by Edmund White
I could see how proud you were of them—perfectly understandable since I as a mere aunt was bursting with pride. They are so beautiful, dipped in silver, they smell so good, of clean clothes and fresh bread, they are anything but spoiled (though you say the contrary); strangely enough, I found something in them oddly beseeching.
I must consider your husband to be a monster because you say he’s one, but prima facie he seems courtly, attentive, even sweet, but that probably shows how naive I am, how easily impressed. Of course, we grew up among some good guys, but you have to admit the typical Texas man is tough going—egotistical, full of more appetite than courtesy, more macho than manly. Of course, I’m speaking of the natural as opposed to the supernatural man. And it’s my job as a Christian to find what’s salvageable in every person; when chatting with you I go back in time to our Ranger girlhood when I sneered at most boys, perhaps as a way of ignoring how they preferred you. Or perhaps I was just frightened by them, since Daddy had shown me how much harm a male could do.
We’re both lucky to live surrounded by so much beauty—I in my cool, quiet, tile-lined, scrupulously clean and orderly convent, the only rupture in its austerity the swirling gold confections of the chapel, the excesses of the Churrigueresque style, the shiny pastry-tubed extravagances of intricately carved and gilt cedar, framing painted life-size statues of royal saints (Saint Louis of France, Elizabeth of Hungary, Hermenegild, whose own father ordered him beheaded when he abandoned Arianism and became a Chalcedonian Christian). I live in a world measured by bells, prayers, meals, duties. You live in an almost equally peaceful world, one of soft voices, of prevailing fashions, radiating streets, exquisite food, frivolous pursuits, burnished surfaces, works of art in a city where traffic sounds are muted, honking illegal, a place misted by rain, where the height of buildings is regulated, where all items of street furniture (benches, grills around the base of trees, overhead lights, subway entrances, newspaper kiosks, public conveniences, and fountains) are uniform and identical, where billboards are outlawed, where a bulb is replaced as soon as it’s burned out, where the entire cityscape was designed by one man, empowered by one emperor, where everything is ruled by taste, where six different train stations serve the rather small population, a city that has more bookstores than all of America, including two that sell nothing but antique editions of Jules Verne. In my convent we all dress alike, discipline our thoughts and words, eat the same food at the same hours, prostrate ourselves before the same God; in your city, everyone cultivates his or her uniqueness, thinks his or her own thoughts, expresses different feelings, listens to different music, eats or fails to eat on his own schedule, bathes or neglects his hygiene, bursts with pride or shrivels with self-contempt, speaks in a hundred languages, falls in and out of love, skis in January, travels to the sea in August, invests in property, clothes, jewelry, lessons, trips. Is the goal to feel pleasure or achieve individuality? If Jericó for me is where personal desires die, Paris is the place where they thrive. It is the world capital of the ego, and, as Paul Valéry writes, Can you imagine the incomparable disorder that can be maintained by ten thousand essentially singular beings? Just imagine the temperature that can be produced in this one place by such a great number of prides, all comparing themselves. Paris contains and combines, and consummates or consumes most of the brilliant failures summoned by destiny to the delirious professions … This is the name I give to all those trades whose main tool is one’s opinion of oneself, and whose raw material is the opinion others have of you. He goes on to say these “unique people” want to do what no one has ever done and never will do. They are striving for the illusion that they alone exist, for superiority is “a solitude located at the current frontiers of the species.” I’ve been rereading Valéry, though his poems and prose are edifying if not pious.
Were you embarrassed by Mercy and me, the big black stork and the small round penguin? Did you hope none of your real friends would come by and be astonished by this freak, your sister? Your twin sister?
But we are twins, which permits me to wonder what your inner life must be like. Do you find solace in friends, your children, reading, your musical soirées? If there were ever a place calculated to seem an earthly paradise, it must be Paris—or at least the Paris of the rich. I suppose the Church counts on miserable multitudes, all those too poor or too ill or too ugly or too old or too stupid to find happiness in this world; but for the happy few of Paris, the present must seem worth giving up paradise for.
