The Black Madonna

by Peter Millar

  ‘I’m going to tell you something, sir,’ he said. ‘You may have taken against those Mexican boys – and I can understand that, in the circumstances – their only order was to bring you here on your own, without causing any harm to your lady friend, and maybe they went a bit too far. If so, maybe that’s my fault. But you have to understand what they were rescued from.’

  ‘Rescued?’

  ‘Rescued, sir. Rescued from the most insidious pagan plot known to man.’

  Jones took another swig of coffee and refilled his cup. Marcus could see beads of sweat gathering on the man’s nose. He bet he was a reformed drinker. They were always the worst evangelists. ‘You may know – in fact, I’m sure you do – that the little statue your lady friend is so keen to visit is not the only black Madonna of Guadalupe, in fact not even the best known.’

  Marcus nodded. ‘There’s one somewhere in the Americas.’

  ‘There certainly is. In Mexico City.’

  ‘And what does the Mexican statue have to do with the one here?’

  Jones smiled, like a precocious schoolboy asked to recite his favourite lesson.

  ‘Everything and nothing,’ he announced. ‘It’s not a statue, you see. In fact, it’s not even black – that’s just what they call it – but that don’t stop it being sinister. In fact, that’s part of the plot.’

  Marcus gave him just enough of a curious look to encourage him to continue. Not that he needed any encouragement.

  ‘As always, the legend here involves a simple peasant. Everybody loves a simple peasant. This guy was allegedly an Aztec, although interestingly enough he appears to have been called Juan Diego – I’ll come back to that. Now one day back in 1531 he was walking up a hill near the old Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan – today’s Mexico City, more or less – when he saw a vision. Don’t they all? A shining lady, no less, who asked him, as they invariably do, to tell his bishop to build a chapel to her on that spot.

  ‘Our peasant did what he was told, but the bishop – allegedly – was a sceptical guy and he told the peasant to get his lady friend to produce a bunch of roses. You with me, so far? The point being, of course, that this was not the season for roses. But hey presto, just like a rabbit from a hat, the lady produces the roses and the peasant wraps them in his cloak, a traditional Aztec garment called a tilma, to take them to the bishop. And when he gets there – this is the good bit – not only are the roses fine, but there’s also a full-length picture of the good lady herself on the cloak.’

  Pleasing Jones was the last thing Marcus wanted to do, but he still couldn’t avoid a whimsical look of scepticism that clearly delighted the big man.

  ‘Exactly. Exactly. And that picture, still there today in the basilica built on the spot is sure as hell one piece of holy hokum, a nice old painting on a bit of cloth and proof of the conspiracy.’

  ‘What conspiracy?’

  ‘Here’s the rub: that hill that old peasant walked up was known to the Aztecs as Tepeyac and on it, before the Spaniards arrived, was a temple to Tonantzin, the Aztec earth goddess – Tonantzin even means ‘our venerable mother’ in Nahuatl, which happened to be the language the so-called Virgin Mary spoke to Juan the man. Tonantzin’s symbol is the crescent moon, and guess what the so-called Madonna is standing on in the picture? Yep, a crescent moon.

  ‘Now we come to the name. According to the story this fine lady, speaking Nahuatl remember, used the expression coatlaxopeuh.’ He spelled it out for Marcus. ‘Write it down in English letters and it looks like nonsense – but what the Spaniards heard was something that sounded like ‘kwa-tla-hup-ehj’ which they decided was an attempt by the natives to say Guadalupe, which just happened to be where a lot of the conquistadors came from. There ya go: proof positive that the Virgin Mary had travelled with them – or proof perfect that people hear what they want to!’

  Marcus furrowed his brow. Reluctantly he admitted to himself that it was uncanny, the parallels between the Mexican story and Nazreem’s idea that many of the ‘black Madonnas’ were derivative of the Egyptian Isis, and the argument she had put forward in the gallery in Munich about the ‘legend’ created to cover up the transition.

  ‘What are you suggesting?’ he found himself almost reluctantly thinking aloud. ‘That the Spanish made a mistake, or …’ he hesitated an instant, ‘that they deliberately adopted the Aztec goddess and turned her into the Virgin Mary?’

