Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

by Tom Robbins

  It was one thing to be intrigued, quite another to take action. If Pope John had, indeed, burned the prophecy and what he believed to be the only copies thereof, he must have done so for a very sound reason. The Vatican undoubtedly would concur with that reasoning. The news that Cardinal Thiry’s translation had escaped the flames might hold a minimum of delight for it. And Rome had a long tradition of killing, literally or figuratively, the messenger. On the other hand, if a surviving copy did exist, wouldn’t it want to be apprised? Especially if the copy was in the possession of a loose cannon such as Abbess Croetine?

  In the end, the bishop nervously telephoned that cardinal in Rome whose duties included the investigation of miracles and visitations. He relayed Fannie’s story and awaited official reaction. It was not long in coming. Less than a week after the phone call, the cardinal rang up the bishop and instructed him that Fannie’s tale was a blasphemous hoax and should be dismissed as such and forgotten.

  Feisty Fannie, however, was not so easily deterred. She went to see Sister Lucia, now nearly ninety-two years old and living again in Portugal. To the surprise of those around her, the normally reclusive Lucia received the Irishwoman. In private, Fannie told her story, and as she recited the words of the third prophecy (over the years, all of the Pachomians had unintentionally memorized it), cerebral calcification cracked, rust flaked away from axon terminals of mnemonic neurons, and in the old woman’s brain, synapses that hadn’t fired in years—decades, perhaps—commenced to shudder, sputter, and send off sparks. They shook hands with other synapses, and the crone found herself recycling each and every word of that fateful prognostication that she’d received over miraculous meadowland airwaves in 1917 and written down for presumed posterity in 1940, the words that she had cautioned would “bring joy to some and sorrow to others.”

  On a couple of occasions in the past, Sister Lucia had voiced polite disappointment that the Church had not even attempted to consecrate Russia, as the Lady of Fatima had directed in the second prophecy, and that the third prophecy hadn’t been acknowledged at all. But Lucia was nothing if not an obedient handmaiden. She had always submitted docilely, thoroughly, to the authority of Vatican fathers. Even in her advanced age, however, she was not unaware of the worldwide resurgence of Marianism in general, and of interest in the Fatima Virgin in particular. Like Switters, moreover, she was susceptible to Fannie’s Irish charm. It hadn’t taken the fugitive Pachomian more than an afternoon sipping watered-down port in a sunny Portuguese garden to convince the nonagenarian nun that the time had come to honor the Holy Virgin’s wishes, to present her exhortations and warnings to humankind, with or without Vatican cooperation.

  Both Fannie and Lucia were aware that a significant conference was scheduled for early June in Amsterdam. Entitled “New Catholic Women,” it was to be a gathering of nuns, laywomen, teachers, writers, and concerned parishioners who had in common a growing spirit of resistance toward the repressively sexist practices and attitudes that persisted within their church. It was the premise of conference organizers that the Church’s continued hostility toward women threatened both their religious lives and, due to its intractable ban on artificial birth control, their physical lives. Representatives of the Blue Army, the largest and best known of the contemporary Fatima cults, had announced their intentions to attend the gathering, and Fannie experienced little difficulty in persuading Lucia that Amsterdam in June was the ideal place and time to disclose the contents of the secret third prophecy to the masses for whom Mother Mary had intended it. For reasons as political as spiritual, regular conferees would be receptive to an airing of Marian information that had been supposedly suppressed by the patriarchs. They would be receptive to the airing whether or not they as individuals believed Mary had actually appeared at Fatima, and the Blue Army would be overjoyed, since it regarded the longreticent Sister Lucia as only slightly less saintly than Mary herself. The frosting on the Communion wafer was that the conference was bound to attract global media coverage.

  Some media members were, as early as December, already paying attention, for when word leaked out of the “New Catholic Women” organization office that the legendary Sister Lucia would surface in Amsterdam to personally unveil the third prophecy of Fatima, the news popped up in papers and on broadcast stations around the world. As is often the case, buzz begat buzzsaw. The phone calls and faxes that the bishop of Leiria began suddenly to receive from Rome were uniformly lacking in any shade of tickled pink.

