Now, however, I notice Trisha, in the front row, lean in close to him and sniff.
Not again.
Trisha glances back at me, smiles, and shakes her head, visibly relieved. “Okay, don’t worry,” I whisper to Ann, “he’s sober.” Like my two co-leaders and me, Ann has barely recovered from yesterday’s scare. Apparently he is only being a slightly flamboyant tour guide.
Ann and I migrate across the bus aisle and peer out at the vista. The medieval city of Rocamadour is clamped against a rugged four-hundred-ninety-foot cliff that rises out of the valley like some mystical province in the clouds. The Alzou River surrounds it like an old moat, the gorge floats in thin, austere haze, and the churches and houses appear to be bolted directly to the rock face. Crowning the summit is an actual fourteenth-century castle complete with ramparts.
Somewhere up there is the nine-hundred-year-old Black Virgin of Rocamadour—one of the venerable old Black Madonnas of Europe. She has secretly become the focus of the trip for me.
After breakfast this morning, in a meeting room in the hotel, I gave a little orientation talk to the group about why Black Madonnas are black or shades of brown. I’d discovered it’s not all about candle smoke, which was the automatic answer for a time. Summarizing months of research, I explained that most scholars believe the Black Madonnas’ darkness derives from their connections to dark-skinned, pre-Christian Goddesses once worshipped widely in Europe—Goddesses with African, Eastern, and Mediterranean roots.
“People weren’t so willing to give up their old Goddesses,” I told the group. “In some rural areas worship went on into the fourth and fifth centuries, and the church often responded by placing a Mary shrine right on top of a Goddess shrine. In some cases, they seem to have simply renamed the Goddess statue Mary.”
As the bus takes the U-shaped curve up the escarpment, I think about the way the Black Madonna has taken on a big role in my novel, in the lives of my characters, and in my own life, too—a little like the queen bee in a hive, I’ve started to realize. I know some of my fascination comes from her kinship with these powerful Goddesses and how that might have shaped her image. Official stories about the Black Virgin of Rocamadour include miraculous healings, calming storms, saving drowning sailors, and freeing captives, but also famously receiving and forgiving heretics during a period of history when they were more often burned. I like her slightly subversive tendency. It puts her in league with other Black Madonnas who stood in for wayward, runaway nuns so they wouldn’t get into trouble; resuscitated unbaptized dead babies long enough for them to escape Limbo; and eased the pain of childbirth, which was not always looked upon favorably since it was considered God’s punishment upon women for Eve eating the forbidden fruit.
We arrive at the forecourt outside the Black Virgin’s chapel by elevator, bypassing two hundred and sixteen steps known as the Sacred Way. Arduously steep, the staircase was considered torturous enough for Ecclesiastical Tribunes to assign it as penance for heretics and prisoners, who then climbed it on their knees and in shackles. At the top, the Black Virgin freed them and a priest removed their chains. I’ve read that some of the chains still hang on the back wall of her chapel.
Trisha and Terry gave me the task of coming up with a simple ritual that would honor the tradition of the pilgrimages here, yet also evoke a way for each woman to have her own individual experience with the Black Virgin. I kept thinking about chain. I bought a heavy strand of it at the hardware store and had it cut into twenty separate links, which took up a precious amount of space in my suitcase, each one being roughly the size of a big, chunky hoop earring.
As we gather under the overhang of the cliff near the door to the chapel, I hand them out, recounting the role of chain in Rocamadour’s past. “If you’re inclined, you can let the chain symbolize something inside yourself you’d like to be free of—some conflict, or fear, or old pain, whatever chains you, so to speak—and like the pilgrims that came here, you can leave it with the Black Virgin.”
Saying this, I wonder if the idea is as simplistic as it sounds, too innocent-minded for the complex knotting that tethers us to old patterns and struggles. Well . . . yes, of course it is. But trying to unlace them starts somewhere, I reason. Usually with a very simple intention. And if setting the intention feels sacred and memorable, perhaps it really could start a shift of some sort.
