Our Lady of Babylon

  I did not. I took three quick, but tiny, sips to disguise the fact that it was much too spicy.

  That apparently satisfied Madame, who continued briskly: “Interviews must occur in a setting as opulent as your many lives. For interviewers — imagine, that this should be so! — such a setting will donate plausibility before interviews begin.” Under the hazy sun, her complexion was a chocolate color, beautiful in contrast to the exquisite whiteness of her teeth.

  Yesterday, after we had roamed through some of my memories trampled upon by that defiling “Account,” the subject of the setting for interviews had come up, but we had left it pending for today.

  “If we were one of those poor lost souls roaming beyond our gates, no one would listen,” Madame said. “Life is so cruel.” She grew deeply pensive. “Oh, I do wish that —” A sustained sigh stopped her words.

  Oh, I do wish that— What particular longing, what retained pain, had stabbed her memory so keenly to have elicited such unexpected words? I was startled anew to realize that this wonderful soul, my cherished friend and ally in truth, must have known grave sorrow to understand it so intimately in others; that this extravagant presence living in one of the most beautiful châteaus in the country and surrounded by always green lawns, among which her gorgeous peacock saunters, that this same Madame Bernice must carry unhealed wounds, one of which had opened unexpectedly now — prodded by what memory? When she looked up, I saw a confirmation of particular pain; her eyes had turned the color of smoky cataracts — misted by contained tears?

  “Madame, what grave sorrow are you remembering?” I held her hand, in mutual trust. I waited for this singular moment — so simply allowed — to open like a fan to reveal her life.

  “What are you talking about, Lady?” she startled me by asking.

  “The way you looked down, the way you said, ‘Oh, I wish that —’” I floundered.

  “Yes, I wish that I had not decided so quickly to purchase this new opal.” She indicated it on her finger. “I’m not sure it was worth the price.”

  How quickly she tried to mask her pain, her huge compassion! I allowed her her camouflage. I accepted another cup of tea because Ermenegildo was eyeing me in an unfriendly manner, sensing, I knew, my displeasure with the new brew.

  “Now!” Madame said. “I’m sure interviewers will expect some evidence of social consciousness, an element that most effectively purges unjust blame in certain of your lives. In such lives, your essence very probably lodged for only one redemptive moment, a significant one, like when you were — so recently — Madame du Barry.”

  I couldn’t recall my life as the famous paramour, though I knew of her.

  “When at court she — you — protested the King’s excesses?” Madame prodded.

  Like a magic key, her words opened the brief interlude into an exact memory. It was its brevity that had allowed me, not to forget it, no, but merely to put it behind so many other lives lived much more fully. Now it pushed assertively forward:

  As he sat squashed in his flamboyant throne attempting to enjoy — he was so jaded he enjoyed nothing — a dance he would soon lead with me, the drunken King, wearing his most preposterous robe, a sunburst of gold on white fur, was told by his Minister of State of the growing restiveness in the country. Earlier a group of peasants had stoned the carriage of a despotic nobleman.

  “The people are too weak to be feared,” the King’s slurred words addressed the corrupt court. Nearby, the crafty Madame Pompadour, his earlier mistress, reduced now to a painted manikin, led applause among the pampered courtiers. Feeling her harsh smile on me — she knew that recently I had traveled across the City, and I had seen pain and poverty everywhere — I warned the King, “But, after you — and soon — will come a deluge that will sweep away our children and your subjects.”

  He shrugged.

  To emphasize my commitment to my warning, I removed all my clothes and jewels. Surrounded by gasps, I stood gloriously naked, my arms outstretched to emphasize that I had retained nothing, nothing. “I shall contribute all my possessions to the welfare of my country and its violated citizens.”

  Pompadour, seeing an opportunity to regain her squandered power, strode to me. “You’re finished, du Barry,” she said. “The King thrives on lavishness. There will be no revolution.” She turned to the leering court for approbation and agreement.

  “Betraying whore!” a voice accused me — and the words were echoed throughout the opulent hall.

  Now, in Madame’s garden, I grieved anew for the violated, the armies of the destitute displaced, homeless, hungry; the sad breed that daily I encounter on my way to Madame’s château.

