Tremble

by Tobsha Learner

  “Every year on Saint Barbara’s day we have the holy relic procession. We bring her down from the convent in a cart, parade her through the streets, and every woman comes to be blessed,” the priest declared grandly, breathing a noxious mixture of garlic and peppermints over her.

  He also told her about the villagers; how behind the facades of the brightly painted houses lay real poverty, with many of the families barely able to afford to send their children to school. After fourteen most of them worked on the fishing boats or beside their mothers at the factory. Any extra cash came from tourism, but these islanders were deeply religious people who didn’t care to have their beaches polluted with naked German backpackers or their cafés invaded by loud sunburned Englishmen. They had placed an embargo on the pleasure cruises that stopped off at many of the other islands; consequently their economy had stopped growing. The main medical authority on the island was an herbalist who was rumored to be over a hundred years old. To see a conventional doctor one had to travel to nearby Donousa. It was as if time itself had been frozen. Many of the women, even the younger ones, still wore the traditional headscarf and modest long-sleeved blouses. There was one satellite dish, perched awkwardly on top of the main café, but it was used solely to watch soccer matches or the Eurovision song contest. The locals studiously avoided any coverage of international news or politics. They were a closed, superstitious clan determined to cling onto tradition.

  Later he took Clarissa to the cannery where the village women worked, twisting thin sheets of tin into cans for the sardines their husbands caught in the bay. The cannery was little more than a glorified shed with an aluminum roof and hardboard walls. In one corner squatted the cutting machine; it looked as if it dated from the 1950s. An enormous woman dressed in a black frock, her hair covered by a scarlet stained bandanna, studiously fed the machine with long strips of glittering tin, her huge forearms shining with fish oil. There were two other machines spitting out the bent metal that made up the sides of the cans while another punched the pieces together, pushing them along a conveyor belt to collect like shimmering waves at the end of a table where women of all ages sat ladling sardines into the cans. The smell—a concoction of fish, perfume, and sweat—was overwhelming. The women, chatting brightly among themselves, seemed immune to both the noise and the stench. Their gestures, automated from years of practice, had a mechanical beauty that juxtaposed strangely with their animated faces, their lips splitting like fruit in laughter. The workers themselves resembled some arcane grouping, and reminded Clarissa of a Rembrandt painting she’d seen—a Biblical gathering of worshippers, the luminous features of adolescents peeping over the heads of wizened matriarchs, the young mothers still supple with an olive beauty. Hope and misery traced across all their faces.

  On a wall Clarissa noticed a board wallpapered with postcards from all over the world: family who had escaped to become migrants now living in far-off places like Canada, America, South America, Australia. With a pang of patriotism Clarissa noticed a postcard of the Sydney Opera House sandwiched against one from Yellowstone Park. Another, from Brisbane, showed a bizarre montage of a giant koala clutching an ultramodern tower block with the word Bridgeport emblazoned across it. Clarissa recognized the building from an article she had read in the Qantas magazine on the flight over.

  She stood lost among the noisy machines, shyly turning from one face to another, uncertain about whom to approach.

  “Hello, you holy sister,” a kid said cheekily, looming out of the shadows, his face smeared with sardine oil. “I am Georgio, your official translator. Any problems, these women will tell me and I will tell you in English. Yes?”

  The boy sat down next to her. A bell rang and the machines stopped. Instantly the factory was filled with the sound of the sea. The women lovingly covered the machines with brightly colored cloths, kissed the plastic statue of the Madonna that stood at the base of the largest piece of equipment, then politely formed a queue in front of Clarissa and Georgio.

  There was Maria, whose husband was a philanderer; Effie, who didn’t want a seventh child but who also didn’t want to offend God; and an octogenarian called Sofia, who claimed that her dead husband had been sexually harassing her in her dreams. “I didn’t want him when he was alive and I don’t want him now!” she squawked, sending the other women into great peals of laughter.

