Hunger's Brides
Page 115
Once the glass did break he snapped out of it, whatever it was. As I recall, when we got to the surface he was mostly pulling me out of the water. An ice-fisherman had seen the whole thing. The motorist who drove us to town called the story in. I was named for some kind of medal, minted in London, England, the papers said. Such medals were to be awarded to a whole group of us by the Lieutenant-Governor. I was a boy hero. The stuff of frontier legend. Reporters came.
He waited upstairs.
He never thanked me. Never mentioned it in fact, or referred to it in any way I could detect. On the other hand he never called me a quitter again.
We moved to British Columbia for a while, just before the ceremony. The medal caught up with us later.
I do not blame him now. Heroism is overdone.
LIVES OF THE GREGORYS
Donald you’d never believe—they’ve named their Smoking Mountain Saint Gregory and make a volcano effigy of amaranth seed and eat it at the solstice. I wonder has anyone ever bolted the volcano whole?—volcanohole, bolted, that would be me. San Gregorio del Popo they call it. The funniest thing was in the Church where Juana was baptized they had a history of all the Saints Gregory. Why?—and which Gregory is the mountain—why so many Gregory popes and saints. Nobody knew, nobody could answer me.
And you, Doctor, which one would you be? If you could, if I could make you….
St. Gregory I: born Rome; elected Pope 3/IX/590; died 12/III/604. During the plague of Rome an angel appeared to him on the rock now called the Castil San Angelo. What did the Angel say that Gregory defends himself as a servant serving God?—servus servorum Dei! Thus instituting Gregorian Chant. Was that the first one—a thousand lines of servus servorum Dei chanted after school? Was the plague angel satisfied?
St. Gregory II: elected Pope 19/V/715; died 11/II/731. Expelled sect of iconoclasts. Ordered destruction of their fetishes.
St. Gregory III: born Syria; elected 18/III/731; died 28/XI/741. Dubbed the mite of Saint Peter, how strange how odd—mite as pittance or insect? Or was that mitre?
Gregory IV: born Rome; elected 20/IX/827; died 11/I/844. Organized armada against Saracens. First of the Pope Gregorys not canonized. How painful, for you all.
Gregory V: born Saxony; elected 3/V/996; died 18/II/999. Forced to flee Rome by anti-pope Juan XVIII. The Gregorian descant picks up speed. Hang on for the ride of your lives.
Gregory VI: elected 5/V/1045; died 20/XII/1046. Took personal command of the Papal army against invaders, all second-comers.
St. Gregory VII: born Tuscany; elected 22/IV/1073; died 25/??/1085. Devised formula Dictatus Papae. ‘Only Pappy is above judgement.’ Yes definitely saint material this one.
Gregory VIII: elected 25/X/1187; died 17/XII/1187. Friend of Barbarossa, helped Christians in Holy Lands oppressed by infidels. Teeny tiny little sixty-day papacy. May have devised formula ‘Carpe Diem.’
Gregory IX: elected 21/III/1227; died 22/VIII/1241. Excommunicated Frederick II. Canonized Saints Francis, Antonio and Domingo. Prepared the 6th crusade. INSTITUTED INQUISITION.
St. Gregory X: elected 27/III/1272; died 10/I/1276.?? The rest is silence. So saintly, so obscure.
Gregory XI: elected 5/I/1371; died 26/III/1378. Rabid chessplayer. With help of another Saint Catherine, moved Holy See to Rome. The better to wholly See you with my dear.
Gregory XII: elected 19/XII/1406; died 18/X/1417. First Gregory to quit Papacy. Most miserable period of the Holy See (not to mention, of the nomenclaturum Gregory).
Gregory XIII: elected 25/V/1572; died 10/IV/1585. Opened seminaries in Vienna, Prague, Japan. Celebrated 11th Jubilee in 1575. Reformed calendar from 4/X/1582 to 15/X/1582. Pope of lost time.
