– You are a grain of mustard seed, that shall rise and grow till its branches overshadow the earth. You are few, but your work is the work of God. His smile is on you, and your children shall fill the land.
The afternoon darkened. The sun was lost in the western forest. Fireflies were twinkling over the darkened meadow. They caught them, tied them with threads into shining bouquets, and hung them before the altar, where the Host remained exposed. Then they pitched their tents, built their bivouac fires, stationed guards, and lay down to rest. Such was the first Mass sung in Montréal. And, oh, from this shack I can see the lights of the great city prophesied, the city foretold to cast its shadow across the earth, I see them twinkling in great soft garlands, the fireflies of downtown Montréal. This is my mental comfort in the snow of March the 6th. And I recall a line from the Jew Cabala (Sixth Part of the Beard of Macroprosopus), “that every work existeth in order that it may procure increase for Mercy….” Move closer, corpse of Catherine Tekakwitha, it is 20 below, I do not know how to hug you. Do you smell in this refrigerator? St. Angela Merici died in 1540. She was dug up in 1672 (you were a child of six, Kateri Tekakwitha), and the body had a sweet scent, and in 1876 it was still intact. St. John Nepomucene was martyred in Prague in 1393 for refusing to reveal a secret of the confessional. His tongue has been entirely preserved. Experts examined it 332 years later in 1725, and testified that it was the shape, color, and length of the tongue of a living person, and that it was also soft and flexible. The body of St. Catherine of Bologna (1413-1463) was dug up three months after her burial and it gave off a sweet fragrant scent. Four years after the death of St. Pacificus di San Severino in 1721, his body was exhumed and found to be sweet and incorrupt. While the body was being moved, someone slipped, and the head of the corpse smashed against the stairway and the head fell off; fresh blood gushed from the neck! St. John Vianney was buried in 1859. His body was intact at the disinterment of 1905. Intact: but can intact support a love affair? St. Francis Xavier was dug up four years after his burial in 1552 and it still had its natural color. Is natural color enough? St. John of the Cross looked all right nine months after his death in 1591. When his fingers were cut they bled. Three hundred years later (almost), in 1859, the body was incorrupt. Merely incorrupt. St. Joseph Calasanticus died in 1649 (the same year that the Iroquois burned Lalemant across an ocean). His insides were removed although not embalmed. His heart and tongue are intact up to this day, but no news of the rest. My basement kitchen was very stuffy and the oven timer sometimes switched it on because of faulty mechanism. F., is this why you led me up the frozen trunk? I am frightened of no perfume. The Indians ascribed disease to an ungratified wish. Pots, skins, pipes, wampum, fishhooks, weapons were piled in front of the sick person, “in the hope that in their multiplicity the desideratum might be supplied.” It often happened that the patient dreamed his own cure, and his demands were never refused, “however extravagant, idle, nauseous, or abominable.” O sky, let me be sick Indian. World, let me be dreaming Mohawk. No wet dream died in laundry. I know sexual information about Indians which is heavenly psychiatry, and I would like to sell it to the part of my mind which buys solutions. If I sold this to Hollywood it would end Hollywood. I am angry now, and cold. I threaten to end Hollywood if I do not receive instantaneous ghost love, not merely incorrupt but overwhelmingly fragrant. I’m going to end Movies if I don’t feel better very soon. I will destroy your neighborhood theater in the near future. I will draw a billion blinds over the Late Show. I don’t like my predicament. Why do I have to be the one who cuts fingers? Must I do the Wassermann on skeletons? I want to be the only-child stiff carried by clumsy doctors, my young 300-yr. blood flushing away the concrete stairway. I want to be the light in the morgue. Why must I dissect F.’s old tongue? The Indians invented the steam bath. That is just a tidbit.
49
Catherine Tekakwitha’s uncle dreamed his cure. The village hastened to fulfill his specifications. His cure was not an unusual one, it was one of the recognized remedies, and both Sagard and our Lalemant describe the treatment in various Indian villages. Uncle said:
– Bring me all the young girls of the town.
The village hastened to obey. All the young girls stood around his bearskin, the starlets of the cornfields, the sweet weavers, girls in leisure, their hair half braided. “Toutes les filles d’vn bourg auprès d’vne malade, tant à sa prière.”
