I stood and stared for minutes, not even blinking, feeling the heat pour from the stoked fire. If I felt sorrow for him, it was buried under the years of abuse I’d suffered at his hands since being wed to him at the age of nine. I was dismayed by the sight and stench of the Mongols who’d fed each of my sons into the ovens before Manu, making certain he’d lived long enough to watch.
“Now let’s see what a fine bread you make,” joked one of the muscle-bound invaders.
Manu screamed. But above even that I could hear the awful popping of his greasy skin.
The Mongols pulled them out from time to time, using tongs to pinch off bits of their cooked flesh to eat. Faces bubbled, puffed, sloughed away. Eyes blackened like balls of sweetened rice or melted like globes of ice. I watched with a terrible fascination, unable to move my feet, to turn around, to run.
The Mongols had known I was there for some time but had ignored me, as if aware I was observing, confident I couldn’t do anything to try to save myself.
There were hops and skips in what happened after. I think I’d been struck on the back of my head with the flat of a sword. I was considering the smell of human flesh as being very similar to that of lamb, fennel seed, and sweet kewra water. I was believing that the whole world was coming apart as the sounds of the city being broken and looted shook the air around me.
And then—nothing—well, a swirling… A sense of being ripped up the middle by danavas. These demons were hung like elephants and used their fangs like the Vetala, which was one of the vampire races of our country.
I imagined them hanging like bats, upside down from frangipani trees in some temple garden, gathering me up in their leathery arms as I’d pass by with an offering for the goddess. Each one took a big bite from my breasts or shoulders or belly, and then set me down again to continue to walk on to the altar. As if I wasn’t bleeding a trail of red lotuses across the grass, and as if there weren’t pieces of me lost in the unlighted dimensions of their guts.
And when I came to and indeed found myself in a temple, crimson flowers just like those I was dreaming of lay around me, strewn so profusely they might have been pools of blood. And there were mouth-shaped gouges on my naked torso. It was dark outside. Was it the same night Tamerlane’s army had attacked the city—or was it the next? Was this even the same incarnation? Did the wheel as it was taught to us stop and start, not continuing on around and around in a fluid, dependable motion?
I wondered if I’d already passed on. My soul might have slipped into the body of another woman who had just been raped by an army and then dumped in some temple as if she were no more than a sacrificed goat. Because this couldn’t be my body. Not this pitiful, ruined rag.
(If it were my own, wouldn’t it be burned? Wouldn’t the Mongols have stuffed me into the bread oven, too?)
I’d been left there or had crawled, ashes of my family dusting me like Shiva was covered when he danced on cremation grounds. I blinked. There really was blood everywhere. Pieces of sheep were hacked up and spread about. Other creatures, large and small, were unidentifiable because of mutilation. There were furs and hides and severed, sightless heads with horns. From sacrifices made daily to Kali.
For this was her temple. I felt a need to show my respect. I tried to sit up, so I could formerly bow and make prayers. But something pinned me down, sharply shattering my axis—as the middle of us is what gives us all balance. I discovered the Turkish blade which had been slipped inside my womb, as if in its own sheathe. The flowers scattered about the temple really were floating in the pond of my blood.
A figure stepped gracefully from the shadows. She gestured down toward me with her four arms. She was black all over, like the night. Like the darkness I’d just survived and was now falling back into. The sky was spinning, revealing the wheel of incarnation I was about to climb aboard. I tried to spread wide my arms in a gesture of welcome, to death and to her. But my arms were already outflung. One of them was actually several feet from the shoulder, resting amid the entrails of some nameless, herd animal.
Kali leaned very close, actually letting me touch the skulls she wore on the necklace around her slender throat. She took my one good hand and rubbed my fingertips across the edges of her glittering teeth. She touched my forehead with one of her fingers, leaving a castemark of blood, as if in choosing or blessing or both. I could smell gore on her feet where she’d walked across the slaughtered offerings. I could smell the raw musk of her as if she’d just given birth a million times over.
