A Saint from Texas

by Edmund White

  After a few weeks of that I thought of arranging to see her one-on-one when I discovered that they were already seeing each other privately, and I was livid. I had pickpocketed Ercole’s agenda and found a date and time and Helen’s name. I confronted him and he shrugged and said, “I thought we were all evolved.”

  “Evolved? What does that mean? Walking on hind legs?” I asked.

  “Sophisticated. Free. After all, you’re a married woman. Your husband could be the indignant one.” I must have looked close to tears; Ercole, who was kind, said, “It was only the one time. I was just curious. And randy.”

  “Was she the one who made the date, or was it you?”

  He just smiled mysteriously.

  “Answer me,” I insisted, though I knew in our world—their world—insistence was a breach of etiquette.

  “I honestly don’t remember,” he said in a quiet voice. I had to lean in to hear him. I realized I’d raised my voice and his soft tone was a rebuke.

  I started discussing our musical salon. I hated being the jealous one, the angry one, the slighted one. In high school and college I’d always been careful to be pursued, never to pursue, to leave and not be left. Easier to stay in control when you’re self-centered, as I was in school; I was genuinely indifferent to everything back then—rich, beautiful, a debutante, careless about the hearts I broke, about the bad grades I earned, about the friends I neglected and the friendships that lapsed. I could always retreat back into the fiction of childhood, the age that avoids all consequences. At the beginning with Ercole I’d been a mystery, partly because I was a foreigner given to strange gaffes, partly because I’d played the dominatrix, partly because I’d expected nothing of him except to playact at obedience.

  I recovered, or at least I convinced him, I think, that all was forgiven and I’d probably forgotten the whole incident. I thought that to be successful in love requires a certain courage, an acting as if one is sane, self-respecting, autonomous, an ability to fake it till you make it. Jane Beth used to talk about being “cool,” which I think was a word out of the jazz milieu, something that black men on heroin could impersonate, whereas in reality they were spooked by the possibility of being busted for drugs, they had stagefright like all performers, they wanted the respect of silent attentiveness from this drunk, noisy, giggling audience of white people rattling forks on plates and talking—oh, they had to be cool as they improvised on their instruments, skirting audaciously around the melody, observing the chord progressions while squeaking and spluttering ever more wildly—the coolness of carved ebony gods stiff in their hieratic elegance, their unreadable faces, fluid in their improvisations.

  I wiped my hand over my face and refocused. I had to be casual, insouciant, self-respecting, but in fact I was very hurt. Maybe because I’d failed with Addy, or rather he’d failed me. From time to time—as in now—I panicked when I realized I was far from Dallas, cut off from my language, incapable of assuming any word or gesture, of even finding the switch on a light or the ground floor on an elevator. What if I became gravely ill or paralyzed? Who would take care of me? Or if I had a stroke and could no longer speak or understand French? I knew for sure that I didn’t want to die abroad.

  About a week later I took my French tutor, Berenice, a nice, extremely thin woman from Amiens who overarticulated in an upwardly mobile way, to dinner at Le Voltaire. The owner and his wife seemed embarrassed and wanted to seat us for some reason in the secondary room, not the one looking out on the Seine but the one at the end of the corridor on the right. “But we’ll sit at my usual table,” I said, irritated that they would try to shunt me off. Was it because we were two unaccompanied women? As soon as they led us in, I saw a friend, the Trieste composer Raffaello de Banfield, who was eating alone and kissed me on both cheeks; he was very rich and was partially subsidizing my musical evenings, even though his one-act opera (I’d heard a recording), Lord Byron’s Love Letter, was sub-Puccini and infinitely easier on the ears than my lot’s music. His opera had been performed (with Raffaello conducting) because the libretto was by Tennessee Williams.

  Then I saw Ercole in the back booth with Helen, where now the Baron Redé sits with Charlotte Aillaud, Juliette Greco’s sister. But Ercole and Helen were just as cozy, kissing each other like lovebirds. I signaled the waiter and said we’d like to be in the other room after all. My guest felt there was a draft in here. Luckily Berenice was hyper-discreet and didn’t question me or object. We made it out without being spotted.

