Our Lady of Babylon

by John Rechy

  The committed Daughter informed her two Brothers that their Mother had once, in her Confession, revealed to His Holiness the Pope “a transgression so vast” that he “often wished his Maker would allow him a special dispensation of his vows of confidence” so he might “divulge it to someone pious who might right the outrage.” (The Daughter had a startling, retentive mind that allowed her to use the Pontiff’s exact words.) Always an innocent, and always, always beloved by the Fair Twin and their Sister (despite everything), the Dark Son, later to be referred to as the Count, refused to believe any such outrage existed. “My mother,” he kept insisting, “always tells me the truth.” With vast illogic (not to say gross injustice), he accused his own loyal Sister and his equally faithful Twin Brother of “plotting something against Mother.”

  The Writer might be led to suspect that the Dark Twin knew more than he admitted and so refused to uncover the harsh duplicities of the Mother, but that supposition is much too grievous a conclusion to be drawn upon the morality of so noble a man as the Count.

  Such an innocent, pure man should surely be encouraged into the Sacred life, his concerned, loving Fair Brother and their perspicacious Sister determined during private hours. They again enlisted the help of His Holiness the Pope, who bountifully gave it, agreeing personally to sponsor, and strongly persuade, the Dark Twin to join a chosen order of most sacred character. His Holiness revealed only then, in a fond moment that clouded his eyes with the warmth of its memory, that, indeed, when the Dark Twin had been but a child he had been a favorite of his, to the point that the Holy Father had given particular attention to the boy’s officiating in the Cathedral; and had, on his own, even then, begun to prepare him for a holy life.

  Responding finally to what he had been correctly convinced was his duty to the Holy Mother Church — through sustained, thoughtful encouragement from his Brother and their Sister — the Dark Twin announced that he would receive holy vows.

  “Madame,” I interrupted her reading to explain, “my beloved Count du Muir told me the truth of that distortion. For reasons of their own, Alix and Irena wanted him out of the way, and so they coerced him by threatening vile allegations about the Contessa. He pretended to agree to their ‘suggestions’ in order to outfox whatever they were plotting.”

  “And still are plotting,” Madame underscored.

  Only then did their Mother, the sinful Contessa, purport to reveal, through horrifying words interrupted by false gasps of sorrow, that in the lineage of their Father’s family, in each succeeding generation, twin boys were born. One was always incapable of producing an heir, always spilling his seed before a fruitful union was achieved. The “seedless” son was always —

  “— the fair one,” the wise Daughter anticipated.

  “Yes, how did you guess?” The Contessa tried to resume her tears. “If my Dark Son accepts the monastic life, the family name shall die, and who knows what will happen to the family wealth?”

  “Then the family name shall not die.” The Dark Son tried to disguise his disappointment by pretending to be overjoyed, hugging the spiteful Contessa, and whirling her about.

  The Reader will not be surprised to learn that the keen Daughter and her Fair Brother disbelieved their Mother. Her “revelation” was obvious subterfuge to shift the wealth of the estate to the Son she assumed would protect her, the one who would retain control by bearing offspring. How most dramatically to reveal her lie than to test it?

  The Fair Son tried, over and over (by special dispensation of the Pope), to disprove the Contessa’s allegations. Attempt after attempt, with the most enticing of women, failed, only at the crucial moment, even though he dutifully persisted to the point of exhaustion. The Contessa’s false revelation had been so powerful and cunning that it had succeeded in its intention, to paralyze him at the decisive stroke.

  That was the atmosphere of the troubled household on the night when, riding through the depraved part of the City to give some surcease to the deserving indigent (not all the indigent are deserving), the Count, a pure man who had been denied his choice of a holy life because of his Mother’s stratagems, met the Whore pretending to be a Lady pursued by a madman, actually the Reverend Pimp.

