The Virgin of Flames
Page 1
Table of Contents
PENGUIN BOOKS THE VIRGIN OF FLAMES
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Acknowledgements
THE ANNUNCIATION
one
two
three
four
five
six
seven
eight
nine
ten
THE UNCONSOLED
eleven
twelve
thirteen
fourteen
fifteen
sixteen
seventeen
IDOLATRY
eighteen
nineteen
twenty
twenty-one
twenty-two
twenty-three
twenty-four
twenty-five
twenty-six
twenty-seven
twenty-eight
twenty-nine
thirty
THE ANOINTING
thirty-one
thirty-two
thirty-three
thirty-four
thirty-five
thirty-six
thirty-seven
thirty-eight
thirty-nine
forty
benediction
PENGUIN BOOKS THE VIRGIN OF FLAMES
CHRIS ABANI is the author most recently of Becoming Abigail and GraceLand, which won the Hemingway/PEN Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a Silver Medal in the California Book Awards, and was a finalist for the IM-PAC Dublin Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His other honors include a PEN Freedom-to-Write Award, a Prince Claus Award, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. He teaches at the University of California, Riverside.
Also by Chris Abani
Novels
Masters of the Board
GraceLand
Novella
Becoming Abigail
Poetry
Kalakuta Republic
Daphne’s Lot
Dog Woman
Hands Washing Water
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in the United States of America by Penguin Books 2007
Copyright © Christopher Abani, 2007
All rights reserved
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Sunday Morning” from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. Copyright 1923 and renewed 1951 by Wallace Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the
author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or
dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Abani, Christopher.
The virgin of flames / Chris Abani.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-0-143-03877-1
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For
Mark, Charles and Gregory
Athos, Porthos and Aramis
also
Harold Pinter and Musa Farhi
There are singular people who appear like metaphors somewhere further out than we do, beckoned, not driven, invented by belief, author and hero of a dream by which our own courage and cunning are tested and tried; so that we may wonder all over again what is veritable and inevitable and possible and what it is to become whoever we may be.
—Diane Arbus Harper’s Bazaar
acknowledgments
Blair Holt, who saw it even when I didn’t and who pushed me to places hard but revelatory. Percival Everett, who can never quite escape the deluge of pages and whose friendship sustains and guides; Cristina Garcia, who never seems to run out of generosity; Walter Mosley, who continues to give and never wants anything back; Brad Kessler, Bridget Hoida, Jonathan Speight, Allison Umminger, Carol Muske-Dukes, Junot Diaz, Parissa Ebrahimzadeh, Peter Orner, Gabriela Jauregi, Titi Osu, Helene Igwebuike, Maurya Simon, Ishita Roy, PB Rippey, Wendy Belcher, Kachi Akoma, Steve Isoardi, Jeannette Lindsay, Emily Raboteau, Angie Cruz, Ron Gottesman, Russell Banks, Tara Ison, Tayari Jones, Elias Wondimu, Sara Mayinka, and Richard Russo—for reading and friendship. Alma Lopez, for letting us use her amazing print for the cover. Kathryn Court and Alexis Washam—for believing and for guiding this book to print.
My family, always: especially Stella and Daphne.
The divine Ellen Levine. There are no words.
The terms “Goodoo Dolls” and “The Ugly Store” are copyrighted by Jeannette Lindsay, and are used with kind permission.
Several drafts of this novel were written in Marfa, Texas, while I was on a Lannan Writers Residency. Thank you for the support and for everything you do for daring and engaged literature.
All the bookstores—independent and otherwise—that never get thanked.
For everyone who fills my life but who isn’t named—thank you.
THE ANNUNCIATION
I want to prove that Los Angeles is a practical joke played on us by superior beings on a humorous planet.
—Bob Kaufman Unholy Missions
one
this is the religion of cities.
The sacraments: iridescent in its concrete sleeve, the Los Angeles River losing faith with every inch traveled. A child riding a bicycle against the backdrop of desolate lots and leaning chain-link fences, while in the distance, a cluster of high-rises, like the spires of old Cathedrals, trace a jagged line against the sky, ever the uneven heart of prayer. The inevitable broken fire hydrant surrounded by an explosion of half-naked squealing children bearing witness to the blessed coolness of water. World-weary tenements and houses contemplating a more decadent past, looking undecided, as if they would up and leave for a better part of the city at any moment. A human silhouette on a park bench reading a book. Junkies hustling the afternoon. And out of sight, yet present nonetheless, the tired bounce of heat-deflated basketballs against soft tar. And a dog. Old, ancient even. And curious.
two
white.
