Our Lady of Babylon

  “Notoriety? Pub — ? Money? Why are you putting yourself through the pain of expressing such outrageous thoughts, Madame? You’ll be known as the catalyst for all my revelations.” I was trying to indicate to her how well I would handle the matter.

  “Oh, will I? You’re sure?”

  What was happening? What was Madame intending? She had never, this long, sustained the role of interrogator, nor in quite this voice, which Ermenegildo must have continued to detect, since he had cocked one ear carefully toward her. Her voice had become . . . frightening! I felt a dizziness, no, I felt stable within the whirling landscape, as if all the colors of Madame’s garden had been whipped about and I was at the bottom of a vortex. But why was I staring up? Oh, Madame had pointed into the sky, and Ermenegildo was following her gaze.

  Directly over us, a hawk — I had seen it earlier, circling the sky all afternoon — was pursuing another bird! The bird dipped toward the ground! The hawk pounced on it! The bird’s wings flailed! The hawk attacked it savagely, withdrew, returned to assault it — over and over — until the bird fell to the ground, a bloody pulp! The hawk soared away!

  “Madame! Please help me through these moments!” I screamed, at the same time that I saw my hand reach out calmly to my cup of tea as I smiled and brought it to my lips and sipped.

  XVII

  MADAME DID NOT COMMENT on the terrible spectacle of the hawk attacking the bird, although she was still pointing to it — no, now she was pointing out — and Ermenegildo was staring at — a dazzling cloud that had burst like a white blossom streaked silver. I concluded that the latter had allowed Madame to leave unmentioned the pantomime of violence in the sky — and my reaction to it. Had my scream been silent, contained just at the point it would have been uttered? Like Madame, I welcomed pushing the ugly matter away.

  Now I needed boldly to clarify and so defuse the distressing words she had been speaking just earlier, questioning her position in our journey that will culminate at interviews. I would do so by indicating to her how well I would handle the disturbing matters she had introduced: “You do want what I want, Madame, to revise false judgments — and to solve the Mystery of Babylon and Eden . . . So I forbid you to continue your earlier line of questioning —”

  “Then I should stop,” Madame said, her eyes pulling away from me, looking down into her hands on her lap. Sadly? She had spoken those words so quietly — and with such moving sincerity — that they were almost stifled by the flutter of a butterfly.

  “Yes!” I welcomed.

  “Except that there is more —” She looked up, her stare newly challenging, determined to continue, and in the odd, disturbing voice that she had used earlier.

  “No, Madame.”

  “— more that must be discussed in a related vein —”

  “No.”

  “Yes.” She affirmed her resolve by assuming a rigid posture in her chair. I told myself that she had done so because her back was troubling her especially today. Her words contradicted my hope: “— and that includes speculation that will be aroused about” — she sipped — “about who you really are.”

  Who I really am.

  How strange, to hear those words as I sat at tea on the lawn of Madame’s château. I looked at my shadow on the marble veranda. Who I really am.

  Madame proceeded: “Surely you agree that some may deem your stories so extravagant that they will grasp for ordinary — yes, more understandable — deductions?”

  “Please clarify.” I did not want to speak those words. I do not welcome cruelty, and — whatever the intent might prove to be here — the subject was cruelty. But explored by Madame, it would be done with kindness, I tried to convince myself.

  Still, the casual voice resumed: “Oh, I suppose someone may claim” — she leaned over to stroke Ermenegildo’s comb; he eased away, closer to me — “that you’re a woman who has not lived at all and is conjuring up extremities.”

  “Not lived at all!” My subdued laughter masked my bitterness at that remote conjecture, and it assured her I could easily dissuade such a vagrant confusion.

  “Oh, perhaps not that, but someone might indeed conjecture that you are really the woman in —” She glanced at the “Account” of lies on the table with our tea.

  “Those are distortions of my lives,” I reminded her. I must keep composed. This would soon change.

  “And we can’t ignore,” Madame moved on quickly, her tone unyielding, “that someone will attempt to identity you as a woman — oh, missing — someone in hiding —”

  “I am in hiding, Madame.”

