“I am glad. You see we have wondered for some months if anyone would come. She deserves to be remembered. A great lady.”
“Great lady? Remembered?” The Idiot was confused.
“Why,” said the guide. “I thought you knew. She died last autumn.”
“That is impossible. I slept—that is, I was with her a couple of nights ago.”
The guide stopped for an instant. His eyes flicked over the Idiot’s face with an edge of rage, edge of resentment for the first time. “I am referring to Sister Beatrice,” he said stiffly, “who died last autumn. You must be referring to her granddaughter.” The resentment remained though on the surface it had faded. “I am sorry, sir. We are at cross-purposes I see. I thought you knew of Sister Beatrice when you spoke of the vanished convent. She was a young woman—hardly more than twenty-five I would say—when the hidden convent was exposed. That would be fifty years ago perhaps. The other nuns fled. Some to Europe. Some to the States.”
“I have met one or two”, said the Idiot, “before I came here.”
“She remained. And began …” he spoke in a smooth voice now, “to involve herself in the rituals of the day.” He paused. “An artist’s model if you like to refer to her as that. It was she who dressed herself up as Christ—yes, Christ, imagine that—in his bullet-ridden vest for the very first time. A dangerous thing for a woman to do. She was seized, exposed in the procession. And raped.”
The word “raped” rang through the wood and possessed for the Idiot the force of terror—naked force, catastrophic aloneness—but on the lips of the guide it seemed nothing but a bridge he embodied unthinkingly across a stream over which the Christ Nun moved for him as if she were reflected naked, dressed in the callous of the day, her skin. Mirrored callous. Mirrored dress. Commerce of soul.
Once again the Fool was displaced by senses of standing abreast of his age (and therefore about fifty years ahead of his time), stripped of callouses, utterly alone, horribly aware how vulnerable it was to be truly exposed …
“As for the granddaughter,” the guide spoke with rising tongue, “I hope you’ll forgive me if I say it. She is accursed. Nothing but a whore. Artist’s model indeed. Nothing like her grandmother. She’s a whore I tell you. There’s neither glory nor money in it for her. Who would pose as ex-priestess, ex-virgin, god knows what, for nothing—except the child of a child born from rape?”
The Fool stopped. He had suffered an assault. How to begin … how to begin he cried inwardly—how to begin to repudiate the devil? “I take it,” he said as if he were speaking from a great distance with another man’s cracked lips, “I take it Hosé you were a young man when it happened.”
“Happened? What happened?”
“To the young nun. Dressed as Christ. Raped. Exposed.”
The guide looked suddenly virulent, inquisitorial. “Yes,” he cried. “She should never have done it. A mere strip of a woman playing such a part. A violent part. A man’s part. She should never have done it. Why even today …” he stopped. Bewildered. Aware he had said what he had never intended to say.
“I wonder”, said the Idiot under his breath, “of whom do you now speak, of grandmother or of granddaughter?”
“What did you say?” cried the guide. “What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
“A great lady sir. It was she who instituted the play and procession you saw when you arrived. And the rumours you hear …” he stopped.
“What rumours?”
“That after that, after she was raped, it was she who seduced a Fool each year to play the part (went into the city and brought him back)—the stories are entirely false and without foundation. It’s the granddaughter who has put those rumours about. She’s mad.”
“A Fool? Each year? What I saw yesterday was a log of a tree, all carved …”
“For a time”, said the guide softly, “it used to be a man, a man with real feelings. But it made things ugly. She had nothing to do with that. She had learnt her lesson. And it was just as indecent having a man as a woman to play the part. She had nothing to do with that. We honour her today as the patroness of Christ and the firing squad. That’s all. It’s a monument, sir, her monument.”
All at once the Idiot found it difficult to know whether he felt pity, contempt or admiration for Hosé. In some quite astonishing and extraordinary way he was proving an admirable guide and the origins of the play (the procession) which the Fool had witnessed, into which he had been drawn, were displaying themselves now through him, through the very prejudices he embodied.