“Should we literally leave the chain in the chapel?” someone asks.
“Sure, if you want,” I say, then consider that I have no idea whether it’s okay or not, whether a guard will wag his finger at us, whether there’s a place to even put twenty fat links of chain.
I press one of the two remaining links into Ann’s hand, then let the other drop into my coat pocket.
“I bet you’ve already figured out what yours is going to represent,” she says.
“Nope, not yet. I’m going to let it pop into my head when I get in there.”
“Wow,” she says. “Who are you?”
I laugh, then shrug. “So what’s your chain going to be?”
She opens her palm and stares at it. “Well, I have to think about it,” she says, and wanders to an iron bench in a nearby archway and sits down to deliberate.
Eager to go inside, but also wanting to wait for her, I walk to the edge of the balcony and peer down at the maze of steps and passageways, then up at a twelfth-century fresco high on the back of a Romanesque apse. It depicts an annunciation scene which, as the saying goes, I could not make up if I tried. In it, the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove pecks at Mary’s forehead in order to impregnate her.
My thoughts overflow suddenly with Ann’s annunciation, so freshly dreamed, and inventive in its own way—a conception by fire. I am not that surprised by the dream or the intuition it stirs in her about writing.
Seeing her over on the bench, journal on her lap, shoulders hunched, her hand moving furiously across the page, I am reminded almost painfully of myself. I think of her growing up with the same abiding need to write that I had, always with a diary or a notebook, penning poems and stories (where does all that come from?) as if some seed inside her simply started to sprout one day. Is there DNA involved? My grandmother, the one who sacrificed her parlor for the lavender chick, had the writing seed, though it never really grew into anything. Her poems were published in her college literary magazine and then she got married and that was that. It’s reminiscent of The Yellow Wallpaper, a story that has recently captured Ann about a woman’s loss of selfhood after marriage. My grandmother seemed happy with her choices, though, but I suspect the inclination to write dogged her all her life.
I have a flash of Ann’s seventh-grade English teacher taking me aside and saying, “Ann wants to be a writer, and I’m encouraging her—I really think she could be one.” I saw that in Ann, too. I praised her writings, but I did not encourage her to be a writer. Wouldn’t that sway her too much? Wouldn’t it come off like the overbearing father pushing his impressionable son to follow in his footsteps? She had to arrive at it on her own. Standing there on the terrace, though, I realize I may have bent the other way by my silence.
Ann looks up and finds me staring at her. “No rush,” I call, and walk over to the empty tomb of St. Amadour and stare at the plaque without reading it. Thinking back on it, I’m pretty sure Ann believed, as I did in early adolescence, that she’d found the small, true light in herself. Then, like me, she lost it.
Perhaps she fought any urge to be a writer out of a need to separate herself from me and my path, the same way I separated myself from my mother and her path. When Ann went to college, I felt the invisible way she broke from me, in that way mothers feel barely discernible things. Even now, as we weave this new closeness, I do not mistake the separate core in her, her own nascent true self, and I watch how she protects it, even as she struggles to unfold it. Do her intuitions about writing come now because she has finally found enough of her separate self to entertain them?
In my case, losing the small, t
rue light was more like turning my back on it and finding something manageable. Becoming a nurse seemed more doable and sensible. You graduated and took a board exam. When you said, “I’m a nurse,” you knew what you were talking about. You had proof. Nobody would register me as a writer. Would I be a writer if I never published anything? Would I be one even if I did? And the real question: how likely was it to happen? At eighteen, I couldn’t find the courage. I took all that passion and sublimated it into nursing. Until, at twenty-nine, it simply refused to go there anymore.
I wonder if that’s the perennial story of writers: you find the true light, you lose the true light, you find it again. And maybe again.
