistani again as long as she lived, her mother had returned abruptly from Karachi after walking out on Omar or Abdul after the umpteenth beating and/or attempt at group sodomy. The first thing she did, said Martine, was change into jeans and T-shirt, drink two cold Cardinals, and smoke a Gitane. That night they both went to a singles bar in Carouge and sixty-two-year-old Maman snuggled up to a half dozen guys and refused to leave until Martine threatened to clock her on the noggin with an umbrella if she didn’t get into a taxi.
“So things are a bit topsy-turvy at the moment,” said Martine. “Poor maman, she needs me around. It’s not over yet. They’ve relations here, her husband’s lot. Geneva’s full of Pakistanis, as you know. So we have to be careful. But I’ll get a bit of relief Saturday. She’s going away for a few days. I can meet you then.”
Hence, Saturday night at the Lyrique. It would make a change for me to dine with a lady, and it would benefit those old gossips of waiters to see me with one for a change. Meanwhile, over a Lismore single malt (one of the lesser-known but better Speyside whiskies) and a Caporal, I paged through Father Benedetto Sanzio’s surprisingly (or perhaps not) un-dog-eared copy of the Concise Catholic Almanac.
“Read through this,” he’d said at the conclusion of our interview. “You are traveling in a strange land, so it would benefit you to learn the dialect of the natives, as it were.”
“So, do you think I’m pazzo, Father?”
“Oh, undoubtedly. The question is, to what degree.”
“And Sister Stefanie?”
“Oh, yes. Nutty as a fruitcake. But most people who make a difference one way or another—most interesting people—are, to a certain extent, at least by the definition of society. You know,” he rose and escorted me the short distance to the door, “it’s most instructive that you are reading this book as a result of your experiences. It calls to mind what the great psychologist Jung said about synchronicity. One thing happens here, another, unrelated thing happens over there, and suddenly a third thing happens as a result of these seemingly unconnected events and there is an unexpected confluence in someone’s life . . . eh?”
“Indeed. I am familiar with the works of Jung, Father.”
“So. Here is a synchronous series of incidents. First you have the vision, then you find the book, then you meet the author. Addio, professore. We will talk again soon and then I will tell you of my meeting with the Sister Stefanie you are reading about. But I don’t want to spoil your reading, ah? Ciao.”
I took my leave of Father Benedetto with warmth in my heart. I liked the old priest’s matter-of-factness, his Italian skepticism, his deep seriousness concerning my visions. Many had had them, he said, including half the population of his native town in Liguria; only the priests never seemed to. Of course, these days it was attributed to bad diet, or stupidity, or sex, or something such as a physical ailment of the blood (or urine); but, he assured me, “you are by no means alone.” Well, yes, I mused later in the Lyrique as I flipped through the pages of the almanac, but in whose company was I? John Calvin’s? Fools and cretins? (And wasn’t cretin just another word for Christian?) Or inspired otherworlders like Stefanie von Rothenberg? Or just Porphyriacs Anonymous?
The old pope smiled shyly at me from the frontispiece of the Concise Catholic Almanac, assuring me in easy prose that I had in my hands the genuine, Vatican-approved summation of all facts relating to the history of Holy Mother Church and Her progenitor, the Christ and His family and all the massed angels and saints and THEIR families and friends. Eagerly, I turned to the entry for my old mate the Archangel: an entire section. There were color plates of him floating about in blue and gold and wielding the blade in various fields of conflict; and of course the Castel Sant’Angelo gig was depicted, himself sheathing his sword and silhouetted against a stormy sky with Pope Gregory gazing up at him, slack-jawed. (I wondered if Michael spoke demotic Greek, or the Latin of the barracks, to rough-and-ready Gregorius.)
St. Michael [said The Concise Catholic] is one of the principal angels; his name was the war-cry of the good angels in the battle fought in heaven against the enemy and his followers. Four times his name is recorded in Scripture.
I was flattered to be visited by so distinguished a personage.
InDaniel 12, the Angel speaking of the end of the world and the Antichrist says: "At that time shall Michael rise up, the great prince, who standeth for the children of thy people."
Children of thy people: sounds Jewish to me. Not that I have anything against, etc., of course not; what am I, a Nazi? But where is the relevance of this phenomenon to a Swiss-Italian agnostic of part-Scottish descent?
In the Catholic Epistle of St. Jude: "When Michael the Archangel, disputing with the devil, contended about the body of Moses," etc. St. Jude alludes to an ancient Jewishtradition of a dispute between Michael and Satan over the body of Moses, an account of which is also found in the apocryphal book on the assumption of Moses (Origen, "De principiis", III, 2, 2). St. Michael concealed the tomb of Moses; Satan, however, by disclosing it, tried to seduce the Jewish people into hero-worship. St. Michael also guards the body of Eve, according to the “Revelation of Moses.”
And our man went toe-to-toe with Old Nick himself. No wonder the face he’d pulled for me was so chilling: it was from the life. Warning or entertainment, as the gods besport themselves with men? Perhaps both. And in a sense, didn’t it mean that, like Stefanie, I’d seen the Evil One too (although she had two to contend with, didn’t she)…?
