by Fiona Maazel
“Hey, go easy,” Stanley says.
Aggie appears with Sabrina in tow, Sabrina who’s got a leather-bound pocket notebook and, I notice, a Bic pen she’s chewed halfway down the barrel.
“What’s going on in here?” Aggie says. “I bet the whole building can hear this.”
Probably right. When a preadolescent girl screams that she hates you, even the dead roll over. Best way to estrange a loved one? Kill off her only friend.
“You want to know what’s going on? I’ll tell you. I’m going to hell, that’s what’s going on.”
Sabrina looks at Agneth, who nods by way of encouragement, like this is Sabrina’s chance to try out what she’s learned, which she promptly does. She says, “Actually, it seems you are coming back. I saw the family tree. So even if you do go to hell, it will be a short stay.”
“Get out of here,” I say. “For God’s sake.”
Agneth apologizes on my behalf. We all watch in silence as Sabrina puts on her coat and quickly gives Aggie her number. After she’s left, I try to feel relieved. As if Sabrina were the real evil here.
Agneth says, “What did you do to Hannah? I’m sorry, but it’s hard to feel bad for you. Don’t you notice that Hannah suffers for everything this family does?”
Loretta, our cook, rings the dinner bell. Stanley takes a pass. Aggie says she wants to call Sabrina because there’s just so much more to explain and the girl seemed willing to learn. I feel a stirring of jealousy and say, “I’m willing to learn!”
Aggie rolls her eyes and asks me to read off the phone number. I consider lying. I do not lie, but it takes restraint.
So now Sabrina knows more about my sister than I do. Hannah, the flagellant; I, child.
Eighteen
Hannah, the frail. I, flagellant. Of the two of us, the flagellant rules. Just think what I have been through. Suffering? They hardly know.
In the year of the Lord 1348, it was like this:
Whoso will through our penance go
Let him restore what he’s taken away,
whose hopes for respite are death, whose spirits are flayed, whose souls are lost, in these where sighs the end of all things, for they who are too many,
Solace of the wretched, pray for us.
Medicine of the sick, pray for us.
Mother Most Sad, the passion of Christ is stoked against us.
We are descended of the Camaldolese and the Cluniacs, the Servites and the Dominicans. The Disciplinati di Gesù Cristo are the dawn wherefore hope survives.
Now let us all lift up our hands
And pray to God this death to a vert.
This horror is unsustainable. I don’t know that I can go on. My chest is given to welts and boils that do not heal. I refuse women, I refuse to bathe. My flesh is bludgeoned for the sake of the Lord. My blood is spilt for the sake of the Lord. I do not speak, I only sing. And yet my sufferance is nothing. The plague can claim a man in fourteen hours. Others linger for several days, blood scum around their lips, feces down their legs, swellings like gourds that burble the Devil’s work, the bruisings and mottled skin, the weeping and hysteria, the stench, this rancid breath of excreta, rot, sweat, and vomit that collects in a slime that paves every road, the keening children who take with them unto death their parents, servants, siblings, and everyone who has touched their clothes or spared a moment’s compassion to behold them and pray; nay, every stranger who so much as passes the house; Lord of all, deliver us from this torture.
Hour by hour, carts drone through the streets, interring the dead five deep. The plague flag snaps in the wind. Last rites are dispatched with haste, and few receive the obsequies they deserve. Madmen are amok. Some say even we are amok. But consider: Venice and Genoa are locked in struggle. Simony mars the papal court. All around is calamity and strife, and yet Clement VI frowns on our conduct. He reviles the apostolic mendicants who are the Disciplinati. We are laymen whose penance claims miracles, which behavior threatens the provenance of oblates and priests. Wherefore shall we desist? Our work has only begun.
In the year of the Lord 1348, can we be found of Him pure and without fault? Ten thousand passings this last fortnight. In the year of the Lord 1348, are we without defect? Mark the dreadful splendor of His wrath. None among us can abide the day of His coming, much less the blanketing hail of His displeasure.