As Ann puts away her journal and pen, I recognize that what I’ve witnessed in her over the last year is the same restlessness and hunger that I felt at twenty-nine. The same sense of exile, the homesickness for one’s place in the world. Oddly, the desire to be a writer seems to be coming back to her not unlike the way it returned to me: gradually insinuating itself into her thoughts; her desire, once gone cold, heating again by degrees like popcorn in the microwave, with the slow rat ta tat and then the bombardment. Finally, at the bursting point, the desire must be said out loud. Like she did to me this morning as she sat on the bed. Like I did to Sandy at the breakfast table on the morning I turned thirty—“I want to be a writer.”
I watch Ann cross the terrace, stopping to look up at the fresco, and I think: I have always sensed the writer in her.
Now her dreams talk to her about it, seeming to say what I never did.
High atop a gilded bronze altar, the statue of the Black Virgin of Rocamadour is just over two feet tall. As I step into the semidarkness of the chapel, she’s the first thing I see: small, thin, her facial features strangely hawkish. She looks like a dark, old bird that has flown in from an open window and perches up there, watching me watch her.
Every chair is taken. Ann and I move along the side wall toward the altar rail, edging as close to the Black Virgin as we can. She is covered with blackly tarnished plates of silver, now cracked and peeling. Her hands are worn to mitts, her feet are mostly missing, and her walnut-wood face is split and splotched.
“She looks nine hundred,” Ann whispers.
The Christ child sits on the Virgin’s lap like a miniature adult. She rests her arms regally on the sides of her chair. Her back is erect and her chin lifted. She wears a crown, not a veil. She looks utterly self-possessed. Old. Bony. Authoritative. Powerful. A much fiercer version of Mary than I expected.
As I look at her, my throat tightens and I dig through my bag for the travel-size Kleenex. Just in case. I’m not sure what moves me about her, only that she’s beautiful to me.
Someone vacates a chair, and I sit down, staring at the flinty old Virgin until the tears really do start to leak. I rub them away and focus on the back of Ann’s brown hair. Ann’s fingers, I notice, are curled around the stubby piece of chain, and I wonder what she has decided about it. What I will decide about mine.
I look up at the vaulted ceiling, locating the iron bell that legend says rings on its own when the Black Virgin performs one of her miracles. Then, twisting around to inspect the back of the sanctuary, I find myself staring at a wall of bare rock and realize the tiny chapel has been built right against the cliff. The surface of the rock gleams here and there from the candles in front of it. As my eyes adjust, I distinguish fragments of chain and shackles dangling from the wall on iron hooks.
When I turn back to the Black Virgin’s peeling face, the teary impulse has gone. I gaze at her unguarded for a long while, aware mostly of how fearless she looks. Her boldness and strength break through, as does her aged wisdom. She is without any need to please, any need to act, or look, or be a certain way. It’s as if she’s done with that, and rests now in the solid center of herself, having arrived at her own condensed truth. She is herself. And that is all.
I know suddenly what moves me about the Black Virgin of Rocamadour: She’s the Old Woman. It comes with some surprise, as if the bird on the altar has just pecked me on the forehead.
Old Woman I meet you deep inside myself. May Sarton’s line. That had started it all, the whole inquest, giving words and an image to my first inexpressible urge to become a new self after fifty. I’ve been searching for the Old Woman ever since reading the line. Now, I cannot help but feel that I’m looking at her.
The chain links I handed out form a winding trail along the marble altar rail. Most of the group has left the chapel, headed for the small Museum of Sacred Art nearby. In front of me, Ann rises from her chair and, after a quick nod over her shoulder at me, disappears into the back of the chapel, I suppose to light a candle.
My thoughts wander to the Black Madonna in my novel—the figurehead with her fist in the air, a heart on her chest, a moon at her feet. Of course, it would come back to her. The chapel is like a quarry, inviting those who wander into it to mine their own Black Virgin. I wonder if that’s part of what I’ve been trying to do in the novel. To dig her up for myself. The last scene I wrote before leaving home was one in which Lily creeps through the pink house late at night, slipping into the parlor to see the Black Madonna. She presses her hand against the Black Madonna’s painted heart. She says: “I live in a hive of darkness and you are my mother.”