Apocalypse 12:7, "And there was a great battle in heaven, Michael and his angels fought with the dragon." St. John speaks of the great conflict at the end of time, which reflects also the battle in heaven at the beginning of time. According to the Fathers there is often question of St. Michael in Scripture where his name is not mentioned.
Well now, here was the action sequence, no doubt about it. Certainly, I was impressed by his credentials.
They say he was the cherub who stood at the gate of paradise, "to keep the way of the tree of life" (Genesis 3:24), the angel through whom God published the Decalogue to his chosen people, the angel who stood in the way against Balaam (Numbers 22:22 ff.), the angel who routed the army of Sennacherib (IV Kings 19:35).
Feeling faintly faint, I accepted a freshening of my Lismore at the gently trembling hands of old Alphonse.
“How are you this evening, M. le professeur?”
“Well. I’m meeting a lady, Alphonse.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s sympathique. I like her.”
“Ha!” He directed an age-moistened gaze at me and shook his head—or maybe it was Parkinson’s. “At your age, I’d learned to control myself,” he remarked, and shuffled away. But surely he was married and had six or more children? I wondered, wondering then if that mightn’t be precisely the point…ah well. So then, back to the Archangel. He was, as I discovered, just about everywhere at all times, and Everyman to all men (even atheists?):
VENERATION
It would have been natural to St. Michael, the champion of the Jewish people [Well, where were you at Auschwitz, then, mon brave, I wondered…] to be the champion also of Christians, giving victory in war to his clients. The early Christians, however, gave to St. Michael the care of their sick. Tradition relates that St. Michael in the earliest ages caused a medicinal spring to spout at Chairotopa near Colossae (Greece), where all the sick who bathed there, invoking the Blessed Trinity and St. Michael, were cured. The pagans directed a stream against the sanctuary of St. Michael to destroy it, but the archangel split the rock by lightning to give a new bed to the stream, and sanctified forever the waters which came from the gorge. The Greeks claim that this apparition took place about the middle of the first century and celebrate a feast in commemoration of it on November 12th (Analecta Bolland., VIII, 285-328).
Bla bla bla bla. I skipped ahead.
At Constantinople likewise, St. Michael was the great heavenly physician. His principal sanctuary, the Michaelion, was at Sosthenion, some fifty miles south of Constantinople; there the archangel is said to have appeared to the Emperor Constantine. The sick slept in this church at night to wait for a manifestation of St. Michael; his feast was kept there 9 June. Another famous church was within the walls of the city, at the thermal baths of the Emperor Arcadius; there the feast of the archangel was celebrated November 8th.
I reflected that it had been November 8th when I saw him for the second time. It was an annoying fact, because it should have been a mere coincidence but didn’t feel like one. Worse, it should have been insignificant but wasn’t. Of course, I could say the same about my induction into the Pantheon of the Mystics generally. And the Greek apparition date, November 12th, was the coming Friday. Beware! I thought again of Marley’s ghost.
The Christians of Egypt placed their life-giving river, the Nile, under the protection of St. Michael; they adopted the Greekfeast and kept it November 12; on the twelfth of every month they celebrate a special commemoration of the archangel, but 12th June, when the river commences to rise, they keep as a holiday of obligation the feast of St. Michael “for the rising of the Nile.”
At Rome also the part of heavenly physician was given to St. Michael. According to an (apocryphal?) legend of the tenth century he appeared over the Moles Hadriani (Castel di S. Angelo) in 550, during the procession which St. Gregory held against the pestilence, putting an end to the plague.
Well known is the apparition of St. Michael (a. 494 or 530-40), as related in the Roman Breviary, 8 May, at his renowned sanctuary on Monte Gargano, where his original glory as patron in war was restored to him. To his intercession the Lombards attributed their victory over the Neapolitans, 8 May, 663. In commemoration of this victory the church of Sipontum instituted a special feast in honour of the archangel, on 8 May, which has spread over the entire Latin Church and is now called (since the time of Pius V) "Apparitio S. Michaelis," although it originally did not commemorate the apparition, but the victory.
I underlined November 12th, May 8th, and June 12th with a light pencil, intending
to later write them in my agenda and reminding myself to be especially wary on those dates.
In Germany, after its evangelization, St. Michael replaced for the Christians the pagan god Wotan, to whom many mountains were sacred, hence the numerous mountain chapels of St. Michael all over Germany. . . .
This surprised me. Michael was really Wotan (“Loge, hör!”)? The archangel Odin!? The Saint of Walhalla. . . ? Then the honor was double!
Sensing a presence—no, let me put it this way…
A shadow fell across the table. I looked up.
“Well!” I exclaimed. Martine Jeanrenaud was standing there. Her mouth ripe with a restrained smile, she was looking awfully attractive, her eyes blue and bright behind her owlish eyeglasses, and red-cheeked from the boreal bise that swirls across the empty spaces of our city in the colder months. Her maroon overcoat went perfectly with her disheveled auburn hair…now, I don’t usually notice these things, being a firm believer in the old adage “if you like the clothes outside, you don’t like the woman inside,” but she had a fine sartorial touch, and her clothes were graduated just so, in varying shades of red: dark, then darker. It accorded perfectly with her satiny skin, her auburn hair. A promising sign, I thought. It implied a sense of order, a respect for the aesthetic basis of civilization, for the necessity of keeping chaos at bay.