Why should he not seek to protect the reputation of ideal monument or “great lady”? Why should he not express his aversion for what seemed to him the violence to which she had given birth as distinct from the heroism she had cultivated? Why should he not seek to preserve a distinction between grandmother and granddaughter as between the preservation of an art (money and glory) and the life-blood of an art (scorn of money and glory)?
Were these not legitimate question to frame of illegitimate sanctity that came to an unconscious head in the prejudices of Hosé?
If Hosé had seemed to him a moment or two ago the very devil himself in respectable dress now it was the Fool who saw for himself the necessity to descend into hell in naked dress if one were to preserve heaven—to descend into hell as terrifying compassion and a capacity to entertain all guides, to be tolerant of all roles, without which the very origins of detachment, the very dress of perfection (like a beautiful body on the cover of a book) would lack the edges of resentment, the edges of callous fury or callous lust that made it priceless as the irony of a pearl in a marketplace of sorrows, of abused flesh-and-blood. Such was the drama of pitiless/pitiful humanity.
They were descending now into a hollow in the ground within which an old wall, an old building, crouched in the earth.
“There it is,” said the guide. “I have tried to scrape some fragments together. To scrape bits and pieces together in which to house a portrait of Sister Beatrice. She was the one who remained when the others fled. It’s not really finished, the portrait, done under stress, I fear, half-a-century ago. But it is possible to make something out of it I think—the seed of a place to which people may be drawn in years to come. And if you give your assistance sir—if you write something—I am sure …”
THE FIFTH DAY
(Rape of the Winter Bride)
Perhaps every man knows he is being dreamt into existence by others, conceived by others; a sense in which he likewise dreams others into existence as husband/father to places and times, as Fool to every ghost-child he entertains or hunts for with pitiful, pitiless ambition. A sense in which every revolution of the hunt, every religion of the sexes, is related to a potentiality for child-bearing, ghost-bearing, capsules of ambition—the unborn child/ghost of hope for some, the never-to-be-born child/ghost of aborted future for others. Related therefore to a ceremony of expectations and of silent mourning concealed perhaps from oneself but active in every career night and day as fate.
And, in some degree, in the circuit of his travels as nameless child or clown to himself (as to others) the conception of ghostly born/unborn selves everyman possesses may fade into a deeper hollow of longing or animal ground or brighten into a blindness of reality and animal sun.
That hollow of longing may signify the strength of particular memories of the chase so strong they blot out everything else. That sun may signify the bullet of a particular morning of the chase so deep it appears central to the mystery of the animal of god one is.
Monument of a subconscious conception of wholeness—vulnerable parts, alarming roles played by respectable idols —with which the Fool lived as if it were his daily bread of fire that left him hollow and susceptible to nameless others.
He returned to his lodgings after his day in the wood; masked he felt, possessed of roles that led into the dead past and into the unconscious future …
He fell into bed and dreamt again he was a man on a log. H
e became that sculptured log. A log must learn to bleed, to fly, to be an animal. Hare of god. Autumn hare. Winter hare. Spring hare.
He looked back, it seemed, through the unfrocked spaces of that hare of dreams to a winter of preparations for flight…. Knocked at the sky, hare of a sky, animal board.
Rapped and shivered. Cold. Cobbled street. Was it an old part of an old town in Europe of which he dreamt? A monk’s body, a monk’s retreat, a monk’s self-portrait?
The door opened and a porter appeared who led him into a blazing studio, blazing fire, took his coat and gloves …
Alone. It was an hour or two past noon. The winter sky was glinting on the windowpane with the ice and the fire he felt in his blood, in his bones. Whiteness, sharpness, thickness as if one could slice into a beautiful half-misted world as into something invisibly hooded, invisibly black.