  Jones turned to the man in the dog collar: ‘See, reverend, I knew the professor here would understand.

  ‘But it goes deeper than that. At first the Spanish tried to give the Aztec goddess a makeover, see, make her look more white.’ Marcus thought of the Dutch matron in the van der Weyden painting. ‘But they let a trace of the olive-skinned native Indian features remain and as copies spread they became closer and closer to the native image.’

  ‘But the real Mary would have had Middle Eastern features,’ countered Marcus, resorting to Nazreem’s argument.

  ‘Professor,’ said Jones, leaning back and slapping his knee. ‘They didn’t give a damn what the idols looked like as long as they kept them Indians loyal to Spain, old religion, new religion – it was all about politics, power and empire, not one iota to do with the teachings of the Lord Jesus on the Sea of Galilee.’

  ‘But this is ancient history. The age of empire-building, colonialism is long over,’ said Marcus.

  ‘You think so, eh? Well, maybe you can think that over here in Europe. The way I hear it people over here are half-heathen nowadays anyway. But you’re missing the point. This isn’t old history at all. It’s bang up to date.’

  ‘Excuse me. You’ll have to explain.’ Whether he wanted to or not, Marcus had got caught up in the man’s tale. And he had a feeling he was getting close to their connection to Nazreem’s missing statue.

  ‘You haven’t been to Mexico, professor, have you?’

  Marcus shook his head.

  ‘I thought not. You go anywhere in that country, and indeed in most of Latin America and that pagan image is everywhere. I mean everywhere, on tin trays, in plastic shrines, on the dashboards in taxis, even behind the counter in saloon bars. They make ’em out of plastic, marble, wood, cake, candy, even tissue paper, and decorate them with beads, baubles, even sugar icing. And they have the nerve to call it Christianity.’

  Marcus could hardly resist the ghost of a smile at the Texan’s furious evocation of all the things that in his mind made Latin American culture so vibrant.

  ‘You haven’t heard the worst of it. Now you can check this out yourself, but most serious scholars don’t believe old Juan Diego – or whatever his Aztec name might have been – ever existed at all. He was part of the conquistadors’ myth-making.’

  Marcus shrugged. He was hardly surprised.

  ‘But some pretty important folks have done their damnedest – and I mean damnedest – to convince the world otherwise.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning his so-called holiness, the late Pope John Paul II himself. In 2002 – and that’s just a few years ago, not a few centuries ago – this Polish pope, who himself, you’ll remember, was one of the foremost adherents of the cult of the black Madonna – went to Mexico City, one of the last big foreign trips he ever made, and declared this Aztec peasant, who in all probability never existed but was made up for propaganda purposes – to be a saint.’

  ‘A saint?’

  ‘You heard me all right. That was bad enough. Is bad enough. The last thing we need in this world right now is any more nonsense about black Madonnas. Do you see where I am leading, sir?’

  Marcus thought that for the first time he was beginning to see clearly enough. These were people who had no interest in seeing the discovery of a new and supposedly holier still Marian relic.

  ‘The basilica in Mexico City is the largest site of pilgrimage for the Marian cult in the whole world. Each year millions of people flock there to kneel and pray before a daubed Aztec shawl. The whole Latin American world worships this s
o-called image of the Virgin Mary as if this goddamn painted idol were the Lord Jesus Himself.’ Marcus could sense almost an imploring tone in the man’s voice, the voice of a self-convinced preacher in the wilderness.

  ‘The worst of it is, sir, that these two young Mexicans in our employ are the exception to the rule. With every year that passes the Latino population of the southern United States is growing rapidly. There are whole swathes of Florida, Texas and southern California where the first language is Spanish. And they bring their perverse idolatry with them. I don’t have to remind you, sir, that the United States – the original thirteen colonies and the nation that has grown out of them – has its origin in true Protestant Christianity, right back to the days of the Pilgrim Fathers themselves. Now, do you see the danger we’re facing?

  ‘We are fighting, sir, for the Christian soul of America itself!’

