Matrix

by Lauren Groff

And it was true, the religion she was raised in had always seemed vaguely foolish to her, if rich with mystery and ceremony, for why should babies be born into sin, why should she pray to the invisible forces, why would god be a trinity, why should she, who felt her greatness hot in her blood, be considered lesser because the first woman was molded from a rib and ate a fruit and thus lost lazy Eden? It was senseless. Her faith had twisted very early in her childhood; it would slowly grow ever more bent into its geometry until it was its own angular, majestic thing.

Then she rose and stared out the open window at the garden in its cloak of fog, feeling the sun go down inside her.

There is cut holly on the raw graves and the red berries are the only things that glow faintly in the mizzle, in the world at large, which has no more color in it. All will be gray, she thinks, the rest of her life gray. Gray soul, gray sky, gray earth of March, grayish whitish abbey.

Goda has the affronted air of someone who lurks in corners to hear herself spoken ill of so that she can hold tight a grievance to suckle.

no more Eleanor to look at from a distance and feel her longing accompanying her like an invisible friend.

There is a very old hostility here between the women, Marie sees, a war of suffering between the mangled foot and the cloudy eyes. Decades thick, and visible, like the rings in a felled tree.

Marie wants to lie on the floor in this white warm room. To leave this prison of flesh in this miserable boggy stinking place, to rejoin her mother in death, to give up the ghost.

Later, Marie will remember those days just after arriving at the abbey as thick and black. When she would peer back into that time, it was like looking from a well-lit room through the window into night; nothing to see but her own face hovering like a moon.

Tels purchace le mal d’altrui dunt tuz li mals revert sur lui! May evil done to others rebound upon the evildoers.

Acedia, she knows, is a sin. Despair.

Marie is caged into her fate by the isolation of those two years, only mitigated by busy Cecily; Marie would never want to live through that desert of her soul again.

Perhaps the song of a bird in a chamber is more precious than the wild bird’s because the chamber itself makes it so. Perhaps the free air that gives the wild bird its better song in fact limits the reach of its prayer. So small, this understanding. So remarkably tiny. Still, it might be enough to live for.

Fine then, she thinks with bitterness. She will stay in this wretched place and make the best of the life given her. She will do all that she can do to exalt herself on this worldly plane. She will make those who cast her out sorry for what they’ve done. One day they will see the majesty she holds within herself and feel awe.

Her love for Eleanor she buries deep within her, even though it is still alive, and it will flare up in her life and have to be banked again and again; it will morph to hatred then flare into lo...

For it is a deep and human truth that most souls upon the earth are not at ease unless they find themselves safe in the hands of a force far greater than themselves.

This first spring that she has come to the abbey, Marie plants the apricot pits she had stolen from the queen’s garden, to get them away from herself, for they are a souvenir of all she has lost. They will struggle to grow, sprouting weak thin leaves. She will feel as though her own life is bound up in the trees. She doesn’t yet know if she wants them to shrivel or thrive.

She is reprimanded for making herself scarce. She apologizes in writing, for she is less uncouth in writing, more like the self she yearns to become.

Marie marvels at the kind of people so magnificent they can create something to last a thousand years beyond their lives.

She longs to be among the greats of the generations before. Marie might have discovered others like herself in that era. She would not have felt so alone.

Ritual creates its own catharsis, Marie. Mystical acts create mystical beliefs.

Women in this world are vulnerable; only reputation can keep them from being crushed.

Marie tells herself sternly she must not love Wulfhild more than she loves the others; but she smiles when she sees the girl, she cannot help it.

Marie thinks that true we are not animals; but it would be foolish to think we’re better than animals. Animals are closer to god, of course; this is because animals have no need of god.

She is moved right there in the street to thank the Virgin, not only with the words of her mouth but with the words of her heart, and is surprised to find them in earnest. How strange, she thinks. Belief has grown upon her. Perhaps, she thinks, it is something like a mold.

Nothing is all stark and clear any longer, nothing stands in opposition. Good and evil live together; dark and light. Contradictions can be true at once. The world holds a great and pulsing terror at its center. The world is ecstatic in its very deeps.

Love attained too easily, she knows from courtly romances, is not love.

By the time Marie was elected abbess, the heat of the end of her menses had withdrawn from her. Now she is no longer touched by the curse of Eve. When the blood stopped, the knives that had twisted in her since she was fourteen were at last removed from her womb. She is given instead a long, cold clarity.

Only when she has re-created in ink upon parchment what she saw does she fully understand it, she writes in her little book. Visions are not complete until they have been set down and stepped away from, turned this way and that in the hand.