Black sat before the mirror applying paste to his face. Face pa
int really, but it was thick like wallpaper paste. Too thick maybe, but when he was mixing it, he thought it would take that much to cover his complexion. It would also help the mask to harden with a sheen he could paint over: rouge cheeks, blue eye shadow, and really black eyelashes. But for now, he had to get the right shade of white. There were three cups of the stuff in a row in front of him in varying degrees of brilliance. He studied his face from several angles, imagining in that pause Miss Havisham sitting in front of a mottled wedding cake in a mottled wedding dress, both of which were the color of the paste on his face, an aging ivory that recalled the musty smell of empire in decline, a sad color really. Whose empire he had no idea. Probably something he had seen in a movie. He wiped it off, suddenly filled with an inexplicable overwhelming melancholy. The thought of Miss Havisham depressed him, made him think of being caught forever in the moment of desire, in the eternity of the bacchanal unable to consume or be consumed by it.
“Fucking sad,” he muttered at his reflection. “Jesus!”
He picked up the second cup and applied the contents slowly to the left side of his face, marveling in a childlike manner at the way mirrors reversed the world. On the wall next to the mirror, a letter-size color sketch of the Virgin of Guadalupe on black paper gazed at him. It was a close-up of her face, which was a brilliant white, the color he was trying to match. It was pinched into sorrow by red cheeks and a wash of blue for her shawl. He wanted to paint a mural of her. To capture all the bittersweet emotion of being the Mother of God. Since he was broke he couldn’t afford to hire any models, which was why he was sitting in front of the mirror trying on face paint. He intended to dress up as her and use himself as a model, painting a more detailed cartoon from his reflection. That would be the study he would transfer onto any wall he could find to use as a canvas. But whatever difficulty getting the face paint right posed paled in comparison to getting the rest of the costume together. For her robe, he had appropriated his landlord’s wedding dress from the cleaners across the street. While trying out the dress, which was several sizes too small and which he had to adjust at his sewing machine, he thought that the contrast of his dark hands and feet against the white of the dress and his face made for an interesting play.
While he waited for the contents of cup two to dry, he turned to look at the wedding dress hanging from a hook on the door like a ghost, all of its ectoplasmic sadness oozing everywhere. Having acquired the dress, he had bought a blonde wig for his hair, though it was hard to tell what color Mary’s hair had been. In all the pictures a shawl covered her head. But since Jesus was painted with blonde hair, he figured it made sense. He didn’t want to admit that there was the element of subversion in this choice, that somewhere in the back of his mind he actually thought of her more like Marlene Dietrich. Whatever he decided to do with the hair, he hadn’t solved the problem of the blue shawl. Should be easy enough, he thought. Turning back to the mirror, he smiled, the paste pulling his lips into a grimace. This is the right shade, he wanted to yell, but was afraid of cracking the still drying surface.
Without trying the contents of the third cup, he painted rouge cheeks onto the hardening mask of his face, and blue eye paint in a shadow around the eyes. Finishing, he leaned back. He looked beautiful, he thought, thinking at the same time how odd it was that he would think that. But then so many odd things had been happening since he took on this project, not least of which was the fact that Angel Gabriel, sometimes in the shape of a fifteen-foot-tall man with wings, sometimes as a pigeon, had taken to stalking him.
Leaning against the wall of the room that he used as an easel was a rug of rice paper. Unsnapping the elastic binding, he laid it out on the floor in a crinkled eight-foot spread. He sat on the stool by the workbench and lit a cigarette and studied the paper. This was how it always began for him. Almost imperceptibly, but with a snap of the wrist that could only be deliberate, Black sent a small ember spiraling into the air. It landed on the paper, and he sighed happily as it made a small hole with a charred black lip. This too was part of his ritual. Finishing the cigarette and stubbing it out in the bowl of bone-black pigment on the worktable, he got up and circled the paper the way Ali would circle the ring to psyche out his opponents. Finally he stopped and lay down backward, the paper crackling under him as it moved to allow his weight to spread out into the weave. With his eyes closed he made a paper angel, then rolled about on the paper, making sure that his body touched every inch of it. He believed that this way, his body was one with the paper and that when he painted he could conceptualize very accurately the dimensions needed. He made all his models do it. Again, it was ritual. Getting up, he dragged the paper over to the wall and stuck it there with masking tape. Now to paint, he thought.
