Historia Calamitatum Mearum

The Story of Héloïse and Abelard

Nominated for the Pushcart Prize

by Donna Glee Williams

When a duckling finally pecks out of the crushing dark, it will follow the first creature that moves across its sight, even a barnyard dog if it sees no better love. That the dog will swallow it down in one quick bite is not its concern; its business is to follow.

You would have loved him too—and I did, no matter how you define or parse or argue the word. If you’d been the one he chose to heat with the fire of his gaze, to talk with, to lift into his swirl of ideas and their history—above people in all of Paris, all the scholars and great ladies—if he’d wanted to spend his time with you, then you would have given yourself without question and never counted the cost.

But it was me he settled on, a nobody. A girl.

* * *

My uncle—I thought he was my uncle, then—liked me to sit with him at dinner when he entertained. He liked to show me off. Trained me like a favorite hound, you know—such a little prodigy, a pretty girl who can speak intelligently of the quadrivium, in Latin and in Greek.

I obliged and did my tricks, wit and conversation for food and a warm bed—also for freedom from the benighted convent and the nuns that raised me. And it was at one of those dinners that I met my love and was forever cursed.

* * *

He was a man at the height of his powers then, thirty-seven years old and the toast of Paris. He’d roundly defeated two of his old teachers in public debates and taken their students from them, loot after the battle. Thousands attended his lectures at the cathedral school and came away amazed.

That first time he was to come to dinner, my uncle vibrated from daybreak like a plucked lute-string, haunting the kitchens, annoying the housekeeper, and giving me my instructions over and over again.

I was to wear my green silk, he said, and be brilliant, but not too brilliant, and make sure our guest’s wine-cup was never empty. “He is the eagle,” my uncle insisted. “The others are mere crows.”

I don’t remember if he arrived alone. I don’t remember what he wore. But his eyes—I will never forget his remarkable eyes, wide and somehow holy, like the eyes of Our All-Knowing Savior in the painting above my bed. A short, straight fringe of brown hair framed his broad, unwrinkled brow, and his curls tucked in neatly above his collar. Even though the feast lasted many hours, his lips remained unstained with grease or wine or sweat. Not like the others.

What else? His voice. Along with his eyes, that was his secret power. That voice could make the subtlest tones of mockery or compassion ring clear across a hall filled with hundreds of eager scholars, or drop a compliment into a young girl’s ear so softly that no one else at the table could hear. That voice.

* * *

He courted us both, you know—not just me—groaning with pleasure at the richness of my uncle’s library, asking leave to come and read there in the afternoons. When he dined with us, he stayed long after the others had gone, drawing Uncle out about the evening, critiquing the other guests and their rhetoric. He praised, always, the quality of my wit and education, which could only be a reflection of the great mind who had formed and guided mine. And my uncle would beam.

Sometimes, even without an invitation, he would knock at our door when, he said, he needed a refuge from the city’s madness or needed counsel about Cathedral rivalries from an older, wiser man. My uncle would happily advise him, and he would return the favor by recommending which of the young up-and-coming scholars should enjoy our hospitality and which of the old guard should be pruned away.

“Dead wood at the dinner table,” he would pronounce, solemn as an Inquisitor, and Uncle would dash a heavy black line through some name on the guest-list. “Now this one—worth inviting for his connections, but put him at the foot of the table or you’ll die an early death from bad Latin and worse logic.”

“And seat your niece near me. After dinner, I will examine her on what she learns from the exchange at table.”

* * *

My uncle—the man I knew as my uncle—gave me to him, like one child gives another a toy, to buy his liking. You couldn’t expect a man of ideas, a great man, to fritter away his time and attention on the mundanities of housekeeping—no, of course not. My uncle would become his patron, see to the necessities of his life—his food, his lodging—and free his mind from all but the sublime. But to spare the young man’s pride, for even doctors of the Church are proud, there would be an exchange: He would take charge of my education.

My Latin was good; my Greek, acceptable. But my Hebrew? I’d barely begun to learn the difference between perfect and imperfect, and I had no grasp at all of gendered verbs; my brilliant new tutor would soon set me right. My grammar, logic, and rhetoric were quite advanced, but I needed a strong hand to lead me into geometry and astronomy.

(Why did I name our son Astrolabe, people wonder, people who’ve never steered by the stars.)

* * *

What is “love,” to men?

What is it that they feel toward us that makes them ruin us, drag us into public shame, betrayed by this “love” and our own bodies?

Here is a question I never asked him, even later, in those letters that still chained between us after we’d each taken our separate vows:

All of those poems and songs he wrote about me, extolling my mind, my hair, my eyes—and, later, my secret parts, too—how did those songs wind up on the lips of howling louts staggering home from the taverns as I made my way to Mass in the mornings?

