by Joanne Weber
I am not as free as I would like to think and neither was Mariana. Her convent quarters became a harsh and unyielding landscape. Many hours of tears, boredom, and more tears. Boredom drilling its way into her skull like merciless sun on unprotected skin. In the end, what does she find, travelling in her cell? I think I know and I don’t have to go to Portugal to find it. I don’t have to travel anywhere, anymore, but I go to find the words to talk about it. With Mariana’s help, I will explain it to myself one more time.
I turn toward Murray. He is sleeping again. I laugh. I turn over again to dream of a scorched landscape and a marriage bed in the midst of a dilapidated old house, with broken furniture, and walls partially torn away, where I must walk through a maze of rooms with torn linoleum, broken windows, scattered tools, to the bed covered with a shining white quilt, where the sheets are fresh and clean.
BOOK TWO
Sixteen
SIMON AND I HAD A FIVE week trip ahead of us, an itinerary including Athens, Rome, Florence, Assisi, and Paris, and we’d just begun our first leg of the journey: Oxford. At twenty-five, I’d just warmed up to the idea of marrying this university professor. This strange, eccentric, lonely man who waved in such a funny way, arm at the waist, twisting his wrist in such an abrupt manner, who lived alone, stuffed every nook and cranny of his basement suite with plastic bags, and was months behind in marking his university papers but who was also the man who encouraged me to sing to him, who made up little ditties that we sang together while we prowled the streets of Saskatoon late at night, even if my voice was impossible and I sang off-key, our voices reverberating among the blue-black branches of trees lit by street lamps, who taught me “confutati, maledicti” from Mozart’s Requiem Mass and the Welsh hymn, “All Through the Night”. Simon had a BBC English accent, spoke Latin, Italian, and French, was writing a paper on the love between Penelope and Odysseus, and I critiqued his writing, delighting to find out that he thought of me as he wrote of Odysseus rising from the Ithaca shore, caked with brine, yearning for Penelope but fearing that she had not kept their marriage bed intact. He was that crazy about me, and I vowed to be his Penelope forever, though he was so sad, haunted, riddled by years of failed relationships with women.
Simon’s hangdog eyes seemed sunken further into his head, his salad bowl haircut seemed even more impossible, I reached for his hand, but he let go of it immediately, conscious of our new arrangement, four days ago, we flew in from Saskatoon, to announce our engagement to his parents in Cardiff, Wales, and after two days of visiting with his mother, who declared loudly, that she loved me, Simon decided that he didn’t want to marry me, thus:
PENELOPE: “ . . . !”
ODYSSEUS: “I just don’t know what happened. I just don’t love you anymore. I have no desire to go through with this marriage.”
Simon and I walked among the glass topped-tables showing illuminated pages in the Bodleian listening to a man singing a line of the Gregorian chant, pausing at each exhibit, the pages dappled brown with an enormous letter at the top, adorned with entwined gold-embossed loops, the gold leaf glittering, mostly in the upper left hand corner. We waited listening to haunting melodies rising from the glass tables nearby, Simon bending his head to me and whispering that he thought the man must be a musicologist, specializing in the plainchant and a bit arrogant to sing each line as it appeared on each of the pages under glass, and I looked around, and I thought: No one seems to mind. We are all transfixed. It was a moment of reprieve, it was an interruption to the long howl of fury and grief, that sonorous tone forever present in my ears.
Dragon Journal
The first time I saw a dragon was on a signpost announcing Cardiff in Wales. Dragons were everywhere, on flags, traffic signs, the corner bars. The dragons seemed to remind me: again, I’m not loved. Simon is only impressed with my intelligence, my tenacity, and my success at overcoming my deafness. I collect jewels, intellectual gifts and knowledge, and hoard them and now he sees beyond my jewel-studded breast. He has reached the limit of his admiration for me.
I put down my pencil. I was a dragon? Dragons were greedy, with jewels embedded in their underbelly. In my more honest moments, I thought: who was Simon to me? Answer: a university, an endless fountain of words. But hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.