  Apparently Madame, too, was thinking of them. She fixed her look where I had directed mine, beyond the trees, where lost figures huddled among their carts full of tattered possessions, hiding until night sheltered them more fully.

  Madame put down her glasses now and waited.

  For me to wander through more lives to be redeemed, of course. Jezebel’s? Reveal the truth about my life with Ahab, who loved me despite my alien color; and of General Jehu who, longing for me, had him murdered and made me violate my mourning, forcing me to paint my face in grotesque colors and decorate my nude body with cheap jewels, and then raped me and thrust me into the street for dogs to tear at while the people screamed at me, “Harlot! Idolatress! Betrayer! Whore!” . . . I did not feel up to returning now to snarling dogs.

  Pandora? The myriad evils unleashed on the world and blamed on me . . . on my curiosity that forced me to open the forbidden jar. And my release of hope for man, hope contained in that same jar? An accident, unintended? No! That was why I opened the fateful box! . . .

  “Why are you taking so damn long to continue?”

  “Madame!” Her tone disoriented me.

  “Yes?”

  “You were being a hostile interviewer, weren’t you?” I hurried to clarify.

  She brushed some crumbs from her lap. “Well, you were taking too long and I was trying to assert a certain pace during the narration of those briefer interludes.”

  How expertly — and now with variations — she played adversary, I marveled as, heeding Ermenegildo’s unwavering stare — he was uncannily able to seem to be frowning — I allowed my cup to reach my lips instead of, as I had intended, setting it down and having no more of this brew.

  “The perfect blend, isn’t it?” Madame said exuberantly. “Apparently you agree?”

  “Yes, indeed, this is the best of all.” I am committed to the truth, but a gentle camouflage to protect those one loves is a duty, not a lie. Besides, Ermenegildo’s stare was unnerving; had Madame fussed exceptionally about her new brand before I arrived today?

  “I shall order only it from now on,” Madame said.

  “Well —” I wished I could have yanked my single word away.

  Madame pushed her tea away. “It’s much too spicy! You think I didn’t see through your reaction?”

  “Madame —” That I would hurt her, even in so minor a matter, pained me, as did Ermenegildo’s glower.

  “Oh, Lady, let’s go on. We haven’t time to waste. We must succeed at interviews this time, because if we don’t —”

  “If we don’t succeed —?” I could not believe I was repeating those startling words, that they had been spoken.

  “Yes, Lady, if we do not succeed this time, your essence — of course undaunted — will continue its journey.”

  How casually she had spoken that. Yet nothing I might have imagined could have aroused the terrifying impact of her words, that we might fail, this time, that this journey of redemption might have to extend, that there would be others blamed, others to redeem. The forlorn woman whose scream I had heard in a dream . . . Had I myself, without recognizing it except in that dream, considered such a possibility, the woman’s scream a warning to me to succeed this time?

  “We shall not fail!” I said, and saw my hand turn into a fist that struck the table. “The interviews w
e’re now rehearsing will clarify it all and there will be no more unjustly blamed women, no more branded with the word ‘whore’ except as we shall redefine it.”

  Ermenegildo winced when my fist crashed on the table, and then he turned his full grave attention on Madame.

  “Of course we shall not fail!” Madame held my hand in double reassurance that wiped away all the implications that had terrified me.

  Of course! She had been testing my determination to triumph! “Well, did I pass your test?” I was delighted to ask, knowing the answer.

  “Yes, Lady,” she said earnestly, “you passed.” Then, smiling broadly and charmingly, she leaned toward me across the vase of today’s flowers, daisies startling in their simplicity, and whispered: “I’m just dying to hear how Salome intended to save the Baptist’s life and purity — and whether she succeeded.”

  And so rehearsals for interviews resumed!

  In the palace as he stood captive before Herodias and Herod, John the Baptist’s body was almost translucent, like a pearl against bright light.

  Herod, decked in a monstrous cloak of peacock feathers —

  “There, there, it’s all right.” Madame was trying to soothe Ermenegildo.

  “Imitation peacock feathers,” I adjusted.

