A love story

I’ve started a new temporary job.

At the Union of the Heads of Free Educational Establishment. The offices have been settled in a former school. They are old and it emanates from them an outdated and reassuring smell. Soon I meet my new « bosses for one month ».

Brother John, a Marist priest from the Congregation of the Brothers of Mary – Mother of Jesus – all of whose members are employed in various sectors and give their salaries in exchange for shelter, food, clothing and so on. Their vow of obedience do not allow them to choose their workplace.

Miss Lagardère, an adorable old lady, nicely unpredictable, who broke her leg a couple of months ago and walks with a plaster and a walking stick.

Sylviane, a beautiful young Caribbean woman, just returned from maternity leave and still under the shock of this great upheaval in his life.

I am there to make up for the delays. And there are many, with all those events !

Our job is to bring together school leaders and teachers. We have to receive the candidates (Father John’s job), take the registrations forms from the leaders, the applications forms from the teachers and put all these people in touch.

In order to help us, we create a small directory that we send to everyone that asks and pays for it. We have an important mailing list. There is a real lot of work. « Super Temp’ Girl » It’s me ! I feel useful and important, I exult.

The building is located on St Jacques Street, in the 5th district of Paris. It’s a ten minutes walk from my home, and stands right in front of the « Val the Grace ». This is where all the funerals ceremonies for the highest military members (like Charles de Gaulle in its time) take place. But they are not buried there of course. Sometimes the wind brings us the sound of the trumpets. We respect the seriousness of the moment !

On that very spring, the weather is so beautiful, so warm, that for a bit, facing Sylviane, I feel like I was in the Caribbean ! To make the illusion perfect, it would just take to replace the chestnut of the court by banana trees…

At noon we meet in the canteen. All the three of us. Miss Lagardère, Brother John and I. It’s cute and it’s good. From time to time we get invited to a cocktail party in the building. There are many other offices besides ours. Mr. Brother is a real live wire. We make a fine team. They love a good laugh and so do I.

In the morning, I am always the first one there. I enjoy the shade under the courtyard, just for the pleasure of feeling the smell of the dew on the wet stones. Then comes M. Brother who is the only one to have the authority to open the door.

He invites me in.

At first we stay silent.

We evaluate each other.

It’s a taming game.

Then he opens the door of his office.

We sit, facing each other.

His face being in front of the window.

So, I cannot see all his mimics.

Its better this way.

He asks me questions.

Essentially about religion.

But I don’t have any of them.

This was the time where I was an atheistic.

Where religion, for me too, was just good enough for poor people. I do not want to hear about it, much less succumbing at it. I am a big girl now, I am doing it alone, without those kind of crutches…

One day, however, he insists more than usual. He really wants to know where I stand. We don’t play hide and seek any more. I do resist a little anyway. Just for the principle. I try to have him talk first. Attack before defense, it sometimes works !

I cast to him : « and so, what is a Marist Brother after all ? He explains his way a little. There was his brother and him in this big family house, somewhere in the north of Paris. They were from the French upper middle class. At age 7 the boys were sent in a Jesuit monastery where they stayed until their majority. During their stay, they both felt a mystic call, and decided to become priests. They wanted to belong to a spiritual movement and thus renounced to everything that MAKES life. Money, love, sex, freedom. All of that. Nevertheless he kept in a small corner of his memory plenty of questions without an answer like : did I do right ?

I can see too that he tries to understand what might well happen in my head. He does “believe”, he has “faith” and it suits him. He no longer needs to ask anymore questions. I have some kind of faith. Vague reminiscence of my Catholic years in a boarding school, but still seeks to explain it (I ignore that this is not required yet).

And all this does not prevent me to cultivate, since I know how to think (and also since I have been caught stealing a chocolate bar) certain values of life that I have summarily borrowed from the Ten Commandments (Hollywood way). But out of it, I don’t want to hear anything about God or his Saints !

I don’t feel it necessary to stick labels everywhere and I pretend that if I do not belong to one particular church, it allows me to belong to all of them. Isn’t it better this way ? I find it very convenient to be able to make my spiritual shopping one day at Buddha’s, another one at the Muslims’ and the following day among the Christians’ and/or Catholics’… The way I feel.

There are everywhere basic values that I can respect. And as for myself it is God that I thrust, not the religion. Fortunately the latest has not yet succeeded into destroying Him !

Brother John understood all this quite well in fact, since one day after what became our usual morning meeting he told me : « see, even if you pretend you don’t belong to any specific religion, it does not prevent you to act like a good Christian !".

After that day, he stopped boring me with it.

Once my job is over, he would call me from time to time, when I am alone, to invite me to some small restaurant. Just to keep on our conversation.

It lasted for about twenty years.

At the beginning, while I lived in Paris, we we went to all sorts of small pubs, Greek or Italian, in « Saint Germain des Prés ». John was curious about everything, and he never ceases to be interested about the « real world » that surrounded us. He asked : how is love ? How is falling in love ? What efforts do you have to do to stay together as a couple ? And so on…

For my part, I learned about Mary of Magdalena. It fascinated me ; I do not know exactly what she accomplished in her life, but the mere fact that she was entirely forgiven had my attention. I was just beginning to imagine unconditional love !

Much later he came to spend a few days in Los Angeles, where his congregation has its headquarters. He told me that they had rented for him a convertible car and that he was very proud to drive it in the streets of the city. He told me that when he came to see me, on his way home, in the small house we rent in West Virginia, where I lived for a few years. I saved for him, at his request, a few moments in a church so that he can say his masses each day, and I was there each day, listening to him. Then he went back to Europe.

Then I went back to Europe too. When my first son was born and I wanted to have him be baptized quickly because I knew he was sick, I rushed up to the Bordeaux region, home of the so famous « Chateau Yqiem » wine, cradle of the Toulouse Lautrec family. John lived there in a very nice small community.

We were sharing a meal together. In the middle of it comes a Brother who launches : « Hey, the baker of the next village just committed suicide… we will give him a decent burial anyway shall we ? »

When our child died, we turn to him, my husband and I, to seek some comfort and he will celebrate a mass, just for the three of us.

I divorced a few years later. I went back to Switzerland and we wrote to each other. As usual, we resumed the conversation where we had left it. Whatever I said or did, there never was, between us, the slightest notion of judgment. Always he would have for me the empathetic gaze of a true friend.

The last time we met was before he has me sent the announcement of his death by a colleague. It was in Toulon (near Marseilles), the land of cicadas.

He still had the same crooky smile.

The same impish look.

He took us for a walk (I came with my second husband) and explained to us with all the details, on a small promontory overlooking the city, what it takes to “make” a boy.

One year later you were there… my daughter !