  CHAPTER 13

  Dear Yvonne,

  I thought I’d write you on our birthday, August 8, though who knows how long it will take for this letter to reach you. I don’t believe in astrology but I guess we’re Leos, which should be a warning for me, a lesson in humility. People say Leo women like to be in charge, in control, and are very susceptible to flattery. Maybe that’s why I work so hard to obey, to follow, to be humble, since I must fight my natural inclinations. Do you like to be in control? You write that Adhéaume is spending all your money and has moved his parents into the restored castle. You mention being unhappy in love. Do you mean with Adhéaume or with someone else? (Forgive me if I’m infringing on your privacy—I’m not accusing you of adultery!) I’m glad to hear you’re tending a music salon; Saint Cecilia is one of my favorite saints and the music of Bach and Palestrina seems to me God’s speech. It must be so delicious to live in that ethereal realm of endless melody, the most universal of all the arts (though no two people can agree on what a piece of music “means”).

  Here I am in Jericó and I’m reminded of the passage (Luke 19: 1–10) wherein Our Lord was wandering through that town, the Jericho in the Bible, and a rich man, the tax collector, Zacchaeus, who’s very short, climbs up a tree in order to see Him. Jesus, spying him, says, “Zacchaeus, come down, for I want to go to your house. I want to stay at your house.” And Zacchaeus does come down and leads Jesus to his house. But the people are grumbling that Jesus should stay with such an evil man. Before long they overhear him declaring to Jesus, “I am going to give half my property to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody I will pay him back four times the amount.” And Jesus says, “Zacchaeus, today happiness has come to your house.”

  When I asked my bishop what was the meaning of this passage, he said that the true meaning of a genuine conversion must be expressed in deeds. And I wondered what deeds of mine grew out of my conversion. And I thought I would follow Zacchaeus’s example and distribute alms to all the poor of the village, but it caused the most awful stampede of greed and grasping and beggars flooding the town crying and begging, so then I decided to dedicate a richly gilt and painted and stuccoed (they do the most marvelous stuccos here in the Portuguese style) chapel to Saint Catherine of Siena. Our missionary order, as you know, is dedicated to Saint Catherine. Concealing my own identity and working through the bishop, we assembled the most wonderful team of artisans, who illustrated the miracles of Saint Catherine. I was most affected by the one in which Saint Catherine exchanged hearts with God. Afterward she ate nothing but holy sacraments, the body and blood of Our Lord, which she feasted on daily. The local artisan portrayed Catherine as a brown-skinned indigenous woman in her white wimple and God as a cloud-borne deity, brown-skinned and slightly chubby. They held out bleeding hearts to each other, which looked like hunks of venison. After God implanted his heart in her body he sealed it and the scar could be seen ever after. Catherine is the patron saint of journalists because she wrote hundreds of letters. In one panel the artist depicts a journalist with a cigarette in his mouth banging away on his typewriter. It’s all delightfully fresh and naive and infused with God’s grace. One side panel renders the Crucifixion with the Blessed Virgin kneeling at the foot of the Cross. The other side panel is of our local religious, Blessed Laura Montoya, healing a few indigenous people, who look like exposed tree roots.

  We had a solemn Mass to celebrate the unveiling of “my” altar; Bishop Oscar officiated. His sermon was all about Saint Cat
herine, who may have been an obedient nun but was a headstrong daughter. She defied her father’s wish for her to marry her dead sister’s widower. Instead she wedded Christ in a mystical marriage; her rather unusual wedding ring was Jesus’s foreskin—which is the only part of him he left on earth since he ascended bodily to Heaven. You may think of the saints and the Trinity as vague and ethereal, but as you can see their faith and deeds were often daring, even scandalous.