The first time I recognized one of his verses, my cheeks burned as if lightning-struck, and I hid my face from the maid that walked with me—he’d stressed from the beginning that no one could ever know about our special times and touches. It would ruin him, he said.

Why? I didn’t understand. Our friendship was so sacred—how could it be anything but of God? Sometimes, the mere warmth of him as he leaned over my shoulder to help me with a difficult text would fill my body with such a welling of divine grace that I knew, I just knew …

Why must such a blessing be hidden?

But he said it must, and I was only a girl. He was twice my years, and twice that in learning, and double that again in wisdom. He must know best, so I schooled myself in the arts of secrecy.

But he did not. Those tavern songs, some even with my name in them, or those little pet-names he would pant in my ear when we were one flesh. How did his poetry slip out from the privacy of my chamber onto the streets of Paris?

That secret he insisted I must keep—did he himself caterwaul it in the alehouse for his friends, teaching them all the stanzas, repeating the lines—my lips, my breasts, my holy well—until the whole crowd got them right? Or did he sell the rhymes for money to some minstrel, to put them about in the town? Or maybe he made copies, and posted them on the walls of the city?

I wish I had asked him while I still could. Maybe after I am dead, God will let us share the same Hell and then he can answer.

* * *

He hit me, I’m sure you know—he boasted about it when he wrote our story. (Why did he write our story?)

It started one day when he was riding me and slapped my flank in play, like a man would slap a horse to make it run. There was something about the sound of flesh hitting flesh and my squeak of surprise—just surprise; it didn’t really hurt—that excited him, drove him deeper. And the power to drive him drove me deeper as well. That little slap led to more.

Sometimes my uncle would notice a bruise or the gingerly fashion with which I lowered myself onto my chair at dinner. Uncle would nod at him approvingly—“Spare not the rod”—and speak to me about being inattentive in my studies.

I would bow my head over the soup and burn.

* * *

I was young. How could I even imagine that such sacred joining, the miracle of our two souls and bodies becoming one, was the same possession that roosters visit on their fleeing, squawking hens, that mangy hounds in the street offer their bony bitches? How was I—an unmothered girl—child raised by nuns—to know that his occupation of me would sow a baby, as sure as coupling dogs and beating wings bring pups and chicks.

It was the little house-maid who washed my rags who knew first. Every morning she would ask me, “Do you have anything for me to wash?” and I would hand her my chemise, my shawl, my smock—but that was not what she was asking for. “Is there nothing else?” Her eyes ever more panicked as the weeks went on.

My kirtle grew too tight. Had the laundry-maid shrunk it in the wash? My belt seemed shorter, too; was I still growing? Was the abundance of my uncle’s table—so much richer than fare at the convent—fattening me like a goose for the pot?

Finally the little laundress told the housekeeper, who stormed into my room and ripped my nightdress off over my head. I shivered in front of her, trying to cover myself, while she looked me over. She prodded my belly like a questionable melon, poked at my breasts, then whirled out of my room with her lips pressed into a line sharp enough to slice venison.

That was my Annunciation.

* * *

And there is that, too, which I would ask my uncle, though I would not have him in my Hell.

Why, when he found me with child, was the fault mine? Wasn’t he my guardian and protector? Wasn’t I his ward?

Who, after all, had invited the brilliant scholar into our house to spare his meager purse the cost of lodgings? Who gave my education over to him, told me to obey him, gave him leave to punish me as he saw fit if I did not meet his expectations?

Yes, I may have been gifted in languages and the sciences, but about the world I was as ignorant as a newborn kitten. I’d been told to honor and obey my tutor. I did so. Why was I the culprit in our calamity?

Why was I the one shouted at and beaten, locked in my room for months on end in a sort of brutal domestic exorcism meant to beat and starve the baby out of me?

* * *

It was not when I fell pregnant that my uncle sent his thugs to cut him. That didn’t come until much later, after my love had snatched me away from Paris and sent me back to the convent of my childhood. For my own safety, he said. I’ve always wondered what made that his unforgivable sin in my uncle’s eyes.

Was it—ah, this is coming clearer now, from the cool distance of years and miles, safe in this prison, behind these high walls, mistress now of my own abbey: Was it that by sending me to the nuns, he moved me beyond Uncle’s reach, forever out of his control?

Was my life nothing but a bloody bone tugged back and forth between two snarling dogs?

The man I knew as Uncle took his bite, that’s sure, but he never took possession of the bone.

* * *

Uncle castrated him for what he did. I knew what the word meant, though I was very young and I’d grown up behind walls and wimples. He himself had tutored me in the Principias of medicine, allowing me to look with him at engravings that revealed far, far more than sheltered girls were supposed to know.

