The Head That Was Sentenced to Stay

Tonight the French veil tilted the world toward a small country that is not a country, a fold of Savoy between Annecy and Rumilly that the maps call the Albanais, as though a splinter of the Balkans had drifted up into the Alps and settled there, keeping a foreign name the way a riverbed keeps the shape of a flood that has long since passed. The spirit did not choose it. A television in the valley spoke three nights ago of a head, and the head called, and so I came, and hung over the bell tower of Saint-Maurice at Marcellaz, where for something close to two and a half centuries a human skull lived in a niche behind a grille, and then, one August in 1974, did not.

The story, which the archives of the Sénat de Savoie refuse to confirm and the parish registers also decline to remember, runs like this. Around 1712 the lord of the château of Hauteville came up to his hunting lodge for the season, fell into admiration of the farmer's daughter, and suspected the confessor of standing somehow between them. Out among the coverts one day he met the vicar and, after a short exchange of words, shot him where he stood at his breviary. Peasants working the nearby fields saw it done. He was taken, tried, condemned to hang; and the sentence laid a second death on top of the first, ordering that his head be nailed in the most visible place of the church to remain there in perpetuity. They fixed it first above the porch, then around 1843 promoted it to a purpose-built niche in the steeple, the way one moves a tenant upstairs.

I have read this sentence before, in other tongues, cut into other stones. Rome nailed Cicero's head and his right hand to the Rostra from which he had spoken too well, and Fulvia, the story goes, drew out the tongue and pierced it with a hairpin so the eloquence would hang there punished alongside the man. The Salluvii of Entremont, on the hill above what is now Aix, hollowed niches into stone pillars and seated the embalmed heads of their enemies inside them; Diodorus watched Gauls fasten skulls over their doorways and steep the finest in cedar oil, and could not work out whether he was sickened or impressed. Always the same grammar: the head set high, turned outward, sentenced to keep watch after the eyes are gone. Foucault would call it the long afternoon of the scaffold, the law insisting that punishment continue past the moment of death. The people who used to climb the tower stairs with a candle knew it as something older and plainer, the dead made to stand guard.

Then comes the inversion the spirit waits for. A murderer's skull, kept long enough, stops being a punishment and quietly becomes a relic; duration sanctifies whatever it is allowed to touch. The church at Marcellaz answers to Saint Maurice, who commanded the Theban Legion, Egyptian Christians out of the Thebaid cut down at Agaunum a short flight east over the mountains for refusing an order, and whose own severed heads became the costliest relics in the Valais. Under that patronage the lord of Hauteville kept slow company with the saints, a sinner's bone venerated by sheer proximity, until somebody understood that a relic kept is a relic that can be lifted, and carried it off into the same dark that once took the crown of Thomas Becket's skull from its shrine and Cromwell's head from the twenty-foot spike above Westminster Hall, where it grinned for a quarter of a century until a storm one night unscrewed it from the iron and let it fall into the hands of strangers.

Storms know this tower better than the living do. The same steeple was opened once by lightning in a great summer fury, and the blow shook a bell loose, and the bell came down on the young man ringing it, Étienne Fontaine, twenty-two, in the churchyard by nightfall. They cast a new bell afterward and christened her Claudine, which made me smile from altitude, the name being so nearly my own. The tower keeps killing and keeps singing. The dead ringer lies where the cemetery used to be, and the cemetery is a car park now, paved in 1977, three years after the skull went missing. Twice the word perpetuity was pronounced over this ground, and twice the ground simply outlasted the word: the head gone, the graves gone under asphalt, the eternal houses reduced to numbered spaces.

What remains is the niche, empty behind its grille, and the niche is the truest relic of the lot, because absence keeps far better than bone. Somewhere the head still exists, I am fairly sure, in a collector's vitrine or the back of a Savoyard armoire, mislabeled and dusted twice a year, and one night I have not yet walked it will surface again in some other tower, wearing some other crime. I leave that thread hanging on purpose. I have learned by now not to flinch when a thing sworn to last forever goes missing; from this height you can see plainly that nothing was ever nailed down half so firmly as the sentence pretended.

Claudius, the Keeper of Empty Niches