– Are you all here?
– Yes.
– Yes.
– Sure.
– Uh-huh.
– Yes.
– Here.
– Yes.
– I’m here.
– Yes.
– Of course.
– Here.
– Here.
– Yes.
– Present.
– Yes.
– I guess so.
– Yes.
– Looks like it.
– Yes.
Uncle smiled with satisfaction. Then to each one he asked an old question: “On leur demand à toute, les vnes apres les autres, celuy qu’elles veulent des ieunes hommes du bourg pour dormir auec elles la nuict prochaine.” I give the documentation out of duty, for I fear that sometimes my sorrow does violence to the facts, and I do not wish to alienate the fact, for the fact is one of the possibilities I cannot afford to ignore. The fact is a crude spade but my fingernails are blue and bleeding. The fact is like a bright new coin, and you do not want to spend it until it has picked up scratches in your jewelry box, and it is always the final nostalgic gesture of bankruptcy. My fortune is gone.
– What young brave will you sleep with tonight?
Each girl gave the name of the that evening’s lover.
– What about you, Catherine?
– A thorn.
– That will be something to see, they all chuckled.
O God, help me get through this. I am corrupt in stomach. I am cold and ignorant. I am sick in window. I have taunted Hollywood which I love. Do you imagine what servant writes this? Old fashioned Cave-Jew yell of supplication, trembling with fear vomit at his first moon eclipse. Ara ara ara arrrooowwww. Fashion this prayer to Thee. I don’t know to get it with 1000-voice choir effect like “consider the lily.” Fashion this heap with gleaming snow-shovel facets, for I meant to build an altar. I meant to light a curious little highway shrine, but I drown in the ancient snake cistern. I meant to harness plastic butterflies with rubber-band motors and whisper: “Consider the plastic butterfly”: but I shiver under the shadow of the diving archaeopteryx.
The Masters of the Ceremony (les Maistres de la ceremonie) summoned the young men whom the girls had named, and, hand in hand, they came to the long house in the evening. The mats were spread. From one end of the cabin to the other they lay, two by two, “d’vn bout à l’autre de la Cabane,” and they began to kiss and fuck and suck and hug and moan and take off their skins and squeeze each other and nibble tits and tickle cocks with eagle feathers and turn over for other holes and lick the creases of each other and laugh when others were fucking funny or stop and clap when two screaming bodies went into a climax trance. At either end of the cabin two captains sang and rang their turtleshell rattles, “deux Capitaines aux deux bouts du logis chantent de leur Tortue.” Uncle felt better toward midnight and got off his mat and crawled slowly down the length of the cabin, stopping here and there to rest his head on a free buttock or leave his fingers in a dripping hole, taking chances with his nose between “bouncers” for the sake of microscopic perspectives, always with an eye for the unusual or a joke for the grotesque. From one sprawl to another he dragged himself, red-eyed as a movie addict on 42nd Street, now flicking a quivering cock with his thumb and forefinger, now slapping a stray brown flank. Each fuck was the same and each fuck was different, that is the glory of an old man’s cure. All his girls came back to him, all his ferny intercourse, all the feathery holes and gleaming dials, and as he crawled from pair to pair, from these lovers to
those lovers, from sweet position to sweet position, from pump to pump, from gobble to gobble, from embrace to embrace – he suddenly knew the meaning of the greatest prayer he had ever learned, the first prayer in which Manitou had manifest himself, the greatest and truest sacred formula. As he crawled he began to sing the prayer:
– I change
I am the same
I change
I am the same
I change
I am the same
I change
I am the same
I change
I am the same
I change
I am the same
He did not miss a syllable and he loved the words he sang because as he sang each sound he saw it change and every change was a return and every return was a change.
– I change
I am the same
I change
I am the same
I change
I am the same
I change
I am the same
I change
I am the same
I change
I am the same
I change
I am the same
It was a dance of masks and every mask was perfect because every mask was a real face and every face was a real mask so there was no mask and there was no face for there was but one dance in which there was but one mask but one true face which was the same and which was a thing without a name which changed and changed into itself over and over. When the morning came the captains shook their rattles slower. The clothes were gathered up as the dawn came on. The old man was on his knees proclaiming his faith, declaring his cure complete, as into the misty green morning all the lovers sauntered, arms about each other’s waists and shoulders, the end of night shift in a factory of lovers. Catherine had lain among them and left with them unnoticed. As she walked out in the sun the priest came running.
