It only works if we all stay very still. If we started walking around, we might bump into one another and I don’t know what would happen then.
There’s a Jeanne on the bed and a Jeanne in the corner and a Jeanne crawling around on all fours on the floor panting and begging and wiggling her bottom, from which a small tail protrudes, hairless and curled like a pig’s.
Jeanne d’Arc has a tail. Who knew?
We must be very quiet. We don’t want Saint Michael or Saint Catherine coming in here and overhearing us.
Who’s your favorite saint? one Jeanne wants to know.
We all look at one another guiltily. We know we’re not supposed to play favorites. The saints are all equal, all messengers of God.
But the truth is that the saints are all quite distinct. Saint Margaret with her spectacles and her knitting, Saint Catherine with her mournful eyes.
It’s easier when there are many of us. There’s less of a struggle. If one of the Jeannes believes, then another can have her doubts. As long as one of the Jeannes can offer her heart unflinchingly to God, the rest of us are allowed to have our own opinions.
I know that what we’re doing is wrong. But I’m so lonely, what can it hurt?
Besides, the saints are always saying that I belong to all of France. Now there’s just more of me to go around.
The indictment
They find her guilty of being a heretic, a sorceress, a schismatic, an apostate. This means the Church will no longer protect her, they will hand her over to the mercy of secular justice. Which sounds nice until you realize it means handing her over to the English, who are already piling up the wood to burn her.
The intern’s rescue mission
I disguise myself in her red dress again. I go to her cell in the middle of the night and stick my arms through the bars to touch her, comfort her, but she presses herself against the opposite wall.
Jeanne, Jeanne, don’t do it, I say. Recant, tell them you lied about the voices. You don’t really want to die, do you?
She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t seem to know who I am. Maybe this dress makes her think that somehow I am her, that she is talking to herself.
Don’t you want a life of your own? I say. Don’t you want to, I don’t know, go home, raise cows, get married, have children?
No answer.
I take a deep breath. I’ll marry you, I say, but she only blinks at me.
I try a different tack. What about France? I say. Think of that. Aren’t you being a little selfish? Are your principles more important than the French people? Who’s going to lead them in battle against the English if you’re dead?
Burt, at the reading of the verdict
They’ve erected two high stages in the graveyard beside the abbey, and thousands of people have crowded in to watch, both townspeople and foul English soldiers.
Jeanne stands up there looking tiny, hunched, stubborn, filthy as a street urchin in her bunched clothes, chewing her fingernails, muttering to herself, inclining her head to one side and then the other, weighing two invisible options. This, or that?
They read out the verdict—…and for these reasons we declare you excommunicate and heretical, abandoned to secular justice as a limb of Satan severed from the Church…
A cluster of English soldiers stands waiting to grab her. She is made to turn and behold the ugly surprise of the executioner waiting, the wood already piled up around the stake. This is it. The end of the story.
But then she breaks down. We’ve seen her weep before—Jeanne was always a big crier—but this is a thousand times worse. She gives in, she recants, she admits to everything. She was wrong, from now on she’ll defer to the Church in all things. She renounces the visions she only pretended to have—yes, yes, she made it all up, she is a silly girl and will do whatever her judges and her Church tell her to do.
It’s hard to watch.
The English are furious. They won’t get to execute her after all.
They make her sign something, and she frowns over it the way she did signing our release form. They take her back to prison.
I ought to feel relieved, but somehow I don’t. She seems so miserable, so defeated, so not herself.
They tell her to put on a woman’s dress, and she obeys.
The intern versus Diane
Diane’s pissed. She really wanted that execution, the spectacular finish.
I don’t know if Jeanne did it for me, or for France, or for some other reason entirely. I’d like to think she did it for me. She didn’t say yes to my offer, but she didn’t say no either. I go to her cell again that night. Diane’s already there, murmuring at her through the bars.
Jeanne looks awful. They’ve shaved her head. Her scalp glows with unearthly light, and her eyes are rolling all around. I have made a mistake, a terrible mistake, she’s saying over and over. Then she sees me.
You, she says. You have been sent by Satan. I know it now. I was uncertain at first, but all along you have done nothing but drown out my voices and cloud my judgment. You tempted me and confused me and led me to betray everything I hold dear.
I saved you, I say.
She sticks her chin out at me and says, Tomorrow I’m going to put on men’s clothes again. I’m going to reclaim my voices. I’m going to say I was weak before and spoke out of fear but now will speak the truth. I will put myself in God’s hands as I have always done.
They’ll declare you a relapsed heretic and hand you back to the English, I say.
I would rather die honestly than live with hypocrisy.
Well, Diane says, sounds like she’s made up her mind.
Jeanne, Jeanne, I say, but she’s already sinking to her knees and beginning to pray, shutting the world out. I look at Diane, who’s struggling to hide the smirk of satisfaction on her face. She’s going to get her big ending after all.
