Aelred's Sin Read Online Free Page B

come all this way.
    Robert, the guest master called my name, knocking me up for Matins. I sit here in my small room, my cell, neat and straight. A narrow bed is in the corner on the right as I enter from the dim and silent corridor. There is a wash basin in the other corner by the window seat, below a window in two stone arches. There is a narrow desk against the other wall and a crucifix on the wall above me. A cell like the one he had: I’m here for him. This is a younger brother’s pilgrimage. Will there be a conversion for me in this? Me so different, our lives taking such different paths.
    Cocoa planter! I say to myself, What you doing here, boy?
    I sit with my prologue, the way I remember the Lives of the Saints told. We had the same book, read by our mother. Is this a fiction like those, a way of telling of a younger time in another place? Was his wish to be a saint? His life can now seem like a hagiographic tale itself. Onepart of me writes it that way. To write it out is to understand it. That was his method. Without his journals, I would be nowhere. But then I’m also out of my depth.
    I speak of him as another, Aelred. That was the custom, named for a saint, clothed. It helps too with the distance which time has wrought. I’ve made a character of him. To think of him as not my brother, as someone else who did those things, is perhaps easier. But there is too the brother I always loved, for sure; the one who went away, the one I lost.
    As I say, I have his words, and words are everything: journals, letters and my own words, enraptured by his ideas. I was inspired by his youth, yes, but startled and shocked. There is a sense of occasion, vocation. But can I face up to what in some ways I don’t want to know? I let words stand on their own. Do they ever, those words? I find myself hardly able to utter them. Our mother would use that expression.
    Unutterable, she would say, something that should not have happened, something that should not be said, a story which should not be told.
    I know a secret history of Ashton Park. I know that this will not be a pious story. The monastic life? Not the one I imagined he had left all of us for.
    I have come to see Benedict, his friend. I am confronted with my own memories as well as his. Things I don’t like to think about myself. It’s a strange feeling, because it’s as if I’m the older brother now as I resurrect that young man in the first year of his monastic life.
    What can Benedict tell me? Will he? Can I really expect him to talk to me of things I have read in the journals, explain them to me, perhaps?
     
    In front of me, the monastic day:
       
Sunday
Weekdays
   
 
3.30 Matins and Lauds
 
 
 
7.00 Prime
 
 
 
8.00 Breakfast
Conventual Mass and Terce
 
 
9.00 Conventual Mass
8.50 Breakfast
 
 
and Terce
10.30 Coffee
 
 
(coffee after Mass)
 
 
 
12.15 Sext
 
 
 
12.30 Dinner
 
 
 
2.15 None
 
 
 
3.30 Tea
 
 
 
5.15 Vespers
5.30 Vespers
 
 
6.00 Supper
 
 
 
7.30 Compline
 
 
    His day. This was how he spent his days.
    Because he went away, and I was the one son among a family of sisters, I had to grow into our father’s shoes and take on the management of the cocoa estate at Malgretoute. Life has fashioned me differently; from the same mother and father, the same home; loved and admired by the same sisters, by Toinette, the same nurse. How is that possible?
    Now, I’m coming here, leaving the world I know, to try to say how it happened, tell it to myself, tell it all. Will that be possible, to tell it all? How do I remember it, now? Can I bear to? Ted? Ted and the others, they, the others, who still stand around me. They, those boys, who stood around him, him and Ted. This is in another place, in a younger time. That’s what comes back on top ofeverything else. Is that why I’m here?
    I am following the ritual. I get to know this life, this liturgy. The bells are so unashamedly, so scandalously, I think, ringing out,