Bishop Oscar did not seem happy to see us back in Jericó. Possibly he is feeling the anxiety around us; the local landlords and gentry don’t like his weekly radio broadcasts in which he argues that the earth belongs to all of us and must be shared. Last week he said, “It is not God’s will for some to have everything and others to have nothing. That cannot be of God. God’s will is that all his children be happy.” In his closing prayer he said, “Let us not be afraid, brothers and sisters. We are living through difficult and uncertain days. We do not know if this very evening we will be prisoners or murder victims. We do not know what the forces of evil will do with us. But one thing I do know: even those who have disappeared after arrest, even those who are mourned in the mystery of an abduction, are known and loved by God. This is the true treasure of God’s reign.”
The life of a convent is as regimented as that of an army barracks and I’ve only run into the bishop once since our return. I started to compliment him on his bravery and eloquence but he just sailed past me; maybe I’m being paranoid, perhaps he is preoccupied or didn’t hear me.
I know, all I do is quote other people and you might wonder if I have thoughts of my own. I do, but most of them are generated by my Mercy-obsessions. During the day I wonder where she is, and I’m constantly taking new routes to my room, to the chapel or the refectory, hoping to bump into her. Yesterday I cornered her at lunch and we agreed to take a walk together through the kitchen garden but then we spotted the bishop staring at us balefully; I noticed the dark patches under his eyes, the lines of tension in his face, his pallor. He looked as if he’d passed many sleepless nights. Of course, he must be worried about an assassination. Mercy and I decided against a walk together; I didn’t even need to explain this change of plans—she must have had the same thought at the same time. Did we feel Oscar was reproaching us for our happiness?
Oh, yes, the quotation. I’m reading Dorothy Day, whose writings speak to me as a Christian defending the poor and as an American. Citing Henry James she says that we English-speakers need once again to sing the praises of poverty. “We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient realization of poverty could have meant; the liberation from material attachments, the unbridled soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly—the more athletic trim, in short, the fighting shape.” Do you think she’ll be made a saint? There is a kind of romantic extravagance in the Christian transformation, a kind of wild abandon, isn’t there?
My current job is fabricating candles, tall church tapers, made from beeswax that we heat and pour into inverted brass molds, the desired slender shape. Bundles of ten attached molds are positioned at waist height. There are additives that determine the scent, what’s called the scent throw (the range of the perfume), the burning point, the floral odor itself. And of course the prewaxed cotton wick of the right length, which has to be suspended at the exact center of the candle length (there’s a perforated tin disk that holds the wick in place). The trick is to pour exactly the right amount of wax for each candle—it’s all in the wrist, as they say. We usually work in the morning, when it’s cooler.
I like the smell of our candles so much more than the odor of the carbolic soap we make, which is medicinal, even antiseptic, the smell of burnt iodine or something, maybe coal. It’s supposed to kill bacteria, but to me it has the sad smell of public schools on a winter evening, of … well, frustrated sex, strange to say, n
ot that I’d know one kind of sex from another.
Our bishop posts the times for our confession to him. I saw that Mercy would be confessing a whole day before I would. An hour before her scheduled time I touched her shoulder as we were perambulating in opposite directions around the columned cloisters (chalky white against the deep shadows under the roof and against the brilliant green of our courtyard, rich with big sawtooth agave cactuses). She avoided my glance and shrugged off my hand. We were supposed to keep rotating and to remain silent, but I was tempted to break ranks and run up to her and demand what was wrong.
I was so in love with her—her tender body, her plump lips, her beautiful bouncy buttocks, her generous soul, her smooth, small breasts, the way she gave herself to me so entirely, pretending to be asleep but groaning with pleasure. If the price to pay for having her exclusive love was never to sleep with her again, I’d gladly pay it. If the price to pay for having her body in love was sharing her with another man or woman, I’d never pay it. I wanted her to love no one else but I would accept any conditions to possess her for myself alone. I knew that I was risking my immortal soul by loving her so intensely, but I was already burning in an eternal fire with love’s pangs—hell would be nothing new for me.