Book illustrations he allowed, yes, but his own pruned body he never showed me. He never lay with me again after the calamity. In my letters, I begged him for the comfort of his arms, his hands, his knowing fingers. For the whispers of his words in my hair, and his breath against my ear. Did they cut off your lips, I demanded? Did they castrate your soul? Did I love you for just those two fragile eggs you dangled?

But he would not hear of it, and I did not understand his shame. It was nothing he had done, I argued; he’d been held down by my uncle’s men. Not his doing. Not his fault. So there could be no shame.

But there can always be shame.

Like I said, I was very young, and still thought that souls could love with no regard for bodies. I thought he was stupid and stubborn for letting that one small wound gape wide enough to swallow us down. I was just a learned child, with very little imagination.

I’m old now, and my abbey keeps cows for milk and cheese. In the spring, when it’s time for the males to be cut, they scream like tortured children and sometimes the screams fill my head and I have to rush away before I faint. My nuns see my teary pallor and bring me hot broth later, in my cell. They say I am tenderhearted and too saintly for the bloody work.

Saintly.

I sip their bland broth and remember those languid afternoon “lessons” of ours, lying sated by his side, cupping his silkiness, the life inside him rolling in the warmth of my palm as he reads to me from his latest treatise. Sometimes, when he was ready, one twitch of my fingers could cause him to lose his train of thought completely, and I would laugh and laugh until he made my laughing stop.

* * *

I wonder if being castrated hurt him as much as bearing the child hurt me? I cannot think so; just one quick draw of the knife—over and done. At least that’s how it is with the calves.

But what I endured, alone with his thin-lipped sister, the terror of a pain not outside but within, tearing me apart like some clawed and panicked beast trapped in my most private core. The gathering speed and fire, until all was ablaze, and I was the heretic at the stake.

And that’s not even accounting for the months of terror and confusion, before, as I swelled and swelled and tried to survive my uncle’s killing fury.

No, I do not think what happened to me ranks any less than what happened to him. It did leave me the glory of little Astro at my breast for a while, though, and his ordeal left him nothing. But wouldn’t nothing be better than the agony of giving up my child when our little trinity was broken? And isn’t that the question of my life: Was it better to have those few weeks with him in Brittany after the birth—those flower-petal lips locked around my nipple—and suffer having him ripped away? Or better never to have known him, never to have loved at all?

* * *

The baby would be provided for, he said. My love could never rise in the Order with a child and a woman at his side. There was no way—not in Paris, not at the Cathedral, not with my uncle withdrawing support and hacking away at his reputation with every word. A couple would be found for the child, care would be taken. All would be well.

* * *

It was only after they took Astro away that I began to wonder about my mother.

Growing up, I knew nothing about her—not from the nuns and not from Uncle, either. But now I knew in my body some of the truths of her life:

I knew how she’d wailed when he pulled the baby from her arms. I knew how, at that moment, she hated her love. I knew how her breasts ached and wept for her babe after it was gone. I knew how she screamed at the man, later—threatened to leave him, to find her child and take me back, even if we had to sleep in ditches and eat weeds. I knew how she sank, finally, into a raging silence that lasted for years. That black despair forever changed her estimation of God.

(God the Father, always on the side of men. Why never on the side of the ones who give birth? “B’reshit bara Elohim”—“In the beginning, God created.” Yes, granted: “Elohim” is masculine in form, but does not Genesis also say that the Elohim were male and female, and in their image we were made? And is not “shekina,” the presence of God, feminine in form? So why must God always be father, bridegroom, and king? Where do the divine testicles hang? Show me. Show me.)

* * *

Mother, I am old now, so you are dead and I will never know you (unless we meet in Hell), but you are no stranger. And neither, of course, is my father.

Even when I was a girl, I sometimes heard a certain tone in the voices of our guests—a secret, knowing sneer just below the level of discourtesy—when they remarked on how wonderfully I resembled my “uncle,” in voice, in appearance, in habits of mind.

I wish I had made him tell me about you, but after the baby and the violence and the vows—when I understood things at last—we never spoke again. I missed him, too—even wrote to him—but my letters came back with the seals intact.

I will never learn your name now or how he came to do what he did. (Even today, with everyone dead, it is still difficult to say it. Should I say it?)

He prospered in life and died old; does this mean that the Father in Heaven forgave him for what he did to you? Should I?

If he had not ruined you, I would not be sitting at this little desk, writing our story in this long-dead language. I would not have loved, borne a child, written my secret books. So was his sin a gift to me? Should I be grateful? (But, oh, my poor mother—did you die in a convent, like I will, or did you find another way?)

* * *

What does my life mean?

