by Robert Gluck
In the square in Constance an old man from Devonshire approached Margery with a grin. “Will you ask me to be your guide?”
She returned his smile. “What is your name?”
“My name is Willyam Wever.” He had a white beard and heavy gray pouches under muddy hazel eyes. His coat was thick as a board. Margery’s expression faltered as she realized he always smiled.
She said good-bye to the pilgrims who had abandoned her and set off into the Alps with a long face; she didn’t know her guide and he didn’t know Italian. Murder, violation, nightfall, strange men: her chance to live forever heightened her fear of death. They both felt anxious. Willyam Wever’s persistent grin was a structural cruelty, like the genial expression a frog must wear even as it disappears down the gullet of a snake. Between smiles he said, “You’ll be taken from me—you’ll be raped—they’ll beat me up—steal my coat—”
•
It was mid-February. Willyam wound his tippet around his neck and sheltered his hands in his armpits; his empty sleeves swung woodenly. Larch and fir grew below snowy peaks. The travelers were flushed with expanding harmonies of wind, space, drizzle, clouds, and thick greens; her words were lost in the wind; snipes zigzagged crying chip-per, chip-per. The road skirted the steepest rocks and in places was hewn out of them. Margery climbed with amazing stamina; Willyam smiled and wheezed. The bottom of his right foot was so sore he cringed when he stepped. They ate boar sausage and stuffed gooseneck. She was traveling; every bowel movement was a triumph. Watermills turned above foaming rivers.
They climbed up to Resia and over the pass. Snow lay thick and abundant, massed on branches, glittering wealth that could not be acquired. Wolves had crossed leaving delicate prints. Stars swarmed upwards, then the moon held the white peaks in a trance. Pale mountains grew smaller in the radiant sunrise. Melting snow water coursed downhill in rills that wagon wheels pressed in the mud. The foothills were covered by sloping vineyards and dotted by whitewashed houses. Almond trees bloomed palest pink. Cowherds tended white cattle splattered with black spots and gave the travelers food and drink; their wives put Margery in their own beds.
A horse was hag-ridden. Its owners filled a bottle with its urine, stopped it with a cork, and buried it: the witch could not piss and died in agony. The air hummed with flies when the travelers approached the cattle—rich odors of dung and hay. They heard an ouzel’s ringing tew tew tew; the peasants cupped their ears. Farmers tilled their small fields to the limit. Women carded and combed, clouted and washed, and peeled rushes as in Lynn. One woman became a man when he jumped over an irrigation ditch and his cunt dropped inside out: gender is the extent we go to in order to be loved. His mittens were made of rags.
Pastures sloped down to a rich valley divided into square farms, fields of rye grass for winter forage, and silvery olive orchards where blue tits sang tsee-tsee-tsu-tsuhuhuhu. In Bolzano, women trading in silk and leather in the square discussed Margery and Willyam as they arrived. Later, Margery woke feeling her heart skip a beat, another, another, as though it fell down stairs and she—laughing in surprise—scrambled after it.
When the pilgrims arrived in Bolzano, they were amazed to find Margery there and decided the spiritual advantage of readmitting her to their party might extend to speed and safety on the highway.
•
Margery had been traveling for two months and she itched with desire. Her scalp itched and her skin crawled. All movement in time and space led to orgasm. When she arrived in Venice with the pilgrims there was still plenty of rain and cold, but she grasped the city’s beauty in the form of Jesus: gold light exulting over the big squares and on the water, the muddy narrow alleys, the clink of a courtyard fountain, always the layering of cool air over hot air, the yammering cats.
•
L. returns from the street with pastry for breakfast. From bed, I hear clanks, a faucet’s hiss, fat spitting. We eat in harsh tremulous silence, caffeine tension riding above the emptied-out clarity of sex in the morning.
I follow L. He knows how to climb through narrow shafts of the Plaza Hotel to the roof. We share an intense visual life—all Central Park below us. Our best days are spent with attention turned outwards. He runs his tongue across the wind on his lips. His features are tense with perfection; they create the sensation of beauty as focus. We stroll around Boston, New York, San Francisco, Charleston, Florence, Sienna, Compostela, and Lisbon. I look for glimpses of him in other men through the lens of my attraction, then glimpses of his spirit in everything the world designs.