  Ermenegildo was not pacified, so disturbed that he did not notice a beautiful butterfly, white with wings gilded blue and gold, that was dancing over today’s vase of flowers. His unique feather continued to quiver.

  So I added: “Herod was garish, he liked dyed things. He wore only false feathers.”

  Herodias said to Herod: “We shall torture the Baptist.”

  Herod leaned back, bored, in his throne. “You promised me a performance such as I’ve never seen,” he sneered. “Torture doesn’t amuse me any more.” He yawned drunkenly. His jaded hand was planted on his groin, forever hoping to find a stirring.

  Herodias waved her jeweled fan impatiently. “This shall not be just another torture.” I read in the slant of her eyes her determination to consummate her evil. I added to my own determination to save the Baptist’s life and the purity that was the source of his magnetic power. I would also join him in his ministry. Perhaps, eventually, he would come to love me.

  The Baptist had remained unbowed in all his naked splendor. Each time he tensed against his restraints, my body wrenched with love, Herodias’s with lust.

  “And how” — Herod perceived in Herodias’s fevered eyes the possibility of an enormous barter — “will the Baptist’s torture satisfy me?”

  Herodias advanced her tantalizing riddle. “Salome shall perform a dance that will thrill you — and torture the Baptist.”

  Herod strained his nearsighted eyes to locate me. His hand squeezed his feeble groin. “Only a dance?” He pretended disdain. He waved his fleshy hand toward the beautiful naked men and women who had failed to excite him with a dance of copulations moments earlier.

  Herodias brushed away the robe draped over her, exposing her lavish body as if to underscore her promise of sensual opulence. “You shall be aroused,” she said.

  “By you?” Herod yanked his hand from his groin. “You never —”

  “Nothing ever aroused you.” Herodias froze her words.

  I must stop feasting on John’s luminous nudity, I must take action. My mother’s cunning was already in swift motion. I was being forced to move within her current without yet knowing its direction.

  In that hall of sated lust, Herodias spoke to the vile Emperor: “Salome will dance a dance I’ve taught her, a dance to be danced only once, only for you — and for the Baptist.”

  “The Baptist! Why him?”

  “To torture him. He will be chained, unable to move, while Salome’s dance entices —”

  “But he’ll close his eyes. He has already. Look!” Herod lamented.

  The Baptist had closed his eyes, to contain the longing that the sight of me would stir. Herodias had known that.

  She leaned forward, her garish face propped like a death mask on her clasped fists. “That’s part of the entertainment, that he won’t dare see what he craves to see. His precious purity will be taunted, his imagination yearning for the fulfillment that he must deny.”

  There was more. I detected it in her voice, exacerbated by her urge to convince.

  Herod applauded. “Torture indeed for the prophet! Well done, Herodias!”

  Herodias’s purple lips smiled. “Afterwards, Sire, I shall ask the granting of a wish.”

  “Only if the dance succeeds —” His hand coaxed his desire.

  She would ask for the Baptist’s death, to possess him forever that way. Well, my dance would succeed so expertly that I would propose a barter of my own.

  I had grasped more pieces of Herodias’s elaborate contrivance to seduce the Baptist. It had to be elaborate to overcome his saintly resolve, strengthened by years of imposed deprivation, isolation, vows. I did not have to wait long for another piece of my mother’s cunning to fall into place:

  Herod had ordered his guards to secure the Baptist against a farther column.

  “No! That one!” Herodias insisted on the one nearest her, a few feet away. “I want to watch his torture.” A snap of her fingers brought forth two of the disposed objects of her recent appetite, two nude guards whose oiled muscles gleamed orange under the light of the torches they carried. They bound the Baptist to the column Herodias had chosen, and they flanked him.

  I suspected, almost knew, Herodias’s plan! I would willingly dance the dance she had long prepared me for, the dance of seven veils.

  “Lady! You insist there were six” — Madame was vastly irked — “and just now you —”

  “There were six, Madame.” I did not want to dwell on the matter now.

