Godhead

by Hansen, Jalex; Alexander, Writing as Jordan

  “Mary bore her son in an animal den because God asked her too. She was humble and believed, and miracles came from her loins.” He smiled at his congregation, knowing that they understood. They also gave birth in filth and poverty; they too listened to the Lord.

  “Miracles come from those who believe,” he told them softly. “From the lowest of us come the greatest things.” He flung his arms wide and threw his head back, stayed that way. His empty eyes stared heaven ward. “It is the cross we bear,” he said.

  Afterward, we drank flat Christmas punch, warm as blood in our cups. The people had feasts waiting, but they were not inclined to hurry. Midnight was still distant, and the children were awake now, pulled out of their warm naps into the movement and chatter. I knew I should go with Julián, I had been invited, but I did not want to share him, or myself tonight. I wanted to be alone with my own spirit, to do my own reckoning and consider my own sacrifices.

  “I can walk,” I assured him. “It’s Christmas, I’ll be safe and the air will do me good.”

  He licked his lips. “Not this air. It carries something on it.” He loosened his collar. “I want to take you. I have something for you.”

  He promised several congregants he would stop by their homes during the night’s festivities and then winnowed his way out the door to where I waited.

  “Es noh gud,” someone was saying in the darkness. “God never noh paat of deh happenins.” Of whose happenings did they speak? There were always so many different answers.

  My house was over-bright after the murk of the church and the squeeze of the jungle, an interrogation room. I turned off all the lights except for two table lamps, and imagined snow falling outside, a fire burning, glasses of champagne. For the first time I was homesick.

  “Me first,” I told Julián, not so much excited as eager to get this over with. The competition of giving presents had always embarrassed me. I often sent them through the mail, or dropped them long before the holiday so that I did not have to be present at their unveiling.

  I had returned to the ruins a week before Christmas and steeled myself to go into the dark temple again. I had brought a flashlight and swept it around in the darkness just to make sure I was alone, and then switched it off wanting to remember the images through my hands and not my easily distracted eyes.

  I had taken a piece of paper and dampened it until it was pliable, and then I pressed it against the wall and used my fingers to gently create an impression in the moist pulp. I stood in the dark an impossibly long time, loosing my center, letting the paper dry until I felt I could take it down and not lose the image. I imagined Julián was there with me again, his body pressed against mine, his breath in my ear. Later, looking at it, I thought perhaps I should have kept my thoughts to myself, all those valleys and mounds seemed infused with my blasphemous feelings. It was a very inappropriate present carrying all my emanations and desires.

  Placing it in a frame on Christmas Eve , on impulse, I had taken the red felt pen I was labeling tags with and drew the outline of my hand over the textures. He would never see it, but I imagined he would know it was there, that he could feel the heat I had left behind.

  I knelt in front of him, placing the gift on the floor where he sat. “Happy Christmas.”

  He laid his right hand on its surface and traced the paper, recognizing it with delight. His hand hesitated over the red outline, as though he could feel the difference in the texture the ink had made, the fine chemical seepage marring his ruins.

  “You give me too much,” he said and pulled his hand away. “It is one of the most beautiful things I have ever felt.”

  I did not trust my own words so I sat in silence staring at the handprint, trying to decipher him and the feeling of his eyes on my face, seeing so much in their sightlessness.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small box, snow white with a jaunty red ribbon. Nestled in a crumble of tissue was a small gold cross, its chain so delicate it seemed suspended in air.

  Julián said, “It was my mother’s. I found it left behind, later, after I had been taken out of the hospital and given to the Sisters of Mercy. I came back to see my house, to look for anything of value. The place had been looted. Even the furniture was gone, but this lay in a dark corner in the dust. I walked right to it even though I couldn’t see and picked it up. It was the only thing left. I thought perhaps if she had been wearing it she might have lived, but I also knew it was a message from God.”

  He moved behind me and slipped his hands under my hair. “I hope it protects you Isabei.” The necklace trickled into the space just below my collar bones.

  Julián’s hands were still under my hair, his fingers curled around my neck. We were held there, we too were suspended on a chain, neither of us able to move. I felt his breath, the pulse in his fingertips, and I knew that I was not the only sinner, that we were hung here together. At this moment, I may have been more powerful than God.

  He moved away, leaving the tracery of his passing on my skin. He was wise enough not to say anything. He simply stood and left the house, his bicycle squeaking away in the darkness.

  That night I prayed.

  “I’m sorry,” I told Him. “I have made a selfish mistake. I don’t want to hurt him. I love him. Please make him forget what he felt tonight. Take my face and body from his hands. Wipe him clean. I’m giving him back to you.”

  I would return all I had stolen from this place to the rightful owners.

  The next morning I drove to the nearest town with a phone and called my mother. “Come see me,” I begged her, not caring if she still blamed me. “I need you.”

  Chapter Five

  LA MADRÉ

  She arrived a week later, disembarking under an orange juice sky into the new year, her hair a fresh shade of copper, her lipstick red and shiny, her heels clacking across the tarmac where I waited for her plane.

