by Tom Robbins
As the heavy habits smoked and slowly ignited, the women watched in their underwear. Most wore knee-length bloomers, the sort of ultra-baggy shorts that might have outfitted a low-rent hip-hop ghetto gangster basketball team, and stiff old-fashioned prototype brassieres that could have harnessed pairs of boudoir oxen. One was in modern bra and panties. From that distance, he couldn’t clearly recognize faces, but he thought (or hoped?) she must be Domino. The last of the eight wore bikini underpants and nothing else, and as firelight twinkled on her far naked nipples, he thought, Fannie?
His attention was diverted from Fannie’s (?) breasts by the appearance in the residence hall doorway of yet another figure, a tall woman, whose silhouette had a certain majesty. She was immediately greeted by two sisters, who took her arms and led her, very gingerly, for she appeared to be old, to the fire. Masked Beauty? Switters wondered, although as far as he could tell, she wore no mask.
Two other nuns had gone inside the residence hall and lugged out a kind of wooden settee. A third went inside and fetched cushions. Masked Beauty—it must be her—stood in front of the settee and, assisted by the shapely one he believed to be Domino, undressed. With surprising vigor, she likewise flung her habit into the flames.
After Domino arranged the pillows for her, she reclined upon the settee, propping herself on one elbow, the better to view the conflagration, and the pose she then struck was so strangely familiar to Switters that it gave his spine an electrical shock.
And just then, as Masked Beauty’s doffed habit erupted into full blaze, he, still tingling, saw by its light that the thin shift she wore as an undergarment was an equally strange and familiar shade of strangely familiar—blue.
Silence is a mirror. So faithful, and yet so unexpected, is the reflection it can throw back at men that they will go to almost any length to avoid seeing themselves in it, and if ever its duplicating surface is temporarily wiped clean of modern life’s ubiquitous hubbub, they will hasten to fog it over with such desperate personal noise devices as polite conversation, humming, whistling, imaginary dialogue, schizophrenic babble, or, should it come to that, the clandestine cannonry of their own farting. Only in sleep is silence tolerated, and even there, most dreams have soundtracks. Since meditation is a deliberate descent into deep internal hush, a mute stare into the ultimate looking glass, it is regarded with suspicion by the nattering masses; with hostility by business interests (people sitting in silent serenity are seldom consuming goods); and with spite by a clergy whose windy authority it is seen to undermine and whose bombastic livelihood it is perceived to threaten.
However, when Domino returned to the infirmary to find Switters propped up in bed, his arms folded, palms upward, across the rough sheet, a thick aura of quietude around him, she attributed it to the fact that he was in recovery from illness and would not have guessed that he might be trying to steady himself after witnessing, an hour and a half earlier, Masked Beauty’s startling impersonation of his grandmother’s painting.
As far as that goes, Domino might not have registered her patient’s meditative air at all, so absorbed was she by her own cares. Her eyes resembled a serving of salmon sushi, and while their puffy redness could conceivably have been caused by bonfire smoke, Switters guessed that she had been weeping. She knew he wanted to talk (though she couldn’t have known how badly), but she begged off, claiming fatigue. “À demain,” she promised, and then apologized that exhaustion had made her lapse into French.
“Tomorrow’s fine,” he said.
“It’s Sunday, so I will be free all the day, after chapel.”
“You’ll still have chapel?”
She was momentarily puzzled. “Oh, you mean after? . . . Mais oui, yes, of course we will have chapel.” She paused. “You watched our brazen ceremony, didn’t you? I saw your silhouette at the window.”
“I wasn’t intending to spy.”
“Ah, but you couldn’t help yourself: you’re CIA.” Sensing instantly that she might have yanked a sleeping dog’s tail, she issued a retraction. “No, please, I’m only making a joke. It would have been impossible not to notice our. . . . We should have waited until you had gone away. Tell me, did you find our display to be tasteless?”
“No, on the contrary, it struck me as rather tasty. But, then, I have an appetite for bold gestures and burned bridges.” To himself he added, And blue nudes. “I don’t much savor pain, however, and I detected a sharp hickory of hurt in the fumes from your little barbecue.”
She looked him over slowly, as if seeing him in a new light. “You are not an entirely stupid fellow,” she said, and she smiled.