  If there exist “minor blessings,” the Writer of this True Account does not deem this to be one; he deems it a major blessing, that, having already chronicled the profanities the Whore invited in the carriage with the Noble Count, he does not have to roam through that carnage of lust here, though there are other incursions into that tainted territory that he must take as he continues (begging the Mightiest of Mighties for courage to be able to do so) in this dutiful pilgrimage.

  Madame Bernice put the sheets down firmly. “Vile!”

  Ermenegildo had turned his head away earlier, in clear disgust.

  “There’s no question these pages have been dictated — some of them written — by Irena herself.” I stated to Madame Bernice what I had deduced last night: “I detect her schemes and craftiness. Alix has contributed, too. I detect his lasciviousness throughout. And the Pope’s hand is clearly here — I detect his lecheries and hypocrisies. They all take grains of truth and cultivate them into monstrous lies to destroy me —”

  “— attempt to destroy you, Lady. They shall not succeed. Yes, their clear purpose is to harm you, slander you, blame you — but I begin to infer other purposes — and mysteries that seem to baffle the writers themselves, especially the mystery of —”

  “— the tulips.” It still amazes me, the harmony of thought between me and Madame Bernice. My mind had been spinning with questions, which I now shared with her: Why did the “Account” dwell in such detail on the Contessa’s interrupted encounter with the Gypsy among the tulips? The Contessa had herself warned me that Irena might become “dangerous” through a knowledge of . . . tulips. What was the “vast transgression” the Pope claimed the Count’s refined mother had confessed to him? “The proud courageous woman I knew, Madame, did not consider her love a transgression. She would have made a point of narrating the event, proudly, boldly, to the Pope.”

  To allow Madame time to consider these matters, I sipped my tea. When I arrived earlier, she had met me at the edge of her garden, to show me her new roses. Ermenegildo had pointed out two that needed special attention and she had lingered to give it to them. So our tea was cool. I did not remark on that, since Ermenegildo seemed to be cautioning me. Surely by now he must know I would never offend Madame?

  She was too deep in thought to notice the condition of the tea.

  “I’m certain of this much, Lady — these grotesque assertions contain many clues that we can use.” Madame moved briskly to lift my cloudy mood.

  And so, in search of clues, we roamed over my true life with my beloved Count du Muir:

  Our love grew, sparked from the very moment I entered his coach that night. We carried our happiness with us everywhere, to the opera, on long carriage rides in the City’s streets. We were lovers for the whole world to see, to gasp at in admiration as we passed. The Count was wildly handsome. His dark hair, dipping in waves, kissed, yes, kissed, the nape of his neck. His smile, tilted just slightly more to one side than the other, dazzling girls and women — and as many boys and men — who barely glimpsed him in his coach. Tailors battled to fashion his clothes, knowing all fine materials would court his body.

  Yet he would insist: “It’s only you they’re staring at, your beauty.” In truth — lam committed to it — I, too, received an equal share of admiration.

  From bruiting in the City, I knew that there were conflicts in the du Muir household, a tight and hostile allegiance between the Count’s Twin, the fair one, and their sister, Irena. Whether the Count was not himself aware of the full extent of those conflicts or was trying to shelter me from them, I did not know.

  As I wandered in the market one day in search of the best berries in season — I always considered the color, not just their texture — for a compote with which I intended to surprise the Count a
t dinner, I heard the word “whore” whispered by various voices. I had the acute sensation that at any moment stones would rain on me, and so I rushed away.

  It was soon after that the kind Contessa informed me of the plot to thwart our marriage. Well, I would be thrilled to defy all threats and to marry the Count, and to do so with the blessings of the Contessa, who remained with me in my mind from that interlude in her coach.

  From my trusted coachman, I learned that, to recall lost happiness, the Contessa often went to a secluded place sheltered by trees along the River. I would never intentionally intrude on such cherished reverie. But riding along the bank myself, I recognized her coach. I saw her standing outside, alone, at the River’s edge, her watery, mournful reflection like an extension of her tears. I did not see her coachman, and so I was concerned.