  Within seventy-two hours of the leak, a helicopter deposited a Vatican cardinal in Leiria. The red hat was accompanied by his secretary and two members of the Holy See’s legal affairs team, one of whom, not surprisingly, was the mysterious Scanlani. Portugal’s foremost Fatima expert, the scholarly theologian and fascist apologist, Dr. Antonio Goncalves, also joined the discussions in the bishop’s study. The following day, Goncalves, the bishop, and the cardinal descended on Sister Lucia and browbeat the frail old nun into publicly announcing that she would not under any circumstances appear at the Amsterdam confab, that she was not at all certain that any text of Fatima’s third prophecy existed, and that if one did exist, it rightfully was in safekeeping at the Vatican.

  As for Fannie, she slipped out of Portugal as stealthily as she had slipped out of the Pachomian oasis. No matter. The Vatican team was not particularly worried about her. Not only was the defrocked Irishwoman deficient in ecclesiastical cachet, she was a known sexual deviant, having, as a matter of record, undergone a number of exorcisms in an attempt to purge her of the Asmodeus that had continued to corrupt her well into her thirties. It would be easy to denounce and discredit her, particularly since she did not possess the copy of the prophecy but only claimed to have read it and memorized it under dubious circumstances somewhere in Syria. Given the facts, the Amsterdam conference quite probably would not even allow her a forum.

  So much for that. But suppose, Dr. Goncalves asked, that a copy of the third prophecy was, indeed, held in a maverick desert convent; suppose it was in Cardinal Thiry’s verifiable handwriting; and suppose, just suppose, it did, as the wench Fannie had intimated, call the future of Roman Catholic influence into question? Shouldn’t an effort be made to secure the document and turn it over to the Holy Father, the single personage with the authority to determine its fate? What if, inspired by Fannie’s efforts, that troublesome Abbess Croetine should decide to carry her uncle’s translation to Amsterdam in June?

  The cardinal was a practical man. “I hear the desert is pleasant this time of year,” he said. He winked at Scanlani. He winked so hard it jiggled his velvet cap.

  January. February. March. It was a period of flat suspense. Alfred Hitchcock on a grapefruit diet. A clock that ticked but did not advance: every time you looked, it said five minutes to midnight. A bomb with a damp fuse. The other shoe that drops and drops and keeps on dropping. Ice fishing as an Olympic sport. The tension was so steady, the pressure so uniform, there were weeks when it might have been boring were it not on the verge of being desperate.

  It was the threat of serious danger that kept Switters in Syria. True, the sisters relied on his computer, but he could have left it with them and gone on to South America adequately served by his flip phone. They would have accepted the computer, all right, but they wanted no part of the government-customized Beretta Cougar 8040G, no matter how he Tom Clancyed its light weight, negligible recoil, side-mounted magazine release button, and all-around athleticism. (“I’m not gun-happy by any means,” he assured Masked Beauty, “but we angels can’t let the cowboys have all the fun.”) So, he remained at the oasis, committed to its protection until matters were somehow resolved. He had a sense of responsibility, of loyalty, Switters did, but it must be mentioned that he was also motivated by simple curiosity.