An hour later she would be confessing to Bishop Oscar. Had she rejected me because she already feared his ire once she told him of our nights together, even though she was blameless—or was she, in the eyes of the Church? She had given me permission to touch her (“I will never refuse my body to you”) and sin begins in complicity. If she was cold to me now, how would she be at vespers or dinner?
I was intensely aware of the time and as Mercy’s confession approached I couldn’t stop pacing and muttering to myself. I felt that the hands of the clock were Satan’s wings, unfolding, meeting, then drawing apart. Would Oscar berate her for our intimacy? For her tolerating my sinful molesting? Would he (Lord help us) be jealous of us? Resent the way she’d replaced him in my affections?
I lurked around the chapel, where the austere dark wood confession boxes were. If I drew near I could convince myself I could hear Mercy’s childlike voice. Of course, I could see her tiny shoes as she knelt. And then, here she was, plunging forth and almost running to the prayer rail facing the solid gold altar, its brilliant gilded curves and pointed details generating light, a honeycomb of light. I knelt beside her—she must have glimpsed me. She turned her face away from me.
Had Bishop Oscar instructed her to avoid me?
Tears began to leak out of my eyes. I didn’t sob, I didn’t pity myself, I wasn’t trying to attract her attention and force her to say something consoling. My tears weren’t a statement much less a plea. No, they were just a matter of leakage. I didn’t have a handkerchief. I just let the tears glaze my face, incontestable evidence of my pain.
She must have seen my tear-shiny face but (the little darling) she decided to stay resolute. That was what her bishop had told her to do. A tropical rain collapsed on the buildings around us, sudden and heavy and falling straight down for no more than three minutes, everything was abruptly cooler and sweeter smelling.
To sober myself I tried to think of Mercy as a robot, as a machine without a face or body, as stripped scaffolding, as nothing but hinges and plugs and wiring—would she still have the same appeal without her rubbery body and placid face? Without her full lips and ridiculously cute “inny,” her inward-twirling navel? Without her soft voice and corny jokes? Was I in love with the packaging alone? If I had to weigh her heart against another, would hers come up lighter? Was hers the beautiful soul I imagined?
Absurd exercise! Her sweetness was so intimately related to her looks, her face and body were such perfect expressions of her spirit, one might as well argue against Christ’s double nature as man and God uniquely melded.
I couldn’t live without Mercy’s love. At first, months ago, I’d talked myself into being in love with her as if to prove to myself I still had merely human appetites or maybe as just an alibi for my yearning (it being easier to accept the involuntary as something willed), but at some invisible point I’d really and truly been transformed into someone obsessed—and now it was too late to turn back. I was hopelessly in love except love of this sort was nothing but hope—for a future that would never be permitted, that I would never let myself envision, that I could hope for only as long as it remained unrealized, even unimagined.
The thought of awakening each morning at matins without the possibility of holding her little hand and looking into her playful eyes—oh, that I couldn’t endure! How did my love of God shade into the love of this unremarkable woman? Why would I give up my chances to life eternal contemplating God for a fleeting touch or glance from a silly girl who was doing her best to observe her vows? Why would she obey the arbitrary commands of a dusty desert deity instead of surrendering to a taller, richer woman?
Fine words, but I felt my life was ending, that I couldn’t breathe, that I hadn’t asked for much, that I hadn’t even dared to long for mutual love, that I could accept any conditions whatsoever as long as Mercy might give me her little smile, in which the petulance disguised the innocence—or one of her childish “naughty” winks (in which she inexpertly closed both eyes).
