A Saint from Texas

by Edmund White

  He asked me what I found so extraordinary about her and I said I didn’t know, perhaps it was her very ordinariness, her simplicity, her innocence—the way she was interchangeable with most of humanity. Yes, that was it. She was human. Ecce homo.

  That’s impious, he said, to speak of a girl in the language drawn from the life of Our Lord. I admitted how grave my sin was. Or my impropriety.

  “It’s a sin,” he said.

  He asked me if my feelings were growing stronger or whether I was learning to subdue them.

  Stronger, I said.

  “You belong in a hermitage,” he said. “Where you see no one, where you are fed by religious in a remote place, where you rise before dawn and begin to pray, kneeling on stone, where your thoughts are trained on each nail, each thorn, on the lance in the side and the sponge soaked in vinegar, on the blood slowly dripping from Him like sap from a scarred tree.” We were speaking English for some reason now and for a moment I thought he’d said “sacred” instead of “scarred.” “It’s your only chance to be saved,” he said. “You are nearly lost.”

  “But you and Mercy are the dearest people in the world to me. I don’t want to be a hermit. And you said we can only worship in twos or threes.”

  The bishop told me he was thinking only of my salvation. He said that Mercy had confessed that she and I had made love.

  I protested that he was breaking the laws of the confessional, that the priest may not mention—

  “I know, I know,” he said irritably. “But there are moments—such as a threat to national security or a murder plot—when the seal of secrecy must be broken.”

  I let a full twenty seconds go by until I asked wearily if he thought my love for Mercy was comparable to a murder.

  “To a suicide! Homosexuality has no place in a religious house, a convent. Even among the laity only married heterosexuals are allowed to have sex; they alone are not sinning and they must have sex strictly for procreation. You are a sinner.”

  I told him that Jesus never once mentioned same-sex love in the Bible. Oscar pointed out that He also said that where He had not set up a prohibition then those of the Old Testament were still in force.

  “Then no bacon or shrimp,” I said.

  “Dietary restrictions are not as serious as a fundamental violation of nature.”

  “Then male dogs mustn’t hump each other?” I hated the sound of trivial discontent in my voice. At last I sighed and said, “I cannot become a hermit. Anyway, she was asleep when I touched her.”

  He thought for a while and said, “I am not only your confessor, my child, but also your spiritual guide. If you are too weak to live as a solitary penitent, then you must become a missionary.”

  “Yes, Your Excellency, that sounds like a good solution.” I said that maybe only because he’d called me “my child” and something in me was pacified. Or maybe just because I’d called him “Your Excellency” and I felt I must comply. Bishop Oscar had brought God’s grace to me. I liked the grown-up but noncommittal sound of “good solution.”

  Oscar told me that he would reflect on where I could be of use. He told me that in the indigenous community of Karmata Rua Cristiania, only about two hours away by bus, in the Andes, the Embera-Chami live and speak their own language and are known for their painted faces, their way of dancing, their embroidered caps and sleeves, their rather primitive clay bowls and sculptures. They grow coffee, plantains, yucca, and avocados. The name of their region means “land of nettles” in Spanish. They are unsmiling but pleasant, remarkably outspoken, heavily intermarried with Christians. Most of them are themselves Christians, though they respect their traditional gods as well. They practice their traditional medicine.

  They live in rather grim buildings of several stories constructed for them by the government, though quite a few families have tin shacks. There are frequent landslides on the hilly roads but people just drive around the fallen rocks. The food sounds repulsive and involves “big-butted” deep-fried flies and goat meat wrapped in goat viscera; they also eat cow viscera, which they call mule.

  I met a nun who was a tribeswoman of the Embera-Chami. She had a cool, anthropological approach to her past, which she clearly wanted to disown. It was evident that she’d just as soon forget it (she looked no different than the other Colombian sisters), but since she couldn’t, she’d sequestered her past into a small field of study. She said that the Andes were heartbreakingly beautiful with their morning mists and rolling green hills, their dangerously steep roads only one lane wide, requiring one of the two facing cars to back down sometimes as much as a mile to a tiny turn-off in order to let the other oncoming vehicle pass, with their sudden midday deluges of rain, their wild orchids and little parrots, their giant cactuses and dripping trees, their truckloads of singing campesinos.