Or perhaps I was reading too much into too little, as was my wont.
“Hello, Professor,” she said.
“Mademoiselle Jeanrenaud!”
I looked at her with something of that mild discomfort mixed with incredulity one feels on seeing in the flesh the object of one’s recent dreams—as if she might suspect my guilty secret (or share it). Of course, through another fogged-over lens I was also, with intimations of awe, seeing the author of Adoration, fictionalizing biographer of Fraulein von Rothenberg, in whom I could not but help detect elements of her creator—in such paragraphs as Her introspective, melancholic character deprived her, much of the time, of an appetite, or any settled routine. Occasionally she drank a little too much, usually white wine, frequently Riesling. In the evenings, like so many of her kind, she smoked. Digestive problems plagued her from time to time, the consequence of a temperament unsuited to normality. But overall she was fit and looked less than her age.
Overall, she was fit and looked less than her age. I ordered Riesling; we smoked. Was hers a temperament unsuited to normality, I inquired? Fortunately, she didn’t reply with the standard modernist trope “Whatever normality means”; instead, she studied the menu and answered me, her eyes scanning the plats régionaux:
“You have been reading my book, haven’t you, Professor?”
“Please. Call me Gustave.”
She looked up.
“Yes, yes. Of course I will, my dear Gustave.” (My dear!) “I just like the word professor. And you do so look like one.” She was flirting; had she, then, wasted some time in idle thoughts of…me? Delightedly, I prepared to respond in kind, then I saw that she saw what I was reading, and thought, no doubt, that the cat was out of the bag…well, it was all her fault, in a way, wasn’t it? I no longer thought it would be fatal to advertise my visions. I’d made up my mind that if this relationship had any future it would be on the basis of candor. I could hardly conceal or deny my visions of the Archangel. So it was time, I reckoned, to make a clean breast of things. Yes, I’d had visions, and that was that. If she couldn’t take it, she couldn’t take me, et voilà tout. But I didn’t really feel so cavalier about it; I was rather counting on anyone who’d written a copious book about the life of Stefanie von Rothenberg having a bit of a soft spot for visionaries.
Alphonse interposed himself to serve the Riesling and to write down our respective orders: poulet de Bresse for her, magret de canard for me—with a side dish of carrots. It was blustery outside, warm inside. I was seated at my favorite table in my favorite café in my favorite city with . . . well, my favorite woman. Things could be worse. For the moment I put aside thoughts of mysticism and visionaries and we chatted of this and that. My classes? Well, well. The usual, you know. The halt leading the blind. Her job? Stressful, as always. Deadlines, deadlines. There was talk of sending her to Rome to cover the Christmas blessing by the pope. Ah, Rome! Yes, a fine city. She would take the train, she thought; she wasn’t keen on flying. Had I heard? A plane from Russia had made an emergency landing at Cointrin that very morning: Thank goodness no one was injured! Russian planes, eh? And the traffic had been awful on the highway from the airport. Of course, there had also been a demonstration in front of the U.N., something about banks in East Africa, tying up traffic even more. And the weather! Colder by the day; sometimes, it seemed, by the hour. Ah, yes: well, it would soon be winter. Cigarette? Oh no thanks I’m smoking too much again, I really must, etc.
Truly, the contentment was extreme. My cup ran over. I toasted the moment. The moment reached its climax. Martine, with idle curiosity, picked up the Almanac. I heaved a deep private sigh. Confession was at hand.
“The Concise Catholic! Are you religious?”
“No. I mean not really. Although an old priest of my acquaintance made a good case for staying in the Church, which he calls the one thing that prevents a man from the degrading servitude of being a child of his own time.”
“Ha ha! Very good. I did a documentary once on rebel priests, mostly in Latin America. I enjoyed the trip, but frankly I wasn’t impressed with the priests. A bunch of self-promoters and womanizers. Anyway, I think I’m very much a child of my time, for good and bad. Are you thinking of converting, then?”
“No, no. No need for that, even if I were. I was baptized into the Catholic Church, and of course I wouldn’t consider any other. Good Italian, you see.”
“Of course. And I, Genevese of good Protestant mountain stock, am Reformed Church on both sides. My two uncles are both pastors: one in Neuchatel, the other in Délémont. My father, the mountain-climber, was a committed materialist, and as for my mother…but, speaking of her!” She put aside the book, animated by other thoughts. “You remember I told you about her dreadful marriage and her return from Pakistan and all that? Yes? Well, the other night after I spoke to you I received an anonymous phone call—or rather, she did, but she handed the phone to me right away and told me to say she wasn’t there.”
“Who made this anonymous call?” I inquired foolishly, then, hastily: “I mean, a man? A woman? A…?”