“I dreamed of vampires,” I whispered, realizing my voice was too soft because my throat had been slashed, partially cutting the vocal cords.
“Did this frighten you?” the goddess asked.
“Not really. I kept going on, bringing my offerings to you,” I replied, forcing the words out across tides of pain. Even as I realized she would have heard me even if I’d had no voice left at all. I managed to smile, thinking about it having been night and then becoming night again.
Did she read these thoughts? For she said, “That is what rebirth is: darkness at both ends. It is how we are reborn. Out of darkness every time.”
And then she held me as I died, my face pressed gratefully between her breasts. The severed heads turned to watch us. I was sure there was no better place for death.
««—»»
Time swirled into the sixteenth century. I was a camp follower with the army of Cortés. The Aztecs were celebrating the festival of Tlacaxipehualiztli as the Spanish took positions in the broad, swept plaza.
It was the most beautiful city we had ever seen—without equal. It was like nothing we had in Europe—not in Barcelona, Paris, Venice. Not even the Moorish mosques with their gleaming, perfect minarets could rival this. There were no slums. There were no piles of garbage overrun with rats. People did not use the streets as open toilets. The citizens weren’t festooned with boils and smallpox and lice. Their homes were black and white and gold, with architectural lines as straight as sunlight.
Of course, we simply had to tear it down. The religion thing was only an excuse. They could have been Roman Catholics. They might have been just the same as us and we would have found a reason to attack. It was why I had come along, making the horrible sea journey, sick on the waves and screaming prayers during the storms. So I could be a part of this great undertaking, getting a front row seat to the rape and pillage that expeditions were about. If they were not intended to be thus, the explorers would bring only men of science—not armies. They would not bring with them coffers for loot and shackles for slaves.
The soldiers were aiming muskets, dragging cannons.
“Carmen!” whispered my sometime-lover, Ernesto. “Get back with the other women. What are you doing up here?”
“I want to see,” I replied softly, smelling carnage in the air from the altars. I knew that more was coming. This was a main event and promised to be very entertaining.
Why, I’d wanted to be a soldier myself. Had practiced in secret with a sword, imagining armor cold and hard between my thighs, flat against my breasts. It wasn’t that I so much craved being able to kill others as much as I wanted to cause their blood to spray across my face, to redden my hair.
Would you believe it? I had actually tried to become a nun, scrubbing floors at a convent in Madrid. But I was thrown out because I kept approaching the sisters, offering to clean them. I was forced first to attend an auto-da-f‚, observing as the accused in conical caps were burned. The roasting flesh had sickened me.
“See what can happen to you if you’re not moral?”
Couldn’t be a soldier—the legendary deeds of Joan of Arc frowned upon by an as yet unenlightened, male-dominated papacy. Couldn’t be a bride of Jesus, knowing that was one cock I wouldn’t actually have to submit to. I didn’t deny to myself that I preferred women but men were more profitable. So I became a whore. And discovered that servicing troops was a good way to see the world.
“What these filthy heathen are doing isn’t
what any decent Christian woman should witness,” Ernesto hissed, the words snapping past his bushy black mustache. “Get back!”
But I sensed an epiphany in the air, creased with copper. Besides, what I’d seen of these Indians was anything but dirty. Compared with the conquistadores I traveled with and serviced, the Aztecs were fanatics about cleanliness. They bathed and regularly, too. Something no decent Christian bothered with. The Church thought it best we not look at our own bodies, just as we weren’t supposed to look at anyone else’s. The Inquisition didn’t teach that cleanliness was next to godliness, but burning witches and hacking up idolaters would be sure to get your dirty hide past the Pearly Gates.
I slid away from Ernesto so he would believe I’d obeyed him. The street was full of music, turtle shell drums and conch shell trumpets and armadillo shell rattles. Everywhere, brilliant color. Blues and greens in turquoise jewelry and corn leaves, feathered headdresses on gracefully swirling dancers, reds and yellows at the top of the temple in abundant blood and flesh. The priests were flaying their victims and donning the skins to represent Xipe Totec’s golden cloak. Small, severed hands dangled from their wrists like aristocratic gloves, waiting to be donned for a rosewater church service.