  Clarissa suggested natural birth control, emphasized the importance of communication with the men and lastly the sustaining power of prayer. But she struggled, trying to sound authoritative as she talked about the omnipresence of God. The village women, infinitely more experienced in matters of life, love, and death, stared skeptically at the pale Australian nun who sweated under her habit. They could smell the festering doubt. They could see the disbelief in her eyes as she blessed them with trembling hands. But as obedient Catholics who respected their Mother Superior on the mountain, they crossed themselves anyway, consoling themselves with the thought that miracles could come in many guises.

  At the end of the afternoon Clarissa, exhausted, stood up on shaky legs. Georgio, seeing that she was about to faint, rushed out and brought back a bowl of ice he’d stolen from the storage unit at the back of the factory. The ice stank of fish but Clarissa didn’t care. She pressed the cubes to her neck and forehead. It felt delicious. Just then a beautiful girl, her aquiline features half-hidden by a headscarf, approached the nun timidly.

  “Please, please, I can’t have baby. I must. For four years I have been married, no children. Please?”

  Clarissa looked at Georgio questioningly.

  “She is…infertile. You bless her and she will have baby, yes?” He indicated the girl’s abdomen. Clarissa glanced at her; her black eyes were full of blind faith. Suddenly the nun felt nauseated by the responsibility of creating false hope.

  “Tell her I can’t help. She should see a fertility expert on the mainland.”

  Clarissa turned away; Georgio grabbed her sleeve.

  “No! She has seen one. You are her last chance. God will fix her. Please, she is my sister,” he pleaded.

  Wearily Clarissa laid her hands on the young girl’s stomach.

  “Holy Mary, mother of God, please bless this woman, make her whole and able to bear a child,” Clarissa muttered, feeling like a total fraud, then added a few words in Latin for effect. The girl was close to tears as she covered the nun’s hands with kisses.

  Weeks passed quickly, more quickly than Clarissa would have thought possible in a place where time was measured only by the changing of the light and the seasons. She adapted to the spartan routine of her fellow sisters, to the simple food, to the ringing of the convent’s bell four times a day calling the nuns to prayer. She even started to learn a few words of Greek. But her faith remained dormant. If anything, the harsh realities of village life were a daily reminder of human endurance not spiritual enlightenment. Her doubt grew like a secret canker and at night, in desperation, she turned to her original love: mathematics. Using the one computer at the convent, she began to study quantum theory on the Internet, searching, as it were, for physical evidence of a God who perhaps hid his existence in the minutiae of life itself. She felt like an alchemist trying to work out how many angels would fit on the head of a pin. She felt like a fraud and she found nothing to exorcise her doubt.

  The harvest season arrived, Saint Barbara’s festive day drew nearer, and Clarissa was swept into the preparations for the procession of the holy relic. It was the main annual event for the village and many came from nearby islands to attend. The convent’s founder, the wife of the crusading knight, had been given the relic by another pious knight on the day he came to tell her that her husband had been killed in Jerusalem. On that very same day the newly widowed woman had discovered she was pregnant.

  The relic was kept in a vault deep within the convent and was brought out only once a year. Whenever Clarissa asked precisely what part of the saint had been preserved, the sisters politely but firmly changed the subject. A
ll she learned was that the relic attracted mainly female worshippers.

  The Mother Superior decided that the guardian of the relic that year was to be Clarissa. It was a task considered to be a great honor, she sensed from the jealous reactions of her holy sisters. Daunted by the prospect she pleaded with the abbess.

  “With all due respect, I don’t think I’m the right choice. I don’t know the local customs, I’m an outsider, and I’m too young,” she argued, looking up at the abbess from her kneeling position.

  “That’s exactly why it should be you. You are the embodiment of purity, even if you’re not aware of it. I know Saint Barbara would have approved.” The abbess smiled wickedly.

  “But—”

  Clarissa was interrupted by a wave of the hand. “No buts, I have decided. However there is one condition.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You have to promise me that you won’t touch the relic itself. It can be dangerous,” she announced solemnly.

  “Dangerous how?”

