Sweeter Than All the World

by Rudy Wiebe

  Maria, Hija Predilecta Del Padre Dios, Ruega Por Nostros

  Yes, Mary, Mary, sweetly favourite daughter of God the Father—your mother’s name mine, does that make us daughters, and sisters?—plead, please plead and never cease, you and your perfect baby, who in this late light appears to be an exquisite daughter Jesus, her tiny right forefinger pointing forever upward to heaven, oh, plead for me, pray for what until now I have never yet known or acknowledged I need.

  There are coloured bulbs ahead, blinking. They outline the roof of a huge crèche to the right of the golden altar burning with seven golden candles. Donkeys, camels, shapes of people and adoring sheep larger than life, lights blinking electrically like an Edmonton December house memory, here where the only snow can be cotton, the manger with its waiting hay empty. Tonight during the mass the necessary plaster, or perhaps plastic, baby will be borne in and deposited there.

  Suddenly, loudspeakers crackle along the cavernous nave and aisles, they mutter into a Wurlitzer “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” Man’s desire indeed. Ineradicable Bach shoves me past altars and stations of the cross, past a “Relique San Macrim Martyris” exposed in glass below a side altar, its naked legs brown like polished wood and half-naked torso contorted as if hanged, past an altar dedicated to “Santa Teresa de los Andes, 1900–1920,” her anorexic image blessed—so declares the letter screwed onto the wall—by Pope John Paul II on 24 March, 1993, the unrelenting tin racket declaring in Johann Sebastian undulations forever and forever that the bleeding wounds of Jesu Christi have set him, him at least if no one else, free, free forever!

  Down Avenida O’Higgins, in one glance thundering past the superb iron filigree of Gustave Eiffel’s Central Railroad Station, in twenty-five minutes I’m back where I arrived this morning: the essential airport. I point to the largest name on the first page of my map. “Iquique, si!” the woman sings; my knapsack is on my back, no need for a passport. The plane rises into a red Pacific sunset, crimson light fleeing to Australia but we are all belted in place and pointed north, fleeting north. I consider my map and see Iquique is only twenty degrees south of north, getting too close, and I concentrate on the stark, shadowed mountains below me, black blocks and pyramids with twisted rivers blazing gold long enough to satisfy any obsessive Spaniard. Abruptly the light cuts into the ragged lines of brilliant surf, seemingly motionless, but I know waves are smashing at the continent, breaking it. The sea has endless edges but never an end. To fall from the sky here, to smash, fuse indistinguishably into cinders of volcanic sand, as Jorge’s blessed Pablo Neruda wrote in “Yo Volvere”:

  afterwards, when I am not alive,

  look here, look for me here

  between the stones and the ocean.

  To be so lucky.

  “Wohl mir! Jesu Christi Wunden”—Good for me, the wounds of Jesus Christ—red cinder Chile momentarily stopped that song in my head; but not the memory. Mother, mother, I know very well that there are two quite different poems for that Bach harmonization because you told me, always an incarnation of a comp lit prof. You explained so clearly that the older poem was “Jesu, meiner Seelen Wonne,” a continuous contemplation of the soul’s glorious rapture brought on instantly and forever by Jesus. But the other text, used with exactly the same melody and harmonization, was all chain bondage and gaping wounds. You said, “In English they sing mostly the rapturous joy of the soul soaring to uncreated light, but in German it’s always the sin and bloody guilt one, see. The only difference between them is the key. The bright G for ‘Jesus, joy,’ and this sombre F.”

  And you bent over me at the piano, translated the last line to the very rhyme as you played so darkly:

  Sin’s huge debt and my soul’s dread,

  Made of me the li-i-i-ving dead.

  Mother, why did you make me understand this? The music was enough.

  At the plane window below my left elbow, west is grey space and black ocean. Nothing remains possible but east; perhaps in that direction, over the thin blade of this continent and then more ocean, finally Africa? How can it be final, continual east can finally only carry me west again? The plane trundles down to land on the Tropic of Capricorn, the Aeropuerto Cerro Moreno outside Antofagasta. In the shadow of the airport’s largest building I leave the file of passengers disembarking and turn left into darkness; wait. Finally the plane roars away, north towards Iquique where my ticket, if it should be traced, will say I landed. No one will trace it.