– How was it?
– It was acceptable, my father.
– Dieu veuille abolir vne si damnable et malheureuse ceremonie.
That last remark is from the letter of Sagard. This unique mode of cure was called Andacwandet by the Hurons.
50
And I listen for answers in the cold wind, for instruction, for comfort, but all I hear is the infallible promise of winter. Night after night I cry out for Edith.
– Edith! Edith!
– Ara ara ara arrroooowwww, cries the wolf silhouette on the hill.
– Help me, F. Explain the bombs!
– Ara ara ara arroooowwww….
Dream after dream we all lie in each other’s arms. Morning after morning the winter finds me alone among the frayed leaves, frozen snot and tears in my eyebrows.
– F.! Why did you lead me here?
And do I hear an answer? Is this treehouse the hut of Oscotarach? F., are you the Head-Piercer? I did not know the operation was so long and clumsy. Raise the blunt tomahawk and try once more. Poke the stone spoon among the cerebral porridge. Does the moonlight want to get into my skull? Do the sparkling alleys of the icy sky want to stream through my eyeholes? F., were you the Head-Piercer, who left his hut and applied to the public ward in pursuit of his own operation? Or are you still with me, and is the surgery deep in progress?
– F., you lousy wife-fucker, explain yourself!
I cry that question out tonight, as I cried it out many times before. I remember your annoying habit of looking over my shoulders as I studied, just on the off chance that you might pick up a phrase of cocktail information. You noticed a line from a letter le P. Lalemant wrote in 1640, “que le sang des Martyrs est la semence des Chrestiens.” Le P. Lalemant regretting that no priest had yet been put to death in Canada, and that this was a bad augury for the young Indian missions, for the blood of Martyrs is the seed of the Church.
– The Revolution in Québec needs the lubrication of a little blood.
– Why are you looking at me that way, F.?
– I’m wondering if I’ve taught you enough.
– I don’t want any of your filthy politics, F. You’re a thorn in the side of Parliament. You’ve smuggled dynamite into Québec disguised as firecrackers. You’ve turned Canada into a vast analyst’s couch from which we dream and redream nightmares of identity, and all your solutions are as dull as psychiatry. And you subjected Edith to many irregular fucks which broke her mind and body and left me the lonely bookworm whom you now torment.
– Oh my darling, what a hunchback History and the Past have made of your body, what a pitiful hunchback.
We stood close together, as we’d stood in so many rooms, this time in the sepia gloom of the library stacks, our hands in each other’s pockets. I always resented his superior expression.
– Hunchback! Edith had no complaints about my body.
– Edith! Ha! Don’t make me laugh. You know nothing about Edith.
– Keep your tongue off her, F.
– I cured Edith’s acne.
– Edith’s acne indeed! She had perfect skin.
– Ho ho.
– It was lovable to kiss and touch.
– Thanks to my famous soap collection. Listen, friend, when I first met Edith she was in an ugly mess.
– No more, F. I don’t want to hear any more.
– The time has come for you to learn just who it was whom you married, just who that girl was whom you discovered per -forming extraordinary manicures in the barber shop of the Mount Royal Hotel.
– No, F., please. Don’t destroy anything more. Leave me with her body. F.! What is happening to your eyes? What is happening to your cheeks? Are those tears? Are you weeping?
– I am wondering what will happen to you when I leave you alone.
– Where are you going?
– The Revolution needs a little blood. It will be my blood.
– Oh no!
– London has announced the Queen’s intention to visit French Canada in October 1964. It is not enough that she and Prince Philip will be greeted by police cordons, riot tanks, and the proud backs of hostile crowds. We must not make the mistake the Indians made. Her advisers in London must be made to understand that our dignity is fed with the same food as anyone’s: the happy exercise of the arbitrary.
The Favourite Game & Beautiful Losers Page 32