“Thanks, Sister,” he replied. “Your own mental prowess has also proven to be significantly superior to that of the average pecan. Nevertheless, what I am most taken with are your eyes.”
“Ooh-la-la,” she protested, brushing her fingers across her lids. “Tonight they are ruined. But as a rule, they are my nicest feature.”
How refreshing, he thought. A woman who knows how to accept a compliment. “It’s like they were congealed from nitroglycerin and mother’s milk. I can’t tell if they’re about to nurture me or crack my safe. And your mouth has a sneaky habit of getting them to do most of your smile-work.”
“Yes, I admit it. I have such a round face that my father told me when I make a big grin, I look like a, how do you say, jack-in-the-lantern.”
“Nonsense,” he objected. “I know my pumpkins, and you’re not of their race. If your cheeks are a little full, it’s because they’re packed with secrets and mysteries, like the moon.”
Domino snorted, and her snort sounded surprisingly like Maestra’s Heh!—an exclamation that usually suggested that what he’d just uttered was a load of bunkum, though a not uninteresting load of bunkum as loads of bunkum go. “I warned you, Mr. Switters, don’t be trying to butter me off.” She then left the room so abruptly he wondered if she might actually be peeved.
When she returned the next morning, however, she wore a starched white dress, an affable aspect—and a sprig of orange blossoms behind her ear.
Switters, for his part, was freshly shaved, brushed, and dressed in a yeast-colored linen suit (the one he’d soaked in the landing on Jonah’s beach) over a black T-shirt with the discreet C.R.A.F.T. Club emblem above the left pectoral. The cologne that he liked to call Jungle Desire, but which, in fact, was simply Old Spice, had been splashed recklessly about his face and neck. He sat, for the first time in more than a week, in his starship, and she seated herself on the stool opposite him.
“Mmm. Mr. Switters. You clean up very nice.”
“Don’t be trying to butter me off.”
She didn’t mind that he mocked her but, rather, seemed amused by it, though she put on an insulted face. He liked it that she was amused, and he liked it that she pretended otherwise. There was something of Maestra in her, and something of Suzy, as well, but he didn’t dwell on those similarities. No heart-shaped blip could be said to have formed on his radar screen. Sister Domino was as charming as she was kind, as fresh as she was wise, but she was too old and too religious, and, besides, he’d be gone in two or three days: whenever the supply truck showed up. Meanwhile, he had an industrial-strength curiosity to satisfy.
“This woman you call Masked Beauty—”
“Yes,” Domino interrupted. “We should begin with her, because everything that we are in this place is a result of her. I’m unsure what you know of nuns. . . .”
“Well, nun comes out of Egypt, an old Coptic Christian word meaning pure.”
“There’s much disagreement over that, but I’m pleased and impressed that you’ve connected the nun to the Middle East, to the desert. That’s very important to us here. But let me go on to Masked Beauty, who is our founder and leader, and who, in the secular realm, also happens to be my aunt. Before I can say much about her, however, I must say a little about the famous French painter, Henri Matisse.”
Like the helmeted heads of an itty-bitty army springing from
the trenches, goosebumps appeared along the length and breadth of Switters’s epidermis, where they marched in place, as if, intent on pillage, they were preparing to advance on his brain.
Although Domino might have been loath to make such a claim, Switters gathered from her description of Matisse that he owed much of his greatness as an artist and as a man to the fact that he was simultaneously epicurean and pious, hedonistic and devout; that he made little or no distinction between his love of wine, women, and song and his love of God—an attitude that struck Switters as entirely sensible.
At any rate, as Domino’s account went, Matisse, in the early 1940s, had painted several large pictures of his nurse at the time, a Dominican novice named Sister Jacques. Matisse loved to paint the contours of the female body, lush, rhythmic volumes that were shown to their best aesthetic advantage when undisguised by garb. Naturally, Sister Jacques could not pose nude. However, knowing the genius to be honorable, ailing, and elderly (in 1943, Matisse was seventy-four years old), and hoping to persuade him to decorate a chapel (which he did for her in 1948 at Vence), she didn’t mind encouraging another girl to sit for him.
