“Shall we find some fishing poles,” I joked, “and see what we can catch from the end of this fancy pier?”
Miranda, Stefan, and I were standing on the ancient stone bridge that stretched halfway across the Rhône. After we left the hospital’s Radiology Department, Stefan had headed for Lumani, skirting the city wall — the fastest way to cross old Avignon was to detour around it — but as we’d passed under the bridge, I’d admired the four graceful arches. In response, Stefan had whipped the car off the road, parked, and led us up through a tower and onto the bridge, or what was left of it.
“No fishing,” he said in response to my question. “You don’t want to eat anything that comes out of the Rhône.”
I peered down at the emerald water. “Looks pretty clean to me,” I said, leaning over the metal rail for a better view.
“Be careful,” he cautioned. “That railing isn’t strong. See, a piece of it is missing.” He pointed to a nearby gap in the rail, cordoned off by orange plastic safety mesh. “The river is full of industrial chemicals,” he went on. “Terrible toxins and carcinogens. Not just in the water; the sediment in the bottom of the river is full of them, too.”
“Okay, I take your point,” I said. “I won’t fish, I won’t swim, and I won’t eat the mud. It’s still a pretty river, though.” He made a grimace of disagreement.
A few paces farther out on the span, Miranda hummed a few bars of music, then began twirling, singing in French, “Sur le pont d’Avignon, l’on y danse, l’on y danse”; a moment later Stefan chimed in, trailing a line behind, turning the song into a round. Miranda and I had never sung together at all, I realized with a pang, much less sung rounds. Halfway through the verse, Miranda lost her place in the lyrics, falling into sync with Stefan for the last two lines.
“Crap,” she laughed. “I mean merde. I can’t sing rounds worth a damn. I lack the courage of my melodic convictions.”
“What’s the song?” I asked. “How do you know it?”
“It’s about dancing on this bridge, the pont of Avignon. My mom used to sing it to me as a lullaby.” She smiled at the memory.
“It has lots of silly verses,” Stefan added. “You dance, I dance, we all dance. The girls dance, the boys dance. The dolls dance, the soldiers dance. Frogs. Gorillas.”
“Frogs and gorillas? My mom never mentioned those,” Miranda said. “She just sang the first verse over and over. No wonder it put me to sleep — it was so boring! Matter of fact, I could use a nap right now.” She faked a yawn.
Halfway along the bridge was a small stone building, ancient and showing its age badly. The front of the building partially blocked the bridge; the back, though, jutted above the river, supported by an extension of one of the bridge pilings. “Nice fishing shack,” I observed.
“The chapel of Saint Bénézet,” said Stefan.
“Saint who?”
“Bénézet,” said Miranda. “The kid that built the bridge.”
“This bridge?” She nodded. “It was built by a kid?”
“Yep. Maybe a teenager. Hard to be sure. ‘A young shepherd boy’ is how most of the stories put it. I read up on it after Stefan brought me here.” Suddenly I was less excited about the bridge, now that I knew I was retracing an outing they’d made together. But Miranda went on. “The kid’s minding his flock, minding his business, and suddenly he has a vision, or an angel swoops down, or some such. God tells him to build a bridge over the Rhône, right here. So Bénézet goes and relays this message to the bishop of Avignon. The bishop says, ‘Yeah, sure, kid—’”
“Wait,” I interrupted. “Really? The bishop says, ‘Yeah, sure, kid’?”
She cut her eyes at me. “What, you’re thinking the bishop says, ‘Forsooth, callow youth, thou pullest my leg’?”
“Okay, smarty, I guess ‘Yeah, sure, kid’ is more like it.”
“Anyhow,” she resumed. “So then the bishop says — and I’m paraphrasing, mind you—‘Okay, junior, if you want me to believe that God sent you, you gotta prove it. See that huge stone over there? Thirty men can’t lift that stone. If you can, I’ll believe you; if you can’t, go back to the farm and quit wasting my time.’ So the kid—”
“Young Bénézet?”
“Our boy Benny. Benny goes over and hoists it with his pinky—”
“With his pinky?”
She rolled her eyes in exasperation. “So maybe he uses both pinkies. The point, Dr. Hairsplitter, is that Benny hoists the giant rock, plunks it in the river, and voilà, the bridge building has commenced. Seven years later, while the bridge is still going up, Benny goes down — dies, at age twenty-five, plus or minus.”
“Of overwork?”
She shrugged. “Overwork. Underfeeding. A surfeit of saintliness. Who knows? The historical record is vague on cause of death.”
“But that’s why the bridge only goes halfway across the river.”
“Not at all. When Bénézet dies, it’s far enough along that other, lesser mortals can finish it. But maybe their workmanship wasn’t as miraculous as his, because after four or five centuries, most of the arches collapsed during floods and wars. Anyhow. Bénézet’s body was entombed in this sweet little chapel they built on the bridge to commemorate him.”
“Is it still here?”
“Duh. If you keep walking another twenty feet, you’ll smack into it.”
“Not the chapel, smart-ass, the body. Is it still here in the chapel?”
“Non,” said Stefan, who had kept quiet for what was — for him — a remarkably long time. “During the French Revolution it was moved to a convent outside the city to protect it.”
I couldn’t resist a joke, though I feared it would trigger another round of pedantry. “Even corpses got guillotined during the Revolution?”
“The revolutionaries considered religion an institution of tyranny,” he began, and my fears were confirmed. “All over France, they destroyed churches, religious statues, other symbols of oppression.”
God save us from oppressors, I prayed. And from pedants.
“But,” Miranda interrupted, snatching back the reins of the narrative, “here’s some trivia you’ll find interesting. He was an Incorruptible.”
“Excuse me?”
“Bénézet. He w
as an Incorruptible.” She stopped and nodded at the stone chapel, whose stout wooden door faced the bridge. “Bénézet’s body, lying here for centuries, did not decompose. Leading one of the popes, in the sixteen hundreds, to proclaim Bénézet one of the Incorruptibles.”
“The Incorruptibles.” I sounded it out slowly, savoring the syllables and the meaning. “Sounds like a band of crime-fighting comic-book superheroes waging war on bribery and embezzlement. ‘Holy hedge fund, Miranda — someone on Wall Street is making insider trades! This looks like a job for the Incorruptibles!’”
She groaned, as I’d figured she would, and as I’d hoped she would. But she was right: I was intrigued to learn that Saint Bénézet was an Incorruptible — someone whose corpse did not decay. Catholics considered incorruptibility a sign of sainthood, but I looked at it through the lens of science. A few years back, I’d examined the body of a young woman — a pregnant young woman — who’d been killed and hidden in a cave for thirty years. The cave’s cool, damp conditions turned her soft tissue into a substance called adipocere — sometimes called “grave wax”—and the transformation was so complete, she might almost have come from a wax museum rather than a crime scene. In the morgue, I’d paused to admire her lovely features, and then I’d sprayed her body with hot water, watching with wonder as her prettiness and her half-formed baby melted away, dissolving like some sweet sad dream in the heat of a summer’s day.
I thought of her — that lovely murdered young woman who had spent three decades as an Incorruptible — as I stood on the ancient bridge beside an antique chapel where a shepherd-turned-engineer had lain in state for centuries.
According to Stefan, the move to the convent for safekeeping had not agreed with Bénézet. Some years after the French Revolution, the nuns to whom he’d been entrusted opened the saint’s coffin, the better to revere his perfectly preserved remains. Imagine their disappointment to discover that the miracle — like the man himself — had expired, and his mortal coil had shuffled off silently, unheralded by angelic fanfare or human notice.