  Silence. A white simmer of night insects I will never, thank god, recognize. I can search for stars. The sky is unrecognizable, I cannot even find the Southern Cross where I sense it should be. It seems momentarily as if I have never before looked up into the night sky. Christmas Eve. Perhaps I am lucky.

  The Lonely Planet Travel Survival Kit still holds true next morning:

  Outside the larger Chilean cities, women travelling alone are objects of curiosity. You should interpret questions as to whether you are running away from parents or husband as expressions of concern. Scandinavian women (or women who look Scandinavian) may find that some Chilean men associate them with liberal attitudes towards sex and pornography.

  I know I look Scandinavian, but overnight in Antofagasta I have not yet had to try and put a Chilean man (they can be “very machista but rarely violent in public behaviour towards women”) to shame by “responding aggressively” in my memorized Spanish. Perhaps they are all resting from their Christmas midnight mass. Or drunk. And no one, not even the massively mothering concierge at the residence off the Plaza Colón, asks me about running away. She has her teenage daughter to shout with.

  The empty Christmas morning bus crawls northeast up the two-hundred-kilometre incline into the sun of the Atacama Desert. We follow the narrow railroad; the highway over the bus driver’s shoulder is a black tar ribbon in a stunning abstraction of grey and tan and reddish ridges that lift to cliffs, long plateaus, hills, mountains. It cuts through the thick adobe and rock warrens of nitrate towns left roofless on the sand and whistling, moaning wind in the staggering light. The eventual city of Calama is wiped upwards against the slope of hills below the mountains of the largest hole ever dug into the earth; even on Christmas Day the copper dust drifts east from it high and splendid as the unreachable clouds of heaven. On the grey road beyond dusty Calama, the city irrigated into green by the Rio Loa flowing from the Andes, the driver tells me over his shoulder that a four-hundred-year drought ended here in 1973, only to begin again immediately.

  In 1973. “They made you hear the screaming,” Jorge told me. “From under the stadium seats, especially at night. You had to smell the terrified. The CIA Americans taught them very well: torture is first of all a place in the mind.”

  The perfect desert, Atacama, not a cloud to rain, not a single sprig of green plant visible anywhere. Though they say enough morning dew is possible to open grey sticks into sudden flowers, possibly once or twice a year on a spot somewhere. The perfect cone of Volcan Lincancabur rises blue into six-thousand-metre snow on the approaching spine of the Andes. In the first and last oasis, trees sheltering the village of San Pedro de Atacama, the bus stops behind the adobe museum, where skeletal bodies hunched inside clay urns hug their bone and leather knees against their bony leather chests. What relative is looking for them? Whom do they remember? The giant algarrobo and pepper trees of the Plaza de Armas separate Conquistador Pedro de Valdivia’s mud house from the narrow whitewashed Iglesia de San Pedro, its dark waves of algarrobo rafters overlaid with pale slices of cactus logs.

  As the stupendous heat of Christmas cools a little, people stroll along the paths of the plaza arm in arm. Bars begin to blare Tex-Mex, dogs smell each other intimately at street corners and fuck fast in circles of staring attention. Dogs and men and children only, never hurrying women. I join a small bus tour onto the Salar. Thirty-nine degrees, forty-two in cloudless sun, flat baked salt and pale water two centimetres deep. The impossible jointed legs of flamingoes walk in the water as if on transparent sk
in, their luminous, doubled bodies meet, bowing to themselves at their black beaks when they feed. I kneel in the salt baked round and jagged as coral boils. It gleams against my brown knees, blinding me, smashingly white, far whiter than snow … Lord wash me and I will be whiter … they say salt water is closer to human blood than—who told me that?—I begin to walk slowly back towards the empty bus, concentrating on the stark distance of the farthest volcano, but I am the bare, tanned skin of my arms, my long legs, the crunch and dark spread of saltwater-blood oozing at the crust where I place my feet. I can only walk faster.

  “Everything happens,” Jorge said. His chest and armpits and inner thighs were circled by thick knobs, as if screws with gnarled, ragged heads held him bolted together in burn patterns. “And it all stays inside you,” he said, “like a splinter, like rusty steel. It gets worse, it never just heals out.”