His cell phone rang.
Bomboy wanted to meet.
He would pay for lunch.
“Lunch? I am about to work. Can’t come out to play.”
“I need help. What will it take?”
“I need rent money, puto.”
“I’ll give you two hundred bucks for your time.”
“I’ll be there soon.”
Black paused by the door. He didn’t want to clean his face until he was sure he could duplicate the shade of white. Fuck it, he thought, pushing a pair of sunglasses on as if they would somehow detract from the grotesque carnival of his face, I am an artist.
He pulled up in front of Bomboy’s building, an apartment block Bomboy said used to be the Langley Hotel, on Normandie and Eighth, and which still had, on the roof, an old penthouse where Cary Grant had lived. This whole area, just one block east of Wilshire and heading downtown, used to be the best of Los Angeles in the twenties and thirties, Bomboy bragged.
The penthouse was in dire need of renovation, and was inhabited mainly by pigeons, but it was all there: tennis court (its chain-link ball stop leaning drunkenly into the Santa Anas), an empty swimming pool and the four-bedroom penthouse. Black rang Bomboy on his cell.
“I’m here.”
“Come up to the roof, man.”
“Why? I’m hungry. Come on down, cuño.”
“Come on up. I have some good weed.”
Black sighed and headed in.
“The blood of Jesus!” Bomboy said when he saw Black’s face. “What’s that shit?”
Black shrugged. “Project I’m doing. Couldn’t afford a model.”
“Project of what?”
“Virgin Mary.”
Bomboy laughed. “You look more like the undead in a Japanese horror movie,” he said.
Black ignored him and taking the proffered spliff, he took a hit. On the roof, lounging back, legs dangling over the empty pool, they smoked pot and watched planes fill the sky.
“Where is my money, puto?” Black asked finally.
Bomboy shook his head and counted out the two hundred dollars.
“As promised. I thought we were friends, Black, where is the trust, eh?”
“In God we trust. So what’s up?” Black asked, stuffing the two hundred dollars into his back pocket.
“Oh, nothing much. It’s just that I need to buy some fake papers. I want to travel back home soon. To celebrate the peace.”
“Home?”
“Yeah, Rwanda. I miss it.”
“Fake papers?”
“You know, on Alvarado.”
“Well, if you know where to get them, why do you need me?”
“To speak Spanish. Those guys don’t speak English.”
“How long have you lived here and still don’t speak Spanish?”
“Speak any African languages?”
“Whatever, chingado.”
“That’s rich chingado to you.”
“Still a chingado.”
They smoked some more.
“Say, Black, what are your plans exactly?” Bomboy asked after a while, lighting up again.
“Plans?”
“You know, for life. I mean you are a grown man, not getting any younger, no offense, and yet you a
re still leeching off of your friends.”
“You invite me over to insult me?”
“No, not insult,” Bomboy said. “But you know we Africans are very ambitious and progressive. I’m just thinking of you.”
“So ambitious you’re working in a butcher shop, güey.”
Bomboy laughed.
“You are vexed. I am sorry, but I don’t work in a butcher shop. You know I own that abattoir. Because of me, five people have jobs. I also live in a nice place and drive a Lexus, so don’t even compare yourself with me.”
What Black couldn’t voice because the pot was making it hard to concentrate, but which filled the air around him with the thickness of smoke, was his fear of simply disappearing like the planes overhead, into the endless sky, forgotten by some distant watcher on a roof somewhere.
“Well, I guess you are a better killer than me.”
“Oh, is that supposed to hurt me? You may be older than me, Black, but you are still a small boy. I found myself in an unfortunate position and I did what was necessary to survive. You on the other hand, you my friend, are becoming a joke.”
Black was silent. He looked out at the empty pool. The last time he was here, a young man had been lying at the bottom, gun drawn, body riddled with bullet holes, his blood vainly trying to fill the concrete hollow. He and Bomboy still smoked their bong by the body that day, knowing it would take the police a couple of days to get to the dead banger. Nobody knew who shot him, or why. Nobody cared. Only the pigeons, and Cary’s ghost, and they weren’t talking. There were a lot of ghosts around the old parts of Los Angeles, same as in any city. It was just that in Los Angeles, the neon lights and the new buildings distracted one’s vision. But Black knew if he looked closely, they would be there, crowding in, singing, begging, crying and dying all over again, every night.