  “Don’t ask, just promise.” The abbess looked her straight in the eye.

  Clarissa, knowing that she had no choice, nodded slowly and was ushered swiftly out of the room.

  Saint Barbara’s day arrived and Clarissa, dressed in a special white habit with a scarlet cowl—a tradition that symbolized both purity and the rejection of depravity—sat perched on the ceremonial carriage as it wound its way precariously down the mountainside, pulled by two blinkered donkeys. The float was a farm cart disguised with lengths of embroidered velvet. White Madonna lilies, a cascade of veined trumpets, were piled high on it, next to bowls of polished eggplants and grapes—the phallic vegetable and purple fruit a gesture of acknowledgment to the earlier pagan gods of Pan and Dionysus. In the middle of this glistening cornucopia, raised on a wooden platform, lay the holy relic itself. Contained within an ornate medieval glass casket, encrusted with semiprecious stones, and woven with gold filigree, the relic was barely visible.

  To Clarissa, perched above it on a cane chair sprayed gold to resemble a throne, the sacred artifact looked rather like a withered, flesh-colored prune. It was already midday and the scent of lilies was sickening in the heat. She swayed from side to side as they descended the narrow mountain path. Two priests walked in front of the cart solemnly waving thuribles of burning incense, followed by four choirboys chanting in Latin. Along the way stood lines of hopeful supplicants, throwing stems of wild lavender and murmuring prayers. Red-faced and hot, they had waited for hours in the sun, fanning themselves with pine branches. Lemonade vendors walked up and down hawking their wares.

  Dizzy, Clarissa forced herself to sit upright, trying not to forget that she was supposed to be a representative of God. But under the white habit she felt horribly human. She urgently needed to urinate and the scarlet cowl cut into her forehead. It’s all so barbaric, she thought, all these people worshipping a piece of cow’s flesh a medieval peddler sold someone as a holy relic. What has this got to do with real faith? And when am I going to reach a toilet? These and other unholy thoughts crowded her mind until the heat burned away everything else and she fell into a state of blank meditation as she rocked back and forth with the motion of the cart.

  They arrived at the town square where four extremely handsome fishermen waited—all bachelors, dressed in their Sunday best, hair slicked back, shirts white and gleaming. Ranging from seventeen to thirty they had been voted the most beautiful men of the village by the women of the island and three of its neighbors. The shortest was blond with green eyes; the next black-haired with blue eyes; and the other two black-haired with black eyes: the full genetic representation of conquerors from the Byzantine through to the Ottoman. Smoothing their oiled hair, white teeth flashing like eager racehorses, they preened themselves proudly as the cart drew near. Amid wolf whistles and shouts of encouragement they each hoisted a corner of the platform onto their shoulders. Then, muscles bulging like knotted ropes, they carried Clarissa and the holy relic slowly through the cheering crowd and into the church.

  Once inside the nun thankfully climbed off the throne and, after a quick visit outside to the sectioned-off hole in the ground that functioned as a toilet, took her place beside the encrusted casket now placed in the center of the altar.

  The pilgrims shuffled through the tiny church—the old, the blind and the diseased, the unemployed and the poor—all barefoot and meekly hoping for a miracle, their faces transformed by bliss and belief as they touched the casket. One mother held up her howling four-year-old boy, uncovered the stump that finished just above his knee, and pressed it gently against the glass lid. Clarissa, made tense by what she perceived as obscene futility, leaned forward expecting to catch the angry child’s flailing arms, but to her surprise he immediately fell into silence, his scowl replaced by sudden amazement.

  By the end of the day Clarissa’s white habit was grimy with dust. The last devotee was ushered out. Pater Dimitri locked the church, then led the nun into the room behind the altar that functioned as an office and laid out a feast of fresh fish, bread, salad, and figs. Clarissa was too numb with fatigue to speak, but slowly the food and accompanying retsina revived her. She glanced through the open door toward the casket. It looked innocuous, like a jewel case from some fairy tale.