For generations, Domino’s family had been deeply involved in both French art and the Roman Catholic Church, so when Sister Jacques set out to find Matisse a suitable model, the logical first choice was that family’s voluptuous seventeen-year-old Croetine, the girl who would, at Domino’s birth slightly less than a decade later, become her aunt.
Switters whistled. “Well, boil my bunny in carrot oil!” he exclaimed. “I can’t believe it.”
“You can’t believe what?”
“That I’d wander into the middle of goddamn nowhere and stumble upon my actual, original, flesh-and-blood blue nude.”
“Matisse painted a variety of blue nudes,” she cautioned, “dating back to 1907. And what do you mean, yours?”
“Nothing,” he said. “It’s not mine. But she’s the one, all right. You’ve got to let me meet her.”
Domino would agree to nothing until he’d explained, and even after he had, she informed him that Masked Beauty was not receiving visitors. Moreover, while she found the blue nude coincidence remarkable—Domino couldn’t help but be amazed that he’d grown up around that particular painting—she saw no need for Switters to get so carried away. Maybe she was right. More than she might realize. A man immobilized by a pyramid-headed Indian’s curse was not a man who ought to be overreacting to a dollop of synchronicity, even when it involved an object of much sentimental wahoo.
“Okay,” he said. “Forget it. I’ve been ill. Get on with your story. Excuse me. I mean, please get on with your story. S’il vous plaît.” At the same time, however, he was vowing to himself that he would not leave the oasis without having met Masked Beauty, and thinking, also, what a kick it was to be sitting there listening to the blue nude’s niece.
Croetine posed for Matisse for more than two years, at Cimiez and later at Vence, and having fallen in love with the artist’s paintings, photographs, and souvenirs of Morocco, made plans to accompany him there as soon as the war was over. When V-E Day arrived, however, Matisse was not hardy enough to travel, and at the encouragement if not outright insistence of her uncle, a well-known archbishop, Croetine made the decision to enter a convent.
Because of her background as a nude model, Croetine was forced to spend an extraordinarily long time as a novice before being allowed to proceed to final vows. Her physical beauty was so unnerving to the Church fathers that her uncle advised her to find ways to make her face and figure more godly, which, assuming that God is inclined toward plainness, she did, stopping just short of grotesque disfiguration. By the time she was finally permitted to formally “marry” Christ, an ovule of rebellion had been planted deep in the sod of her sanctimony.
The solemn vows were still rippling in her saliva when she began to petition for assignment to Morocco. Not wishing to be too accommodating, they sent her to Algeria, instead. She worked in a mission there and liked everything about it; liked it so much, in fact, that her mother superior feared she was going native, and, citing such disturbing activities as “long solitary walks in the desert,” had her transferred back to France. It was in Paris in the mid- to late fifties that she formulated and promoted her ideas for the Order of St. Pachomius.
“Since I have a snakelike fascination with examples of extreme human behavior,” said Switters, “I really ought to have paid more attention to the lives of the saints. But I confess I’ve never heard of good St. Pachomius.”
“Pachomius was an Egyptian Christian ascetic. Around the year 320, he founded the first religious community for women, the very first convent. He built it out in the desert. So, Pachomius is the father of all nuns, and nuns had their beginnings in the desert. Today, the Middle Eastern desert countries are Islamic, and while there are small Christian minorities in these lands, those are almost exclusively Eastern Orthodox. It was my aunt’s idea, back when she was Sister Croetine, that an order of desert nuns be formed that would both honor St. Pachomius and give the Roman Church at least a token presence in the region. Pretty smart, don’t you agree?”
The Vatican had agreed. Up to a point. Which is to say, it liked the general idea but was sorry that it had come from Croetine, who not only had once posed for naked pictures but who, on at least two occasions, had openly expressed reservations about Rome’s prohibition against birth control. The Church never rejected the Pachomius idea, it simply dragged its velvet slippers when it came to implementing it.
“Then, something happened. I can’t tell you what it was. It was in 1961, and Croetine’s uncle—my great-uncle—had been appointed to a cardinalship and was then stationed at the Vatican. He had come into the possession of an item—a document, let us say—that he wished to conceal in the safest way possible. So, our cardinal used his influence with Pope John the Twenty-third to get the Order of St. Pachomius approved. Quarters were procured for it in Jordan. Croetine was named as its acting abbess, and when she went to the desert, she took the cardinal’s secret document with her to safekeep it there.”