She didn’t sit at her usual place at dinner and she kept emitting her loud, high, nearly hysterical laugh, a new sort of horrible neighing that I was sure would be reprimanded by Mother Superior, but the older woman seemed imperturbable at the high table, raised on its dark green tile dais, and she was smiling calmly in her reassuring way. Could it be she didn’t hear her rogue nun neighing?
I went back to my cell feeling as if I was holding a leaking cistern, my heart, and my task was to return to privacy before all the liquid ran out. It was as if a storm cloud were gathering in my head, smothering my sinuses, drowning my lungs. I didn’t want to bring attention to myself but somehow at the same time I wanted someone to intervene and save my sanity, my life … Simultaneously I wanted to attract and escape notice.
That night I slept fitfully, threw off my covers then was cold, kept turning my pillow to the cool side, resented all the deprivations of convent life, longed for Parisian luxuries (why not suffer in luxury like you, dear Yvonne?). It occurred to me that the religious life was all hocus-pocus—designed to protect the rich, harbor lazy, gluttonous nuns and monks, supply fresh-faced boys for priests to groom and sodomize, drug the living and tranquilize the dying, provide structure for the mad and merely eccentric, lend meaning to purposeless lives, give old widows in black something to do such as arrange altar flowers or iron surplices or suffer supplices.
Did I love Mercy more than God? Did I want a year with her more than eternity in heaven? Why did the very words “Heaven” and “Hell” sound like something out of a comic book in which the bright colors weren’t stamped properly and were bleeding into one another? My mind had become a palestra where the Devil exercised, where he was growing stronger day by day.
I spent the morning packing long white fragrant candles in boxes of twenty, which the local candymaker had manufactured for us stamped with the convent coat of arms—things we could sell along with sweets made of coconut shreds, jars of honey, the soap, eau de toilette—everything sold in our shop at the front gate. Tourists bought our products, other churches, the pious, and the well-to-do.
At last it was my time to confess. At first I didn’t say anything. I could hear Oscar’s heavy breathing and smell his distinctive male odor. After a moment he said, “I’m listening,” and I said routinely, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.” Then I told him how long it had been since I’d last confessed and I fell into a painful silence again. Somewhere nearby I could smell tortillas being made—it must be the deacon’s wife who lived in a room adjoining the church. The idea that a woman was wisely cooking tortillas reminded me that not everything was tuned to the high drama of the convent.
I could hear Oscar shifting about in his pen like a bronco before it’s released in a rodeo. He sound
ed dangerous or frightened or both—but was I just imagining that? Bored, maybe, impatient at my silence. I was so hesitant because I didn’t want to provoke him into saying something we’d both regret. I started to speak in English, as we usually did, but he asked that I speak in Spanish. Automatically I felt less sincere, since I was shaping what I said according to what I could say. And almost every phrase recalled where and when I’d learned it—a second language isn’t history-neutral but drags a huge tail of circumstance behind it.
I told him that I’d sinned by worshipping an idol—another nun rather than God. He asked me to name her. I said that was irrelevant.
“Name her!” he nearly shouted. An echo of his voice reverberated through the church.
“Sister Maria Immacolada,” I whispered.
He didn’t make a sound. I knew that Saint Charles Borromeo had designed the confessional box so that priests couldn’t assault nuns sexually, but that precaution now seemed cruelly irrelevant to me. Why couldn’t I see his face and how he’d reacted?
“Is your love for her very great?” he asked and now I felt we were no longer staying within the rules. I could hear the anguish in his question.
“Yes. Very great.”
He asked me if I’d ever loved anyone with the same degree of passion. I told him that I’d thought I’d loved Our Lord like that and when I’d read of Saint Catherine exchanging hearts with Jesus, the book had trembled in my hand and I’d felt a wound in my side. But that was a feeling I’d worked to prolong, whereas this passion for Mercy was something that awakened in me as soon as I woke up and that absorbed all my thoughts throughout the day, an involuntary anguish to the neglect of my prayers.