Oh how the girl loves god, hungers for god, believes in the goodness of all things with a kind of rigorous simplicity. Such knowing simplicity in this complex world takes great intelligence, Marie finds. She envies the girl, admires her.

And without the flaw of Eve there could be no purity of Mary. And without the womb of Eve, which is the House of Death, there could be no womb of Mary, which is the House of Life. Without the first matrix, there could be no salvatrix, the greatest matrix of all.

A wolf, chewing a bone, gets it caught in its throat. In pain, the beast calls all the animals of the kingdom together to demand that one pull the bone from its throat. Only the crane has a long enough neck. Of course, the crane is understandably reluctant to put its head between all those sharp teeth. At last, the wolf tells the crane that if it were to reach its head into the wolf’s mouth, it would get a wondrous treasure. So the brave crane reaches in and plucks out the bone. The wolf, released from pain, tells the bird that it now will get its treasure. And that the treasure is its life. The crane must be happy not to be eaten.

In the morning, Marie will not ride the shortcut but rather the entirety of the labyrinth, the many leagues of it, to see it as though an interloper. She loves this estrangement from her own knowledge, shivers in the thrill of it.

What she does not see behind her is the disturbance her nuns have left in the forest, the families of squirrels, of dormice, of voles, of badgers, of stoats who have been chased in confusion from their homes, the trees felled that held green woodpeckers, the pine martens, the mistle thrushes and the long-tailed tits, the woodcocks and capercaillies chased from their nests, the willow warbler vanished in panic from these lands for the time being; it will take a half century to lure these tiny birds back. She sees only the human stamp upon the place. She considers it good.

If one looks hard at even the most powerful magic, one can see nimble human hands, Marie says.

Yet if there is no inner reading, how can there be any inner life? Marie thinks and imagines the cold blowing desert that must stretch inside her subprioress.

She awakens to the same pleasure, the same lightboned moving succubus, the silence and swiftness in the dark, the rush and wild and pulsing release. Better than wine. As shameful as drunkenness.

In the morning, without ceremony, Avice is lowered into it in her shroud facedown with her babe at her feet, so that in the Revelation her bones will never be able to rise to the hands of the Angels of the Resurrection. Such pitilessness, Marie thinks, for a sin of the flesh. Avice, dead. A garden shut up, a spring stopped, a fountain sealed.

Oh, dear Marie, Eleanor writes at last. Even now, when both are so old, Marie is up to her tricks. Can she not remember? They are not the kind of friends who love each other best when they are in the same place, riding the same fields. They, the queen writes, must be friends at a distance.

Marie goes heavily to the trunk she brought with her so long ago, which is empty save for a very ancient Byzantine ring of jacinthe, which had belonged to her grandmother. It can only fit on the final joint of Marie’s pinkie. When she wears it she sees golden birds diving through fields, a muscular river, and a springy gray-haired woman with no face but a soft voice, her grandmother. A thickness fills her throat that she cannot swallow away.

she cannot take this seething city into her anymore, being in the proximity of so many of the far worser sex is filling her with aggression and fret. She thinks she is taking evil into her very body with each breath.

Aging is a constant loss; all the things considered essential in youth prove with time that they are not. Skins are shed, and left at the roadside for the new young to pick up and carry on.

The infirmatrix nuns speak softly in a corner but the awakened part of Marie’s mind hears them and understands that they are worried she will die. And with their words, Death steps into the infirmary and stands a bad vigil in the corner of the room.

In the night she wakes again to see Death bent over Sister Sybilla, who had been old even when Marie came to the abbey, a hard worker and uncomplaining but perhaps because she had been born without a voice to speak, and Death is pressing its lips to her mouth and breathing the life out of the old nun.

Marie wills herself to love poor Goda. It is not her fault she was born like this.

Philomena needs to hurt, to find catharsis through bodily pain, she will not be satisfied without it.

And Marie clutches the letter and presses it to her, because she believed her aunt must have died long ago, she is at least sixty-five years old, and it is an unexpected gift of god to find she is not alone, that there is someone else on this earth alive who knew what it was to swim in the willow-hidden bend of the river, what it meant to gallop after a doe’s tail springing through the forest, to love the great calm intelligence that had been Marie’s mother.

One day, Marie looks at her hands and sees them spotted, knobby. She is old, she thinks with surprise.

The winter is a sheet of parchment that the small feet of birds, of vixens, of hares, write upon.

Marie looks from the mother whom time has coarsened to her fresher likeness in the girl, and does not say that beauty is the great deceiver, that it is harder and not easier to become saintly when one has been born with it, that ordinary women become more holy only when the dew of youth has passed from their bodies and the small humiliations and stamps of age have pressed themselves through the skin and into the bone.

Some of the old strength returns to her. Marie is always at her best when there is someone to fight.