It is no coincidence that there made its appearance the pestilence in April, whence He who was foretold was expired by they who rejected Him. Sayeth the Son of Man: “But those mine enemies, which would not have me reign over them, bring them hither, and slay them before me.” Should we disobey? Should we vaunt our will and expect mercy? The Jews comport themselves as swine and exist by way of debauchery. They are Christ killers who must be made rid of, else more of this punishment, which none will survive. I have seen it with mine own eyes.
In the year of the Lord 1316, it rained without end. The rain pelted the land like spikes. Fields were scalped of soil so that it seemed one walked across the earth’s core. Houses were collapsed and soused. Cattle were butchered, then horses, dogs, cats. It is told of men who ate one another. In 1316, when the crops failed and hunger seized rich and poor alike, my mother wrested manure from a beggar who died crying while she fed me this vile meat. I watched my father lie down in a thick of mud until his body turned to stone and was swallowed by the pitch. Everywhere were limbs jutting from the rising tide like driftwood. Day by day, we huddled, naked, under leafless boughs and stared at the livid skies, hoping for respite. Our hair grew out, we were all bone, and the rain continued. Some fell prey to a fate worse than starvation: Saint Anthony’s fire, in which one’s limbs are as if seared by flame, and in which after much writhing and agony, these limbs rot and fall off. Others fell to a disease of the bowel in which one is unable to relieve oneself until suffocated from the inside by one’s own excrement. Others went blind and others still were ceded to rash, fever, delirium. And yet these tribulations were but presage of worse should the Jews be kept unmolested among us. There followed the conjunction of Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars three years ere now, which was regarded by Jean de Murs as augury of sedition, disease, and unspeakable mortality. Did we listen? Did we vanquish His enemies until none survived? In the year of the Lord 1348, we persist in sin and dereliction.
In the northeast, the Jews are plunged in barrels and thrown into the river. Elsewhere, they are cast into great bonfires whose smoke is as a beacon for Christians at a loss for means with which to ward off plague. When put to the question, many of the Jews have confessed to poisoning the air, though no one such confessant has escaped retribution by death. But it is not enough.
Fear and rumor throng to mind with every tiding from the west. In this our early spring the skies are clement and the crops are well. No matter. Pisa and Livorno are stricken. Genoa has ceased to trumpet her glory. Here in Pistoia, the pestilence claims near five hundred a day. Crowds are forbidden. Those who have left town are barred from return. Al be these measures well intentioned, they do little to assuage the terror of we who are quarantined. To be sure, the pestilence aggrieves most he whom it spares day after day. Some have taken to flight, abandoning neighbor and kin, amori proximi of no more virtue than amori bovis, often less. Among those who remain, whom contagion disposes to reform, there are sufficient voluptuaries to people a village. Healthy persons shut their windows to the south, where vapors are dense and foul. They say pediculous humors and flybome air are culprits of plague, so the townsmen make a pyre of flowers and brush, attar and spikenard, by way of purging the air of offense. Fig, apple, bol armeniac, venesection—all are thought to forfend plague, though none has proven itself capable. If such be the case, and our dead swear it, whence resist we who live by example? Arise, by the honor of pure martyrdom! Rend thy skin for that the people be absolved their sins by The Anointed. Pray with us, for the Disciplinati are trustees of spirit, an office shared with finer souls consecrated in this wise. Recall Saint Sebastian, who triumphed over that wh
ich would kill him, Apollo’s wrath unloosed but the arrows of plague overcome. Recall Saint Rocco, whose breath cleanses the sick of what agony rains down for his Lord’s sport and vengeance. Indeed, there are eighteen patron saints whom the afflicted beseech, though none so glorious as our Lady, who gathers unto her breast and shields with open arms.
When time allows and my will is mine own, I am possessed of the thought that our most iconic arrows are for love and pestilence. The plague of dark, the disease of noon, Eros and Apollo flex their bows and from them quivers the same tip.