Simon went to the Balliol chapel to pray, his eyes sunken with guilt, demanded that we attend mass every day, but I didn’t want to, seeing that it was an useless exercise in atonement only to appease Simon’s guilt. He was kneeling in the pew while I wandered restlessly in the back, until I found a door, and a spiral staircase up to the choir loft. High up in the loft, I sat on a wooden bench, and peered over the rail at Simon’s head, that mess of loose curls, and the sweat blooming under his armpits and down the back of his shirt. A Dominican monk came sweeping over to me, tucking his hands into the great folds of his sleeves. Although we were sheltered by the heavy medieval stone walls from the sunny day outside, I could see beads of sweat on the monk’s forehead as he shifted in his white habit.
SWEATING MONK: “Can I help you?”
Tears quivering in my eye sockets, me tilting my head upwards to prevent them from travelling down my face, me gesturing at Simon down below, unable to express the impotency to the monk before me, the futility of going through another failed relationship, and he glanced down at Simon, who was still kneeling.
MONK: “Come,” (Gestures) “I have something to show you.”
From beneath his robes, he took out a ring with several keys and unlocked the door to a dry, cool room on the same floor as the choir loft. The room was small and cramped, several old leather bound tomes lined the shelves. The monk lifted down one of the books, and opened to an illuminated page.
He spoke to me in a soft tone: “The miniature is from the Office of the Virgin. You know, the Divine Office.”
Suddenly the rise and fall of the man’s chanting at the glass-topped tables in the Bodleian filled my ears. Phantom music.
The monk said: “This is the visit between Mary and Elizabeth. Look, Elizabeth is reaching to touch the Virgin’s swollen belly.”
My eyes took in Mary’s cobalt blue gown, the haloed heads of the women, holding hands as they talk, Zechariah, struck dumb, holding a crown high in the air behind Mary as if to name her queen of heaven, making signs with his hands because he refused to believe in the angel’s prediction of Elizabeth’s own pregnancy, angels striking him dumb, making him powerless, and the loop of the Carolingian script with crimson red and lapis lazuli flourishes, and the gold leafed initial adorned with baby’s breath. The furious howling in me stopped. I realized: I have come all this way, to England, for a page stored on the top floor in a medieval chapel. The page promises me life, beauty, and goodness beyond this difficult time. I thanked the monk, marvelling at how he endured the heat, mopping his forehead to give me a glimpse of that page, and returned to the balcony to watch Simon grieve below.
At Perugia, I woke up crying in the morning. Simon reached across to the single bed I was in and shook my shoulder, and that made me feel even worse. The fading of our intimacy was complete. The light of the morning sun came through the single window of the hotel room, casting a soft glow onto the red-tiled roofs outside. Later that morning, at Assisi, I didn’t want to go down to the lowest floor with Simon, to descend down the stone steps into the crypt of Clare below the basilica, but his voice was insistent: “Her body is perfectly preserved though it is over eight hundred years old.”
Before entering the stone archway that led to the descending spiral stairs, I whispered: “Have you seen her before?” I could scarcely breathe; there was something morbid about viewing a body whose remains are entirely intact.
Simon said: “Yes, about five years ago.”
I grabbed Simon’s hand, even though I was not supposed to. I didn’t want to see Clare of Assisi. I wanted to go up in the open air, feel the warm sun on my shoulders, and finally take this scarf off my head.
Simon pulled at
my sleeve, and said: “Come.”
I slowly walked past a glass case, where a woman lay in a dress covering most of her body. I willed myself to look at her head. It was partially covered by a wimple. Her hair was black, her skin a dark brown, dry as paper, but, nevertheless, skin.
I whispered: “Simon, doesn’t she seem like she’s breathing?”
He said: “Yes, but she isn’t. But she looks like she’s sleeping.”
Clare’s hands were folded under her breasts. I could see her knuckles twined with a rosary. The light in the crypt behind us mirrored my face in the glass against her body. She was one of the incorruptibles, one of the saints whose body had never decomposed. I stepped closer to the glass cage. Behind me, a line of people navigated the stone steps down to the crypt, captured by the idea that her body still had skin, bone, muscle, and hair, was a house whose spirit was still in the walls, floors, and foundation. I thought: Morbid curiosity.