  “What exactly is the relic?” she asked. Pater Dimitri, who was already on his fourth glass of retsina, chuckled.

  “They haven’t told you?”

  As she shook her head he laughed even louder.

  “The holy relic is the withered nipple of Saint Barbara.”

  “Are you serious?” Shocked, she glanced back at the glass.

  “Of course,” the priest answered sternly. “It is of the divine and has performed many miracles since they took it from her body.” And with a wink, he tossed down the last of the retsina.

  Clarissa lay next to the altar on the uncomfortable camp bed covered by goats’ skin, keeping vigil. Outside she could hear the sound of the waves lapping against the stone pier. Somewhere a dog barked and nearby a donkey brayed. It was comforting. She imagined the village night had sounded like this for centuries.

  Images of the past floated through her mind: her father ecstatic with joy when she was accepted at Adelaide University; Ruby’s frightened face staring up at her, tubes writhing from her fragile body; her closest girlfriend looking horrified when Clarissa told her she was joining the order; her father teaching her to play chess when she was ten…images of family, community, all now lost to her. Outside a cat wailed; in the rafters above a bird rustled. Clarissa rose from the bed and walked over to the holy relic.

  Moonlight streaming through the stained-glass window made the casket glow blue and emerald. Could it really be dangerous? she thought, strangely attracted to the engraved inscription on the glass lid. Holding a candle above her head she leaned over to get a closer look. She recognized the words as Latin. Beneath the cloudy glass sat the nipple. Clarissa peered closer. The areola was visible, a dark wine color surrounding the nipple, which was collapsed and shriveled. Fascinated, she wondered whether the nipple had ever been an object of lust, imagining that perhaps a man had once caressed and sucked on that sad piece of flesh. Guiltily she crossed herself for the blasphemy.

  She had to get a closer look. As if in a trance she ran her hand across the casket’s surface. It’s just a box with a stage prop inside, she thought, nothing more dangerous than the trick rubber fingers I used to buy as a child. She dared herself to go further. Go on, a voice kept saying inside her. At least open the lid, it urged.

  To her surprise it opened easily, as if the hinges had been recently oiled. Now she could see the appendage more clearly. It looked as if it had been neatly cut away from the breast and was bigger than she had thought. “The breast would have been large, with a dark smooth areola and a long nipple,” she said out loud, trying to muster a detached medical tone in an effort to exorcise any guilty feelings. The image of the full breast floated before her and briefly settled
across the carved features of the suffering Christ. Now feeling incredibly furtive she couldn’t stem the flood of possibilities that ran through her mind. I wonder what it feels like? Should I touch it? What would happen if I did?

  If it were fake then nothing could happen to her. If it were genuine and she saw no result it would finally prove to her that there was no God and then she could free herself. On the other hand, perhaps touching it might restore her faith. It was all so confusing and yet the nipple was so tantalizingly close…one little caress, surely it would be harmless.

  “No one would know,” she whispered out loud. What did she have to lose?

  She placed one finger delicately onto the relic. It had the same texture as a piece of old leather. As Clarissa had suspected, she felt nothing—no great revelation or spiritual bliss. Just a slight clamminess and mild revulsion.

  Disappointed, she closed the lid and retreated to the camp bed. As she lay there she couldn’t help but reflect on how much easier life would be if she could believe in miracles like the pilgrims she’d seen that day, their faces luminous with hope. Then the night, a comforting black envelope smelling faintly of camphor and stale incense, closed in on her and she surrendered to sleep.

  She spent the next day receiving another endless line of optimistic supplicants. At dusk the convent’s Jaguar waited for her in the town square. As Pater Dimitri walked her toward the car a blind man stepped out of the shadows. Stumbling slightly he blocked their path, his face tilting as he sensed the people in front of him. Suddenly he placed a hand on Clarissa’s stomach and, in a high-pitched voice, shrieked some words. Dimitri pushed his arm away and hurried Clarissa to the car. Although the incident had only lasted a couple of seconds Clarissa found it very disturbing.