  40

  It was a calm night; the waters of the Gulf of Cadiz stretched out like a flat dark blanket beneath a moonless sky. To the south the lights of the old fortress city twinkled like fallen stars, to the north he could make out the protruding harbour wall and the busy little marina of the small town that they called Puerto de Santa Maria, the port of Saint Mary. The irony did not escape him that this should be the nearest place to the spot where he would at last set foot on the profaned soil of crusader-occupied Al-Andaluz.

  The Son of Saladin was anxious for the moment, anxious to arrive, to begin the next stage of the task God had set for him. It was dangerous for him to be here. But he could no longer take the risk of leaving the matter in hand to bunglers or traitors. In the end it was a matter of trust, and he trusted no one that far: not to the end.

  Death did not terrify him – surely there were delights enough ahead in Paradise as the reward for his labours – but ignominy did: the idea of being subject to the infidels’ so-called justice, of being paraded like the monkey they had made of even their greatest ally in the war against the true religion, the evil Saddam – a thousand curses on his blasphemous memory. No, that he could not abide, not even the thought of being imprisoned in their stinking jails full of unbelievers, prey to the scorn of even the scum of their society, a subject of contempt instead of adulation, to be abused rather than obeyed. That alone was genuinely to be feared.

  The journey had been a long one, particularly for a man whose movements made him vulnerable. Yet in many ways the greatest risk would soon be behind him. He had been in no particular fear of apprehension in an Arab country: those who wanted him had no international outrage to point to, no atrocity they could lay at his feet to demand his arrest. Even so, he preferred whenever possible to avoid drawing the attention of any government agency. He had used a false Egyptian passport for the flight from Cairo to Casablanca which had proved to be merely an endurance test as was the long drive in a truck full of citrus fruit up the coast to the grimy port of Tangier.

  Yet now he was venturing into the lion’s maw, into the world of people who scoured the planet from satellites, fed biometric details into machines capable of performing retinal scans, analysing DNA, the so-called building blocks of life. Such was their scorn for the wisdom of God, that they took unto themselves powers to tinker with creation. Because these would-be masters of the universe failed to see – even when their instruments were turned against them – that those whom their hegemony forced to crawl in the gutters could also destroy them.

  In their idolatrous art they depicted crusaders on white horses trampling on the snake of Islam. The snake was a creature that in the sound of the Arabic language, the language of the Holy Koran, represented life. And a snake could cross the earth unnoticed and bite the unsuspecting.

  So while the Spanish customs and excise patrolled the busy port of Algeciras and cruised the Straits of Gibraltar on the watch for drug smugglers in fast speedboats stashed with heroin, or tramp steamers docking at dead of night to unload cargos of dozens of illegal immigrants, no one paid any attention to a small fishing ketch returning to a nondescript little coastal resort up the Atlantic coast, or the fact that it had – out on the seas in the hours of darkness – briefly made contact with a similar vessel from Morocco, and taken on a solitary passenger.

  The ketch bumped ashore on the long spit of sand. A few metres away, dunes topped with reedy grass separated the beach from the empty road that ran between it and what passed for local industry: the long lines of plastic tunnels covering tomato crops grown for northern European supermarkets, and the salt pans in which the locals, like their ancestors going back to the days of the Caliphate, extracted the precious mineral from the sea.

  Stepping onto the shore, he restrained himself from bowing down to kiss the soil of a stolen land. On the roadway a vehicle turned on its sidelights. He walked slowly towards it as the ketch slipped back into the waves. In less than an hour they would be in Seville; he would have them drive through the heart of the city to afford a glance, no more, at the great Mosque of the Almohads, it too now defiled with the name of the Whore of Babylon. By morning he would be in Madrid, where his soldiers would be waiting for him.

  41

  ‘Let me get this straight,’ Marcus said, watching uneasily as the big Texan got to his feet with a dangerous glint in his eye. ‘You are suggesting that the United States is in danger of being taken over by Marian-led Catholicism inspired by immigrants from Latin America and that the late pope was party to the plot?’