Sitting in the shadowy stillness, I could almost laugh at how the Black Madonna has gotten herself such a prominent role in my pages, how she has been curiously mixed up with the novel from the beginning, from the moment I stood before the icon of the dark-skinned Mary in the myrtle tree in Greece and spilled out my prayer . . . my admission: I want to be a novelist. In a way that I’m only beginning to understand, the Black Madonna is slowly becoming like a muse to me—the personification of the dark, old voice of the soul.
Yet I’ve been slow to trust what is inside me—this new well of images, story, characters, and language. I haven’t wanted to confess to myself how plagued I am with skepticism. I’ve finished seven chapters of the novel, roughly half of it—believing in the work while simultaneously doubting the whole thing. Some of that is simply part of writing, but too much of it comes from enfeebling notions I have inside about my creative abilities, remnants of inadequacy that go back to my childhood, with its commanding old fear that I would not live up to expectations, that I would disappoint. How humbling to sit here, wanting to believe the fear has been unplugged and find it sputtering determinedly on like a rundown generator in a back room.
A couple of times since arriving in France, I’ve entertained the unreasonable thought that when I get home, I should just print out the half-novel, package it up, and send it off to the literary agent I met three years ago—the only agent I’ve ever met—who has probably forgotten she ever met me. The thought comes to me again now, but who sends off half of something? And the idea of someone besides Ann reading it, of it being out there, in the world, makes me squeamish.
I get up and deposit my piece of chain on the altar rail, knowing what I would like to be free of: the part of me that dares too little and fears too much. The terrible voice that pipes up: you can’t, and the next minute, don’t.
As I leave the chapel, I glimpse Ann lingering still in the back, and it is only because I pause to wait for her that I see the nun striding in in her big black shoes, heading straight for the altar rail, toting a handbasket. Ann and I watch from near the doorway as she gathers the pieces of chain the group has littered all over the place. I cannot see her face, but I envision her lips pressed together making the tsk, tsk sound. This is her job. Keeper of the Chapel. Custodian of Offerings. Cleaning up after the messy pilgrims. Another day, another basket.
She scoops up every last loop of chain, letting them drop noisily into her confiscated stockpile. Clink. Clink. Clink.
Just before she carries them away, though, she lifts the basket up toward the Black Virgin with a hasty genuflection. As if to say, here they are. Do what you can.
Ann
Cathedral of Notre D
ame-Le Puy
The Cathedral of Notre Dame in Le Puy sits on a large volcanic pinnacle. To reach the door on the western side, we trudge up a cobblestone street angled like a ski slope, then mount a stairway with so many steps I’m inspired to count them. These are the same steps that launched the First Crusade. We arrive at the top of them, huffing and puffing.
“My guidebook says there are one hundred and thirty-four steps,” I say to Mom. “I counted one hundred and one.” I look down the slope, able to see red-tiled rooftops below us. “How did we miss thirty-three steps?”
Perspiration has beaded across Mom’s forehead. She unwinds her black scarf from around her neck, revealing a light pink turtleneck.
“Hot flash?” I say.
“No. Steps,” she replies, stuffing the scarf into her bag.
It’s hard to tell whether the red flush she gets is from a hot flash or a cardio workout. Yesterday, when she began fanning herself at breakfast, I asked, “Is this what I have to look forward to?”
“Yes, it is,” she answered, without the sugar coat.
The steps have made me considerably warmer, too, and on this autumn day, I peel off my overcoat and sling it over my arm, anticipating what awaits us inside. Another Black Virgin.
France is Black Madonna country. There are hundreds of them. Just yesterday, we visited the most famous one, the Black Virgin of Rocamadour, nearly seven hours from here.
My visit to her had turned into something memorable. Before going into the chapel to see her, I sat on a bench outside the door and thought about the question Mom had posed to the whole group: What do you want to be free of ?
Mom had even handed out pieces of chain that were supposed to symbolize the answer. I placed my piece in my lap and flipped through my journal until I found where I’d recorded the dream I’d had a couple of nights earlier. Beneath it was a stream of thoughts.