Very moody days in Venice, somewhat empty. Dark churches. It’s exhausting to trail after him and not talk about us, but my fatigue doesn’t count even to myself. I stop and he continues speeding around a corner. A moment of elation rises in space above the reflection of that space. Then I’m stymied—I’m nowhere. At the hotel we don’t mention the hours apart. He strokes my ass—it’s his faithful dog basking in attention that seems honest because absent-minded. Later, he brings oranges to bed and feeds me sections.
Lunch at the market, roast chicken, book box in antique store, wall paintings of fruit trees. I spend too much trying to keep up. I fret passionately: What should I own? We look at some green velvet stamped with gold. I complain, “It’s too fragile—it’s what rich people would buy.”
“Do you mean to say, people rich with a highly developed sense of aesthetics?”
Walking back slowly, we stop to consider a play of features, a hat, a dish, winter light skittering on the feathery needles of a hemlock; for a moment we are only that awareness. The image holds and displays the promise of the wide world, then we walk on with a pang of regret.
•
Venice grew crowded as spring progressed. At dusk the population spilled into the streets and piazzas, sweetly murmurous, still dazed from the light.
Margery’s maid prepared the company’s food and washed their clothes; she washed dishes and clothes, her submerged hands squeezing out dirt, but she would not attend Margery or explain why she had abandoned her.
19
Pilgrims bought tours of the Holy Lands from ship captains stationed in Venice who negotiated package deals with the Saracens. The galleys usually left Venice in spring or early summer.
Margery’s company arranged for a ship at the beginning of May; they bought provisions, wine and bedding, but only for themselves. Margery intended to sail with them but Jesus assigned her to a many-oared Venetian galley. Seeing this, the pilgrims lost faith in their own ship. They switched at the last minute, taking a financial loss; furious, they lugged their bedding in bales crisscrossed with rope.
The galley smelled like tar and resin. The sea was intense, abstract. Brutal oarsmen. A priest stole a sheet. Margery’s berth was a rectangle chalked on the boards long enough to lie down in. She woke in the noisy crowded hold with a jolt of longing so vibrant she thought she was falling. She slid her hand between her legs and found it wet there. Her love was mixed with a desire to arrive and succeed. They sailed south along the Dalmatian coast, then east through the Greek islands. Piss, rancid meat, moldy cloth, farts. The sailors’ bare feet slapped the wooden deck. A deep wind rose in the sky of her hearing. The voyage lasted thirty days. The pilgrims tormented her. “I pray you, sirs, be in charity with me, for I am in charity with you, and forgive me if I have amazed you along the way.”
•
She was riding a donkey across blighted land when she glimpsed Jerusalem, a fantastic jewel with thick walls, towers and ramparts, buildings stacked like crystals, gold onion domes weightless above the sum total of terrestrial experience, the beautiful slow time that Jesus owned. I cross intercosmic distance to embrace L. I would not cling to existence if I believed in it more. Heaven is belief in the future, endless meaning, endless narration. Two blond Germans kept Margery upright. They heard the ringing kata, kata, kata of sandgrouse but the sky was too bright to see them overhead. Intimate touch made a promise of immortality. “So thanks, Jesus, and let me see the
city of heaven as well. To live forever is to live in the future.”
Jesus dropped into Margery’s ear and cried, “You will!”
Surprise almost knocked her to the ground. “Sirs, I beg you, don’t be amazed though I weep bitterly.” The Germans didn’t speak English.
The heat was a demand but each cool breeze was heavier fulfillment. This time the sun sank in front of the mountain. Dusk fell in an instant, the cloth backdrop, the palms. Shadows quickly climbed bare slopes.
The Latin kings of Jerusalem built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre three hundred years before. Saracens collected entrance fees and admitted the group at evensong, to remain till evensong next day. Inside, friars led the pilgrims to places where Jesus suffered. They all carried wax candles. At Calvary, a rocky hill fourteen feet high, a turbulence grew in Margery: she was ashamed; she wrestled with her body, holding it in as long as she could; she flung her arms apart and screamed, quick and extended as an insect shedding its shell. The pilgrims stared in horror. Some said it was an illness or that she drank too much wine; some wished her at sea in a bottomless boat.