  “We both know that, and why, and from what, according to you. But they may claim you’re someone else in hiding . . . because of, well, some kind of . . . violence . . . beyond, you know, what occurred in the Cathedral —” What did her unflinching look anticipate?

  My voice was calm. “I have known much violence, yes.”

  “In the extreme, some may even claim that you’re in —”

  I reached out toward a flower on the vine nearby, but before I could feel its petals, I saw that it was almost dead. I withdrew my hand. I touched my forehead, sheltering my eyes from the sudden return of a terrible white glaring sun. “— in the country, Madame,” I finished for her. “That is exactly where I am. In the country! And I — And I— And I —!” Madame’s garden was fading, everything was fading into darkness and I was plunging into its depths. I gasped, and struggled to push myself out forcefully.

  “Lady!”

  Madame stood up, over me. She raised her hand, as if to touch me. She sighed. “Lady —”

  “Madame?” The darkness receded in waves.

  Madame’s hand finished its gesture, a gentle gesture; she touched my hair, stroked it softly. “Oh, Lady, Lady, I’m sorry. I went on too long, far too long! Ermenegildo tried to warn me, did you notice?”

  I breathed. Her voice was back, Madame’s caring voice was back.

  “It was all necessary, Lady. You had to know the wild conjecturing that will occur — but only in the very first minutes, because, once you present your evidence — once you’ve cast your spell of truth” — she indicated with a snap of her hand how quickly that would happen — “there will be not one solitary interviewer who will doubt a single word you say.” She sat back down, but across the table she held my hands, returning blood to them. “It racked me, to put you through that most grueling ordeal, oh, I shared it, I promise you I shared it.” Was she dabbing at tears, pretending to be holding the napkin only to her mouth while actually drying tears?

  I felt . . . reprieved. Yet a wisp of sadness lingered. “Who I really am,” I echoed those strange words.

  “Oh, Lady, that was the most difficult part I had to go through. You are the beloved of the Count du Muir, and, most important, you are the essence —”

  “— of all fallen women unjustly blamed.”

  “Who better than I would know that, Lady? It was I who first explained your dreams —”

  “— as memories.”

  “I had to be cruel, Lady. If you could endure the kind of brutal skepticism I put you through — and you did, Lady, you endured it — you will hold the interviewers in your hands.”

  “And I will!”

  It was over, the harshest rehearsal was over, and I had passed. How quickly the sense of trust that bound us was restored. I felt a resurgence of my determination — our — determination.

  Ermenegildo brushed his head against my lap and then strolled over to Madame and brushed hers, formally announcing that the troubling moments had passed.

  “Lady! Let’s continue with another life!”

  “Yes!” How wonderfully it was all restored. It took restraint for me not to rise and hug Madame.

  Now we would resume our rehearsals for interviews!

  Roam through the War in Heaven, the fiery plains, plagues, fires, trumpets, shooting stars, and locusts? No.

  Could I bear now to face memories of Jesus’ and Judas’s naked bodies, dea
d, one on the cross, the other hanging from a barren tree? Could I bear to remember with what franticness I longed to disrobe to the storming night, to share their nudity in death just as I had shared it in life?

  Was it that this day’s light was about to melt into dusk, so soon — was it that which made me decide? Had the strange interlude with Madame contributed, warning me that I must recoil from nothing? “I believe, Madame, it’s time to continue the story of Mary and Jesus —”

  Madame touched her forehead solemnly; perhaps she made a sign of the cross.

  “— and to see Judas clearly.” My eyes demanded that she face me.

  She fussed — it is the only word I can think of to describe her series of movements — with her tiara, finally abandoning it at what might otherwise have clearly seemed to her an odd angle. She was preparing to be intransigent, that’s how completely the Madame Bernice I had known had been restored after the strange interlude, which had now lost its strangeness entirely. “I do believe that as we proceed into that sacred territory, we should keep in mind that Judas has been powerfully implicated —”

  “— as powerfully implicated, yes, as Eve.”

  Ermenegildo peered — I might even say stared warningly — at her.