Then black powder stench and explosions. Dancers bodies came apart in their harvest plumage, bones popping like they were hollow, until I could almost believe that the soldiers had only opened fire on a flock of birds. People shrieked, and indeed they screamed like birds as everywhere they turned brought them up against another gun or cannon, baptizing their faces with iron.
I went up the temple steps in awe, barefooted with the blood which streamed down from the sacrifices running between my toes. It was surprising that I didn’t slip in it. The Aztecs who had been working so diligently—so cleverly—with their knives were killed. Those waiting in line to be sacrificed had also been slaughtered by our soldiers. Their bodies had been thrown down the temple steps to lie with those the priests had mangled in ritual. No distinctions were made. No one escaped.
There was one priest still at the altar, chest rising and falling slightly. A cannon ball had taken off his right shoulder and arm. Shattered bone stuck out from the rest, splintered, almost feathered until it resemble some part of a carved stone Quetzalcoatl.
I leaned down, staring at the purloined features which wrinkled across his face. He’d skinned it from one of the bodies which now lay at the bottom of those steps.
I knew this action… Somehow—even though this was not an outrage I’d performed myself—I’d seen or dreamed this thing. And it hadn’t been horrible but gorgeous. The visage of a red-haired woman flashed before me, rising like steam off the priest’s prone body.
Before I knew it I was reaching nimble fingers down to peel it away from him. It was slick and sticky as I placed it over my own forehead, cheeks and chin.
Glancing back down at the priest I saw he was conscious. He stared up at me and then smiled, as if approving of what I was doing. He shivered but managed to bring up his remaining arm, using the hand to point to a pillar with a large round disk carved onto it. Was it a representation of the sun? It was as round as a symbol they used. A zero. A nada.
The disc reminded me more of a wheel. The face carved inside might be the power within it—or it might be trapped inside it.
The priest made a circle with his finger, starting at the top, going around, ending in the same place.
I shrugged. What did that mean?
He died before he could tell me. I stood up, taking in the feel of the death mask on me. I stuck my tongue through the opening of the mouth, marveling at the flavor of that crimson honey. I peered through the slits for the eye sockets. I felt as if I’d been struck by lightning, my entire body stung, going rigid.
I began to dance, slowly gesticulating with hands out, wrists supple, feet taking me down a few basalt steps and then up again. My hips swayed and I arched my back. I sensed a compelling separation within, of an inner sublime removed from the outer baseness.
The Aztecs did this skinning thing to illustrate the spirit—freed from its shell—released back to the realm of the gods, return being an essential facet of the life cycle. Like a feathered serpent with its tail in its mouth, like a wheel…
I hugged my body down close to the black steps as if time was crushing me, then leapt back up as if I’d been released from that prison. Thinking in my head Terrible, Terrible, Wondrous and Lovely Terrible.
A hand came down on my shoulder, spinning me around. It was Ernesto, glaring at me in shock and disgust.
“What are you doing?” he demanded.
“Not now,” I sang, stroking the wet silk across my face, licking at its damp edges cupped around my lips. Oh, it really fit me so much better than it had that Indian priest. “I’m about to be reborn.”
His eyes burned as he spat. “Heretic.”
“Why Ernesto, you don’t seem half so revolting this way. I could kiss you and not want to throw up,” I said.
Then I grabbed him by his face and embraced him, waggling my tongue through the bloody lips of the mask and into his mouth. I felt the slime from it coat his dark lips.
Then I pushed him back and danced away, sensing my time coming, seeing the edge of some other—sweeter—universe approaching.
Ernesto shuddered and wiped his mouth. He glared at me as he spat out little wads of blood and saliva. The rancid saliva was his own but the blood had come from the gory flaps of the mask’s scooped embouchement.