“It sounded like a very young man or a boy, with a high-pitched voice and a strong Middle Eastern accent. First he asked to speak to Madame Suleiman, that’s my mother’s married name. I said, of course, she’s not here. I didn’t offer to take a message, because there was something in his voice, you know. And sure enough, right away he became extraordinarily abusive.”
She frowned at the memory. Alphonse swooped down with dinner. After tucking in for awhile (she ate heartily, unaffectedly), we resumed.
“Now, tell me. In what way did this crackpot abuse you over the telephone?”
“He yelled at me. ’You’”—she put on a mock-Arabic accent and wagged a forefinger—“’you are another whore like her! If we need to we will come and kill both of you! Tell her she belongs in her husband’s home in Pakistan and if she does not come back we will come for her!’ Then he screamed, ‘Allah yew haw lala Allah hew ha la de dah willy willy willy lalah,’ or some such gibberish, and rang off. Charmant, n’est-ce pas?”
Well, naturally, I became quite agitated.
“This is serious. Did you call the police?”
She waved an elegant, dismissive hand. Police? Of course not. Police meant upheaval, lights flashing, muddy boots, neighbors peering out of their doors, the long nose of inquiry sniffing everywhere. No, no police.
“Well, really, Martine. I mean. When a woman is threatened by a screeching lunatic over the phone, it’s no small matter. You must call the police. Immediately, please.”
“There’s no need to lecture me, professor! It’s not that I’m not taking it seriously, you know. Mother’s going to Paris for a few days to stay with Laure, my sister.”
“But…does this mean you’ll be alone in your apartment?”
She popped the last morsel of her poulet de Bresse into her mouth and, smilingly, chewed.
“Well, that depends where else I might find accommodation,” she said, and the winsome glance she shot me could have only one meaning.
“Might I suggest a humble scholar’s garret on the picturesque Boulevard des Philosophes, with the city’s best collection of Italian opera records and an unparalleled view of the Chemistry Faculty of the University over the rooftops?” I blurted, with bold verbosity.
“Hmmm. It sounds irresistible.”
I was flooded with a hot and cold fever of anticipation as delicious as dinner, but it was followed immediately by near-panic as I made a mental inventory of my flat (I was, after all, a bachelor of lifelong standing, unaccustomed to ladies, or indeed anyone, visiting): the singlet draped over the radiator; the stack of half-read books on the coffee table; the pajamas hanging on the kitchen door, the ashtray in the study piled high (well, there was no need to go into the study); the bed maladroitly made (but made, at least, after a fashion)…I excused myself and cooled down amid the tiles and plashing of the gents,’ where I took my glucose pill and gazed at myself in the mirror, marveling at the chance that had led this far, and mentally damned myself to hell if I failed to take full advantage of it.
And yet I had still not told her the tale of Gustave and the Archangel. Perhaps it wasn’t quite the moment.
Alphonse bowed as we left. I reciprocated, with irony. Martine and I walked briskly down the nearly-deserted Boulevard du Théâtre. The bise roamed the streets, bullying pedestrians into corners, alongside walls, or inside. Dead leaves and scraps of discarded newspapers and wrappers rose, flapped, and fell, with the slow spasmodic movements of deep-sea creatures. Ragged cloud-shards striated the black moonlit sky from which howled the cold pure wind. My heart swelled with a strange exhilaration I hadn’t felt since youth. I felt like Berlioz, or Casanova, or Garibaldi at Naples, or one of those travelers in meditative poses from Caspar Friedrich’s wondrous wanderworld. It was October, season of ghosts and memories of the hopes of Octobers long gone. At the corner of Place Neuve we stopped and shivered theatrically and looked across the square at the beckoning trees in the Parc des Bastions, their swaying come-hither sporadically illuminated by the bluish light of the streetlamps. In their shadows phantoms lurked. I told the tale of one: The Lamenting Widow, never seen, sometimes heard, plaintively sobbing, whispering words unspoken since the seventeenth century, mourning her husband killed by halberd-toting Savoyards.
“Have you ever heard her?”
“Once I thought so. And I was quite sober. It was after midnight, one New Year’s. But it could have been the wind.”
“And you were sober? At New Year’s? Pull the other one, professor.”
Martine slid a warm gloved hand under my arm. We headed south across the emptiness of the Place Neuve. General Dufour and his mount continued their time-frozenprance atop their pedestal. The mansions on the centuries-old escarpment of the Rue des Granges haughtily drew up their skirts and turned their gray backs on us. A tram slid smoothly by on its gleaming rails. Several cars raced by in single file, like ducks seeking shelter. There was a shout from party-bound students near the Music Conservatory. Shadows flickered under the Doric portico of the Rath Museum. A man paced back and forth in front of the Grand Théâtre, glancing at his wristwatch. The wind lifted my sparse hair into a feeble crown. Martine’s grip tightened. When we came to a crosswalk and waited for a clanging tram to pass, I turned and took her full female warmth in my arms and kissed her with all the ardor in my bottled-up soul. Our eyeglasses collided, with a plastic crunch.