  “But why would they want you, the indigenous people? Do you have medical skills? Have you studied agronomy? The native language?”

  I confessed that I knew how to teach English, maths, Spanish, Latin, Greek …

  “No need of dead languages,” she said with a slightly offended stare. “These people are just barely hanging on. It will be a real burden just to feed you. There are only about four hundred families. I suppose you could invent some native dances for them, design them some native costumes, help them with their beadwork—tourism is their biggest industry, that and growing coffee. They have nothing to attract tourists for longer than an hour, nothing to sell them but ten-dollar bags of coffee beans and beautiful blue, red, and yellow beadwork on hats and sleeves and beaded bracelets and necklaces with wonderful sun signs and mountain signs. There’s a Catholic priest living there but he doesn’t seem to do much—just a single mass a week for about five people. No classes. No confessions. Lots of whiskey. I suppose some tourist crackpots would want to buy native herbal medicines, though they’re worthless. Oh, everyone is sick with dengue fever. It could annihilate someone as fragile as you.”

  I saw Mercy working in the vegetable garden. She had hiked up her skirts out of the dust and was wearing a big bonnet; she looked like someone in a Vermeer. Or rather she seemed inaccessible, like people in history. She had tied an apron around her waist, of the same cereal-colored unbleached cloth as her bonnet.

  I put my hands in my sleeves to indicate I wouldn’t try to touch her. Even so, she looked frightened when she saw me. “We’re not supposed to speak to each other for a month.”

  “A month? Is that what he said? He’s very inventive and precise, isn’t he? Well, you’ll be glad to know I’m being sent far away as a missionary among the indigenous people of Karmata Rua Cristiania.”

  Mercy’s hand wrestled my hand out of my sleeve and kissed it. I could see the tears gathering in her dark eyes, so precious to me. “It’s all my fault,” she said. “I should have never confessed that. Reservatio in petto—isn’t that our right?”

  “No, it’s best to make a clean breast of it, speaking of petto.”

  “How long will you be gone?”

  “A month? Two? We didn’t discuss it.”

  “When do you leave?” The noon sun was filtering a soft light through her bonnet and tracing the seam above her upper lip with gloss. Drops of sweat were rolling down her cheeks—sweat, not tears.

  “He hasn’t told me.”

  “Is he in love with you? Is he jealous of us?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes.”

  Then I entered the silent period of my love. I no longer spoke to Mercy nor did she speak to me; we were forbidden to communicate. But it calmed me to know that she was faithful to her vows of chastity and that she was unlikely to develop a crush on another woman, religious or secular. I suppose it sounds crazy to you, worldly and “realistic” as you’ve become, to be like me in love with a woman who doesn’t fancy women but who “likes” me. Crazy to be content as long as she doesn’t love anyone else and we’re able to exchange innocent smiles at least once a day. Of course, I’d rather hold her in my arms and feel her warm cin
namon skin and her wet body writhing and bucking under my intrusive hand, but we have taken vows to forsake the elusive pleasures of this world for the timeless joys of the next. If they exist.

  We have tiny, harmless lizards in the courtyard and Mercy likes to catch them, hold them for a moment in her hand, and speak to them. They are warm and wriggling like her. Poor girl, she must be lonely. How ever did such a life-loving girl become a nun? Maybe she was hungry and it was the only alternative to laboring and starving. Sometimes she will sing a little song to her lizard—in Tagalog, I like to think.

  The next time I went to confession, a week later, Bishop Oscar asked me right away if I was still guilty of the sin of concupiscence in thought or in deed.

  “Perhaps in thought,” I said coolly. I felt sorry for him; he was obviously suffering more than I was.

  “Give me some details.”

  I told him that whenever I saw her my heart thudded; I was afraid it would knock through my rib cage and splatter on the floor. But I assured him we didn’t exchange a word.

  “I know how difficult that silence must be for you,” Oscar said.