  I hugged her, held her close, felt how delicate she really was under all that brass. She smelled of Shalimar. “I ‘m so glad you came,” I told her ear tasting the atmosphere of hairspray in her curls.

  She held me at arm’s length, her eyes flicking first to the cross around my neck and next to my thin brown frame and mismatched hair.

  She said, “You most certainly needed me….from the looks of it.” She traced my cheekbone with one gentle finger. “It’s this place,” she said. “It promises things you can never really have.”

  In my father’s house, my house, she took charge, exercising her influence in a domain she must still have thought should rightfully have been hers.

  Pierre was intimidated by her, and shuffled and twisted and eye rolled like an epileptic, until she sent him away with a list and told him sternly not to dilly dally around town but to come right back this very evening. He scurried off without a backwards glance, leaving Matilde chuckling. My mother shooed her out of the kitchen as well and proceeded to reorganize the cabinets and straighten the tabs of the curtains.

  Matilde, being a mother herself, understood my mother’s behavior and gave her a wide and respectful berth that developed into a friendship of sorts. As this small woman ten years my junior learned to make casseroles and roasts to fatten me up, beside the mother I had tried to ignore, I found myself growing jealous, a child sitting at the table trying to mind her silence. They talked about me as if I wasn’t there.

  Matilde had brought her children over, a boy and a girl with round eyes, and round tummies, and bowl haircuts. In all this time I had never seen them, but Matilde had brought them to show my mother as soon as possible.

  They clung to Matilde when she introduced them to me, but as soon as my mother rounded the corner they were all over her, smelling her hair, touching her lips, and showing each other the red prints on the pads of their fingers. They hung like loose socks around her ankles, played games with their hands, and whispered to each other under the umbrella of her skirts.

  “They’re just beautiful children,” she told Matilde. “So w
onderfully behaved.” My mother had always appreciated a quiet audience.

  “They like you very much,” Matilde said splitting a chicken breast in half with a wet crack.

  “I always wanted grandchildren,” My mother said. Their backs registered my silent unwelcome presence. “Maybe someday.”

  “Miss Isabel doesn’t love any man that can give her children,” Matilde said.

  So the cat was out of the bag. It yowled fiercely and climbed the drapes being a nuisance.

  “Is that so?” said my mother taking the chicken and dredging it in flour. “I always hoped she would find a good man, to temper all that wildness.”

  “They are only good before you marry them,” Matilde said knowing what she was talking about.

  “Unbelievable!” All that wildness she feared, that tainted brown heritage in my skin rose to the surface. “I’m not like you. I’m not going to sell myself down the river if I can’t have what I really want.”

  Matilda cracked another bone and the room subsided into stillness. She rinsed her hands, gathered her round babies, and excused herself into the other room.

  My mother was still leaning over the sink, her hands thick and gooey with wet flour. “Don’t you dare presume to understand me,” she said quietly.

  I knew I had gone too far, which usually was my impetus to go even farther. “I know you too well,” I said. “It’s your fault I turned out this way.”

  She slowly and deliberately rinsed her hands and dried them on her apron. When she turned to face me the first thing I noticed was that her lipstick had bled into the lines around her lips. I had never noticed the lines before. “Maybe that is true,” she said. “But you are old enough now to take responsibility for yourself. If you were wise you would take my mistakes and learn from them.”

  She sighed and leaned back against the counter, suddenly too tired to hold up her hair, and makeup, and starched skirts. “If I had married your stepfather years ago, if I had sold myself, as you say, before I met your father, I probably would have been a very happy woman.”

  I was out of ammunition and she knew it.

  “I quit smoking,” she told me in a flat voice. “Right now I sincerely regret it.”

  After that we pretended to understand each other better. She had had her say after all this time, managing like the great dramatist that she was, to encompass all those feelings of resentment and years of bitterness into one powerful disarming sentence.

  I joined her and Matilde in the kitchen and learned to cook properly in order to appease her. I allowed her to dye my hair, laughing over mixing bottles and rubber gloves.

  The finished color was darker than my natural shade, the color of the inside of temples, of the choking forest at night, of Julián’s eyes.

  I did not know if my prayer had been heard or answered, but several weeks after Christmas Julián appeared on my doorstep wearing a long black robe as well as his collar. “I have been in the city,” he told me by way of explanation. “And today the Archbishop came for mass.”

  Matilde and Pierre were there; my mother and I had made pot roast. Julián did not have to speak to me directly, and I felt not only was he unable to see me, but he had grown deaf to listening as well.

  My mother was pleased to have someone so grand to dinner. She made bright small talk, dropping pennies of conversation his way all throughout the meal, asking just the right questions of he and Pierre about the labor movements and export taxes.

  Over coffee she leaned over to me and whispered, “So handsome…such a shame.” I did not know if she referred to his blindness, or his station in life that made him untouchable. I knew his seeing ears had heard. I felt the cross burn around my throat.

  Julián truly seemed to enjoy my mother’s company. He came for dinner twice a week after that, presumably seeking out her conversation.