Burt witnessing the condemnation
Ten thousand citizens are watching when they condemn her. This time as she stands on the platform she looks as she should: steadfast, fervent, fiery, glorious. She gives a half-hour speech that reduces everyone present to tears. She prays to God, she asks everyone to pray for her. There’s not a dry eye in the place. It is a most amazing speech, I don’t know how to describe it. And unfortunately we won’t have it on tape either—there’s something wrong with our equipment, we can only get picture.
They lead her over to the stake.
I’m nauseous thinking of what’s about to happen. I’ll never do barbecue again. I may never cook again. Diane’s beckoning. What the hell does she want now?
Diane at the burning
It takes a long time to burn a person. You think it’s going to be one quick whoosh of obliterating flame, but no. It’s more of a cooking process, a slow toasting starting with the feet. It takes hours.
I made Burt and Karleen leave before it started. I was afraid Burt would do something stupid, like try to stop it, run up there and try to save her or something. And probably Karleen would be upset to see the skin she’s tended for over a year charring and blackening and flaking off.
But I’ve made the intern stay to film the whole thing. We’ve got hours of footage, except for the small breaks when he’s puking. I’ve got the second camera trained in close on her face. Maybe now, after all that’s happened, I’ll finally get the shot I need to tie the whole film together, the moment of realization when it dawns on her that maybe she’s not the messenger of God, maybe she’s just a delusional little farm girl who got in way over her head.
But the moment never comes. She never wavers, never stops believing, steadfast to the last.
A few minutes ago some fireworks exploded in the flames, spelling out JESUS in five-foot-high letters. A white dove flew out of the fire, circled and winged away. The people gasped in wonder. I thought, That damn intern.
He’s done it before, planting fireworks as a joke. He’s ruined a lot of shots with pranks like this. The last time he did it I nearly tore him a new one. I’m
amazed he’d have the balls to do it again.
He comes back from puking for the umpteenth time and sidles up to me. Nice job with the pyrotechnics, I tell him. When did you rig it?
He says, I didn’t rig anything.
And the white bird. That was nice. Subtle. I didn’t think you were capable of subtlety.
I don’t know what you’re talking about, he says, looking nervous. I didn’t do anything.
Ubiquitous Jeanne
I saw them lead one of the other Jeannes up to the stake. I saw her crying out and didn’t feel a thing. Should I feel guilty that she is being burned in my place? When the burning began I saw other Jeannes streaming out of her, leaping down the piles of wood like mountain goats and pushing their way unnoticed through the mesmerized crowd, and I wondered, How will they ever burn us all? They can’t even catch us! There is not wood enough in all of France!
What happens now? I had been so sure that I would be flying straight up to Heaven in a blur of bright light. But now I worry that there will not be room in Heaven for all of us Jeannes. I see it all as if from a great distance, countless Jeannes swarming, a thousand sooty specks. It’s getting awfully crowded, since each one has her horse and her sword and her standard held aloft. One comes galloping up to stand beside me. Is that really what I look like? Is that Jeanne? Is that me?
The executioner
I go to the pub afterward, I don’t know what else to do, my hands are shaking. I’ve done this a hundred times but it’s never been like this.
I was ordered to reduce every bit of her to ashes, to prevent those who still believe in her from using her remains as holy relics. But her heart and entrails remained. They would not burn, they would not burn. I tried and tried and then I panicked and threw everything in the Seine.
Now I drink and drink but still I see her heart in my hands.
Out of nowhere this woman comes up to me, a bony woman dressed in black, she pinches my arm and says she’s heard about me, heard the stories, heard what happened. It’s just a joke, she says. This intern, this guy who works for me, he likes practical jokes…Calm down, calm down. Drink your wine, here, drink.
I drink my wine. She’s still here. Come on, she says, it’s just a prop. Can’t you tell the difference between a rubber heart and a real one?
I say, Listen, woman, I am an executioner. I know body parts. This was her heart. It would not burn. It is a sign. I have committed a terrible sin and burned a saint.
The intern: synapses
So I finally got to see Jeanne without her clothes. Without her skin, too. I smelled her burning and it smelled like a red dress. I took her atoms into my lungs and they will travel through my blood and lodge in my brain, making a sooty smudge there, all the signals tangled together but strong as ever. If you were to take off the top of my head and jab an electrode at the spot, I would smell her gray eyes, see her low husky voice like a plume of smoke, taste the texture of her hair.
Cristina Henríquez
I
I loved a girl once. Every story starts that way, right? She was from my old neighborhood, in San Miguelito in Panama. Her name was Gabriella.
I saw her on the first day of my last year of high school, on the minibus that lumbered up our street, swallowing students waiting in their starched cotton uniforms and spitting us out again at Luis Martín High School. I had lived on that street my whole life and thought I knew all of our neighbors, but I had never before seen the girl who climbed onto the bus that day with her navy blue knee-highs pulled up past her knees like a tramp, her pleated navy skirt perfectly cinching her waist, her black hair falling over her shoulders in curls so big you could fit your whole hand inside one.