  “Not really. As long as I know she’s somewhere near. This may not be a permissible question: Why did Mercy become a nun?”

  “I don’t know why and if I did I wouldn’t tell you. You don’t think she has a true vocation?”

  I was startled that he would interrogate me about such a crucial aspect of her character. I stuttered and said, “I never asked her. But she seems very p-p-pious and obedient.”

  “What a hateful word: ‘obedient.’ I can see you’re smouldering with resentment.”

  I paused and then said, “Yes, I am.”

  “Do you believe that the state of your soul is my only concern?”

  “No.”

  He sank into silence, sighed painfully, and finally said in a near whisper, “You should say ten Hail Marys and ten Our Fathers and pray for guidance and light.”

  I slipped out of the confessional and went to the altar rail to pray. A moment later I glimpsed Oscar leaving his booth, his hands joined behind his back and his head bent very low. He seemed to be muttering to himself.

  I was about to send this letter to you, when I got a telegram from Bobbie Jean. I’m sure she sent you one, too. Daddy died. Heart attack. Apparently they were going to watch TV together and Daddy was about to sit down when he said, “Why, Bobbie Jean, I can’t feel anything in my feet, now my legs. They’re moving up, it feels like butterflies …” And Bobbie Jean said, “P.M., why don’t you sit down,” and he did and he died, just like that. Of course, they couldn’t hold up the funeral for us. She wants to bury him upstate near the farm where she grew up outside Denton. She must feel rather lost. You know how she led her own life apart from him, with her own women’s clubs and charities, but even so she must feel rather lost. Impossible as he could be, he was her husband for years. And he could be a handful. She devoted at least half her energy to him.

  How do you feel about his death?

  I feel as if there’s unfinished business between us. I wanted him to visit me in Colombia and see how beautiful the convent is, how peaceful. Maybe I’m not at peace right now due to my infatuation, but ordinarily I feel secure, knowing where I am to be when, feeling that my life matters to those around me and that it is being closely observed. Some people might find that kind of scrutiny oppressive or food for vanity but it makes me feel substantial, makes me feel real. Back in Dallas I always felt in danger of falling off the edge of the world. Those long afternoons after school and before dinner. Sometimes I was at Christ the King but three or four days out of the week I was alone in the White House. Homework would take me an hour at my desk. Then I would read for an hour, but after a while even that began to feel stale. Maybe because I had no one to talk books with. I’ve never in my life had a real reading pal. I can’t even imagine what that would feel like.

  Of course, I also felt less afraid. Daddy had me again and again. He was always a potential threat, even in my nun’s cell, even in Jericó, as if he could circle the city seven times, blow on his ram’s horns, and make the walls fall down. In my frightened little girl’s mind he was that powerful; he even had a special covenant with God allowing him to destroy me.

  You must feel sewn into history in your medieval château, as I do in this very old convent. Poor us in windblown dusty Texas, where the oldest thing is the Alamo (about 1800, as I recall from our Texas history class). We had no roots—everything was a simulacrum (White House, Ver-Sales, Alhambra). The “old” families were cattle people, homesteaders, and eventually oil men, but Texas had only a few thousand citizens when the Texas Republic was annexed in 1845 by the United States. It was a rough, tough state at war with the elements and the Comanche.

  Daddy was from such a poor family in the Hill Country outside Austin. He never did believe fully in his oil millions and though he diversified his portfolio by buying Dallas real estate and lived as frugally as Bobbie Jean would let him, nevertheless he treated all of us regally. He sent both of us to college, and before that to Hockaday. He bought you a pony and had it trained and stabled. He rented us an apartment in Austin. He paid for an elaborate debut for you and then a big Paris wedding. He gave the convent a handsome dowry for me. He bought Namaw an assisted-living apartment in downtown Dallas. He gave Pinky a comfortable retirement fund. Of course, he could be impossible, but I don’t think Namaw ever wasted the least bit of love on him—till he became rich. Our mother loved him in her haggard, dutiful, unquestioning way; Bobbie Jean never loved him, I’m convinced, but her father was that awful, boring, self-centered racist math professor, poor sinner, who thought he was so funny with his racist jokes. People can summon up only the love that was bequeathed them.

