The sound of the engine changed, and the launch slowed as it sailed into the island’s harbour: all around the bay were the pale facades of slate-roofed houses standing cheek by jowl, vying for a narrow ray of sunlight, as though proximity were the only way to survive on this island. The launch moored at the quay and the passengers got up, retrieved their belongings from the bow: trolleys and pushchairs, shopping bags and sacks of cement, suitcases and bicycles. The two sailors lent a hand as they disembarked, straddling the water and the land, their faces weather-beaten by the wind and the cold. One had pale blue eyes, bleached by the water and the salt; the other had eyes as dark as the deepest ocean where no light could penetrate. As she stepped on to solid ground, Sister Anne swayed for a moment, caught in the rolling motion.
‘Sister Anne!’
The Bourdieu family had come to meet her: they had repeated their earlier invitation, insisting that she come to the island, and since her vocation included the pastoral care of the island’s parishioners, Sister Anne had agreed to visit on her day off. She said hello to Michel Bourdieu and his wife, kissed little Julia, and then they climbed into the car and drove away from the port and the milling islanders. As they drove, the paved road gradually gave way to a dirt track. Swerving now and then to avoid stones and potholes, Michel drove through the dunes to the last wooden gate; the track came to an end just outside their house. As she got out of the car, Sister Anne saw the silvery shore below and was amazed by the shallow, almost transparent water that seemed at once green and blue – she had heard about this colour, known in Breton as glaz, but only now did it reveal its extraordinary character; it seemed less a colour than an enigma. The Bourdieus invited her inside. Theirs was an austere house, decorated here and there with a crucifix or a religious icon; Sister Anne had seen less spartan monks’ cells. They sat down to lunch, and together they said grace; the presence of Sister Anne seemed to lighten the mood, and everyone smiled as they reached for their plates and chatted cheerfully. Even Hugo was grateful for her presence here, since it distracted his father. They had had few visitors since coming to the island, and any guest was something to be celebrated. After a dessert of apple tart, Michel Bourdieu solemnly laid his hands on the tablecloth.
‘And now, as we promised, it’s time to show Sister Anne around the island.’
They trooped out and headed east, up the narrow coastal trail flanked on one side by a row of Lambert’s cypresses and on the other by a fence. Brushing aside stray branches that lay across their path, they walked briskly in single file, pushing the pace a little so that they could reach their destination more quickly: from time to time, they caught glimpses of the sea below; the small beaches of fine sand dotted along the coast; the rocky coves that tumbled into the sea; the houses built to face the sun and sheltered from the wind by the bushy cypresses.
‘It would have been nice to show you the Delaselle garden, but unfortunately it’s closed for the winter. It’s a botanical garden, just on the other side of that fence.’
Stimulated by the presence of the nun, Michel Bourdieu suddenly became garrulous. As he led the procession, with his daughter sitting on his shoulders, he proudly pointed out that there was not a single scrap of litter to be seen, that this glorious wilderness was unsullied by man.
‘The Breton people don’t treat nature with contempt, they revere and obey it. They still have a keen sense of the sacred.’
And it was important to revere and to obey, to recognize what was sacred, to tend towards the divine – and it was precisely because modern man had forgotten such things, had embraced the secular in the vain pursuit of freedom, that society was on the brink of collapse.
‘A society that does not venerate anything is not free. It is sick, you understand?’
Gradually, the landscape unfolded to reveal sunlit uplands, the paths criss-crossing the meadows, a deep cobalt blue below that dazzled the eye. They stopped for a minute to catch their breath. Michel Bourdieu’s mood suddenly darkened as he surveyed this boundless space, terrified by all that he could not see, all that scripture had foretold; he was a scholarly man – he had studied the Gospels and the prophets – but more than this, he had seen enough of the world to known that catastrophe was imminent. In that moment, he was no longer severe. There was nothing intimidating about the heavyset build, the broad shoulders, the hands that could both create and destroy. Michel Bourdieu was a man possessed by fear. He felt a hand on his arm: his wife, sensing his distress, interrupted the gloomy thoughts that so often took her husband from her. The gesture soothed him; he gripped his daughter’s ankles, clinging to the child, because this was how he survived, how mankind had always survived: by holding on to the unchanging constant of marriage and children.
They sat on the grass. In the distance some horses were grazing. The path followed the coastline, tracing sinuous meanders before disappearing beyond a rocky outcrop. Not a soul passed by. The island cast its spell on everyone.