  She broke one of the delectable pastries into crumbs and extended them to him. He did not take the . . . bribe? “The point I’ll make here,” she said, “is that we’ve already had Lucifer in a very unconventional light — which I know is the correct light, since you were there —”

  “Precisely.”

  She had trapped herself. “Oh, let’s go on and find what we shall find.” She hurried to add: “And that might be what we’ve accepted for centuries about that man.”

  My silence allowed her that possibility before I resumed:

  Eventually, it lifted — the moodiness that had separated Jesus from us after we had eaten the magic mushrooms, the moodiness that had settled over him after Mary’s declaration that in his visions of kingdoms and satanic temptations he had discovered whose son he really was. Even more fervently, Jesus denounced injustice, of rulers, priests, all despots. “Resist oppression!” he demanded simply but powerfully of the people he gathered easily at street corners. Even those bowed by misery were stirred by his challenge.

  “— defiance and possibility, that’s what he offers,” Judas said proudly. “That’s a real miracle, Magdalene, to give hope to those who’ve lost it, real hope, not false hope.” He had spoken loud enough for Jesus to hear as we sat in a tent we often pitched outside the City for a night, a day.

  “You could do all that, too, Judas,” Jesus extended generously, but Judas shook his head and said, “No, only you.”

  Jesus lowered his head, trying to conceal his smile at Judas’s praise.

  “Lady,” Madame brought me back into her garden, “did Jesus blush?”

  “Yes, Madame.”

  “Charming, yes, charming, indeed lovely. Might you —?”

  Jesus blushed and lowered his head, trying to conceal his smile at Judas’s praise.

  In the deep of night, Judas and I woke — Judas first, and, sitting up, he startled me — to find Jesus gone. We knew where. Earlier, he had informed us — and we assumed it was Mary who had informed him — that John the Baptist was outside the City. “I must speak to him,” Jesus had said. We found him and the Baptist in an improvised thatch hut by the River.

  Judas and I remained a distance apart from them, remembering when we had first met on the bank of the River Jordan. The reflections of John and Jesus were dark smears in the water as they talked until dusk cooled the desert and Jesus joined us silently — and then stayed away that day and night.

  In the City, at dawn, we walked by Mary’s dwelling. Awash in the day’s new light, the exquisite blue lady and her bedazzling son stood watching the sun rise.

  “No painter ever captured that splendid moment,” Madame Bernice rued.

  “Alas, no, Madame.”

  The sun appeared, adding new splendor to the two presences. Mary nodded to us graciously, and Jesus greeted us warmly, holding our hands. In that moment, we recognized our beloved again, unchanged. As we walked away, we heard the soft murmurings of Mary’s voice: “The holy Baptist confirmed —?” When she spoke, it was always as if she were praying.

  The next day, a hot, sultry afternoon of violent desert winds, Jesus returned to where Judas and I huddled in our tent. He smiled and embraced us. We lay on the sand, holding on to each other, moments that did not calm, only intensified, the sensual currents within which we swam, always deeper. When the wind had settled and the sky was bright with stars, we gathered from a hill the mushrooms we had eaten an earlier time, and we ate them, restoring the bursts of color and sounds we had first experienced, the sight of dipping stars.

  After the drugged hallucinations were over and Judas and I lay on the cooled sand, Jesus stood over us. His robe rested only over his shoulders, framing his exposed, feverish body. He trembled in the heat; the moon turned his perspiration into a silver glaze.

  “All begins and ends with me, and before me there was nothing.”

  Judas laughed.

  Jesus’ look of astonishing seriousness did not relent.

  Angered, Judas challenged him: “Are you sacred, then?”

  “I am the Son of God.”

  Judas reached out to touch him.

  “No,” Jesus said.

  I watched unbreathing as the two men I loved gazed at each other.

  Judas completed his gesture, his hand on Jesus’ shoulder, tentatively; I sensed Judas’s fear as his touch firmed. Jesus embraced Judas. Only I saw Jesus’ tears. Judas felt them on his bare shoulders. Jesus pulled away.

  In the morning, dark clouds roamed undecided in a blue sky when I woke. Judas lay near me. Jesus was gone.