Gregory XIV: elected 8/XII/1590; died 16/X/1591. Incompetent, deceived by counsellors. Excommunicated Enrique IV and quit. Took a professorship.
Gregory XV: elected 14/II/1621; died 8/VII/1623. Took a paternal interest in the missions. Instituted orwellian confraternity of THE PROPAGANDA FIDE.
And never forget Gregory of Nazianzus, toasting ants and termites as the architects of labyrinths while ordering Sappho burned. And Gregory of Nyssa who linked Christ to Theseus, Dionysus to Horus, lame god of Isis. ‘Nyssa’—Arabic for birthplace of Isis. Another coincidence probably.14 So synchronistical.15 So many fished up in one bright shining net of electrum.
Doctor, don’t you sometimes wonder if all the Gregorys aren’t … One?
HARLEQUIN: OLD COMEDY
VERY SOON NOW they—you: my public—will begin asking by what right I’ve appointed myself editor and taken over Beulah’s project.
By the same right she makes me a character in it.
And no, not just a character but chorus and audience, accused and executioner. It has not always been an easy thing, seeing myself in the reflections of her journals, but here, in her notes on Old Comedy, I’ve found something else again. It is not really my area, but such are the forsaken pleasures of scholarship that I’ve played my part and done some extra research.
Old Comedy: an outlandish form of drama that disappears with Aristophanes after the fall of Athens to Sparta. Often drawing throngs of over fourteen thousand spectators, it was perhaps the oldest and most popular theatre of all. Like its sister, Tragedy, Old Comedy sprang from the threshing floor of the harvest and the fertility rites of Dionysus, a whirl of ritual marriages, bawds and bacchanalian feasts, a threshing ecstasy turning to blood, from blood to raucous laughter—just the kind of transit that would appeal to her. As a form, it depended on ancient religious sanctions to escape censure for its deep obscenity, blasphemies, and seditious political commentary …
But mid-lecture, the scholarly paragon pauses, shaken, his index finger still raised to accentuate a telling point. Might she have seen not just the occasional chapter but her entire work as a comedy? Could this be? To have dedicated years of deep passion to a joke? One with a particularly savage punchline. Why does the mind, my mind, recoil—is this so difficult to accept? And why does it only get harder to make a joke of it, when this had always been my intention?
Because I was there that night. Because I was there. With her blood on my hands, in these pages. Because I close my eyes and see her every page signed in it.
Everything written is constructed, the scholar reminds himself, recovered now. It’s what I’ve always taught. I hear her voice in the room, taunting, in the semi-darkness around me. Anything written can be deconstructed, unless you’d believe we take our dictation from the muse. But what kind of mind constructs this?
Does she want to show me the mind of God? Is this what she’s doing—rehabilitating god? A god of old comedies.
Stretch, Donald, whispers the pupil to the teacher. Can’t I read the signs?—the deliberately garbled allusions, mock-epic clash of tones, verse and prose in tangled collision, all the mangled midrash of a still more ancient tradition. Is this what I’m supposed to find, Beulah? Even the pnigos in the breathless patter of her journals—all constructed for me, her agon—her chorus split in two.
So that now to me falls the parabasis, the author’s jarring attempt to win the audience’s approval.
What gives you the right? Who gave you permission? What kind of insanity is this to dedicate years to a grandiose joke?
I don’t want this.
No—no: all this is just your nihilism. That’s what she’s doing—putting me alone in a darkened theatre then offering up her heart’s blood to the one person least able to accept it.
Was it less painful this way? For her to grope and struggle towards some doubtful revelation, armed with the absolute certainty that it would not be understood? She was so certain of me, then. Of my limitations. That I would be incapable of glimpsing the slightest trace of grandeur in the ruin she had built.
Why me, I ask now for what must be the thousandth time. Here then is my answer. This is how I am to serve. As the reminder of how little pity and terror is left to this spent millennium of hers—how little comprehension, how little empathy.