‘What’s that thing around your neck?’
The little girl was staring at Sister Anne’s pendant as it glinted in the sun. She had noticed it while they were walking, a small medal that seemed to protect the nun’s every step.
Sister Anne unfastened the clasp and gently handed the object to the child.
‘It’s a Miraculous Medal. It was first given to Saint Catherine Labouré. She was a Daughter of Charity, like me.’
She told the girl how Sister Catherine had decided to take the veil on 19 July 1830 after the Blessed Virgin had appeared to her one night, when no one else was around, in the little chapel of the Daughters of Charity at the Mother House on the Rue du Bac – the same convent where Sister Anne had taken her first steps in the religious life. It was later described by Saint Catherine as the gentlest, sweetest moment of her life.
‘So she saw the Blessed Virgin, like Bernadette did at Lourdes?’
‘Exactly.’
The Virgin had appeared to the young novitiate on two further occasions, and during one of these visions she had asked Sister Catherine to create a medal just like the one Julia was now holding, promising that ‘All who wear it will receive great graces’; no sooner was it created than the medal was in demand all over France.
The little girl silently studied the medal in the palm of her hand: on one side was the Blessed Virgin standing upon the earth as though watching over the world, her head crowned with a halo, rays of light streaming from her half-closed hands; on the other side was a circle of twelve stars, a large letter M surmounted by a cross, and below the stylized Sacred Heart of Jesus crowned with thorns and the Immaculate Heart of Mary pierced with a sword. Gently, thoughtfully, the girl stroked the symbols with her finger, as though this were one of those magical objects that fascinate the pure of heart.
‘So, if you wear it, does it work miracles?’
It was true that miraculous cures had been reported during the cholera epidemic in Paris. A Jewish man named Alphonse Ratisbonne, who wore the medal, had a vision of the Virgin and converted to Christianity, which was much talked about at the time. When Catherine Labouré died, a child who touched her coffin was suddenly cured of a lifelong infirmity. And then there was Catherine Labouré herself, whose body was exhumed sixty years after her death and found to be utterly incorrupt.
‘It’s not the medal itself that’s miraculous … Nobody ever questioned what the young novitiate said about her visions. It is only when you cease to doubt that miracles can happen.’
The little girl found the story unsettling, though she did not know why; she did not guess how much power these words would have over her imagination. She looked at the nun sitting on the grass, her back turned to the sun, her slender figure bathed in light – she found her somewhat frightening too.
‘What about you? Have you ever seen the Blessed Virgin?’
The artlessness of a child, always wedded to a keen instinct. Sister Anne smiled gently and whispered that the Blessed Virgin would always come to those who prayed to her.
They sat for a while, gazing at the coast, then set off home. Their limbs were tired, but it was the pleasurable tiredness of being in the great outdoors, up on a hill with nothing to block the view, where every breath filled the body with a sense of wellbeing.
Before Sister Anne left, the whole family kissed her goodbye as if she were a long-lost friend, and made her promise to come back soon. She got into the car next to Michel Bourdieu, and they set off down the track in a cloud of dust.
At the foot of the hill, a teenage boy suddenly appeared. Sister Anne was struck by the boy’s delicate features, by the anxious darting of his eyes, by a gracefulness she had never seen before; looking at him in the rear-view mirror, she asked Michel Bourdieu whether he knew this boy.
‘That’s Isaac. He’s one of my second-year students. Not what I would call a well-adjusted lad.’
The teenager waited until the car had disappeared over the brow of the hill before carrying on his way. He strode quickly up the dune, crossing the coastal path and making his way towards the headland; he walked on, oblivious to the fact that he was being observed by Madenn, who was standing near the hedge at the top of the path. She had been watching for an hour, perhaps two, her heart pounding fretfully, waiting for the boy to come back to the promontory where she had left him the day before.
When the wind had become too cold, she had walked away without calling out to Isaac one last time. Afterwards, she had been unable to sleep so she had dug out some old family albums; as she leafed through the pages, she had found photographs her mother had kept: the black-and-white shots of four smiling girls – Jacqueline and Jeanne, Nicole and little Laura – had been taken back when her mother was living in L’Île-Bouchard. Her mother had known the four schoolgirls, had witnessed their delight when the Blessed Virgin together with the Angel Gabriel had appeared to them in the village church several times over the course of a week. Sitting up in bed, in the glow of the bedside lamp, Madenn had studied the frank smiles of these country girls, the four innocent faces who had been given the gift of grace; she leaned back against her pillow, the album open in her trembling hands: the next day she would know for certain.