I have read that in our appeals to the Mother Most Sad, in her mercy and intercession, are the origins of modern drama. We seek refuge in her calm, she responds, and stories are made. I have read that in our ex-votos are permutations of art for the people. We commission the image, offer it up, and because we are true, He will reward us. I have read, even, that with reference to our burning of the Jews there were committed pogroms and holocaust for the propitiation of Christ by the folk, but that such employment, glorious in design, has little reward in this life. Condemnant quod non intellegunt , they condemn because they do not understand.
I am fortunate to have seen our worship studied, though the advancing of science counterclaims the cause of our torment. Rattus rattus, they say. X. cheopis. Y. pestis, Pulex irritans. The flea that swells of one blood made of two, of three, and four—to this we owe the demise of twenty-five million people? Three alive for every one departed? The flea feeds on diseased blood that never acquits his stomach. Thus he is always hungry and always choking for why his body cannot intake more blood, blood festered with plague bacilli that he vomits into each new bite, the flesh of my kin: mother, brothers, aunt. On this sequence, it is said, we are to blame the near collapse of mankind.
In this afterlife, I have had many years to reflect and discourse with others whose ethics dispute mine own. I do not think it has been the most salutary disposal of my time. Across the table, a leprous child eats with passion unfettered. What sort of humble condition is this? In the year of the Lord 2002, He does not say: Seat you well and gorge of the pie I gave you. He says: Deny yourself and I will sustain you.
But who will listen? There is a woman among us who drowns. Who drowns and prays to men of the earth. Men of ideas. I have attempted dialogue:
What expedient is agitprop against the terrors of God arrayed against us?
You are a stupid votive, and the apparatchik army will not be conned by word of salvation.
Are you acquainted with the Might who avenges consort with false idols?
Your mortified flesh and bubbling stool are killing my appetite.
It is told that the virtue of these lives on earth be to grow up into Him in all things, always to covet advancement of feeling, to seek out knowledge of Him in every experience for to accomplish the nova of spirit that is promised, and for eternity to bear the sheen of His resplendence. Still, the current of progress moves slowly. What will be for us? I fear the instant demise of fellow feeling during the plague. Parents who cast their sick out into the street. Parents who killed their sick for fear of contagion. The woman who drowns ascribes this inhumanity to the survival instinct, which is paramount and irreproachable. If the one you love is soon to perish, should you, too, cede yourself to death to provide only a few days’ comfort? Consider of what good you will have deprived the world with your absence. A reasonable argument against which there is little to say except that in my time without body and constraint, I have come to see that when love be the end of all things, only then can we rejoice in this our year of annihilation.
Nineteen
With an hour to go before Eric, I was attempting outfits. When it comes to outfits, I lack for taste. History bears this out. The one chance I got with the principal’s assistant—dinner at a local cafe—I wore for the purpose of seduction black leggings and a white sleeveless shirt. Only the shirt was more girdle than shirt; and my breasts were prominent like eaves. I remember draping a green cardigan over my shoulders in prep-school fashion, as if to conceal the eaves, but not really. I remember tying another cardigan around my waist as if to conceal the ass, but not really. Calvin was thirty-five; I was sixteen. After dinner, he kissed me good night on the forehead, and I went home to cry. I cried for a year, and my wardrobe went baggy. Suitors were not forthcoming. I had erred in the other direction and perhaps allowed the appearance of sloth to boost whatever suspicions men had about me in bed—that I was drowsy and absent taut genitalia owing to the libertine sport of my youth. I was always worrying about the relative tautness of my genitalia and questioning my lovers about them to bad effect. I guess Am I tight? only sounds hot the first or second time you ask.
For my lunch with Eric, I was vetting options that might have struck me as absurd the day before. Like earrings. Pink lipstick. My colors are dead leaf, hazel, and biscuit, which means anything not brown is a risk. In the brown family I tend to include gray, black, and olive, which delimit the spectrum of my closet, and walnut, which is the only color to hit my face. Walnut blush. Eye shadow. I look like a tree every time I leave the house.
Naturally, then, pink lips were impossible. Likewise the earrings. There’s no jewelry to match a dog collar. Maybe the collar had to go. In the end I settled on leggings and a white sleeveless shirt that cut above my belly button. I was twenty pounds lighter than in high school; the eaves, the ass: no longer a problem.