  Instructing my driver to leave me a short distance away, I approached the solitary figure, slowly, so that I would not break her reverie, nor startle her. She turned her sad eyes to me, as if she had expected me. She said, with moving simplicity: “My lover was murdered on orders from my husband after he interrupted our lovemaking under the statue of an angel near a fountain.” She touched my arm. “My dear, do everything you must to thwart a similar fate . . . Irena has been following you. No ruse is beyond her. She’s been inquiring about you, trying to gain the confidence of your attendants, claiming she’s your devoted sister seeking you on behalf of your father —”

  “My sister!” I was more appalled by the association than by the spying. I recovered quickly: “Inquiring about —?”

  “Your past.”

  The Contessa’s voice gained urgency. “There are things I can tell only you. When, in the tulip garden, I and my —”

  At that moment, another carriage stopped abruptly over the bank of the River, and waited.

  “It’s Irena!” the Contessa said. “She follows me, too! She mustn’t suspect we’ve ever spoken!”

  I pretended to be sauntering along the River.

  “Lady —” Madame seemed unduly casual. She sipped her tea three times, selected a pastry, rejected it, substituted another. “Irena was inquiring about . . . your past?”

  I had the unsettling sensation that she, too, was inquiring. “Who knows that better than you, Madame? My essence has traveled —”

  “We both understand that, Lady.” She sipped again from her tea, munched on a pastry. “But in your present life, your past, which Irena was investigating —?”

  “My present past, Madame? . . . It was ruled by a cruel father.” I punctuated the finality of my declaration by meeting her gaze over my own cup of tea.

  “Ah, but of course,” she said.

  An odd heaviness had clouded our tea. So I chose to narrate to Madame a precious tidbit from that “recent past”:

  “The Count was so marvelously close to his mother, Madame, that, often, preparing to make love, he would stand naked before me, grasping his imposing groin — that act required both hands — and he would say, ‘Now I feel like the son of a gypsy that I am! — not of that ugly old codger my mother had to marry.’”

  “Son of a gypsy?” Madame grasped at that so eagerly she did not notice the Count’s imposing nudity.

  “That was just an expression of closeness with the man his mother truly loved.”

  Madame considered, considered. “Of course he could not be the son of the Gypsy. The Contessa and her lover had been separated for a year —”

  “— yes, and the consummation of the renewal of their love was interrupted; she told me that herself.”

  “And all of it occurred in the tulip garden,” Madame said. “Hmmm.”

  My recollections of that day with my beloved Count du Muir, when he had proclaimed himself the “proud son of a gypsy,” had led me into darker moments, which I narrated to Madame: “My beloved Count detested his father — whom he referred to only as ‘the ugly old codger my mother was forced to marry,’ a ruthless man who justified any barbarity to assert his power — that’s how the Count described him, always with rage, Madame. ‘The old codger’ had betrayed his first wife constantly, and when their grown son and a close friend were charged with treason against the Crown — ‘so mysteriously,’ my beloved Count told me — the old man had refused to intercede, and the son and his friend were assaulted by a mob. My beloved, whose compassion embraced all the violated, Madame, could only gasp at the horror of those deaths.”

  Madame extended her contemplation so long, and so sadly — and the evoked violence was so harsh — I had imagined the frenzied mob as vividly as if it, too, belonged to my memories — that I forced my attention away, to the silk floss trees blooming in profusion and already spinning their gauzy veils, which draped their trunks gracefully. The blossoms had assumed a deeper shade, their former pink closer to red, even purple. The burst of yellow in their centers seemed paler, and so even more startling. I noticed that the leaves, darker green than —

  “There are so many secrets. What the old man did to his first wife, how he was involved in his first son’s horrifying death . . . Has it occurred to you, Lady” — Madame had leaned toward me, but I had not become aware of that until she had begun to speak — “that the object of murder in the Grand Cathedral was truly the Count? — not you. I believe we must consider that.”

  The Count’s murder as part of an extended plot in which I have become the central object? For me at this moment, that altered nothing; all that had been aroused by Madame’s words was the memory of his death in my arms . . . I touched the amber diamond on my finger, the ring the Count had placed there as his last gesture of eternal union, to assure that we would be forever husband and wife. They had been too late to stop that!