“Merde,” I said. She laughed softly and took her glasses off and we resumed. A young man’s craziness surged through my veins. Suddenly it seemed a dreadfully long way back to my apartment, but the cold windy square was no place for ardor… and I draw a discreet curtain over what followed.
Suffice it to say that, as the poet has it, that night we were not divided.
“So things are a bit topsy-turvy at the moment,” said Martine. “Poor maman, she needs me around. It’s not over yet. They’ve relations here, her husband’s lot. Geneva’s full of Pakistanis, as you know. So we have to be careful. But I’ll get a bit of relief Saturday. She’s going away for a few days. I can meet you then.”
Hence, Saturday night at the Lyrique. It would make a change for me to dine with a lady, and it would benefit those old gossips of waiters to see me with one for a change. Meanwhile, over a Lismore single malt (one of the lesser-known but better Speyside whiskies) and a Caporal, I paged through Father Benedetto Sanzio’s surprisingly (or perhaps not) un-dog-eared copy of the Concise Catholic Almanac.
“Read through this,” he’d said at the conclusion of our interview. “You are traveling in a strange land, so it would benefit you to learn the dialect of the natives, as it were.”
“So, do you think I’m pazzo, Father?”
“Oh, undoubtedly. The question is, to what degree.”
“And Sister Stefanie?”
“Oh, yes. Nutty as a fruitcake. But most people who make a difference one way or another—most interesting people—are, to a certain extent, at least by the definition of society. You know,” he rose and escorted me the short distance to the door, “it’s most instructive that you are reading this book as a result of your experiences. It calls to mind what the great psychologist Jung said about synchronicity. One thing happens here, another, unrelated thing happens over there, and suddenly a third thing happens as a result of these seemingly unconnected events and there is an unexpected confluence in someone’s life . . . eh?”
“Indeed. I am familiar with the works of Jung, Father.”
“So. Here is a synchronous series of incidents. First you have the vision, then you find the book, then you meet the author. Addio, professore. We will talk again soon and then I will tell you of my meeting with the Sister Stefanie you are reading about. But I don’t want to spoil your reading, ah? Ciao.”
I took my leave of Father Benedetto with warmth in my heart. I liked the old priest’s matter-of-factness, his Italian skepticism, his deep seriousness concerning my visions. Many had had them, he said, including half the population of his native town in Liguria; only the priests never seemed to. Of course, these days it was attributed to bad diet, or stupidity, or sex, or something such as a physical ailment of the blood (or urine); but, he assured me, “you are by no means alone.” Well, yes, I mused later in the Lyrique as I flipped through the pages of the almanac, but in whose company was I? John Calvin’s? Fools and cretins? (And wasn’t cretin just another word for Christian?) Or inspired otherworlders like Stefanie von Rothenberg? Or just Porphyriacs Anonymous?
The old pope smiled shyly at me from the frontispiece of the Concise Catholic Almanac, assuring me in easy prose that I had in my hands the genuine, Vatican-approved summation of all facts relating to the history of Holy Mother Church and Her progenitor, the Christ and His family and all the massed angels and saints and THEIR families and friends. Eagerly, I turned to the entry for my old mate the Archangel: an entire section. There were color plates of him floating about in blue and gold and wielding the blade in various fields of conflict; and of course the Castel Sant’Angelo gig was depicted, himself sheathing his sword and silhouetted against a stormy sky with Pope Gregory gazing up at him, slack-jawed. (I wondered if Michael spoke demotic Greek, or the Latin of the barracks, to rough-and-ready Gregorius.)
St. Michael [said The Concise Catholic] is one of the principal angels; his name was the war-cry of the good angels in the battle fought in heaven against the enemy and his followers. Four times his name is recorded in Scripture.
I was flattered to be visited by so distinguished a personage.
InDaniel 12, the Angel speaking of the end of the world and the Antichrist says: "At that time shall Michael rise up, the great prince, who standeth for the children of thy people."
Children of thy people: sounds Jewish to me. Not that I have anything against, etc., of course not; what am I, a Nazi? But where is the relevance of this phenomenon to a Swiss-Italian agnostic of part-Scottish descent?
In the Catholic Epistle of St. Jude: "When Michael the Archangel, disputing with the devil, contended about the body of Moses," etc. St. Jude alludes to an ancient Jewishtradition of a dispute between Michael and Satan over the body of Moses, an account of which is also found in the apocryphal book on the assumption of Moses (Origen, "De principiis", III, 2, 2). St. Michael concealed the tomb of Moses; Satan, however, by disclosing it, tried to seduce the Jewish people into hero-worship. St. Michael also guards the body of Eve, according to the “Revelation of Moses.”
And our man went toe-to-toe with Old Nick himself. No wonder the face he’d pulled for me was so chilling: it was from the life. Warning or entertainment, as the gods besport themselves with men? Perhaps both. And in a sense, didn’t it mean that, like Stefanie, I’d seen the Evil One too (although she had two to contend with, didn’t she)…?
Apocalypse 12:7, "And there was a great battle in heaven, Michael and his angels fought with the dragon." St. John speaks of the great conflict at the end of time, which reflects also the battle in heaven at the beginning of time. According to the Fathers there is often question of St. Michael in Scripture where his name is not mentioned.