I had a great love, and lost him. I had a child, and lost him, too. My story ends in a prison—not of my own choosing, maybe, but I am the warden of that prison. I am housed and fed and clothed. I am honorably occupied in the affairs of my convent. And yet for one short day with the man who ruined me, I would cheerfully trade my soul, if I still hold title to that stained rag.

* * *

If the story they tell us is true, death will most certainly send my soul to damnation, and I will nod and say yes, it is a just price.

My confessor duly hears my venial sins, of course, my little greeds and annoyances against my sisters. But that is all. What act of contrition could I ever truly say? My God, I am heartily glad and grateful for my sins and only repent their ending?

Will my love meet me in Hell? Or did he buy his own soul back through confession? On his deathbed, maybe, did some virgin priest, more eunuch than he himself, whisper “ego te absolvo” in that ear I once licked like a cat? Did he sell our love for Heaven?

* * *

Imagine if I had never loved him.

Imagine if I had lingered on in my uncle’s big house, presiding at his table, a good mistress to the servants, a good student to my tutors, polishing my fame as a scholar of history and the arts of civilization. The freedom of that library. Imagine growing old in that house, maybe inheriting it, owning those books, answering to none but God. My heart untouched, my body a blank page, perhaps, but my mind’s brightest sparks published. In real books. Not just consigned to these secret scratchings or to those puny letters I wrote him later, convent to monastery—brittle flapping moths orbiting his brilliance. Really published—imagine it. My own words, under my own name. (Not his.)

Could that have ever been a future for me? Or, if our calamities had never happened, would my “uncle” have simply claimed his little “niece” for his own? Down that dark alley I cannot peer.

These tracts and treatises I protect from prying eyes, inking them out on the back of the abbey’s accounts in the Hebrew my love taught me—my Passio Mariae Magdalenae, my De Querela Mulieres, my De Mendacio Amoris—might they even now sit in the world’s great libraries? Might they be read, if I had not known him and borne his child? (His child? His child? Does the man that spits the seed own the tree?) Or would I have written different books, prim and sterile, befitting a maiden scholar?

If I’d never caught his eye over the top of his wine cup or, if I had, but looked away, modestly, as proper nieces do—who would that woman be?

No passion.

No grief.

Better, or worse?

Is this torture that I’m doing to myself, this pondering how things might have gone differently, just some precipitate Hell of my own devising? Was there ever any path for us that didn’t end with us locked away in our separate prisons?

I think there must have been, must be. Not that we never loved—that world could never stand. But something … different.

That other ending, I feel it sometimes, a wind’s whisper on the other side of a closed door.

It comes to me most often when I’m on my knees, in the chapel or perched like a lonely pigeon on the hard rail of my own prie-dieu: A room, somewhere warm. Wide windows, flung open to the morning sun. A great bed. His head—untonsured, gray—beside mine on the pillow. The voices of our grandchildren, like calling birds in the courtyard, disturb my sleep for a moment. I turn onto my side and fit my back into his belly, feeling him, whole, stir against my buttocks, even though we are old and sleepy.

Could I run so easily to this memory that never happened if somewhere—down a different branch of time and choice—that bright room, that bed, those sheets that smell of him, did not exist?

About the author

Donna Glee Williams is a poet, editor, scholar, and writer of literary fantasy and historical fiction. Her poetry has appeared in a wide range of publications, from literary magazines like The Main Street Rag, Inch, The Bellingham Review, and The New Delta Review, to venues where poetry is welcomed less often: The New Orleans Times Picayune, Psychological Perspectives, The Great Toxics March from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, and the stage of the Diana Wortham Theater in Asheville. She makes her home in the mountains of western North Carolina, but the craft societies in her novels The Braided Path and Dreamers owe a lot to the time she's spent in Mexico, Spain, Italy, Israel, Turkey, India, Wales, Ireland, and Pakistan. Her forthcoming novel The Night Field is based on the work she did in India on a Fulbright Senior Environmental Leadership Fellowship in 2008. As a finalist in the 2015 Roswell Awards for Short Science Fiction, her short story "Saving Seeds" was performed in Hollywood by Jasika Nicole. Her graceful speculative fiction has been recognized by Honorable Mentions from both the Writers of the Future competition and Gardner Dozois's Best of the Year collection. These days, she earns her daily bread by writing and helping other writers as an editor, but in the past she's done the dance as turnabout crew (aka, “maid”) on a schooner, as a librarian, as an environmental activist, as a registered nurse, as a teacher and seminar leader, and for an embarrassingly long stint as a professional student.

About the artwork

The illustration is Hildegard of Bingen, stained glass found in the collection of the Eibingen Abbey. Date unknown. Getty Images.