  The Texan looked down at him, with what Marcus imagined was intended as a blend of pity and compassion, as far as either could be realistically imagined as emotions readily felt by an ex-Marine with a neck like a butcher’s block.

  ‘I’m gonna have to give a B-minus there, professor. It seems you’ve only heard what you wanted to hear. This is not some conspiracy theory. There’s no master plan out there. It’s just what’s happening. The other side is slowly winning.’

  ‘The other side?’

  ‘All those people that reject Christ’s simple message, that reject the Bible, that reject the idea of One God, Father and Creator.’

  Marcus nodded quietly. It seemed the only safe thing to do.

  ‘Let me ask you something else, do you remember an old movie called The Robe?’

  Marcus shook his head. The name rang a vague bell, but he couldn’t place it.

  ‘I’m not that surprised, I guess. It dates back to the 1950s and kind of got overlooked when Ben Hur came out a few years later. But at the time it was one of the highest-grossing movies of all time, second only to Gone With the Wind.’

  Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn, thought Marcus, wondering what the hell this madman was on about.

  ‘One of the great Christian movies of all time, sir. Before Hollywood succumbed to Satan. Won a couple of Oscars. Starred that British actor, Richard Burton, and Jean Simmons. Fine actress.’

  Marcus smiled weakly. Not just an ex-Marine Sunday-school teacher, but a film buff too.

  The big man rewarded him with a none-too-gentle prod in the ribcage with an index finger like an iron poker.

  ‘The point I’m coming to here is this: there’s a moment in that film when one of the Roman centurions says to this Christian girl – they’re in love, right – that all she has to do is accept that her God – this is the Lord God Almighty of Israel we’re talkin’ about here – is the same as the Roman Jupiter, or the Greek Zeus, that all she has to do is use a different name when she talks about him in public, and she won’t be fed to the lions.

  ‘What does she do, of course she tells him where to stick his Jupiter and his Zeus and all those other names of Satan, that she will not be fooled by the serpent, and she goes to meet her martyrdom, ripped apart by wild beasts in the arena. He thinks she’s a fool who doesn’t know how to play the game, but we know, we know that she has been saved, whereas he will rot in hell for all eternity.’

  Marcus nodded again. You had to give Hollywood something, it impressed itself on people’s minds. Jones was on a roll, the spirit of the Lord
was with him:

  ‘Let me tell you, the Catholic Church may think it took over some of the old ways and turned them to the ways of Jesus Christ, but they are the ones who lost their way, a long time ago. The Roman Church, sir, as it exists today, and particularly in this country, Spain, the country of the ‘black legend’, is riddled with apostasy and the remnants of pagan religions.

  ‘Have you ever looked at some of those Spanish fiestas? Taken a close look, I mean, the way they carry on, at Easter in Seville with those white hoods, more like the goddamn Ku Klux Klan than true followers of Our Lord Jesus Christ.’

  Marcus could imagine Martin Jones and his sinister minister getting on just fine and dandy with a local Texan chapter of the Klan, but he let it pass.

  ‘Or those in Burgos or Santiago de Compostela, or Valencia or Elche, or just about any goddamn town where they need only the slightest excuse to get themselves up in these giant costumes, parade through the streets and get drunk as all hell.’

  Marcus had seen several. He had always thought they looked rather fun. The children enjoyed the spectacle and the adults got pleasantly drunk and enjoyed the party.

  ‘It’s idolatry, pure and simple. Those saints, those giant images paraded around the town, you think they have anything to do with Christian holy men, with true followers of Jesus, the preachers and baptists who follow the Lord’s word? My ass, they do – pardon my language, reverend.’

  The reverend waved the minor lapse away.

  ‘Those are pagan idols, that’s what they are. Just like the images of the Virgin Mary that they carry around on trestles and then fall down on their knees to worship. Is that the way Our Lord taught us to pray? I think not.’

  He opened a thick file of papers that Marcus had paid little attention to, seemed to pick one at random and read, with mock solemnity: ‘“With the singing of the Regina Caeli let us entrust to the Blessed Virgin all the needs of the Church and of humanity.”’ Do you know where that comes from?’