  I was unable to get the image of Jesus’s foreskin slipping over Catherine’s emaciated finger out of my mind. I confessed this unseemly thought to Bishop Oscar and he told me that I should regard it not as a temptation from the Devil but as a great blessing from God. Once he gave me permission to entertain this shocking thought, it was as if in my dreams and daydreams I was now free to lie down with my Lord, with his broken, livid, painfully thin body, which I’d contemplated so often suffering on the Cross. I knew his body better than my own; when I bathe, like all the nuns, I wear a simple loose-fitting smock into the tub, disguising all my shameful parts, and I wash myself sight unseen. I’ve mentioned before the spell cast on me by the odor of Oscar’s perspiration. In my mystical embrace of Jesus’s body this odor was combined with the sweet perfume of incense rising from the priest’s swinging thurible.

  In her Dialogue Saint Catherine hears from God himself that the meaning of the verse, “Whenever two or three will gather in my name …” is that the solitary individual cannot worship alone but must be joined by at least one other person, the Friend. I asked Bishop Oscar how he interpreted this passage and he said, “It’s obvious. God cannot hear the hermit. He or she must join in prayer and adoration with at least one other person. ‘If there be two or three or more gathered together in My name, I will be in the midst of them.’ ” I waited for Oscar to draw the parallel with us. I looked at him hungrily. (Saint Catherine thinks the pious must be hungry for God’s grace.) Oscar blushed and looked away and said, “We are Friends in Jesus. Together we contemplate him hanging by his arms from the wood of his Sacred Cross, suffering for our redemption. He is God and man rolled into one; God is like the yeast that makes the bread rise.”

  I was so moved Oscar thought of me as a friend that I smiled. In that moment I was guilty of self-love. I think, sensing my sinful feelings, Bishop Oscar told me, “When Christ was crucified, his body became disgusting. He suffered more than anyone ever suffered. Blood and tears and saliva and pain poured forth from him. He was horrifying and his death shameful. He died between two thieves. He was like a worm in the dust. You must contemplate him with repugnance. If you want to measure the gravity of your sins you must look at his twisted, bleeding, repugnant body and say to yourself, ‘I have left him like this. I killed him. To clean me of my filth he became filth.’ Never forget that in order to redeem us God kneaded the human into the divine—and it was as a human he suffered for us and redeemed Adam’s sin.”

  I had rarely heard the bishop speak with such urgency. He really did want us to see that Jesus was human and that his suffering was unbearable, that he wasn’t some sort of impervious divinity, that the nails drove into his flesh and that the spear gored his side, that he suffered from the soldiers’ mockery, that he felt abandoned just as we would.

  How are the children? It must be odd to have fraternal not identical twins, to see the differences between male and female. Of course, you and I may be identical in body but maybe not in spirit—or maybe yes, that your spirit is as virginal as mine, as fierce and militant, though I strive to be humble and meek. And maybe I am as sensual as you, though I want so desperately to be pure. The least pure thing about me is that when I think of my marriage to Jesus, to surrendering to his sweet embrace, or when I think of Saint Catherine’s wedding ring, I feel waves of heat crawl up my torso to turn my neck and face red in strange blotches of fever blossom and (I would confide this only to you) my vagina becomes extremely wet. We sprang from the same zygote—do you have these symptoms of desire and ecstasy? For me they are painful proof of the Old Man, the unredeemed part of me; they are my stigmata, as in stigma.

  Did you know Saint Catherine had a twin sister who died at birth?

  You must think I’ve gone crazy with piety. And yet I love my students, and my little future priest, my postulant, has become very good at Greek. I think the diocese will try to send him to Rome to study the classics and theology. He’s a tiny thing; I think his body was stunted from hunger. But not his mind! He is curious about everything and often he asks me questions about the scientific nature of the world I am unable to answer.