I asked: “This isn’t a hoax is it?” Simon said: “No, this is confirmed to be real flesh.”
I said: “Let’s go up, right now.”
I wanted to be away from this woman who could not shed her own flesh, not even in death, I didn’t care how holy people thought she was, I only felt horror at her flesh refusing to melt off her bones, suddenly I had no patience with the Catholic preoccupation with bones and relics and their triumphant promotion of several saints as incorruptibles, the whole thing seemed so unnatural, I thought: Why hang on to our bodies? Who wants to remain in a wounded body, bloodied, torn, crippled, with heart and mind broken? Why not aspire to the realm of the spirit, or at least adopt a new body in reincarnation? And: The Catholics want to prove their own special point: Clare’s body and the bodies of all the other incorruptibles are permanent houses, even though their spirits are gone.
Then I was breathing in the open air of Assisi, and we were walking past the pink marble buildings to the walls of the ancient medieval town, and from a parapet I could see the rival town of Perugia in the distance. Simon was busy with the camera, working on a panoramic view of the horizon over the walls. I was breathing, this time with a certainty that I would survive this loss of love again. My breath animated my whole body, and I relaxed, as I tried to push out of my mind the image of Clare laying in that glass case in the crypt below.
I looked down to my breasts, lapping beneath my tank top, to the large, fringed scarf wrapped around my large hips, to my small, narrow feet interlaced with leather thongs, to Simon standing a foot away from me, his arm slack at his side, that, before our flight to England, was always twined around my waist, and I realized: Simon’s inability to form a commitment to me comes from his own inner torments, however mysterious and puzzling they are to me.
But my body cried out these days, aching for Simon’s touch. I couldn’t think, couldn’t read, and couldn’t sleep. I was overcome with a profound sadness. All the men in my life had loved me primarily for my mind, enthralled by my ability to live in the Hearing world.
Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” thrummed in my head, the voice of a young Leonard Cohen touching Suzanne’s perfect body with his mind even as we travelled by train that night, where I breathed in the sharp cold air of the Alps. In the morning, I awakened on the top bunk of the sleeping car, watching two girls across from our bunks prepare themselves for the morning stop in Paris. One of the girls motioned at Simon sitting on the bunk below me, and asked, in heavy, guttural English: “Are you with him?”
I shook my head: No. And to myself: I am alone with this deaf body, this imperfect house.
JOHANNA
I should plant a garden this year. Even a handful of herbs if nothing else. Murray offers to put our old pink bathtub out in the backyard just in time for spring. I look at him aghast until I realize that I missed the innocent lilt in his voice, his deadpan face. I should know this by now, I chide myself, how he pulls my leg, how I am gullible enough to take seriously his every gib and jibe.
I’d like to blame it on being deaf, but I can’t. It’s not about detecting those subtle inflections in his voice, it’s about paying too much attention to outward appearances. I understood that long ago in Assisi when I saw Clare in the crypt. I got it, really got that her body was her soul, that it was the house of her whole being. It didn’t even faze me to read, years later, that the leathery face I saw was exactly that, a leather mask placed over her decaying skull. Rather, it was all about where to focus my attention.
Yet I figured that the body and soul were two parallel lines that eventually converged. If I bent the lines in forty-five degree angles that, dammit, they’d meet. Or if I could catch every subtle nuance, every syllable uttered in the dialogue between my body and soul, between the deaf and hearing, then the two irreconcilable parts in me would become one. Now I know better. There is no dialogue. Just silence.
Murray chuckles at me gently when I roll my eyes at the bathtub being carried out the front door. I should know him well enough to know that he’d do this, pull my leg, I mean, but he’s so full of fickle and strange fancies. Murray is like quicksilver, not two separate substances, but not yet one. I have to pay attention to the silence growing in him and in me instead of relying on my faulty hearing. I have to travel between the not two and not yet one in him to find him as he is.
