The Vintage Book of International Lesbian Fiction

by Naomi Holoch

  I will not kill myself. The dead are so quickly forgotten.

  One can only raise happiness on a foundation of despair.

  I think I will be able to start building.

  Let no one be accused of my life.

  It’s not a question of suicide. It’s only a question of beating a record.

  Translated by Dori Katz and the author

  Emma Donoghue

  In “Looking for Petronilla” (1996), the Dublin-born writer Emma Donoghue re-creates and unifies disparate moments of Irish time as her narrator travels in quest of a wronged woman. Donoghue’s fascination with history and the lesbian presence within it was amply demonstrated in her pioneering work Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture (1668–1801). Both in her current work—a collection of fairy tales—and in her novels, which depict the early days of Ireland’s lesbian-feminist movement, Donoghue uses mythic and real time to address issues of gender and social inequalities. In style as well as in content, this story exemplifies Donoghue’s ability to seduce the reader into a world where all historical time is open to her characters.

  LOOKING FOR PETRONILLA

  I’VE been away too long.

  The plane took me from London to Dublin in less than an hour. I would have come this way before if I had known how simple it was. When I first took the boat to England, vomiting up my whole self into the Irish Sea, I swore I’d never go back. But most promises wear out in the end. This plane trip was almost merry, clouds back-lit by champagne.

  I bought it in honor of Petronilla. Since she couldn’t be here today it seemed only fitting to toast her virtues in overpriced bubbly, ten thousand feet above the island she never left.

  The rented Volvo took me to Kilkenny with surprising speed. They’ve built craft shops on every corner and knocked down a lot of old houses. Kyteler’s Inn is still there, though; its wooden lines stand firm against the swarm of tourists. There’s an Alice’s Restaurant in the cellar (“It’s a kind of magic!” jokes the sign, catching the sunlight), and upstairs is called Nero’s; how very suitable. What’s your poison, traveler?

  I stand at the bar and order a glass of the best red they have. I look around, waiting for the centuries to fall away, but my eyes lodge on the chintzy little tablecloths and chairs. I am so used to the twentieth century that it is almost impossible to imagine myself back to the fourteenth. Hard to believe that this round-bellied building was ever cold and damp, with one fire sighing and the smell of tallow flaring in the nostrils of visitors.

  I peer at the wall, where a Disney hag pours cups of smoking brew for four little men with uneasy expressions. Perhaps they have noticed that their shoes, toes tied to their knees, are from the wrong country and century. I read through the five-line caption, which is a tribute to the powers of invention. Nothing worth losing my temper over. Why should anyone remember, anyway, except someone like me, whose business it is? There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since 1324. History always becomes a cartoon, where it survives at all. Your best hope for a ride toward posterity is the bandwagon of folklore.

  “Oldest house in Kilkenny, this is.”

  I accept the wineglass from the graying woman behind the bar. “So they say.”

  “You know the story?”

  “Oh yes.” I take a sip: not dry enough. I wonder what kind of hash this woman could make of the tale, but it hardly needs another telling. It is remarkable only for the gender of the protagonist. When a man kills his wife, he is a tortured rebel, criminel de passion, dusky Othello or bluff King Hal. When a woman kills her husband, she is never allowed to forget it. I stare at the drawing again. Alice Kyteler, four times widow in two dozen years, has evolved into a long-nailed monster, a Kilkenny Clytemnestra. “Researching?”

  My eyes swivel back to the bartender, who is polishing glasses with a Guinness tea towel. “Beg your pardon?”

  “Doing a radio program or something? Family history?” she adds. Her hand has paused, knuckles yellow against the glass.

  “More or less,” I tell her, with a ghost of a smile.

  “Very nice.”

  I glance back at the wall beside me, then at the others, weighted down with old maps and giant replica copper pots. No picture of Petronilla de Meath. I suppose I could ask the bartender, but I’m not sure my mouth could bear to form the words.

  Why is it that almost nobody knows Petronilla’s name, when she was much more remarkable than her mistress? No demon Dame Alice called up and bound with spells ever served her so faithfully. What interests me is not so much the mistress’s evil, which seems after almost seven centuries to amount to no more than a banal footnote in the annals of war and treachery, but the maid’s extraordinary ordinariness. How through thick and thin, sickness and sin, Masses read backward and Christian funerals Petronilla retained her sense of being a good servant, whatever that could mean in a house like this one. As if she had heard some fireside tale that ended with the tag Whanne that yr mistresse sell here soule to Luciphere ond take a wisshe for to kille her lawfulle wedded husbandes, be you of gode cheere ond giff her al manere of aid for to brewe ye poysionne.

  “I love history, myself.”