Now, out on the headland, Isaac seemed to be waiting for something. He kept looking around him as though unsure what he had come there to find. Madenn decided to go to him: she approached slowly, step by step, holding her breath, never taking her eyes off the boy. Suddenly her heart began hammering so fiercely she thought she might faint: Isaac had just turned round and gone utterly still, staring at whatever had called him to this place again. Madenn raced back down the path and across the dunes to Alan’s house, and as she had the day before, she pounded on the door as if determined to break it down. Finally, it opened.
‘You need to come with me.’
She grabbed Alan’s wrist and dragged him out so forcefully that he almost fell flat on his face; then she set off at a run. She was already panting for breath and dizzy from the scene she had just witnessed, but she did not slow down; in fact she ran faster, determined that this man should see what she believed to be true.
‘My mother was living in L’Île-Bouchard when those visions happened … She saw the girls in church …’
Her mother had described the scene in detail: four little girls kneeling at the foot of the altar, motionless, spellbound, gazing up at a blank wall as though it had revealed all the mysteries of the universe, and behind them a group of villagers, seeing nothing yet feeling everything, realizing they were not alone, that in that very moment, the Blessed Virgin walked among them in their little church.
‘There was something about their eyes, the way they stared … And your son … he’s doing the same …’
Alan stopped in his tracks, annoyed that this woman had dragged him out here for no reason, irritated that she had woken him: having come home from work, he had stretched out on the sofa and had instantly dozed off; he hadn’t heard his son’s footsteps in the hallway, hadn’t heard the front door close. Sleep had simply overwhelmed him. For years now, Alan no longer decided when to sleep: he simply waited, lay awake at night counting the hours, never knowing when sleep would come.
During the day he might drift off for a while. Once, while teaching a pupil to navigate, he had fallen so soundly asleep that he did not hear the screams of the panic-stricken student, who had to steer the vessel back to harbour unaided, and had never set foot on a boat again. His wife’s death had robbed Alan of his equilibrium, and he had let it go, surrendering himself to whatever each day might bring; he even took a certain comfort in no longer making decisions.
‘What’s the matter with you, Madenn? What the hell are you talking about?’
The lack of instinct in men never ceased to amaze Madenn; it was her turn to be annoyed now. She turned, took a step back towards him, fixing him with a steely blue glare; she would say this only once:
‘I’m talking about people who see the Blessed Virgin.’
Without giving him time to think, or even to consider what she had just said, Madenn dragged him on again. Down below them, the tide was rising, returning to the shore it had abandoned all day long; the kelp had been washed away and now floated among the waves, a viscous ball that the tide would spit out tomorrow when it ebbed.
‘Over there. Your son.’
Standing on the promontory three metres above the sandy shore, Isaac was oblivious to the incoming tide, deaf to his father’s voice calling his name; he was staring at the sky, watching the scudding purple clouds. Or was he looking at something else – the gulls circling overhead, the waxing moon already on the rise, some special quality of the light that only he could see? Once more his name echoed into the void, into a world of which he was no longer a part, like the dead vainly trying to speak to the living. The sharp salty tang of the sea filled the air; the tide continued its approach, devouring the last shreds of kelp; the waves murmured as they embraced the shore, ringing the coast with a darkening blue as the light waned.
‘Isaac!’
The voice was close now, right behind him. Alan raced up, panicked, unable to bear the sight of this motionless figure that triggered some nameless fear in him. He grabbed Isaac and spun him around; he did not recognize this face. This was his son – these were his features: the almond eyes, the slightly upturned nose, the thin, mute lips – yet Alan did not recognize him. The boy seemed like a stranger. Not knowing what to do, he clutched the boy’s arm and shook him roughly, as though shocking the body might bring back the mind; as though he had not shaken his son enough, as though this transfixed face were the result of his neglect. Behind him, Madenn screamed, begging him to stop, not to hurt the boy, but Alan did not hear. It was as if nothing could be heard here on this headland, as if it were cut off from the rest of the world. Alan continued to shake the boy, trying to rid him of the stupor that had frozen his face, gripping his frail arms so tightly he could feel the bones beneath the skin.
‘What the hell is wrong with you? What are you doing out here?’