She
leaves me here to agonize and cogitate in luxury. She leaves me.
She leaves me here to wonder: what is the parody of a parody of an ecstasy?
I am asked to play her one-man chorus, Elizabethan—to sing the part of hoary tradition in my fine castrato’s voice. To parody Murder in the Cathedral and that great scholar Thomas à Becket. To be revealed as everything he was not, to be made a martyr without a cause, playing at agony, just managing self-pity.
Foil.
Jester.
Fool.
Oh Donald, she wrote for me there in her diaries, such a wonderful clown you’ll make! Just what’s it take to make you blink, just how much truth can you take …?
REFORM SCHOOL
Saint Mary of Egypt Women’s College … A hard school but holy. So here’s the layout and your day’s agenda.16 Every day. Each single day of your lives.
1. Wake towards 4:30. Upon awakening, recall the material to be meditated on: run over each point without giving way to other useless, secret thoughts and shirking. Dress, giving thanks to God for having preserved you during the night from all evil and pray for liberation from all sin….
2. Once dressed, enter into prayer until Prime, preferably behind the chancel lattice, chastely screened, discreetly cancelled. There, read the points of meditation; that is, should they not already come readily to mind.
3. It being the hour, say prayers with the same clear expression, voice and tone of the others in community and with attention—interior and exterior—reverence, modesty and silence, as someone who is speaking to God in the name of Holy Mother Church. As Saint Theresa herself has said: This is the hour to negotiate with Christ and iron out any outstanding matrimonial disputes, by correcting your own numberless faults.
4. Return up to your cell, rest, break fast, read, meditating on some passage from Contempt for the World….
5. At eight, attend main Mass, and until nine make devotions. If the community celebrates Mass at another hour, perform instead labours to the accompaniment of saintly discourses read aloud, visit the sick or see to ordinary errands.
6. From nine to eleven (or else eleven to twelve): labour, say the rosary of the Virgin, make devotions and visits to the altars of the Holy Sacrament. Conduct general and particular examination of the conscience.
7. At 12:00, proceed either to the refectory or back to the cell to eat a frugal meal, appetite firmly fixed on the mildness, mortification and presence of God, on the memory of the bitter gall and fasts of Christ and on the poverty of His Mother. Buen provecho.† Sorry Father, can we say this in Latin?
8. Lie down some while if such is your custom or need; rest without the slightest exercise or mental care until two o’clock.
9. From two until three, devotions and new visits to the Holy Sacrament.
10. From three to four, manual labour, cell-keeping or the work of special duties and offices.
11. At four, visit an invalid or the Holy Sacrament again, or bless the dormitories, etc.
12. From five to six, spiritual readings.
13. From six until seven, pray aloud while conducting an interior examination.
14. Between seven and eight, attend to one’s prescribed needs, devotions, exercises or special mortifications.
15. From eight until the half-hour, dine and rest a moment in holy conversation.
16. From the half-hour until nine, general and particular examination of the soul and preparation of the items for the dawn prayer.
17. At nine, prepare for bed, thinking of God and the morrow’s prayer, and pray to the Guardian Angel to protect and wake you….
†Bon appétit.
HARLEQUIN: FIFTH BUSINESS
I STUDIOUSLY AVOIDED knowing her, but how closely she was studying me. Not just for the pleasure of plotting my humiliation but of calculating how I might be brought, willingly or not, to help her carry it out. Yet somewhere along the way I’ve stopped believing this is only about revenge—first Beulah’s, then mine. Something more, then, something else … but what?
And somewhere I decided to help her tell her story by folding mine into hers. But where, when did this sea change come? I try to remember, to find the turning. I can’t. I can’t find it. I’ve missed the moment. This, and so many others.
What an odd little life mine has become. Disdaining religiosity yet craving my tiny armageddons—final farewell tilts at foreign travel and languages, honest scholarship, bachelorhood, then at infidelity itself. And, oh yes—ambition. In the end, leaving every last battlefield on the run.