  Not that Switters would have deemed curiosity an inferior or even ordinary motive. Au contraire. On his very first field assignment for the CIA, he had, undercover, accompanied a champion high-school marching band from
New Richmond, Wisconsin, on a trip to Moscow. There had never been anything in Russia even remotely resembling the eighty-piece, high-stepping, plume-bedecked ensemble that, fronted by a baton-twirling, short-skirted, white-booted drum majorette, paraded from Gorky Park to Red Square, booming a brassy, sassy rendition of “Jesus Christ, Superstar”; and Switters, when he could pry his gaze off the majorette (any hope on his part to get in her pants was ruthlessly squashed by a sizable phalanx of mother hens from the New Richmond PTA), couldn’t help but notice how many Russians simply turned their backs on the spectacle and went about their dreary business in the streets. Even if you were fiercely anti-American, he thought, wouldn’t you at least be curious? In later years, when he would find himself the only outsider, the first Caucasian, in a remote African or Asian village, he would notice that some inhabitants gaped openly, grinning at him with itch and relish, while others looked right past him or turned away, expressionless. And so he came to recognize that there were two kinds of people: those who were curious about the world and those whose shallow attentions were pretty much limited to those things that pertained to their own personal well-being. He concluded further that Curiosity might have to be added to that list of traits—Humor, Imagination, Eroticism, Spirituality, Rebelliousness, and Aesthetics—that, according to his grandmother, separated full-fledged humans from the less evolved. Of course, curiosity was not entirely lacking among four-footed beasts, as many a dying cat would attest, and Maestra’s narrow-focused “missing links” were occasionally capable of being intrigued by trifles like the domestic affairs of film stars and royalty; but such displays of interest were feeble, even pathetic, when compared to the inquisitive marveling of the wonderstruck, the obsessive questing of scientists and artists, or even to the all but squealy speculations of those who could barely wait to see what was going to happen next.

  In that regard, the Vatican also could be assumed to be partially motivated by curiosity. The pope, naturally, was curious about the augury that had set his predecessor to throwing off tears like an ice sculpture in a wind tunnel. Dr. Goncalves was curious for academic reasons. Even the blandly arrogant Scanlani must have been curious. The Church undoubtedly wanted possession of the Fatima prophecy because it worried that it might encourage the feminist bent of the new Marianism and because of the rumor that the Virgin had foretold of a spiritual renaissance in which the Christian establishment, unthinkably, was not a major player. Every bit as much as it feared and resented the prophecy, however, the Church was curious about it. Domino, with the help of Switters, both stoked and thwarted that curiosity. And they and the sisterhood lived with the consequences.

  January. February. The Ides of March. A sky-lidded night plain. A star-loaded sky. A moon without a pond to primp in. A wind without a leaf to tease. A nighthawk without a wire to rest on. A couple without a corner to turn. Her sandals, his wheels, made a popcorn-eating sound in the sand.

  He watched as she squatted to pee. She was matter-of-fact. He whistled a show tune. Although they never touched, theirs was the radiating, maddening-to-others intimacy of longtime easy lovers. If she made enough water, the moon might glimpse itself, after all.

  Now that they no longer rendezvoused in the tower room, Domino and Switters often strolled together at night. Rather, she strolled, he rolled. (Stilting in tandem with a companion on foot produced ridiculous rhythms.) Switters usually preferred to stroll and roll outside of the compound, out in the desert, both because they could speak more freely there and because he could check the perimeters for possible intruders. By March, the Vatican had apparently given up on trying to pressure Syria to deport the Pachomians: thanks to Sol Glissant, they held clear legal title to their land. Army helicopters no longer buzzed the oasis, and the last police raid, in early February, had failed for the third time to find an alien American male on the premises. (“Just one pretty nun,” reported the officer-in-charge, “and nine ugly ones, including an old abbess who can’t stop rubbing her nose and a big burly mute one, confined to her bed.”) Still, it paid to be alert. Switters remembered those Islamic militants from the closest village, and it would not have surprised him if Roman agents incited them to spy on, or even attack, the convent.

  For more than two months, while the abbess paced in her chambers, absentmindedly but compulsively polishing the unfamiliar regularities of her newly planed proboscis, Domino had bargained hard with Rome. Scanlani, who proved as verbose electronically as he was taciturn in person, spoke for the Church. Initially, starting about a fortnight after Switters had run him and Goncalves off the compound, his on-line communiqués consisted of the kind of insidious intimidation—bully-boy menace couched in oblique legalistic formalities—for which lawyers were universally despised. When Domino failed to back down, when she intimated and then flatly stated that her aunt might, indeed, attend the “New Catholic Women” conference, disputed document in hand, Scanlani became gradually, reluctantly, more conciliatory. Of course, at that time, Masked Beauty, still wary of its presumed Islamic overtones, had absolutely no intention of publicizing the Virgin’s message in Amsterdam or anywhere else, but she came to appreciate her niece’s strategy: “If the Holy Father agrees to reinstate the Order of St. Pachomius,” Domino would write again and again, “then the Order of St. Pachomius will consent to turn over to the Vatican the sole extant text of the third prophecy of Fatima.”