Well now, here was the action sequence, no doubt about it. Certainly, I was impressed by his credentials.
They say he was the cherub who stood at the gate of paradise, "to keep the way of the tree of life" (Genesis 3:24), the angel through whom God published the Decalogue to his chosen people, the angel who stood in the way against Balaam (Numbers 22:22 ff.), the angel who routed the army of Sennacherib (IV Kings 19:35).
Feeling faintly faint, I accepted a freshening of my Lismore at the gently trembling hands of old Alphonse.
“How are you this evening, M. le professeur?”
“Well. I’m meeting a lady, Alphonse.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s sympathique. I like her.”
“Ha!” He directed an age-moistened gaze at me and shook his head—or maybe it was Parkinson’s. “At your age, I’d learned to control myself,” he remarked, and shuffled away. But surely he was married and had six or more children? I wondered, wondering then if that mightn’t be precisely the point…ah well. So then, back to the Archangel. He was, as I discovered, just about everywhere at all times, and Everyman to all men (even atheists?):
VENERATION
It would have been natural to St. Michael, the champion of the Jewish people [Well, where were you at Auschwitz, then, mon brave, I wondered…] to be the champion also of Christians, giving victory in war to his clients. The early Christians, however, gave to St. Michael the care of their sick. Tradition relates that St. Michael in the earliest ages caused a medicinal spring to spout at Chairotopa near Colossae (Greece), where all the sick who bathed there, invoking the Blessed Trinity and St. Michael, were cured. The pagans directed a stream against the sanctuary of St. Michael to destroy it, but the archangel split the rock by lightning to give a new bed to the stream, and sanctified forever the waters which came from the gorge. The Greeks claim that this apparition took place about the middle of the first century and celebrate a feast in commemoration of it on November 12th (Analecta Bolland., VIII, 285-328).
Bla bla bla bla. I skipped ahead.
At Constantinople likewise, St. Michael was the great heavenly physician. His principal sanctuary, the Michaelion, was at Sosthenion, some fifty miles south of Constantinople; there the archangel is said to have appeared to the Emperor Constantine. The sick slept in this church at night to wait for a manifestation of St. Michael; his feast was kept there 9 June. Another famous church was within the walls of the city, at the thermal baths of the Emperor Arcadius; there the feast of the archangel was celebrated November 8th.
I reflected that it had been November 8th when I saw him for the second time. It was an annoying fact, because it should have been a mere coincidence but didn’t feel like one. Worse, it should have been insignificant but wasn’t. Of course, I could say the same about my induction into the Pantheon of the Mystics generally. And the Greek apparition date, November 12th, was the coming Friday. Beware! I thought again of Marley’s ghost.
The Christians of Egypt placed their life-giving river, the Nile, under the protection of St. Michael; they adopted the Greekfeast and kept it November 12; on the twelfth of every month they celebrate a special commemoration of the archangel, but 12th June, when the river commences to rise, they keep as a holiday of obligation the feast of St. Michael “for the rising of the Nile.”
At Rome also the part of heavenly physician was given to St. Michael. According to an (apocryphal?) legend of the tenth century he appeared over the Moles Hadriani (Castel di S. Angelo) in 550, during the procession which St. Gregory held against the pestilence, putting an end to the plague.
Well known is the apparition of St. Michael (a. 494 or 530-40), as related in the Roman Breviary, 8 May, at his renowned sanctuary on Monte Gargano, where his original glory as patron in war was restored to him. To his intercession the Lombards attributed their victory over the Neapolitans, 8 May, 663. In commemoration of this victory the church of Sipontum instituted a special feast in honour of the archangel, on 8 May, which has spread over the entire Latin Church and is now called (since the time of Pius V) "Apparitio S. Michaelis," although it originally did not commemorate the apparition, but the victory.
I underlined November 12th, May 8th, and June 12th with a light pencil, intending
to later write them in my agenda and reminding myself to be especially wary on those dates.
In Germany, after its evangelization, St. Michael replaced for the Christians the pagan god Wotan, to whom many mountains were sacred, hence the numerous mountain chapels of St. Michael all over Germany. . . .
This surprised me. Michael was really Wotan (“Loge, hör!”)? The archangel Odin!? The Saint of Walhalla. . . ? Then the honor was double!
Sensing a presence—no, let me put it this way…
A shadow fell across the table. I looked up.
“Well!” I exclaimed. Martine Jeanrenaud was standing there. Her mouth ripe with a restrained smile, she was looking awfully attractive, her eyes blue and bright behind her owlish eyeglasses, and red-cheeked from the boreal bise that swirls across the empty spaces of our city in the colder months. Her maroon overcoat went perfectly with her disheveled auburn hair…now, I don’t usually notice these things, being a firm believer in the old adage “if you like the clothes outside, you don’t like the woman inside,” but she had a fine sartorial touch, and her clothes were graduated just so, in varying shades of red: dark, then darker. It accorded perfectly with her satiny skin, her auburn hair. A promising sign, I thought. It implied a sense of order, a respect for the aesthetic basis of civilization, for the necessity of keeping chaos at bay.