  “Oh, and by the way, Lady —”

  It would not be a casual observation.

  “— the man in that ‘Account’ of lies, the man referred to as ‘Reverend’ —

  She was being careful; I would dissuade her caution: “He’s referred to as the Reverend Pimp, Madame.”

  “Yes, him. Of course, the ‘Account’ distorts everything, relying on its effect by using only kernels of truth —”

  “You want to know — don’t you, Madame? — whether that man has an antecedent in . . . reality?” What an odd ring that word has. Reality . . . I closed my eyes and heard words spoken by my voice: “For years, Madame, I didn’t know that what I called my life was . . . drift, just drift. Within that drift, a man convinced me to stay afloat, just afloat, to believe that I was swimming while I continued to drown. I confused all that with love, even his cruelty —”

  “— the man pursuing you with a knife during the night’s events distorted in this ‘Account’?” How gently Madame was able to speak those harsh words!

  “Yes, a man turned cruel in the most terrifying way” — I touched my stomach — “a man I left forever. That was when I met my beloved —”

  “— the Count du Muir.”

  “Yes — who shared everything with me, exquisite love, and even the pain of the past that I had fled but which had left open wounds he tried to cauterize with love.”

  “And the other man —?”

  “The allegiance this ‘Account’ asserts no longer exists. The writers assign him a prolonged role for only one reason — to remind me of a bitter past, where he belongs — and he belongs only there now.”

  “I understand entirely.”

  X

  I MANAGED TO SLEEP A PART OF THE NIGHT.

  I did not realize how fitfully until now, when I see evidence of my restless tossings on the tangled covers. Dawn finds me standing naked by my window. I part the drapes to invite some warmth to dry last night’s tears; I just saw the moisture on my pillows . . . Even before I draw the drapes — they must be changed as soon as my period of meditation is over; I noticed a mote of dust free itself into the air — I know it will be a drear day, a day in seasonless limbo, without even the full drama of a storm.

  I slip into my robe. The pages of the despised “Acco
unt” rest on a table marbled with intricate dark veins; I’ve placed the noxious pages next to my gun. I shall take the pages with me every afternoon to tea, to proceed at appropriate times to deal with their relevance to our journey.

  How desolate gray light turns even this lush landscape when it drapes it in gloom — but especially so the huge patch of barren land beyond the road, acres stripped by a fire that raged a year or so ago and in seconds devoured everything on the hills. Slowly, new life is claiming the seared acres. I notice swatches of purple heather among weedy bracken that has managed to produce tiny desperate flowers. Near gnarled branches of dead oaks, soft plumes of foxtail ferns attempt to disguise patches of scorched earth. Laurel shrubs dot the area with green and yellow. The blackened trunk of a palm tree has succeeded in yielding new green fronds that open, triumphantly, above the ashes.

  How persistent life is!

  Look beyond at the destitute figures emerging from their hiding places exposed by twilight, preparing for yet another day of . . . what? Nothing. I see a group of them piling their pitiful belongings into their carts to be carried . . . where? Nowhere.

  As soon as interviews are over, I shall open the gates of my estate to these poor creatures and divide my wealth among them. I believe that I have become, under Madame Bernice’s expert tutelage, an egalitarian. She has told me she eventually shall share her fortune similarly, retaining a few of her cherished jewels. She will, of course, make sure that she and Ermenegildo have ample comfort; she shall deprive him of nothing. Madame is already such an “egalitarian” — her marvelous word — that she dismisses the servants immediately after everything has been set — correctly, of course — for tea.

  As it was, set perfectly, when I arrived at her château this afternoon.

  “I admire your eagerness to share your wealth, but that must wait,” Madame asserted. The way she had poured our tea — elaborately sniffing at it — inhaling it — made me suspect what I would soon affirm: She was trying out a new brew. I longed to love it.