  Eventually an industrial-strength votive candle had flared in the old abbess’s mind. She chuckled. She stroked her shockingly sleek snout. “Chantage,” she said.

  “Yes.” Domino grinned back. “Blackmail.”

  They laughed. They bit their lips, their tongues, the pulpy lining of their cheeks—and went right on laughing. They were disgusted with themselves, guilt-ridden, ashamed; but they were, momentarily, at least, forced into giggles by the very idea of it. Blackmailing the pope!

  And there had come a day, just past the middle of March, when the pope blinked. Scanlani signaled that, in exchange for the return of certain Church property, the Holy Father would officially accept the Pachomian sisters back into the fold. There was a catch, naturally, and it was the terms of the Roman offer that had occupied Domino and Switters on their stroll and roll that night in the parched but cooling grit, where the moon, as anticipated, had indeed examined its acne in the puddle that Domino straddled like the primordial Mother of Oceans.

  Because of her youth in Philadelphia, perhaps, she’d never acquired the French habit of dabbing herself with the hem of her skirt, so she squatted there, panties down, for a while, as if waiting for the wind to dry her. To distract his thoughts, Switters tried to spin his chair, but it was no use: you couldn’t pop a wheelie in the sand. Finally she stood, affording him just a flash of what, in South Africa, the whites called the poes and the moer, the coloreds called the koek, and many blacks knew as indlela eya esizalweni (a mouthful any way you looked at it): the cultural information latent in the different ways those neighbors referred to the same commonplace and yet everlastingly mysterious organ was fodder for a fascinating sociological thesis, though not from our man Switters, who was happy just to have learned the names, in case an occasion ever arose to address the thing in question in its proper local idiom. At any rate, Domino was beside him again now, repeating the conditions of the Vatican proposal.

  “They’ll readmit us to the cloth, but they won’t support us financially, which is okay, because we’re used to poverty and we can take care of ourselves. However, they also demand that we stay out of Church politics, keep our mouths shut, don’t rock any boats.”

  “And you absolutely will not agree to that?”

  “Mais non! We have to speak out. It’s our duty to life. Putting a stop to this rampant, irresponsible procreation is like finding the cure for cancer. The ‘breeders,’ as you call them, are rather similar to cancers, actually; tumors with legs. A cell becomes malignant when it misinterprets or mishandles information from the DNA, and then all it cares about is replication—at least that’
s what I’ve read—and it will go on blindly, selfishly replicating itself even though it smothers the innocent, healthy cells around it. And, of course, it eventually dies itself because it has destroyed its environment. Everything dies then. Yes? So, the egotistical breeders misinterpret God’s word, or cultural definitions of manhood, and they—”

  “Yeah, I get the analogy, sister love.” Moreover, he agreed with it, although it seemed harsh coming from her. He wondered if some of his own cheerful cynicism had rubbed off on her. He wondered, too, to what degree, if any, she’d ever entertained the fantasy of bearing children of her own.

  Now and again, one could detect in a childless woman of a certain age the various characteristics of all the children she had never issued. Her body was haunted by the ghosts of souls who hadn’t lived yet. Premature ghosts. Half-ghosts. X’s without Y’s. Y’s without X’s. They applied at her womb and were denied, but, meant for her and no one else, they wouldn’t go away. Like tiny ectoplasmic gophers, they hunkered in her tear ducts. They shone through her sighs. Often to her chagrin, they would soften the voice she used in the marketplace. When she spilled wine, it was their playful antics that jostled the glass. They called out her name in the bath or when she passed real children in the street. The spirit babies were everywhere her companions, and everywhere they left her lonesome—yet they no more bore her resentment than a seed resents the uneaten fruit. Like pet gnats, like a phosphorescence, like sighs on a string, they would follow her into eternity.