Or perhaps I was reading too much into too little, as was my wont.
“Hello, Professor,” she said.
“Mademoiselle Jeanrenaud!”
I looked at her with something of that mild discomfort mixed with incredulity one feels on seeing in the flesh the object of one’s recent dreams—as if she might suspect my guilty secret (or share it). Of course, through another fogged-over lens I was also, with intimations of awe, seeing the author of Adoration, fictionalizing biographer of Fraulein von Rothenberg, in whom I could not but help detect elements of her creator—in such paragraphs as Her introspective, melancholic character deprived her, much of the time, of an appetite, or any settled routine. Occasionally she drank a little too much, usually white wine, frequently Riesling. In the evenings, like so many of her kind, she smoked. Digestive problems plagued her from time to time, the consequence of a temperament unsuited to normality. But overall she was fit and looked less than her age.
Overall, she was fit and looked less than her age. I ordered Riesling; we smoked. Was hers a temperament unsuited to normality, I inquired? Fortunately, she didn’t reply with the standard modernist trope “Whatever normality means”; instead, she studied the menu and answered me, her eyes scanning the plats régionaux:
“You have been reading my book, haven’t you, Professor?”
“Please. Call me Gustave.”
She looked up.
“Yes, yes. Of course I will, my dear Gustave.” (My dear!) “I just like the word professor. And you do so look like one.” She was flirting; had she, then, wasted some time in idle thoughts of…me? Delightedly, I prepared to respond in kind, then I saw that she saw what I was reading, and thought, no doubt, that the cat was out of the bag…well, it was all her fault, in a way, wasn’t it? I no longer thought it would be fatal to advertise my visions. I’d made up my mind that if this relationship had any future it would be on the basis of candor. I could hardly conceal or deny my visions of the Archangel. So it was time, I reckoned, to make a clean breast of things. Yes, I’d had visions, and that was that. If she couldn’t take it, she couldn’t take me, et voilà tout. But I didn’t really feel so cavalier about it; I was rather counting on anyone who’d written a copious book about the life of Stefanie von Rothenberg having a bit of a soft spot for visionaries.
Alphonse interposed himself to serve the Riesling and to write down our respective orders: poulet de Bresse for her, magret de canard for me—with a side dish of carrots. It was blustery outside, warm inside. I was seated at my favorite table in my favorite café in my favorite city with . . . well, my favorite woman. Things could be worse. For the moment I put aside thoughts of mysticism and visionaries and we chatted of this and that. My classes? Well, well. The usual, you know. The halt leading the blind. Her job? Stressful, as always. Deadlines, deadlines. There was talk of sending her to Rome to cover the Christmas blessing by the pope. Ah, Rome! Yes, a fine city. She would take the train, she thought; she wasn’t keen on flying. Had I heard? A plane from Russia had made an emergency landing at Cointrin that very morning: Thank goodness no one was injured! Russian planes, eh? And the traffic had been awful on the highway from the airport. Of course, there had also been a demonstration in front of the U.N., something about banks in East Africa, tying up traffic even more. And the weather! Colder by the day; sometimes, it seemed, by the hour. Ah, yes: well, it would soon be winter. Cigarette? Oh no thanks I’m smoking too much again, I really must, etc.
Truly, the contentment was extreme. My cup ran over. I toasted the moment. The moment reached its climax. Martine, with idle curiosity, picked up the Almanac. I heaved a deep private sigh. Confession was at hand.
“The Concise Catholic! Are you religious?”
“No. I mean not really. Although an old priest of my acquaintance made a good case for staying in the Church, which he calls the one thing that prevents a man from the degrading servitude of being a child of his own time.”
“Ha ha! Very good. I did a documentary once on rebel priests, mostly in Latin America. I enjoyed the trip, but frankly I wasn’t impressed with the priests. A bunch of self-promoters and womanizers. Anyway, I think I’m very much a child of my time, for good and bad. Are you thinking of converting, then?”
“No, no. No need for that, even if I were. I was baptized into the Catholic Church, and of course I wouldn’t consider any other. Good Italian, you see.”
“Of course. And I, Genevese of good Protestant mountain stock, am Reformed Church on both sides. My two uncles are both pastors: one in Neuchatel, the other in Délémont. My father, the mountain-climber, was a committed materialist, and as for my mother…but, speaking of her!” She put aside the book, animated by other thoughts. “You remember I told you about her dreadful marriage and her return from Pakistan and all that? Yes? Well, the other night after I spoke to you I received an anonymous phone call—or rather, she did, but she handed the phone to me right away and told me to say she wasn’t there.”
“Who made this anonymous call?” I inquired foolishly, then, hastily: “I mean, a man? A woman? A…?”
“It sounded like a very young man or a boy, with a high-pitched voice and a strong Middle Eastern accent. First he asked to speak to Madame Suleiman, that’s my mother’s married name. I said, of course, she’s not here. I didn’t offer to take a message, because there was something in his voice, you know. And sure enough, right away he became extraordinarily abusive.”