Jesus hung before her in his manhood, his beauty tense as glass, his milky skin more full of holes than a dovecote, his long white feet nailed to the hard wood, blood gushing from every limb, the grisly wound beneath the tiny pink nipple—
When they came to the grave where Jesus was buried, fel sche down wyth hir wax candel (as Margery wrote), palms pressed against her breast, sweat streaming in icy rills. Two angels held her shoulders and a third lifted a tear from her cheek onto its thumbnail where it glistened in the brown-velvet shadows. The angel wore a white deacon’s robe. It deported itself like a maître d’ presenting rare brandy. Gazing at the tear with a hollow expression, Jesus felt the heat and weight of his cock snake across his thigh. He steadied the angel’s hand, lapped up the tear with his pointed tongue, and then it was the angel’s turn to steady Jesus: his legs trembled, he convulsed with pleasure as he clenched against it, an underwater scream. He slid to the side, gritting his teeth and groaning. His fine skin became invulnerable, the bright armor of the intoxicated. The angels’ inky wings were a melancholy flourish.
Margery and Jesus were reunited. “Don’t be ashamed to weep for Jesus . . . Mary Magdalene wasn’t ashamed.” Mary said this in a breathy whisper and wavered in mild pervasive distortion when Margery visited her grave; she cupped Margery’s breasts in her hands. She viewed Margery’s nipples as an opportunity to multiply flavor, skin tasting honey or sugar. Margery was too surprised to move and wondered what had chipped and dirtied Mary’s nails. Mary was naked beneath the thin chemise of a bathhouse attendant; a sheer scarf loosely hooked to her crown flowed downwards with her golden hair. “St. Stephen wore green tippets . . . when we stoned him . . .”
20
The pilgrims would not let Margery go to the River Jordan. Jesus said, “We’ll go whether they like it or not.”
Margery and Jesus followed them through a wilderness of thorns. The ground burned Margery’s feet and the distant rim didn’t even ripple. Hermits wearing cloth of thorn and camel hair ate locusts and sat grimacing on anthills as though easing into too-hot tubs. Vultures croaked and whistled, wings raised in pious attitudes. An oasis held a lake so clear it didn’t seem to exist; it made her want to laugh, weightless. She was so thirsty her tongue reached the water before her lips.
The road ran straight towards the sky, permanent. Margery and Jesus walked along the ridge, their long shadows bowing into the valley, curvatures of agreement. A kite sailed in buoyant flight, extended wings and forked tail in sharp silhouette. Margery had confidence in her body and the naked Jesus was an athlete; when he’d sprained his ankle he was mad at the ankle, not at himself. The muddy river wound between steep banks. The Saracens forbade anyone to dive under water or swim across to gather willows. Pilgrims often drowned; a paralysis came over them even though Jesus was a strong swimmer.
“Did you miss me, Jesus?” Her question twisted him beyond endurance like the fibers of a rope. It had taken days to unwind; now he was cold and aloof again. Just the tip of his lanky cock was interested in Margery. He jogged ahead up the gray path on his way to Rome. Soft puffs hovered above his footprints. Margery held her arms out as though to touch him through the air. She thought they would always be together. She called but he didn’t look back.
•
The friars welcomed Margery and sold her the hair and bones of saints, a kind of pornography in that even fragments of the aroused body have value. Margery spent so much money that the friars wanted her to remain with them. The Saracens who organized the tour also admired her zeal and tears. Everyone liked Margery except her own countrymen, who felt trapped in the sound of her voice.
•
The pilgrims backtracked from Jerusalem to Ramleh and returned to their ship. Many fell ill, vomiting and feverish; Margery heard their groans and violent coughs on deck and then their horrible cries below where they fucked while the ship endlessly pitched. Fear made them clumsy. Margery stumbled on the chief mate and her maid in a hidden corner of the deck: he was joyously stroking the girl’s small breasts, sending shock waves through her entire body. Her nipples grew rigid as marbles. He was thirty years old; her skin was so soft he started to purr. He saw the maid as a symbol of abundance, a luck he couldn’t encompass because it included his own life. She thought, “Now I know I have something men want.” She wasn’t sure if she was still a virgin, which line had to be crossed.