When exactly did I become fifth business? … a type to cast in summer stock, the harlequin. How does a man let it happen but not really notice? Become a player just fit to swell a progress, angling for a bedroom scene or two.
But now she offers me a real role, a meaty part with a striking costume: tragicomic jester’s mask, split right down the middle. How she must have found her paradoxical harlequin irresistible: humourless yet mocking, craven yet arrogant, cynical yet ambitious. One more critic with an unfinished novel in his desk. Now I presume to finish hers.
Am I to play Salieri to her Mozart, then? To steal her music and pass it off as mine? Salieri publishes his concerto, his great new work, a new direction! Then Mozart recovers, the genius comes back from the dead, and plays for him, plays the unfinished music that should have been. Plays for him. And he sees that he understood so little. Plays for him. And there is more, infinitely more.
Plays for him.
At least Salieri … heard.
If the mask I’m handed fits so well, why not also wear it well? It’s as she predicted, you see, the prophet can no longer tell Providence from Irony. Her satire annihilates me. How can I face her? I am defaced.
Let him wear it then, the jester’s mask she proffers. Let him put it on. There, at last he thinks he sees: the real difference between tragedy and comedy is not up on the stage.
It’s in the audience.
JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ
To be contested by a crowd …
1: Not less than a hundred generations
have held in veneration
the ancient Wonders of the world;
I would not quarrel with the list,
but wish to establish, once and for all,
which of these was greatest.
2: It is I who will prove the greatest to you!
3: No wait, you two, for
I am the one to whom
you should listen.
2: In no way! I was the first
to answer her proposition
and so should have the floor!
1: If it is to wear yourselves out
that you dispute, how much better
to do so setting forth your arguments….
3: Let him who would, begin.
2: Then I will make my case:
the walls that Semiramis raised,
I would offer
and suggest,
were such a wonder
of spaciousness
that along the rampart tops ran carriages,
while within the walls were planted
by the city’s denizens
the most luxuriant gardens
that have ever existed.
3: Stop right there—enough of this!
These were not nearly so prodigious
as the Colossus of the Sun,
whose presiding genius was one
Clares Lidio,
and whose formidable stature
was a full seventy cubits,
honestly measured.
4: My word!
How much more colossal then
were the pyramids of the Egyptians,
so terrible and yet incredible—
one measuring fifteen hundred feet a side—
and many others
not much smaller,
on all sides.
5: In all my life!
Listen now to me alone
as I tell you of
the Mausoleum th
at Artemisa
built and ornamented
for her husband’s tomb
at the cost of such efforts
as to exhaust herself and her kingdom’s coffers.
6: No need to go on and on—
vastly more extravagant
was the Temple of Diana,
built in Ephesus,
that Erostratos in a fit of madness
reduced to ashes,
thinking such excess magnificent.
7: Extravagance, yes—
but far greater than this
was the magnificent monument
raised to Jupiter by Phidias
and by which his art was seen
at a glance to have surpassed
not just his wildest dreams
but the subject of his study.
8: To me it falls to propose
that the most signal of marvels
was the lighthouse at Pharos,
which guided the navies of the world entire
and in whose mirror,
there stood revealed
to human view
all the vast blue realms of Neptune.
9: No. Not one of you has hit upon it;
since of all these wonders, the most exotic
was Catherine of Alexandria:
who was a wall,
proof against all assault;
a Colossus,
but of a sun more beautiful;
a Pyramid,
risen in a single flight to heaven;
a Mausoleum,
and, the more I look at it,
monstrance and also temple
consecrated to the Sacramental Christ;
a Statue
hewn from living marble,
finely graved, in profile wrought,
and by its finishing touches made a lovely catafalque;
a Tower,
exalted, eminent,
reaching up and touching Heaven,
and at whose foot the others knelt …
ALL:
This, this is indeed a Wonder
worthy of the title!
This and no other.
Catherine alone.