His glance turned now inwards, towards the dumb furniture in the room, heavy, dark. Head nodding. The room was warm, beautiful fire. A solid mourning language lay everywhere. He stirred, got up. Moved over to an easel which was turned away from him. A startling canvas. The Winter Hare (it was called). An enormous painted hare adorned with … he could not be absolutely sure … the paint was blurred … were they a man’s testicles?
A ghost of a hand ran between its legs with a thorn. Thorn of love? Thorn of hate? Thorn of accumulated longing?
The Fool retreated, resumed his chair and let his head fall deep into a huge desk, an enormous coffin. It was a curious room. There were Bibles, prayerbooks and a number of Mexican ornaments, calendars and effects that seemed to lift the room into space like a mid-Atlantic cabin suspended between Europe and Central America.
Far below on the skin of the ocean was inscribed the hand with the thorn … burning eyes … The Fool’s eyes were closed … He was asleep … Buried in the structure of a thorn that pricked his eyeballs …
“Sorry to have kept you waiting,” came a deep voice like a wave upon the floor.
The Idiot stirred, pulled his head up. He was asleep. Buried in the structure of a thorn that encompassed his head. For weeks now he had been burning the proverbial midnight candle, researching, writing up his papers, anticipating the pyramid of the sun, the vanished foundations of the moon, anticipating lakes and skies, haloes and furnaces.
It was all he could do to struggle to his feet.
“Please,” she said. “Don’t get up. I am sorry I am late. But it has been an effort to get here and I do want …” Her voice was trailing away and the Idiot was filled by a confused stab, a look of importunity, a plea to him not to abandon her so quickly, that ran close to the light of jeopardy in the painted hare.
He knew his sensations were irrational, that they sprang from the borderline of sleep (or of death) as though he were dead (or she was dead) though they were self-evidently alive.
Sister Joanna was a woman in her middle eighties. It was a long time, an age or two perhaps, since her flight from Mexico and her abandonment of an active vocation in the Catholic Church though in fact she had been active, in a different way, as an ex-nun who drove herself into good deeds, numerous charities and social works. Her reputation as a good woman, a woman of good deeds, was known to all.
“It was kind of you”, he said, “to agree to see me. I wrote … I cannot remember when it was …”
“Just under a fortnight,” she said. “And I replied immediately making this appointment. I was sure then I could help you. And I felt today somehow, in spite of much that has happened to me since then, I could not let you down. I am an old woman and I have learnt now that a single minute, a day could turn into a signal compression of all our years, a signal plea. It’s the Mexican ritualist coming out. I am half Mexican.”
Her voice was much stronger now, half self-mocking, half deadly serious, and the oppressive sensation the Idiot had had at first of a formidable gulf between them, between her habit and his time, began to lapse into the irony of communication. She had become his echoing target, a voice that stood within him and confronted him with its inner face to his inner face, its outer death to his inner life (his inner journey).
“I am planning some research,” he said, “as I explained in my letter, into post-Christian ages, post-Christian foundations …” The words seemed heavy on his lips. Sculptured lips.
“Ah,” she said. “I can tell you about my own order. You will find in the end that what matters is a capacity to revise all your plans—however painful that may be—day to day—to respond without bitterness to self-contradictory tongues that speak with the voices of saints, devils and angels all rolled into one. I wish I had remained in Mexico. She did.”
The Idiot’s curiosity was aflame. “Why did she?”
“It’s a long, long story, young man. Her youth for one thing. We were ten, fifteen years older than she. And women are by training conservative. She saw darkly the need for an equation …”
“Between revolution and religion.”
“You have put the words into my lips, young man. Into my dead lips. For I am dead, my Fool, you are alive.”
“Do you think she succeeded?” the Idiot cried as if possessed by the dream, the language of a dream-play. Or as if he were deaf to her humour. How could she be dead and still speak to him except there was a mythical logic to deafness, to blindness, inserted into the spectre of order?
“She tried …” the voice was fading into a myth.
“Tried? Tried what?”
