by Robert Gluck
I keep dropping off. My legs fall against his legs unconsciously and with painful readiness. I’m reluctant to lose control of my limbs in a crowded compartment. Emptiness wants me to yield, order wants me to stay awake.
22
Rome was not Venice; it was rough, plague ridden, almost derelict. Mountains of decaying refuse poisoned the water. Since early August, it had been revolting from the King of Naples’s government. The urine-discolored streets were nothing but potholes littered with garbage, pariah dogs, and beggars and whores of all sexes drawn helplessly from the overtaxed surrounding farms and towns—the whole covered by fat flies that rose snarling in unison. Dead horses, donkeys, and children were thrown into vacant houses on ruined streets and left for rats and dogs because it was easier than dragging the corpses outside the city gates. Even buzzards found their way into these charnel houses. For a moment Margery wondered if it was snowing: ashes floated everywhere. The chief industry consisted in burning the marble of classical Rome to produce lye.
The pilgrims were already there; Margery joined them at the Hospital of St. Thomas of Canterbury, the hostel for English pilgrims in the Via Monserrato.
She was given a room with shutterless windows that opened onto a back garden. A neighbor’s jasmine encumbered the hot breeze. An arbor covered half the yard; broad leaves caught the shadows of broad leaves above, their mass suggested by tones of light, the green grapes immature. The old garden wall had the wisdom to be stupid, its mortar spongy, its mass suggested by edges.
Margery exulted in lucidity as though her mind were erect. She untied Jesus’s codpiece. Jesus gravely lifted each leg so she could peel his hose off; he was starting to enjoy the attention. Margery felt the charm of taming a skittish animal, shy with its emotions, then completely present. Mullions’ dull shadows on the whitewashed wall, mosquitoes adrift in the corners of the ceiling, chatter of unseen birds and the monotonous scales of someone’s flute. Through the leaves the sky was an afterthought.
He exhaled loudly; she could hear the tension leaving him. His bony face softened, disheveled and staring. Pre-come gathered in a sticky puddle below his navel; he kept losing his erection. She drew her forearm across her brow but her arm was as sweaty as her face. Her outer lips were moist and slightly parted, swelling in helpless lechery. She felt his breath on her curls and clit, his saliva left a surprising coolness on her ass and thigh.
Jesus the athlete moved with her easily. He aroused her with his long burrowing tongue. He pulled her hair aside and drew her clit into his mouth. “It’s too much.” She squirmed away from the intensity. He rolled it on his tongue till he felt it rise. Margery’s moan was low and fluty, faint and continuous; the folds of her cunt slid against each other and her pinched nipples made her hips tip forwards. She rejoiced in the absence of fear. He opened his pores to let sweat pass through; a trickle rolled down his chest and dropped onto her belly. A low vibration commenced as her body generated pleasure. He watched her womb roil the surface of her stomach and he lapped up his accomplishments.
Margery’s senses were entirely awake in lush satisfaction, a subtle fire in the darkness of a sleeping world though daylight fell plainly in their room. Her hands roamed across his skin; he pulled back; she was groaning; her foaming juice equaled a lucent sweetness. Pleasure burned through all expression allowing a different truth to appear, their faces bare as china dolls. Every second they thought, This could be it; he did not make a sound except one note as a deep quaver swept through his ass and balls and traveled the length of his cock. They held absolutely still at the first spurt. The strongest pleasure that can exist occurred in Jesus’s cock: ecstasy was not parsed out in spasms; for all time sperm spills steadily down the shaft.
Satisfied desire set her in a world where satisfied desire was the only possibility. Being with Jesus was like breathing underwater or flying: the granting of a childhood wish for ease in a different medium. She lay facing him, her red hair fanned out behind. Arms and legs draped over each other, lips touched in ardent peace. Margery adjusted so they breathed together. Inside the moment she held him forever, at rest and in continuous flight.