21
They docked in Venice on July 18. The round-trip had taken eleven weeks. The pilgrims abandoned Margery again and set out for Rome. In the Piazza San Marco a beggar with a hump caught her eye. His coat was of carry-marry cloth and he was about fifty. She cried, “What’s wrong with your back?”
“Broken in an illness.” That was hard to imagine. Richard was from Ireland. A scab grew in the middle of his forehead. He was twisted over; gray hair poked through the holes in his hood; his shoes were thickly cobbled though his grimy toes appeared when he walked.
“Richard, guide me to Rome.”
Panic yanked him backwards. “Your countrymen abandoned you. They have bows and arrows to defend themselves—I have nothing but patches. My enemies will rob me and rape you.”
“I will pay you two nobles and Jesus will provide.”
Richard wrapped himself in a winnowing sheet to keep out the weather. They rode south to Pesaro, then turned inland into the Apennines. A waterfall fell white on brown rocks below; they couldn’t hear it thunder till they passed by. In Richard, Margery met her match at nonstop talking. She pissed in silence behind an oleander, a puddle frothing on the hard dirt. At night a steady wind pushed the campfire’s flame and the shifting branches above looked like snowflakes rising. The travelers saw their shadows by moonlight and Margery could read the inscription on the ring Jesus had given her, JESUS IS MY LOVER.
Margery pretended to sleep, listening in horror while Richard talked to their fire. The flame conveyed a sense of continuous beginning; he told it that his platoon fucked a whore in France with sweet and sour tattooed on her breasts—the whore fainted and he tucked her in.
He told his hand that once he had talked to a tree, that a tree is a bush with a hard-on. Margery couldn’t figure out where he got the bottles of wine but she could see from his drunken gestures that he thought he was in tune with the universe. He raised his arms and face above his crooked frame, fingers high in the air, and shrugged with good-natured exasperation. He asked them all—fire, hand, tree—what Margery was going to put him through next day.
Before dawn Richard vomited on his hands and knees, shouting with each burst, “Look out, she’s ready to blow!”
•
Richard led Margery to Assisi, a walled city perched on a little mountain, and to the church where Mary’s kerchief was exhibited. Lamas Day, August 1, was the date of the Portiuncula indulgence, an important pardon with plenary remission.
A lady had traveled to
Assisi to obtain pardon. Her name was Dame Margaret Florentyne and she came from Rome with other ladies and Knights of Rhodes. Richard asked Margaret in Italian if they could join her party and then continued in English, “Either the tide is going in or going out.” Margaret nodded as if she understood. Dame Margaret experienced herself as discrete lake waves, small encouragements from a larger source, internalized into a lifelong refrain. She was the mirror of fifteenth-century beauty: straight nose, gray eyes, little pink mouth, and skin so smooth it blurred. It was an honor for her to protect a holy woman; she admired Margery’s tears and couldn’t understand a word of her story.
Margaret traveled on pillows in an open horse litter faced in leather on which her coat of arms was stamped in gold.
The skin’s dry heat and the dry grass scent. At night, a woodlark. Richard sang,
The moon does always piss
When she is pale,
When red, she farts, when white,
She wipes her tail.
•
It hurts me to see L. sleep, his long head half-supported by his jacket hanging next to the window; in the crowded coach he is isolated by my desire. We both had our first orgasms when we were about eleven—with a sense of isolation and estrangement from our bodies. L.’s ex died of AIDS. They’d had some unsafe sex. Is that how it will go?—Will sickness weaken L. till he accepts my love?
Nothing can be seen outside except the occasional fog-held glow of a streetlight that burns through our intense reflections: a couple chats, a woman does a crossword puzzle, a man reads a paper. The women wear stylish glasses. Bright dots jump off jewels and wristwatches. The world that appears has the look of the world of appearance.
L.’s eyelashes flutter; he whispers “Bob the Moronist,” and I grin moronically. I can orient myself only with an abridged self-knowledge; I can fulfill myself only by revealing our hidden parts. I reiterate the six hairs on his chest, the brown patch above his cock, and the few curls around his asshole. The air is heavy despite the no-smoking sign. A “scroll of parchment” is pinned to the wall above L.’s head: the word Roma on a ribbon unfurling above medieval towns with towers and ships in a river. Even asleep, L.’s body promises travel.