  Oscar’s best male friend, a very outspoken priest from El Salvador named Father José, has been assassinated, mowed down in the street by gangsters in a passing Chevrolet. His parish was in Chocó, a nearby coastal town, where he would preach against the authorities and the landowners. The cardinal tried to silence him, but he kept denouncing the enemies of the people and reminding them that God did not want anyone to be landless or hungry. He saw how the landowners held their campesinos in virtual slavery. I’m reminded of the Roman centurion who asked Jesus to cure his ailing slave. Jesus said, “Bring him to me,” and the centurion said, “If you say a prayer he will be cured no matter where he is.” Jesus was astonished and said, “I have never seen such faith, not even in Israel,” and the slave was healed. For me the centurion’s concern for his slave is the remarkable part of the story. In the eyes of God no man is a slave. We must love one another, even if they dislike us. We must love the murderers.

  Bishop Oscar was so saddened by this event, the death of Father José, that he said, “This will be my fate, too.”

  “Oh, don’t be foolish.”

  He thought for a moment and said, “Our faith—yours and mine—is folly. Our God is a fool; he’s mad with love for us.”

  “But you do such good works. You must live for the sake of others.”

  Bishop Oscar said, “God will continue His work. He has other soldiers. I am happy to die for the Church Triumphant.”

  This is preposterous, I thought, and wondered if there really was a God and if Jesus had been just some desert charlatan and I’d been worked for my money.

  I could smell the sulfur in the air and knew the Devil had visited me. In bed that night I said a hundred Hail Marys and two hundred Our Fathers. God forgave me and shed his grace on me.

  I was the only attractive, educated, sophisticated woman among the religious. The others were squat, simpering, childish, simple; they were also all Colombian, undoubtedly the homely, unmarriageable younger sisters, and one childish Filipino.

  There! I’ve said it and will never have to say it again.

  You’ve never seen anything more absurd than all these buxom women playing catch during recreation, bobbing up and down in their long black dresses and white wimples. Or the way they were all giggling inanely when we took our first vows, glancing at one another slyly or at least with complicity, and smiling with foolish radiance when the Mother Superior called out their names and they went up to the altar to receive the priest’s blessing and a prayer card with a silly rhyme in Spanish and a poorly printed color picture of the Blessed Laura. They all got encouraging nods and smiles and giggles from the other postulants when their name was spoken through the loud speakers; they knelt among the Easter lilies they themselves had placed around the altar only an hour before. In the audience were their tall, skinny brothers in shoes and no socks, their shiny black hair parted on the side (the girls’ hair was parted down the middle), here and there holding aloft a child the better to see, the child sucking a dirty thumb, her pink bow coming undone or his eyes falling shut in the spring heat. Here were the wide mothers dressed in black, smiling toothlessly, or the wizened grandfather with his hollow cheeks and four days’ unshaved white stubble.

  Just to prove to you I’m not entirely negative, there is one person here I adore—Mercedes, a chatty, smiley Filipino woman. Maybe it’s because she’s physically attractive. Funny. Reasonably good English. Big heart.

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nbsp; I think we may accompany my student to Rome together. And, of course, I respect our Mother Superior. And don’t get me wrong. I love the atmosphere of our convent and its wonderful alternation between silent contemplation and cheerful industry. We make candles by filling long, slender upside-down molds with pure white wax. We bake tasteless tortillas and then stamp out piles and piles of the hosts, all the while saying prayers. We tailor and sew holy vestments, altar clothes, banners. We grow our own food. We run an infirmary. We’re always providing supplies and sleeping bags for missionary nuns (that’s our main purpose) to travel into the jungle to clothe, convert, and feed the indigenous people. Unwanted babies (mostly girls) are “exposed” on our doorstep and we take them in and raise them in our orphanage. We give them names, change their diapers, teach them to sing, encourage them in school, patrol their dorms after lights-out, try to keep the teens (with varying results) from smoking, drinking, and getting pregnant. I like to sit in on chemistry and biology classes—subjects that never interested me in the past, as you well know. Because of my tutoring I’ve kept up my Latin and Greek and I’ve even tried my hand at translating Book IV of The Aeneid into English (and Spanish) verse. I read Spanish poets (Quevedo is my favorite). I also like the dramatist Valle-Inclán because he’s funny (but so satirical; he may be on the Index, I’ll have to check).