She frowned at the memory. Alphonse swooped down with dinner. After tucking in for awhile (she ate heartily, unaffectedly), we resumed.
“Now, tell me. In what way did this crackpot abuse you over the telephone?”
“He yelled at me. ’You’”—she put on a mock-Arabic accent and wagged a forefinger—“’you are another whore like her! If we need to we will come and kill both of you! Tell her she belongs in her husband’s home in Pakistan and if she does not come back we will come for her!’ Then he screamed, ‘Allah yew haw lala Allah hew ha la de dah willy willy willy lalah,’ or some such gibberish, and rang off. Charmant, n’est-ce pas?”
Well, naturally, I became quite agitated.
“This is serious. Did you call the police?”
She waved an elegant, dismissive hand. Police? Of course not. Police meant upheaval, lights flashing, muddy boots, neighbors peering out of their doors, the long nose of inquiry sniffing everywhere. No, no police.
“Well, really, Martine. I mean. When a woman is threatened by a screeching lunatic over the phone, it’s no small matter. You must call the police. Immediately, please.”
“There’s no need to lecture me, professor! It’s not that I’m not taking it seriously, you know. Mother’s going to Paris for a few days to stay with Laure, my sister.”
“But…does this mean you’ll be alone in your apartment?”
She popped the last morsel of her poulet de Bresse into her mouth and, smilingly, chewed.
“Well, that depends where else I might find accommodation,” she said, and the winsome glance she shot me could have only one meaning.
“Might I suggest a humble scholar’s garret on the picturesque Boulevard des Philosophes, with the city’s best collection of Italian opera records and an unparalleled view of the Chemistry Faculty of the University over the rooftops?” I blurted, with bold verbosity.
“Hmmm. It sounds irresistible.”
I was flooded with a hot and cold fever of anticipation as delicious as dinner, but it was followed immediately by near-panic as I made a mental inventory of my flat (I was, after all, a bachelor of lifelong standing, unaccustomed to ladies, or indeed anyone, visiting): the singlet draped over the radiator; the stack of half-read books on the coffee table; the pajamas hanging on the kitchen door, the ashtray in the study piled high (well, there was no need to go into the study); the bed maladroitly made (but made, at least, after a fashion)…I excused myself and cooled down amid the tiles and plashing of the gents,’ where I took my glucose pill and gazed at myself in the mirror, marveling at the chance that had led this far, and mentally damned myself to hell if I failed to take full advantage of it.
And yet I had still not told her the tale of Gustave and the Archangel. Perhaps it wasn’t quite the moment.
Alphonse bowed as we left. I reciprocated, with irony. Martine and I walked briskly down the nearly-deserted Boulevard du Théâtre. The bise roamed the streets, bullying pedestrians into corners, alongside walls, or inside. Dead leaves and scraps of discarded newspapers and wrappers rose, flapped, and fell, with the slow spasmodic movements of deep-sea creatures. Ragged cloud-shards striated the black moonlit sky from which howled the cold pure wind. My heart swelled with a strange exhilaration I hadn’t felt since youth. I felt like Berlioz, or Casanova, or Garibaldi at Naples, or one of those travelers in meditative poses from Caspar Friedrich’s wondrous wanderworld. It was October, season of ghosts and memories of the hopes of Octobers long gone. At the corner of Place Neuve we stopped and shivered theatrically and looked across the square at the beckoning trees in the Parc des Bastions, their swaying come-hither sporadically illuminated by the bluish light of the streetlamps. In their shadows phantoms lurked. I told the tale of one: The Lamenting Widow, never seen, sometimes heard, plaintively sobbing, whispering words unspoken since the seventeenth century, mourning her husband killed by halberd-toting Savoyards.
“Have you ever heard her?”
“Once I thought so. And I was quite sober. It was after midnight, one New Year’s. But it could have been the wind.”
“And you were sober? At New Year’s? Pull the other one, professor.”
Martine slid a warm gloved hand under my arm. We headed south across the emptiness of the Place Neuve. General Dufour and his mount continued their time-frozenprance atop their pedestal. The mansions on the centuries-old escarpment of the Rue des Granges haughtily drew up their skirts and turned their gray backs on us. A tram slid smoothly by on its gleaming rails. Several cars raced by in single file, like ducks seeking shelter. There was a shout from party-bound students near the Music Conservatory. Shadows flickered under the Doric portico of the Rath Museum. A man paced back and forth in front of the Grand Théâtre, glancing at his wristwatch. The wind lifted my sparse hair into a feeble crown. Martine’s grip tightened. When we came to a crosswalk and waited for a clanging tram to pass, I turned and took her full female warmth in my arms and kissed her with all the ardor in my bottled-up soul. Our eyeglasses collided, with a plastic crunch.
“Merde,” I said. She laughed softly and took her glasses off and we resumed. A young man’s craziness surged through my veins. Suddenly it seemed a dreadfully long way back to my apartment, but the cold windy square was no place for ardor… and I draw a discreet curtain over what followed.
Suffice it to say that, as the poet has it, that night we were not divided.