Around the rustic bed stood angels in court dress, their faces aware as lightning. Their baggy sleeves were drawn at the wrist and they echoed Margery and Jesus, passing around the jubilant life. Her body smelled like his. She thought that confirmed an undecaying union. She heard neighbors’ shutters bang, the rap of unripe figs dropping on the garden flags, and she watched the light soften into long afternoon while Jesus slept. Wings surrounded them. She felt unbelievably lucky.
The first cool breeze, Jesus said, “The more men want you, the better I dress you.” He promised Margery a white cotton mantle and veil. She drew close and sought eye contact; he had a persistent cough she wanted to nurse. He was moved by her devotion but also bewildered and hemmed in. He said with a cough, “I don’t have a cough.” Then, “Except when I’m with you.” He cocked his pointed face as though viewing her from afar.
He stood up and she followed him into the dusty garden. “If it were possible I would weep with you.” He hesitated, dazzled; he smelled sage. With his feet turned out and his knock-knees and his broad hips tipped forwards and his pointed nose in the air, Margery observed with tender hilarity that her lover looked like an ostrich.
Random fires on the black hills. Clumsy beige moths that crumbled into dry smudges when she touched them. Above, inky clouds lifted in the twilight: it was a longing within her. She never forgot that night. She said, “Jesus, grant me a well of tears through which to receive your body.”
23
An English priest, one of the pilgrims, was attracted to Margery. He was a thin man in his early twenties with wiry black hair. Black curls were sprouting on his butt; he watched them grow with a puzzled expression. He needed to be vindicated. He recognized in Margery the fireworks he wished to ignite in himself, as though unfettered passion were available to everyone, and he locked her in a fixed, painstaking squint. He did not dispute that she had supernatural gifts—but were they malevolent?
•
The sun was so bright the shadows of trees seemed to ride on water instead of white dirt. Margery needed support in Rome. She took her broken-backed man to Wenslawe, the priest at St. John Lateran, who asked in German, “Are you the woman who speaks with Jesus?” She was becoming famous.
Wenslawe understood no English so they spoke through Richard. The priest was learned and beloved; he held one of the richest offices in Rome—jasper, malachite, onyx, opal, lapis, and alabaster. He was blond, solemn, his face square as a shoebox. Wenslawe did not have much Promethean fire. Inside himself he was always raising his hand to his forehead, a flighty, hapless gesture at odds with his looks. Margery asked him to pray to understand her English and she would also pray for understanding.
The English priest spread rumors about Margery because her white clothes turned the earth of his heart upside down. His wish to become Margery made him hostile, frightening. He was so critical that people began to justify their existence before they met his ferreting eyes. Margery undressed with her back to the window; she felt observed all the time. He watched her narrowly and said, “You make me sick.” In fact, he was always feeling for the onset of disease. He called Margery hypocrite and whore till the pilgrims refused to eat with her and she was thrown out of the Hospital of St. Thomas.
•
Margery needed allies. She returned to Wenslawe to test the effect of their prayers. She needed to talk quickly in a clear voice to build a constituency of belief. The German understood her English and she told him her story from childhood to that hour. “Last night the holy virgins decorated my bed with flowers and spices—Jesus slept there—” Her tears made her more intelligible to herself—grueling nausea and self-disgust—but that idea is too far ahead. Wenslawe thought an evil spirit had seized her but her frantic hands looked more like they were trying to seize.
Wenslawe began to have misgivings so Margery confro
nted him with the failings of his own life: He’d made up lies about himself. He wanted to be more aggressive, more sure. His mother had died on Saturday and he acted as though it hadn’t happened. He didn’t want other people to see his sadness. She’d had a disease that glued her eyes shut. She’d worn big hats. He’d admired her for wanting to be different. She’d made a statement.
The priest felt caught in a dream whose parts were not disjunct but overrelated. He went to mass and wept so deeply his tears wet his vestments and the ornaments of the altar.
So this good man was not embarrassed to side with Margery against her countrymen. He ordered the Grey Friars to take her in and he instructed her to wear black again for her own safety. Wenslawe was her first conquest in Rome: the Romans loved him even more and loved Margery too; they invited her to dinner.