  We moved as far away from Daddy as we could get—to Colombia in my case, to Paris in yours. Neither of us lives in our native language. I’m called Sister and you’re called Baroness. We never returned to Texas. Of course, he abused me and got me pregnant when I was still virtually a child, but he was so starved for love, such a social misfit, so incompletely socialized, that he had no idea what was off-limits. Most people are subject to checks and balances throughout their lives, which inhibit or extinguish their criminal urges, but Daddy grew up in that village under the roof of a tyrannical father for whom he had no respect and who abused him and had no sense in the first place. They were all hungry, uneducated, dressed in rags, and Daddy had to fight off the schoolboys who taunted him every day for being poor and scrawny. Remember the story of the kid who snitched on the other boys and they paid him back by sawing his right leg off? That’s the world he grew up in. Only a generation back his grandparents had fought almost constantly with the Comanche and Daddy’s great-aunt Bea was raped and scalped by Indians. It was a lawless world. Later, after he became rich, he had no friends who were his equals. He associated only with his employees; for them the boss was always right. How could he ever learn from the help what was considered unacceptable? Of course, Pinky and the others were good, moral people, but they weren’t going to criticize Mr. Crawford and lose their jobs. At first he was isolated by his poverty and then by his wealth. He never had peers who could ride herd on him. To the degree he understood morality he tried to do right by folks. But he was both the pauper and the prince and isolated at both periods of his life. Bobbie Jean was hopeless; she just wanted to rise in that squalid little world of Dallas “society.” Our real mother, Margie Ann, was a deeply moral person but afraid of her own husband. He expected her to wait on him at the dinner table. When Daddy read her diary and had to recognize how he had tortured our poor mother, whose death was partly brought on by her physical exhaustion, for the first (and maybe only) time he had to repent of his past cruelty. I’m convinced that was why he was so eager to grant Bobbie Jean’s smallest desire; he didn’t want to worry another woman into an early grave. He wanted to be good.

  But he wasn’t good. He was a monster. He had been brutalized by his impoverished chil
dhood, and, given his exceptionally strong pride, he was deeply wounded by his family’s low (nonexistent) status in their village. He was a physical coward, too skinny and out of shape to fight. In Texas, physical violence is just under the surface and the simplest disagreement can end in a hospital. Men don’t have to be handsome or intelligent. They must be rich and angry. Daddy was inclined to be a sissy; he never felt comfortable except among his dependents; he knew every day of his adult life that as a boy he’d been sodomized by his daddy. But to the world he put on a belligerent, frozen-faced, slow-talking demeanor. His favorite actor was John Wayne.

  I pray for his salvation. As you know, I don’t believe in Hell, but I do think there’s a cold, empty place where the unsaved go, a sub-zero desert, a floating, eventless emptiness, the very aridity that nonbelievers picture as the afterlife, not the lively homecoming parade that we Christians believe in with its clangorous, brightly lit floats.

  He loved us both, but me he loved in an unhealthy, tormented way. Why? Maybe because I was the weird one, the nerdish one, and he felt I was more vulnerable. Maybe because I reminded him of himself. Or his mother. I really hated him; I think most abused children hate the men who abused them. And yet, now that he’s dead, I feel I want to sit down with him, on eternity’s curb, and hash it all out. Of course, there’s no getting to the bottom of what he did to me.

  I never told you this, but once when we were living in Austin Daddy was hospitalized with pneumonia and Bobbie Jean called me and said that if I wanted to see my father alive I must come immediately.

  I didn’t think about it twice. I don’t know where you were—maybe in Houston. Yes, you were in Houston with a sorority sister. I rushed to the hospital. He was allowed only one visitor at a time. When Bobbie Jean came out, I went in. There he was, hooked up to tubes and monitors. I thought he was asleep. I said, “Daddy, it’s me. Yvette.” And he woke up, grinned with his awful little brown teeth. He threw back his sheet and he was completely nude. He said, “Powder me.”