The voice returned with a struggle—“She saw what was pressing upon us. Beyond words. She tried to face a future everyone feared or shrank from. And I believe her trial counts in the end more than any success I have had.” Sister Joanna’s voice was shaking a little. There were tears in her eyes and the Idiot noted the texture of her skin, rather chapped, even coarse, and yet imbued with a kind of strength, a fabric that resisted to the end as if it were trembling on the edge of its grave.
“I know”, she continued with a surge of power, “that Beatrice may appear to have achieved little. The old walls she prized—we all prized—crumbled before her eyes. And in some quarters her legacy is viewed as dubious, even scandalous. I am told she instituted a new procession, a dream-play, and in the beginning there were elements in it which were deplorable and savage. I have heard all this. And other things have been kept from my ears. You see I correspond with one Hosé. He should prove an excellent guide. I know—I am sure of it—the seed she has sown is terribly, terribly important …”
“I do not follow,” said the blind Fool. “You are the one who, in practical terms, has achieved good works. You have done good. Not a breath of scandal attaches to you. Whereas she … What has she achieved? I am astonished …”
Sister Joanna gave a slightly abrupt, slightly coarse laugh like the latch of a window which the wind blows loose so that it rattles in the throat of space as it speaks.
The Idiot stirred, half waking.
“Remember,” she said. “Mark my words. You will revise your plans when you arrive. As I have come to revise in a flash, at the last moment, my estimate of every good performance I have given. All in the light of her scandal …” She was laughing still. Then she seemed to fade a little, grow still save for her voice which rose again out of the dumb furniture of place as though intent on its disconsolate, painful confession. “If I have done a useful body of work I am glad of it but I have no wish to erect a monument. It would be wrong to do so when this house (it has been my asylum) is the monument, the base for my good works in a country that is still by and large homogeneous and Christian rather than heterogeneous and post-Christian. The house by the way is run by a very strange man, a Father Marsden. And he and I worship good deeds though he knows as well as I that in Europe—with its long tradition of Christian charity —good works seem easier to perform than in other parts of the world we have known. More natural in performance, shall I say, and less imbued with contempt, of which we may be wholly unconscious, for the poor.”
“What do you mean by
that?”
“I mean there is a well-defined, a finished doctrine in Europe—though one is aware of new questions now being asked—that clears the decks for a vision of compassion in action. A metaphysic has been ironed out, fought over for centuries, and finally established lucid and firm for all to obey.
“This, in my experience, is not the case in Mexico (or in the lands south of Mexico) where a cleavage exists within the ethics of sacrifice entertained by divided civilisations, different cultures rooted in pre-Columbian, post-Columbian worlds, pre-revolutionary, post-revolutionary states. And within that cleavage action is largely meaningless until one strips away from it a body of encrusted habit that trades on the exploitation of culture by culture. Indeed action has become a bureaucratic succession of callouses between man and man. A technique, a technicality, nothing more. Except, of course, that there is pity, the obscurity of pity, which moves one man to reach out to another as though for a moment or two they lose themselves and become naked souls.”
“And don’t you feel”, said the Fool dimly conscious of his and her frustrations now, “that this is true of Europe and America too?”
“Not in the same way,” she said. Then paused. “I do not know. I have already tried to explain. Did you not hear me? What I do feel now”, her voice was struggling to maintain its paradox, its force like a displaced sibylline feud of pride and prejudice, “is that her trial of values, her scandal, her supreme trial of values, her supreme scandal, is the exposure of a dead world dressed in all the garments of history and even now—at this late stage—it has led me to conceive, miraculously conceive …”
“Conceive what?”
“Has driven me—forced me to conceive …”
“Force? Do you know what you are saying? Force is rape.”
“Forced me to conceive.”
“Conceive what? Conceive what Sister Joanna?”
“To conceive, as if for the first time, the very earth in which I lie, into which I run …”
Companions of the Day and Night Page 3