24
On November 9, 1414, God said to Margery, “Daughter, I’m glad, especially because you love the manhood of my son.” These words unrolled from his parted lips on gold ribbon. Margery ascended on the beam of her upturned gaze.
Margery had never seen God before. He resembled Jesus, but his blue eyes were faded and a wreath of silvery olive leaves crowned thinning blond hair. He was comfortable only with servants; he chatted with his wine steward, the servitors, the gardener, the musicians. When Margery asked what she should call him, God became silent, gazing with the family’s dazzled expression into the branches of an old oak. Was he trying to remember? Although he had created himself out of shadowy rage, he seemed mild and dry as a country vicar. He said, “I will marry you and show you my secrets so you can live with me forever.”
Margery had not founded an order like St. Bridget or promoted church reform like St. Catherine. She looked for glimpses of Jesus in handsome blonds on the streets of Rome. She felt humid, tense misery when she saw beautiful men in the tumultuous streets. Was it surprising that she couldn’t answer Jesus’s father? The one whose manhood she desired said, “What do you say to my father, Margery? Are you pleased?” She covered her face and wept.
Margery’s red hair fell uncovered, a loose pillow, virginal. She wore a purple-velvet mantle banded in gold over a gown of white silk stamped with gold fleur-de-lis. Her huge bag sleeves were trimmed with strips of dagged baby-blue silk. Jesus spoke for her. “Excuse her, she is abashed and can’t answer.”
The father was loving but unsteady, an apparition that remained. He took Margery by the hand before Jesus, the Ghost, Mary, the twelve apostles, St. Katherine, St. Margaret, & many other seyntys & awngelys, as Margery wrote, whose wings were pale ocher blending into pale Venetian red with spidery feathers at the joint. St. Margaret wore red silk brocade from Lucca on which firebirds rose in fastidious elaboration. She said to St. Katherine, “Would you move over a little?” Katherine could only have an orgasm when she was completely passive; she wore a violet gown of chatoyant silk furred with marten; she stepped closer to St. Clare, who wore a nun’s habit.
Angels lifted Margery’s train. The father said, “I take you, Margery, for my wedded wife, for fairer, for fouler, for righter, for poorer. Never was a child so kind to its mother as I will be to you.” He dropped gold and silver coins in the book.
Margery made sucking sounds, trying to suppress her tears. She felt more like a human spy than a bride. The father, Mary, and Jesus were reversible; they juggled amongst themselves the conditions that defined Margery: daughter, wife, mother, her need for money, her mortality, her desire. Mary was a fractured silence, unfolding veils of cool spectral vapor. She smiled brightly to reassure the newlyweds; they leaned towards her. “. . . an orchestra played to drown her cries . . . broke all her teeth . . .” Margery couldn’t tell if Mary remembered her. The gods were indifferent to events; a disaster that pulled Margery’s body inside out like a dirty sock would have sedated Mary.
“Margery, if you wore a coat of mail, or a hair shirt, or fasted on bread and water, you would not please me so much as when you are silent and allow me to speak.” God was the grandest religious leader to ask Margery to be quiet.
25
They are eating the Roman wedding supper al fresco at a long table laid with a damask cloth. God retires, content in a void. His pomeranians wander freely among the dishes. It’s almost later but not quite. The autumn sun comes round and canaries exult in their cages. A citizen of actual paradise preens itself, wings surrounding its torso in place of shoulders and arms: gold and pale Venetian red. Red geraniums and oleanders grow in terra-cotta pots and a square cement fountain glugs periodically. Jesus picks up where his father left off, speaking to everyone but most directly to Margery. “There’s more merit in one year in your mind than a hundred praying with your mouth. You will not believe me.” He means, longing and weeping are the best love.
Margery considers her love; she could live on his scent, rosy, musty. Flames like human tongues start shifting in her breast—even in winter she will feel hot.
“I take you by the hand because my wife should be on homely terms with her husband. I lie in your bed. You desire to see me; you boldly take me as your wedded husband, your dear darling, for I want to be loved as a son is loved by his mother, and I want you to love me, daughter, as a wife loves her husband.”