“It isn’t so bad, is it? The flavor of it?” I queried. “It’s what that other destiny must be seasoned with. There, look, Ernesto! It’s the rim of a darker, wonderful world, fat on blood.”
I pointed to what I saw emerging through those scoured, vacant eyeholes. Ernesto was cursing in the Latin of the church as he took me by the arm and flung me down the temple steps. My breasts bruised into sacks of purpled fruit. My hips and neck cracked, my back snapping like castanets during a morisca. The mask fell away and I made an attempt to reach for it. But I couldn’t move in any direction I wanted to go. Down at the bottom of the steps, in the plaza where blood ran in narrow rivers, I crumpled like a broken bottle. My face had convulsed, expression shunted into one of sudden panic. My eyes had bulged and now rolled loosely in their sockets. I must have looked as if I’d witnessed a monster through the eyes of that mask until it had quite paralyzed me with horror. But I hadn’t. I’d seen only a beauty of sanguine infinity, and heard fire, water, wind…
A soldier hurried over to kneel beside me, knowing I was Spanish, like him. Thinking one of the Aztecs must have killed me.
He shuddered. “Madre de Dios! Your face!”
And I died, with the idea of how twisted I appeared somehow comforting me. A strange relic to take from one life into another. Odd how we lived for so many years only to be available for some brief revelation.
««—»»
“Mihnea Brancovic… Come out!”
“Basarab Frumos! Are you there? Answer if you are!”
“Ladislas Szilagy, have you become a demon bird of the night? Your widow claims you are…”
“Alceste Lormendi, Maria Faludi, Ilona Sima—I am waiting for you! Come out and be loved; come out and give me your love!”
In eighteenth century Rumania I was locked in an asylum for wandering lonely burial places, calling the names of suspected Strigoi. Vampires, yes. And who would beckon to vampires if not someone mad? I was lucky not to have been burned as a witch. They might have driven a stake through my heart for fear I’d been calling to a vampire who’d already tainted me, dooming me to rise up and drink the blood of others.
But I lived in an area with a university to enlighten it. And doctors who argued I was insane, not demonized. They kept me from the rough hands of superstitious peasants. I was delivered to a place where the demented were put to receive treatment. That is a picture which comes back to me now, striped with darkness, as if I recalled just every other heartbeat.
The place was more dungeon than hospital. I shared a “room” with a girl who had been diagnosed as catatonic—or whatever terminology those rudimentary mental specialists used then. She was only a child really, sitting like stone in a dark corner, no restraints on her since it was evident she lacked the capacity to try to struggle or escape. Shani was her name. Oily black hair hung over her eyes and nose so that only her white lips were what showed of her face. The pale mouth was strange against her dusky skin, as if it had been drawn on her face with chalk. Otherwise she was dark as a gypsy. She smelled very bad, of shit and vinegar. And she didn’t stir when I was dragged in. Nor when the jailer fondled my breasts, reaching his hand under my skirt to thrust a long, iron key up inside my womb. He brought it out again and up to my lips. It tasted cold and rusty, like an icicle of blood.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t let you be lonely. What do you want vampires for? I’ll suck any part you like.”
“Then suck something of hers,” I said, trying to shrug away from him. I jerked my thumb at my nonresponsive roommate. Not that I would have wished pain on a child but I was desperate to rid myself of the jailer’s touch.
“Ugh! That’s like sticking my tongue in a toilet,” he replied. “She wasn’t any better when she was brought in here six months ago, carried off a barge which came up the Danube from some place south. A priest said a band of Spanish sailors in a port down there bought her from a Turkish pimp and then raped her for days, but I can’t imagine how they could stomach her long enough.”
Days passed when no one else would come in except to push a bowl of soup under the door. I sat and stared at her, wondering what she looked like under the hair. Except for the white lips, she might have been beautiful. Except for the filth…
I listened to people screaming beyond our walls. Heard laughter like December wind, cold outside in the hallway. I wondered how she survived when she didn’t seem to eat anything.
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