  “So, what is to be done?”

  “You ask me?”

  “Can’t a person decide, something?”

  He faced me sitting in my lap, our legs and arms joined around each other.

  “You and your perfect Canadian ‘decide,’ ” he said. “You have to get inside yourself, and cut it out. Or encrust it.”

  “What?”

  “You carry it, but it is sealed off. Encrusted.”

  “The English medical term is ‘encapsulate.’ ”

  “Mine is short, and rougher.”

  Jorge said. But I know only walking, always walking, away. Through devastating dust, past shade trees and irrigation canals like pencil marks drawn in the sand and paths made by goats climbing between rocks, like Greece but blacker, and piled into walls. I stop high above the twisted valley of Rio San Pedro— every name here is conquering Peter, every solid rock on which to nail another Jesus—I am on a hill veined with the stone walls of the pukara where the Inca/Atacamas made their last stand against Pedro de Valdivia in 1540. The Atacamas did not have nearly enough either, of anything. Below are adobe walls, village roofs traced among the oasis trees, the distant flat of desert rises gradually to an endless, undulating skyline anchored in immense volcanoes. Superb in the moonlight, like altars. No, deeper … like rising prayers. If only.

  I said to my mother. “Right,” I said. “Just right: a song for wounded living-dead Mennonites.”

  “Trish, Trish,” she said then, quickly, “it wasn’t a Mennonite who wrote the words, it was—”

  “Like a fuckinawful Hollywood movie,” I interrupted her because I already knew I knew everything it was necessary to know. “Sing ‘The Menno-night of the Li-i-i-iving Dead.’ ”

  Under the clear moon this futile fortress of defence is spread over the mountain around me like a thick, dark Inca weaving. You are here now; so are they; they will certainly overwhelm you. What is to be done?

  And my mother, Susannah Lyons Wiebe, is holding a book. I am leaning against her knee and watching the book, and slowly, like the book opening between her hands:

  With the fire of life impassioned,

  In the love of jo-o-oys unknown

  very slowly in the blue moonlight my mind opens.

  Morning brightens behind the desolate mountains. I can walk only northeast, up the sharp river valley towards the spine of Andes between Chile and Bolivia. Black-faced sheep with lambs surge out of high speargrass for their Boxing Day drink from the stream, the shepherds wait for them, a woman in dark trousers, a quick black-and-tan dog, a man, until they cross where the water clatters over rocks. An hour later there is an open stone sheepfold, gnarled branches bent over a corner shelter, and on the plateau above that a small tower. A church, set in wide and completely empty space, made of baked earth, the top of its red walls level with my head, a domed door fastened from inside. The white tower at its corner opens in the four directions for a hanging bell. I stoop into the tower, pull the rope, and the single toll rings along the valley and comes back faint with its thin edge of iron. Not the round, full “bo-o-o-om” of a Buddhist prayer log swinging back. Comes again.

  Trish Wiebe.

  I have heard my name. I wait. I turn carefully in every direction in the fierce sun around the small, red church. My name is Ann, do you hear, Ann Wilson.

  Nothing moves. I slip into my pack and walk to the faint track switching back and forth up to the next plateau. I climb too fast, the church becomes a red and white flicker, impossible to see unless I blink and search for it, and I breathe my body down into a distance-climbing rhythm until at last the tiny building is gone; only desert cliffs and erosions and tiered plateaus of gravel surround me, empty as crushed paper.

  Sky. Tremendous, eroded cliffs burning into high noon above me: there are the ruined fortress walls of Catarpe, built by the Incas so they could watch the valley in either direction. Their conquest and repression of the Atacamas only a shade less ruthless than Spain’s oppression of both, the eternal human litany of fear at the core eddying around small ease and much, much pain. A narrowing barranca opens down, I clamber into it, feet and hands. The volcanic walls glisten with veins of minerals, feathered slabs of feldspar, and a gash split by rock-shift and water opens beside me. Deep, deep inside, where the black layers tilt together, from some narrow split sunlight gleams on odd, unrockishly knobbed, splintered, curved tan and white protrusions.