She sat by herself in the front seat, and I remember feeling embarrassed for her because the front seat was where only the nerds, the come libros, sat. I was bordering on being a nerd myself, and even I avoided the front seat, but there was no way to communicate with her discreetly. And truthfully, she didn’t seem to mind when Alberto Avila got on and sat next to her even though he wore black glasses that were forever falling off his face and he sniffled constantly, wiping his nose with his fingers. She simply looked at him and nodded and then stared out the window.
There was a buzz around Gabriella from the beginning. By our lunch break that day, I found out from Jaime Torres and Ricardo Solís, who were smoking under the coconut palm in the school courtyard, that she and her family had just moved to Panama City from Colombia.
“Una colombiana,” Jaime said. “What do you think of that, Nestor?” He dropped his cigarette on the ground.
“It’s fine,” I said.
“That’s it? Have you seen her ass? Fuck, man.”
I shrugged.
“Forget it,” Ricardo said, pointing at me. “You know his story. He’s for the other side. He wouldn’t notice her ass if she rubbed it in his face.” He and Jaime laughed.
I couldn’t remember when the joke that I was a pato started. There had been moments when I wondered whether it was true. Once, in physical education class during my eighth year, someone yelled that Claudio Garces’s nuts were hanging out of his gym shorts and I turned to look. But everyone had turned—boys and girls alike—so I figured it didn’t mean anything. I didn’t really think about guys in that way, I told myself. I didn’t really even think about girls that way. I was one of those guys who, while everyone else was walking the halls with their arms draped over girls or was having sex in the library, had never had a girlfriend. Then came Gabriella. And I thought, I get it now. That had been the problem all along. I had never met the right girl.
The first few weeks of my senior year went like a flash. I was taking physics, calculus, English V, and world history and was dedicated to my studies because I wanted to go to college. I wanted to be an engineer and work on the canal. It was a big dream compared with all the guys in my class who wanted to work at their fathers’ body shops or figure out a way to spend all day at the horse track, making money off lucky bets, or better yet, live with their mamis who would feed them and wash their clothes until their mamis kicked them out and they found wives to provide the same services.
It was a Tuesday when my calculus teacher, Profesor Treviño, kept me after class to ask if I had time to tutor another student. I was so serious then, begrudgingly surrendering my time to anything other than schoolwork, but when he told me the student’s name—Gabriella Díaz—I said yes in a heartbeat.
That afternoon I spent ten minutes in the boys’ bathroom straightening my clip-on uniform tie and spit-shining my shoes and hair alike. Gabriella was settled in a desk when I walked into the classroom. She had her chin on her hand and was staring out the windows that looked out over the tops of the palm trees in the courtyard.
“Hi,” I said. “Gabriella?”
“Yes,” she said. “And you?”
“Nestor.”
“A pleasure,” she said.
The desks were arranged in clusters of four, and I lowered myself into a seat across from her, so we were facing each other. I opened my notebook.
She stared at it and said, “So you’re here to teach me about function notation?”
“Profesor Treviño asked me to.”
“Function notation is just a condensed way of writing out function values. F of x, right?”
“Right,” I said.
She turned to look out the window again. “I already know it,” she said.
“We can work on something else, then.”
“I already know it all.” She was still gazing out the window.
“Do you know function composition?” I asked.
She took my notebook and wrote:
(f o g) (x) = f (g (x))
“For example,” she said.
I stared at her, though she seemed not to notice. Her bangs fell in her eyes a little and quivered when the tips collided with her eyelashes as she blinked.
“It sounds like you’re caught up,” I said.
She turned to me.
“I guess so,” she said. Then she shifted in her chair and reached to the floor to grab her canvas bag before standing. “Next week?” she asked. “Same time, same place?”
I nodded, and watched her walk away.
After that, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I thought I had finally—finally!—found love. I went home at night and got in bed, trying to imagine her lying beside me in nothing but her knee-highs, the woolly feel of them against my legs, the warmth of her skin against me everywhere else.
The following Monday, I was the first to arrive at Profesor Treviño’s room.
“Hey,” Gabriella said when she walked in. She dropped her bag and plopped herself into the desk across from me. “What are we doing today?”
“Secant.”
She grinned. “Easy.”
“Well,” I started, “when we’re talking about a curve, it’s a line that intersects at two points on that curve.”
“At least two points,” she interrupted. “Could be more. The word secant comes from Latin, you know. Secare. To cut.”
“Why did Profesor Treviño ask me to tutor you if you already know all this?”
“He doesn’t know I know it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nestor,” she said, “you live down the street from me, don’t you?”
I watched her gold bracelet slide up her arm as she ran her hand through her hair. “I think so,” I said. “You ride my bus.”
“That’s what I thought.” She tapped her teeth with her fingernail for a minute and then asked, “What’s the name of the boy who sits with me on the bus?”
“Alberto Avila.”
“Do we like him?”
I loved how she said “we,” like the two of us were in on something—anything—together.
“He’s okay.”
“He never talks to me.”
I smiled. “He probably doesn’t know what to say. He’s not much in the department of social graces.”
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