December in New York. With sweater, vest, bomber jacket, hat, scarf, gloves, I was still freezing. The avenues were adorned with cheer, with Christmas perennials holly and pine. Every year I wait for the giant wreath above Fifth Avenue to snap loose and gird our shoppers as in a Lifesaver or donut. I feel this way because holiday decor is coercive and annoying, not to mention nervy. It’s the city’s way of saying fuck you to its homeless. Sorry, we’re only budgeting for lightbulbs and ribbon this year. Perhaps the theory is that pretty trees attract tourists and tourists mean revenue. But for what? More trees, of course.
Such thoughts carried me for several blocks until I decided there’s nothing worse than a drug addict with opinions, at which point my white sleeveless girdle started to feel stupid and this vagina-pink nail polish was a bad idea and my God, I really do walk like a man, I should make better use of my hips, Jesus my hips are fat, I should donate them to a shelter or sell them on eBay, and, while I’m at it, maybe I needed mitten clips, a new wallet, and a spanking because on eBay you can buy a spanking for fifty bucks.
I had chosen a dessert place for us to meet. You could order lunch, but the place was all about dessert. It pitched to a rich clientele of eight-year-olds. I figured if things got bad at my table, Eric and I could always delight in the relief of having made it past age eight.
Curdle was gathered in the joints of my mouth. My eyes had secreted a lubricant turned crusty at the seams. This happens when I am nervous. I get leakage. I am always dreaming of leakage, though I do not see what relevance it has to my life. In any case, it was nothing a fragrance-free baby wipe couldn’t handle. I had overapplied perfume for fear of underapplying. I smelled of industry, which was carried out by the antiseptic lozenge on my tongue, excess deodorant, lotion, and chamomile hair product. When I got to the café, industry collided with the distinct aroma of kids and cake. It is the smell of birthday parties before you were old enough to realize that when gaiety is compulsory—as on birthdays or New Year’s—it is frequently the worst night of your life.
Eric was in a corner, flanked by a table of two girls and a table of eight. Me included, this made eleven girls to his one boy. In the war of the sexes, I felt we were evenly matched. He was wearing the same clothes I saw him in last. A few months had gone by, but for all I knew, he wore the same thing every day. Some girls might find this unappetizing. But I liked it. It sprang terms of endearment to my lips. I used to call him Pajama Head.
He made some crack about my layers piled on the seat next to him. Maybe if I’d chosen a warmer top, I wouldn’t need the pile. I smiled,
but the girdle said, See?
He had already ordered a milk shake. I ordered same and wiped at my lips for dread of curdle.
“So what are you working on?” I said, and the girdle went, LAME! Worst opening ever.
“Just some stuff. Nothing exciting.”
“Can I see?” He’d brought a zipper case of photos.
“Nah, I just have this because I’m going to see a potential client later.”
I thought: What the hell, he’d show them to some stranger and not me? But then: Well maybe he’s afraid I won’t like them. Maybe he cares what I think! Or: Maybe he just wants this lunch to be as sterile as possible. His wedding ring was hard to miss. A big silver thing, almost like a napkin holder.
“Come on,” I said. “I want to see.”
Unexpectedly, this produced a reason to sit next to him. Of course, if our legs touched and he inched away from the contact, I’d weep.
He flipped through the portfolio like a Rolodex. I slowed him down. Asked questions. He’d done a series at the unclaimed luggage depot in Alabama. Largest place of its kind, and everything is for sale. A lump of wedding dresses high as my shoulder. A coffin. Dentures jammed in a laundry bag and biting the mesh. The photos were lovely. Eric said the proliferation of loss was less about product than story. A woman loses her wedding dress—before or after the ceremony? What becomes of a bride whose dress vanishes on her wedding day? What becomes of a marriage inaugurated in attire that runs away?
As Eric spoke, every part of him seemed to come loose. His hair mutinied. His crewneck sank. I remembered that great red-fleck birthmark just above his nipple, haloed by skin paler than his natural color.