“Look, I really don’t have time for this,” he said. “If you have concerns about the book, you can address them to my publisher, and otherwise I’ll thank you not to call my office again.”
I didn’t stand a chance with the publisher and he knew it. A high school language arts teacher on early retirement, against Dr. Carter Bristol, professor of literary psychology at one of those schools where they wear the hoods. But. That was before I knew that Inga Beart’s letter about the druggist was not necessarily the product of a depraved imagination that Bristol made it out to be; that Parisians in the 1950s sometimes did get hit by falling rocks. Just that little hole in Bristol’s theory made me feel that I was onto something. I pictured my Aunt Cat, holding up a hand-knit mitten, looking for the place where one of us kids had snagged it on barbed wire. In my mind she was wetting the frayed ends of the yarn between her lips, knotting them together again, reminding me or Pearl or Eddie that the whole thing’s just one thread and a little tear unravels everything.
{NEIL}
Paris, June
It was the final hour before the archives closed for the day. Everyone was bent at a sharper angle over their fiches and dossiers and old books supported on rolls of green velvet like frail kings, all of them leaning into the last minutes of the day. Usually Neil was one of them, waiting until the third announcement of closing time to put the documents back in their cartons and return them to the cross-eyed man in the gray smock at the counter. But that day, after seeing Magdalena off at Gare du Nord, Neil hadn’t been able to get much done. He’d arranged his notes around him and put in his request for the monk’s papers from the Saint-Jean-d’Angély abbey again, then started paging through a carton of documents about monastic communities in Rouen.
The problem was that Neil still had a little bit of Magdalena’s friend’s ashes under his fingernails, and it was making it hard to concentrate. The things he usually loved about the archives—like the way two old papers might be stuck together with a pin that was shaped differently from the pins of nowadays, or how a document might be dated according to the Revolutionary calendar, the fifth day of the month of Brumaire in the year III, for example—weren’t holding his attention.
Neil looked through a bundle of papers and found a reference to a twelfth-or thirteenth-century document by the abbot of Vend?me, forbidding monks to go on pilgrimages and citing a decree by the pope that said the same thing. That was interesting, because it meant that the monk from Rouen was violating the pope’s edict—or maybe he had a special dispensation—when he set off on the road to Spain. It was something to bring up at the next project meeting with Professor Piot. The personal motivations of medieval pilgrims was one of the themes they were considering for the Tour Saint-Jacques exhibition, and Professor Piot might like the idea of a rebellious monk, wriggling free of monastic life and setting off on an unsanctioned adventure. Neil turned to a new page of his notebook and wrote Monk from Rouen—why? And underneath it, adventure?
Neil had been a little sloppy in what he’d said to Magdalena at the station. The pilgrimage that left Paris from the Tour Saint-Jacques technically ended in the town of Santiago de Compostela, which meant “field of stars” and didn’t sound as interesting as going all the way to Finisterre, the “end of the earth,” like he’d told Magdalena—though there were some scholars who said that Finisterre, which was a bit farther west on the Spanish coast, had been the original destination. According to them, the symbol of the scallop came from the shells pilgrims collected there as a way to prove that they’d really been to the edge of the world. And the legend of the body of the saint washing ashore at Finisterre covered with scallop shells and surprisingly preserved was only one of the miracles associated with Saint Jacques— or James, as he was called in English. But it was an image Neil particularly liked because it seemed like the kind of miracle one could almost believe in. There were hundreds of miracle stories dating as far back as the tenth century, and Saint Jacques was generally credited with bringing people back from the dead and doing other things that, in Neil’s opinion, only saddled the faithful with impossible hopes. But in that particular miracle story the saint’s divinity served simply to keep his skin and eyeballs intact for the arrival at his burial place, and that was enough.
In fact, it was Neil’s theory that stories like the one about the body covered in seashells—as opposed to the more standard miracles—had helped to make Saint Jacques’s the most popular medieval pilgrimage after the ones to the holy cities of Rome and Jerusalem. Neil didn’t have enough evidence yet to present his idea, but it seemed like the kind of thing Professor Piot himself might come up with. Neil could almost hear him describing to his students how the world might have looked to a pilgrim like the monk from Rouen, who couldn’t raise his eyes to heaven as the church demanded without first seeing that the world around him was full to the pores with rot and disease. The image of a body held together in defiance of decomposition had attracted wanderers from all over Europe; it might have been enough to draw a monk away from his prayers. Neil opened his notebook and added looking for miracles? under Monk from Rouen.
He had just enough time to look up the actual edict from the Vend?me abbot forbidding pilgrimages in the Patrologia Latina, a collection of medieval texts that the archives staff kept in the reference room. But he could still remember the feeling of Magdalena’s fingers brushing his forehead as they sat at the café table, and he was afraid that if he thought about anything else for too long the memory would fade. And when it did he would lose forever the exact sensation of her fingertips, the way she’d looked at him and smiled so that he’d felt his whole body change temperature, but hadn’t been sure if it was to hot or cold. Neil put the papers back in their carton and gathered his notes.