  She stayed, and stayed, and stayed. Her clothes moved from her suitcase to the bureau in the guest room. She went barefoot in the house sometimes, and unbuttoned her blouses to cool off. She drank coke from the bottle instead of the glass and began to learn a little Spanish from Matilde. She joined me in the village teaching the children to read. Matilde’s children were her star pupils. At first she had wrinkled her nose and placed her spiky little heels carefully among the mud and detritus. She blushed when the bare breasted women spoke to her, and averted her head when they nursed. She never accepted anything to eat or drink. The Maya could not resist her as they had me. She was infectious, a disease you wanted to get.

  I wondered sometimes watching her how my father had resisted. She was still beautiful as well as charming, and I saw now in my maturity the blatant wit and carefully concealed intelligence she had always had.

  She started going to mass every Sunday and did not ask why I did not join her. Julián walked her home, until one day she came up the hill on his bicycle panting and puffing while he jogged effortlessly along beside her, holding one handle bar to guide her.

  My mother had gone native.

  The sun slogged its way across the rainy spring skies for weeks while we played Parcheesi and sewed new clothes on a treadle machine that my mother and Matilde had found in the store room. Julián had taken the crate of figures away one day and I had not asked what he had done with them. It was not my business.

  Just before Easter, the sky peeled back its gray skin and exposed smooth blue muscle and a bright dawn. I was drinking my coffee on the veranda when it happened. The season changed from rain to clarity in the space of a hummingbird’s wing beat. The weather was the only thing that moved quickly here.

  In the distant fields there was a fine green haze. I noticed something different about the banana plants, a new weight.

  I hurried down to inspect them. The bulbous pendant bracts had peeled back and the female flowers had developed into slender green fingers reaching for the sky. The sun was burning the limp rainy air away and the world was bright and hot, fresh from the oven. Julián and my mother found me there an hour or so later circling my trees.

  “Look at them!” I cried totally delighted. “The bananas have started! It’s happening.”

  My mother considered the plants, her heels planting her in the wet earth, anchoring her firmly. “It’s a lot of plant for a humble banana isn’t it?”

  Julián stoked the fine firm green stalk; it was straight and strong. “The people here call the stalk La Madré…the mother. When these bananas are harvested the mother will be cut down and from her remains, the daughter will rise, becoming a mother and bearing fruit in her turn.”

  My mother put her hands on hips, considering the plant whose only fate was to bear a hand of phallic fruit before being cut down. “Well,” she said pulling her feet from the ground, uprooting herself. “They’re just like us aren’t they?”

  At Easter the Maya held a festival that lasted nine days. The celebration had risen from pagan origins rejoicing in the interaction between nature and man, which was ultimately antithetical to modern Easter with its ascetic and mournful tone hidden in baskets full of fertile eggs. But Julián was a native priest and he understood the connection between old and new, understood it as the only way to cross the bridge and communicate with a people that lived straddled between two times.

  My mother expressed a great interest in this festival and we found ourselves in the village drinking corn hooch in our Easter dresses. Matilde had had us to her house after Mass. It was as humble as any of the others, but the walls were hung with pictures Pierre had brought her, cut out of magazines and framed, pictures of distant places, the pyramids at Giza, the London Tower, Niagara Falls. I wondered if he had promised to take her away someday.

  Her absentee husband had returned for the holiday with money in his pockets and presents for the children. He was as thin and featureless, as a cardboard tube and his expression stayed the same no matter what was going on around him. I could not imagine how her round children had come from this combination of sticks, and considering her behavior with Pierre,
I was not so sure they had.

  Matilde had lived a whole life by the time she had reached an age that I remember as the point life started.

  The presence of her husband seemed to weight her, fill her bones with lead. Even the normally quiet children were subdued almost into non existence. They ate under the table in their white holiday clothes, munching with the quiet purposefulness of kittens.

  My mother served herself large helpings of dinner. Her distaste for village food had dissipated in the midst of her acclimation.

  Julián was wan and tired after an impassioned sermon, the first I had been to since Christmas. It had been an unnerving lesson, instructing us that the true meaning of Easter was rebellion...that Christ had been a fugitive, a guerilla, a willing outlaw.

  “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth!” he shouted at us making me flinch. “I came not to bring peace but a sword!”

  Everyone around me was nodding, tapping their chests. There was a galvanization, a ripple of energy through the congregation. I thought they might rise up and spill out the door picking up converts and healing the sick.

  I felt more inclined to throw myself on the sword in some dark quiet place, to commit hari kari in the closet without complaint, like a good Catholic.

  I could tell at dinner by the worn and beaten look on Julián’s face that he too was already wounded. How many battles was he fighting right now, beneath that passive face? I suspected I was not the only one.

  Outside the music was picking up again, the flashy twang of the marimba heralding the beginning of the Deer Dance, the culmination of the week. The dancers wore masks made of crudely carved and painted wood, some depicting hunters and some prey. With garish creepiness the hunters lunged and chased their quarry, awkward in their heavy masks and graceful shapely feet. As each one was caught, a primal cry rose up from the spectators and then was replaced by a low keening, a chant I did not understand.