“What kind of document?”
Domino shook her head, causing her cheeks to wobble like puddings on a pushcart.
“Does she still have it? Are you privy to it?”
“You’re pretty cotton-picking nosy, Mr. Agent Man.”
He touched her wrist. “You know, Domino”—it was difficult to call her “Sister” when she was in white lace and orange blossoms—”you know, Domino, I hate to have to tell you this, you trying so hard to be hip American and all, but the euphemistic expression, cotton-picking, left the idiom about the time you left Philadelphia. Or even sooner. Nobody says cotton-picking anymore.”
Domino looked as if a scorpion had stung her, and Switters felt as low and venomous as any one of those arachnids. However, she quickly recovered her composure. “If I say it,” she announced haughtily, “then somebody still says it.”
And as she took a sip of tea before resuming her story, Switters thought, Now here’s a woman who would stick to your ribs.
When it had been proposed that Abbess Croetine be permitted to personally choose the nuns who’d serve with her in Jordan, one prelate objected on the grounds that she might stock the new order with those who shared her radical views. “Of course she will,” said another, “and what better way to get them out of our hair.” The area of Jordan where the convent was to be located was not only remote but also dangerous. Moreover, it was chartered as an enclosed convent, one in which the sisters, fully isolated from the outside world, would be expected to seek their salvation and that of others through a regimen of worship, prayer, and contemplation, rather than providing health care, education, or social services.
For several years, while they adjusted to the enclosure and the climate, the Pachomians stuck to that blueprint, but eventually Croetine and her twenty-two hand-picked sisters began—through epistolary campaigns and journal articles—to take public issue with the Holy See’s
inflexible stand against birth control. From the peeling wastes east of Az-Zarq¯a, there came a faint but persistent cry, a cry to dam the flood tides of semen, to leash the sperm packs running wild in the sheets, to zonk the zygotic zillions and mitigate the multitudinous milt, to garrote the gullible glorification of gamete, forsake the foolish fidelity to fecundity, and wrest free from a woman’s shoulders the boa of spermatozoa that the Church had draped there like a weighty shawl and that pulled her ever downward into sickness and servitude, while at her skirts her too-many children went hungry, went bad, or just went.
“Rome tolerated it for quite a while,” said Domino, “but after Croetine’s uncle died in 1981, they finally erupted against her.”
“Naturally,” said Switters. “Isn’t it the sacred duty of the Catholic masses to increase geometrically the number of true believers in the world, just as it’s a secular duty to provide merchandisers with more and more little consumers?”
“Pachomians don’t look for ulterior motives. That’s too cynical. We petition for free will and common sense and compassion, and avoid casting blame on the guardians of the doctrine. After all, they were divinely commanded to ‘go forth, be fruitful, and multiply.’ “
“You mean their tribal antecedents were so commanded. Four thousand years ago. Before a person had to stand in line for an hour and a half just to get a whiff of fresh air. It’s tough to say who’s a greater threat to the world, an ambitious CEO with a big ad budget or a crafty cleric with an obsolete Bible verse.”
In the ensuing exchange, Domino made it clear that while she might be estranged from the Church, she would no more brook criticism of its mediators than Skeeter Washington, in exile from New York, would accept insult to the Yankees. In the absence of an urgent ax to grind, Switters was happy to shut up and let her get on with her chronicle.
The Vatican fathers did not officially abolish the Order of St. Pachomius—an act that might have engendered bad publicity—but in the hope of drying it up, they quietly reduced its budget by two-thirds. A necessary economic move, they said. Then, they sold the Pachomian compound to the Jordanian military. If the sisterhood was to survive, it would have to arrange private subsidy. Amazingly enough, it did, although by the time Croetine found the Lebanese businessman who offered her a small oasis in neighboring Syria (he’d scored it as part of a real estate deal but could make scant use of it himself, the oasis being quite out of the way and he being quite Jewish), most of her sisters had moved on to other places, other orders. Undaunted, she returned to Europe, recruited a handful of new members, including her niece, Simone Thiry, and led them to the Syrian desert in 1983.