Seventeen
MY HEART LIFTED FINALLY, IN PARIS, as Simon and I boarded the train, as I looked through the windows at the racing trees and expected that they should be different somehow. Perhaps their leaves are octagonal? Perhaps they should be purple? Perhaps the bark should be made of rubber! And realized: The world has changed since Assisi, but I’m not sure how. Even Simon had noticed.
SIMON: “You are so much calmer now — much less angry and sad.”
MAYBE CHANGED JOANNE: “ . . . ”
The train lurched toward Chartres.
Dragon Journal
I am now a mere collector of experiences, a tourist in search of shiny bits of knowledge, history, trivia, and facts. I am sitting on intellectual jewels. These are my treasures: Assisi, Clare in the crypt, the medieval plainchant at Oxford, and illuminated manuscripts. Now they are implanted into my chest like a shield.
I wound my way through the thick stone pillars at Chartres Cathedral, my neck aching as I studied the rose windows. The light was weak and the flagstones were cold beneath my feet. I was in sandals and jeans and a wool sweater against the damp. Delicate pools of light emanated from the tall panels and roses of stained glass: brilliant, rich colours; saturated hues of red, blue, violet, and green; figures on horses; people kneeling and weeping before a prostrate body, palms outstretched, somber eyes, and downturned mouths; all fractured by the thick black leaded lines separating the panes of glass.
Near the centre of the cathedral, I noticed a path on the floor approximately a foot wide. The inset stones formed sinuous loops. As I rounded a corner I saw that the loops were a circle. Its centre was inlaid with a flower of stone. I balanced carefully to keep on my path and held my breath. I remembered: Floor labyrinths were put into cathedrals during the Middle Ages to accommodate those who longed to go on pilgrimages but were too infirm or poor to travel. Usually, the pilgrims would walk these stone paths on their knees.
One loop promised to bring me close to the centre but suddenly veered away, taking me near the outside of the labyrinth, far from the stone flower in the centre. I thought: How many times have I thought myself so close to the truth only to suddenly discover myself so far away?
I saw a young man ahead of me on another loop and wanted to skip across to him because I thought he was Kevin. I studied philosophy with him in Saskatoon, he was the one who called me Johanna, Johanna of God, he wrote in his letters to me, and my asking, Why do you call me that name? and his answer: Because it’s the essence of who you are.
We studied Thomas Aquinas, because we wanted to get to the bottom of everything, once and for all, attending classes in Professor McCullough’s attic, because he preferred to teach us (four young men
and me) philosophy in his home. Professor McCullough and the young men bowed their heads over their Aquinas texts on prudentia, and I, Joanne, sat beside the grand piano, in the attic, staring upwards at the polished wooden beams, thinking: I thought attics were dirty, dusty places, crammed with boxes and odd-shaped objects, perhaps a fishing pole, oversized boots, and boxes of books read a century ago, but this attic is warm, clean, comfortable, and safe.
There was only one problem with Kevin. He was too handsome with his aquiline nose, the finely sculptured body, his hair (reddish brown), his eyes (frank and searching), his mouth (perfectly formed). I became afraid. My deafness is going to mar Kevin’s acceptance of me. I am a rather plain woman, with a rather nasal voice, and articulation errors. It’s only a matter of time until the soulmate bubble will burst.
Then it happened. Kevin made a joke about how I was not able to hear something he thought I should have been able to hear. I fled. Away from him. Slammed the heavy College door in his face. I arrived home several hours later, after tramping along the river that snaked below campus. I found a new coffee mug on my desk, filled with chocolates and a hastily-scribbled note: I wounded you in a deep way tonight, deeper than most people who are in your heart do. For I belittled you unknowingly . . . unwittingly I showed you all of your inadequacies that are the most painful because there is nothing you can do about them, O Johanna of God, Johanna the Controller, Johanna the Beautiful and Wise, Johanna the Defective and Incomplete.
I stiffened at the word, “defective.” He had left me with nothing to salvage. “Defective” was the final blow. I refused to speak to him again, despite his desperate entreaties.
Chartres. The sinuous loop brought me close to the centre again. The stone flower was on my left, pocked with age. I thought: There he is! On the loop to the right! Kevin! I reached out to touch his arm as he walked past. He turned around. The face was not his.