  I turn on the bartender, who is rubbing at the lipsticked lip of a glass. “Why is that?”

  Her blue eyes, behind her glasses, seem surprised by the question. “Well, it makes you feel more complete, doesn’t it?” A pause. “Knowing where you’re from.”

  “Does it?”

  “Reminds you there’s more to the whole business than your own little life.” She gives me a wholly unmerited smile. “I like to think that no one ever really dies as long as their folks remember them.”

  “Perhaps they’d prefer to.”

  “Remember them?”

  “Die.”

  “Oh. Oh I don’t think so,” says the woman, as if to reassure us both.

  I ask to be directed to the Ladies; this seems the best excuse for poking around. For all the dark wood, most of these walls look new; these smooth beams have never had a sconce stuck in them. I hitch up my tights, careful not to tear them. I take off my heavy ring to wash my hands. My face looks back at me with a hint of defiance: no new lines today. On the wall, a Kondo-Vend machine offers me the Quality Range of Luxury Lubricated Sheath Contraceptives. I can tell I won’t find what I’m looking for in Kyteler’s Inn.

  As I cross the narrow elbow of St. Kierán’s Street, I find myself humming a tune, a very old one; I realize that it has been stuck in my head since Dublin. The words slide onto one another like water over worn rocks. Voice on anonymous voice, disciplined in melancholy resignation.

  Quiconques veut d’amors joïr

  Doit avoir foy et esperance

  Such patience the singers had back then, giving every melancholic syllable its own line of music, a full half minute to a phrase, as if they had all the time in the world. Faith and hope is what the seeker after love must have. Faith to keep you longing, hope to relieve your despair.

  The town has become a maze of gift shops and boutiques; I can’t tell where anything used to be. As I step off a curb, a car roars by, inches from my handbag. LABHAIR GAEILGE says the bumper sticker, as if simple encouragement could set my tongue to talking the language I’ve long forgotten.

  What was Petronilla’s first name, I wonder? The one she knew herself by when she was a raw serving-maid who could speak only two tongues and both of them with a County Meath accent. When her hair still fell loose under her white coif, not yet having been tucked away as the mark of womanhood. When she came in a cart to Kilkenny, telling her beads, before her mistress renamed her for the saint whose day it was, the Roman Virgin who tended Peter. What went through the girl’s head those first months, I wonder, as she ran to order: “Fetch my Venetian brocade, the rayed one you fool,” and “Strap on my pattens if you would not have me wade through every puddle in town,” and (in a low voice) “Have you fetched candles of beeswax for the ceremony?”

  She was Dame Alice’s loyal bo
ndswoman from the start; she was a dagger thrown back and forward between those ruby-weighted hands. The first Sabbath made her retch in a corner, but she said nothing, told no one, never broke trust. The girl had no malice of her own, but her mistress’s orders girded her like chain mail, and obedience made her brave.

  The most inexplicable thing is that at no point in her imprisonment or trial did Petronilla try to run away. Did she keep hoping Dame Alice would return from England to burst the doors, with all the force of law or simply a click of her stained fingers? Or did the maid simply keep her garbled faith, offering herself as ransom for her vanished mistress, waiting on the pleasure of the dark master? Or, more likely, did some portion of her drugged conscience feel her execution to be a proper end to the story?

  What is clear is that she was not one of the weeping, piteous victims who flock across the pages of history. She embraced her death as a final order. Does that make her mistress’s betrayal better or worse? All the records have to say on the matter is that at the hour of her death, Petronilla declared that Dame Alice was the most powerful witch in the world.

  I feel slightly faint. I am standing on a street corner with a slightly crazed expression. A small girl leaning against a lamppost watches me; she has a purple birthmark the shape of a kidney. “Lights changed ages ago, Mrs.,” she points out.

  I cross without answering her. I should be looking for the jail, but I can’t face it yet. I wander up the hill, past Dunnes Stores, a stall selling local fudge, a poster inviting costumed revelers to a Quentin Tarantino Night.

  St. Canice’s seems almost small after the great cathedrals of England. Its walls are gray and serene; beside it, the round tower pencils the clouds. I look for the grave, but they must have moved it. Inside the church I finally stumble across the headstone, one of a dozen propped against the walls. With difficulty I make out the old French letters framing a fleur-de-lis cross. Here lies José de Keteller, they say. Say thou who passest here a prayer.

  He came to this town in chain mail with a long sword, an old-style legitimate killer. Learned Gaelic, grew long mustaches, finally even rode without a saddle in the native way. A peaceful settler, shaping himself to the island fate had placed him on, José de Keteller was not to know how his name would be immortalized by his iron-willed daughter. Why is it so much worse to execute husbands than infidels, I wonder? Most of us are descended from killers, one way or another.