  “It was only the mushrooms that made him say that, that’s all. Nothing’s changed,” Judas said anxiously.

  For a time, that seemed to be true.

  So gradually that at first we did not notice, new words infiltrated Jesus’ talks — now sermons — words that soon replaced his exhortations of just defiance; he spoke about “God’s reward in Heaven . . . joy in the Kingdom of God . . . comfort only in God’s love . . .”

  We no longer performed in his “miracles,” which we had staged. Now when he came upon the sick and the insane, he tended to them by taming “afflicting demons.” And he did allay their pain and fears with his intense, powerful insistence; soothed them for brief moments of dredged faith that were witnessed by increasing crowds that rushed to spread the word of miracles. Some began to call him “Lord,” a designation that soon spread. Now men and women knelt before him — and reached out to touch him for his blessing, which he granted “in God’s name.”

  For moments, I, too, was swept away by Jesus’ growing power to mesmerize. “Is he the Son of God?” I spoke aloud, immediately amazed at my own words.

  Judas shook his head. “He’s a man.”

  I told Judas what Mary had claimed, that day in the marketplace, about Jesus’ divinity, her own pure conception.

  Although I warned him not to, and I ran after him, Judas wouldn’t stop, didn’t stop even when we encountered Jesus sitting on the edge of a fountain, instructing a smattering of people gathered about him.

  Judas and I found Mary weaving a blue shawl in her home. Mary kept her rooms impeccably clean, and she chose to sit in a place where, in the morning, light from a window would sprinkle her presence with azure.

  “Tell Jesus the truth of his birth! Whatever it is!” Judas demanded.

  Mary glanced up at him, with a vague smile of greeting. “The truth?” She seemed just slightly baffled. She continued her weaving. Nearby, her husband, Joseph, absently crossed two pieces of abandoned wood.

  Does she know the truth anymore, whatever it is? I wondered urgently.

  “Yes, the truth, Mary!” Judas demanded, and added softly, “Please.” He spoke cautiously, with kindness: “Perhaps about what you
consider your own sinful transgression — but it wouldn’t be, Mary, it wouldn’t be sinful,” he pled.

  Joseph looked up, questioning. Silent, Mary was more distant, more like blue crystal, and more beautiful than I had ever seen her. The aura painters would give to her never compared to that which truly embraced her.

  Judas sighed his words to Mary: “Were you taken against your will? Is that why you’re claiming —?”

  I preferred the image I had had of her on an earlier day, of her lying on a field of flowers and laughing exultantly with her lover.

  When she heard Judas’s question, Mary stopped her weaving. She inspected the blue shawl, and then she looked up at him. “I am pure, Judas, and Jesus is the Son of God. The Angel Gabriel announced that to me.”

  As Judas and I were leaving the impeccably ordered lodging, Mary took me aside. With a gentle touch of her hand — so soft I hardly felt it — she led me to a courtyard, a small garden to which at serene moments she retreated. I noticed that, here, too, the morning light filtered blue on her.

  Under an acacia tree, its white blossoms radiant in that light, I sat with her on a bench. Absently, from a luxurious shrub nearby, she plucked a perfect anemone, its center so pale it was almost as white as its outer petals. “Magdalene,” she began, “I know how sincerely you and Judas believe that I’m wrong, or even” — she smiled at this as a clear impossibility — “that the Angel Gabriel was wrong.” She lowered her head. “You cannot understand certain things because” — she touched me again, to lighten her words — “because, once, you were a . . . prostitute.”

  I stood, aghast. Her words had scorched me with hurt.

  Centuries later, in Madame’s garden, I felt a pang of that hurt. “I thought then, Madame, that I would never be able to forgive her; that Mary and I had been separated forever . . .

  “Mary and I had been separated forever!”

  Madame repeated the same words I had just repeated, words that lingered, echoing, in my mind, now with the hint of a new meaning, the barest hint, like the withdrawn touch of a hand. I saw Madame emphatically add the same words to the essential evidence she was collecting. Her hands pressed her temples for moments longer than usual.