Now she’s wedded to Jesus, but father and son decline to remember which is which. Bellows blow in Margery’s ears: it’s the sound of the Ghost. Jesus turns it into the tremolo of a dove and then, lighter and shriller, a redbreast’s call. It sings in her right ear. She sees she is standing on tiptoe.
Jesus rises and touches Margery’s face, darkly romantic. “Take me in your arms and kiss my lips, my head, my feet as sweetly as you wish.” Reeling with sweetness, she enters myth. At last her desire organizes the universe. Her conquest of priests and bishops brings fame and power, her marriage to Jesus brings safety and pleasure.
“Even when I stand here and say you can never come to heaven, never see my face, tell me you will never abandon me though you lie in a lake of fire. If you can’t exist without loving me, then I am all you have.” They kiss over the bride cakes but his eyes are red and swollen and his lips are giving way. His voice quavers as he says, “Margery, make yourself destitute.”
•
Margery followed his command without knowing how to interpret it. He seemed to withdraw in the midst of his marriage vow. She handed out her own money and then money borrowed from Richard. The broken-backed man jumped up and down, raising dust in the street. He was so angry his eyes turned back in his head and for a moment the world was distorted.
•
A Victorian etching of a sarcophagus in a crypt. On the back of the postcard, L. had copied out these lines by Denton Welch: I saw all this, and Ray’s jaw had fallen open, as the jaws of all corpses in schoolboys’ books are fallen open. His mouth gaped so that I could see the place where his wisdom teeth had begun to sprout. And his dead tongue was stiff as the metal clapper of a bell and the purple-brown color of burnt iron. “Everything spoilt and wasted,” I thought.
•
This novel records my breakdown; conventional narrative is preserved but the interest lies elsewhere. Like L., Jesus must be real but must also represent a crisis. After Margery gave every penny away, she sat in the rear of Marcellis’s church and reminded herself, To Jesus, isn’t everyone dependent and voiceless? He complains that his father makes a blind spot of his loved ones, withdraws from a demand, inflicts pain casually, but he duplicates these traits. Discrete rays falling from the lantern windows give shape to my love for L.
26
Jesus and Mary squatted, making little cries, then looked curiously at each other’s shit.
Later they sat on a marble bench in the yard outside St. John Lateran. Mary wore a white mantle and robe. The English priest grabbed her white collar. “You wolf, what is this cloth you wear?”
Mary looked happily into his face. Swifts gliding by on stiff wings shrieked, “Wool, sir.”
“Now I know you have a devil because I hear him speak.”
“Ah, good sir,” she laughed, “drive him away, drive him away.” Her laughter touched an exposed nerve; the priest lurched back and retreated in confusion.
A light drizzle darkened the flagstones except for a dry gray rectangle under their bench. Contorted roots of umbrella pines had gripped and dislodged some of the stones. Jesus could not define himself through Mary. She caressed the folds of his mantle as though they were membranes. She whispered, “I see pale angels round about you.” She felt the thick surge that lifts us towards a person we love. He looked up. The angels were primitive, like golden orchids.
Jesus felt muddled, a fog of sadness closing in. He depended on Margery for motivation but a cold bar plunged through his heart when she asked, Did you miss me? Their time together was more definitive for him since he had much more to define. Their sex was satisfying but he was undermined by the terror of the incomplete: If her cheekbones were higher or personality cooler would their union be more compelling? Safety meant being recognized without returning recognition. That is, everyone was his slave. As though to confirm this, Jesus asked his own mother to beg for Margery’s food and wine.
•
So that night Mary went to a feast with important people—she was disguised but visible. It was not unusual for these banquets to include a pauper who was holy, even divine. She sat at the high table next to Wenslawe, the priest from St. John Lateran. He was like a child, wide eyed with surprise. He ate with his head lowered, then pressed a gold coin in her palm and whispered, “If I have to die, return me as a stylish woman’s elaborate earring.”