  Herodias had taught me well, the lessons begun soon after the Baptist’s curses rang nightly, arousing her. She would coax me: “Hold this veil to your breasts for a moment, seem about to remove it, let the edge of it touch only one of your nipples, but don’t expose it — there, that’s it, just the very tip — and then whirl around, glide, barely curve your leg, exhibit only a flash of your thigh, then let that veil fall, only to reveal another. Astonish with each one! Then astonish again! — and even more the next time. Astonish! And at the seventh —” Herself aroused, she ran her hands down my body.

  This day, Herodias had painted my face herself, carefully adding highlights with her saliva-moistened fingers. She had leaned back to admire her creation. “Yes!” She held a hand mirror before me. I had seen a startling face: the face of an innocent child and the face of a corrupt woman, the face she had painted on me so deliberately.

  “I await the dance!” Herod’s sated eyes clasped me to him. I felt contaminated even by his voice, rancid with festering desire.

  Pulling her robe behind her, Herodias walked imperturbably down the steps of the throne. She commanded me: “Dance the dance exactly as I taught it to you, or you, too, shall . . . suffer . . . my beloved daughter.” She whispered feverishly: “And dance it near the Baptist’s closed eyes. Let the perfume of each falling veil waft the air about him. He must hear, or imagine he hears, each slide of your flesh, each twist and turn, each sensual moan I’ve taught you — withhold nothing! — and let him know that each veil has fallen, one by one —”

  To keep him in a state of agitation she would then manipulate. What she intended would occur in one moment, which I must thwart. I understood more of her secret plan now. “I shall dance the dance you taught me, Mother.” Yes, and I would surprise her.

  She lingered before the Baptist, whose eyes remained closed. With one finger of her decorated hands — nails painted a blackened red — she outlined, carefully, slowly, without touching him, his exposed virginity. Then she brushed her own thighs with that same hand. Confident, she returned to her throne.

  Under her watchful stare, I walked toward the Baptist, my legs parting my veils, my flesh glowing silver as I passed shadows, golden when I entered the embrace of torches
. As I neared the holy man — his eyes resolutely closed — my veils sighed, a sensual sigh that he heard.

  I drank in his beauty as I stood before him, to shield him from Herodias’s gaze, and to be able to say this undetected:

  “You must open your eyes only when I tell you to!”

  He shook his head, turning away, asserting his vows of chastity.

  “It’s all that can save you from Herodias’s lust — and your death. I swear it! Please believe me!” Even then, I longed to draw his body to me, into me. The thought of risking death for that dashed into my mind like lightning. I looked away from his beautiful face and limbs. I was here to save him, not to lose my virginity to a saint. “Promise me. Trust me! Swear!”

  “I shall. I swear!”

  My devotion had convinced him. “Your eyes must remain closed until the exact moment,” I emphasized — and the moment must be exact, I warned myself.

  In affirmation of his vow to trust me, his eyes locked shut.

  His voice! — just those few words: “I shall, I swear” — the voice I had heard distantly for nights, like the sound of the ocean after it crashes on the shore and then turns gentle on the sand.

  I allowed my lips to brush his ear, ending my whispering.

  “Don’t touch him!” Herodias cried out. She tried to explain to Herod: “That will increase the torture, Sire.”

  I located myself before the vile rulers — and so near the Baptist that I continued to hear his breathing. I arranged my hair so that it framed my face in a shiny dark corona, I smoothed the veils that adored my body. I must look beautiful beyond belief, and I did.

  “Lady.”

  “Madame?”

  “May we pause for a moment? Thank you. Listen to the words you just spoke — ‘I must look beautiful beyond belief, and I did.’”

  “It’s true. I must and did.”

  “I don’t doubt that. I’m referring to your own designation of your own breathtaking beauty. Having you say it sounds —”

  I warned her with my silence.

  “Let’s look at it this way, Lady,” she said. “Those who will be listening at interviews may bristle at such self-description, no matter how true. People are peculiar about admiring oneself too much, however deserved that admiration may be.” She poised her cup of tea before her lips — “I’m getting used to its spiciness” — to indicate the care she was giving her next consideration: “I suggest that at certain points in the telling of your many lives, you might use the more familiar name of the person you were at the time. Like this — ‘Salome was beautiful beyond belief.’”