  Bones. It must be. I drop my pack, I face the gash and lay myself face down along it, stretch myself thin and wriggle in. I feel my shirt hook, rip along my back; one bra-strap snags on rock but loosens and scrapes past when I squeeze lower, squirming forward, reaching until the rock lowers to clamp itself onto my head. My fingertips can almost touch them, long ends knotted, leg bones perhaps, they are set immovably in a runnel of sand washed hard as concrete. Through split rock the sun’s finger of light is pointing, look here, look for me here—

  I pull in a long breath, twist to lay my head flatter, sideways, and hunch ahead, squeeze the last centimetres until I can feel them, feel and see my fingers just at the corner of my eye, the knobbly grain of their age and surface impressed like the cellular filigree of a leaf. My left shoulder and breast are crushed, a volcanic tip is hooked down into my left ear, but my reaching left hand can still move and if I stare straight ahead to where the rock closes on darkness, at the peripheral edge of vision I can see the shadow, even as I feel the edge, the slender fluted comma of a human rib.

  This at last is bone of my bone,

  and she shall be called wo-man,

  because she was taken out-of-man.

  Genesis, my father Adam says. Even the Hebrew pun replicates itself in English. His square face, the heavy Wiebe jaw lightens into his surprising smile. So suddenly gentle it might seduce anyone, if only for the moment it may last. Truly a DNA story, you lovely bone of my bone.

  I am your daughter.

  You are. And so, scientifically speaking, more bone of my bone than your mother can be. As you are hers more than I.

  I am, I will always be, a double daughter.

  It seems the Chilean earth has shrugged softly, tighter, and I am held without breath, held firm and immovably at last. Or at least long enough, by the earth encrusted. No more deciding.

  TWENTY-TWO

  HOMESTEAD

  Waskahikan, Northern Alberta

  Calgary

  1996

  TO GET INTO THE COPSE they have to push between brush over their shoulders, scrub willow, saskatoon, sharp, scratching rosebushes and wild cranberry, their berries freeze-dried by winter; but after a few crunching steps the bush opens suddenly, upwards, and there are the tall aspen. Their white, branchless trunks crowd around the two grey buildings, bend over them in the giant curves of the perpetual northwest wind, so tall the sky is spring green, a tropical canopy drawn above them.

  Adam thinks again, How can they be here, these immense trees? The yard was clean as a swept steppe, the chickens grazed the grass to the ground and the only tree nearer than the shelter strip north of the garden was the huge spruce beside the outhouse where the magpies squabbled while y
ou sat—there is no spruce. Beyond where it grew is the thickest tree of all, a black poplar—schundt his father declared them, trash, the roots suck up every drop of water, the first tree to clear away and never bring into the house, no heat in that wood, just pulp leaking soot from the stovepipe—but there it grew, on the edge of the space where the sod-roofed barn once was; almost a metre at the base. Fifty years.

  There is a bluster of wind, too high to feel but he can hear the rush of it as the aspen flicker far above him and bend east, swing, circle back in their rooted give and return and, staring up, it seems he is standing on a tall ship, its great masts heel as he leans to remain erect on the tilting deck, the green-blue sails bulge before the wind and he staggers, his hand finds a balance on the nearest mast of a tree and instantly he feels the earth’s motion, even as he hears and sees it; as he leans again with the white mast and is carried, driven hard through the heaving sea.

  “Sir?”

  Ground returns, solid beneath his feet. He has never travelled on a sailing ship.

  “Mr. Wiebe? Are you all right?”

  Alison beside him; she is a tall, heavy woman, but her hand is lighter than a leaf on his shoulder. He turns to her small smile: he had not met her before she and Joel arrived in Edmonton last night, and he thinks again that maybe Joel is lucky, really lucky—no, not luck, Adam’s mother said when she first saw him through the maternity window, so broad and black-haired and heavy and roaring loud enough they heard him through the thick glass, your boy is blessed.

  “Thanks, thanks, I’m fine—” Adam hesitates before Alison’s steady gaze. “You don’t have to call me ‘sir,’ ” he tells her again.

  “I know…”

  She shrugs, and he smiles with her. He says, “I was feeling … Flickering aspen, when the wind comes and you touch them, you can … seem to … feel their sound.”