Bright Dark Madonna

by Elizabeth Cunningham

  PART TWO

  AVE MATRES

  CHAPTER TEN

  MY PEOPLE

  Ave Matres

  Hail all mothers

  graceful or not

  God or goddess is with you, believe it or not.

  Blessed are all women

  and blessed are the fruits of our wombs

  whatever names, ridiculous or not, we choose for them

  and even when they’re acting rotten.

  O mothers

  holy human mothers

  all our children are divine.

  Long after they leave us

  they will curse us and pray to us

  now and in the hour of our death

  now and in the hour of their need.

  I HAVE TAKEN THE LIBERTY of making this famous prayer to my mother-in-law a paean to all mothers—myself included. I am about to become a mother again. I am the bright dark madonna of this story, the daughter of mothers, bright and dark, the mother of daughters bright and dark. I take my place, however hidden, in the lineage of madonnas, Mary the mother of Jesus, Isis the mother of Horus, Demeter the mother of Persephone. Mother of a child or child of a mother, you are part of this lineage, too, this holy human lineage, the origin of bliss and loss.

  Of course, I did not think about any of that then. I had tunnel vision. The only thing that mattered was getting home to Temple Magdalen, the only home I had ever made. In my heart, I had never left it.

  Ma and I arrived just at first call of the Sabbath shofar. The gates stood open, and I paused, relishing the sight of home: whores and children singing the evening hymn to Isis; Judith and various helpers hurrying to lay out all the food before the third call of shofar sounded. Cats stretched, strolled, or lolled; chickens scratched the dirt and strutted. Old men entertained the bedridden with dice games, while old women scolded them for being in the way. On one of her trips back and forth, Judith caught sight of us and dropped a tray of figs. “Aren’t you just like him!” she complained and exulted. “Always showing up just when it’s time to eat!”

  Shabbat dinner at Temple Magdalen was one of our untraditional traditions. Our creed, to the extent that we had one, was to celebrate all and any holy days, especially if it involved eating and drinking. Judith, who was Jewish and not, by the way, a whore, knew all the Sabbath songs and blessings, so she presided over the table, so to speak, which really meant all of us sitting on the ground together in a big circle, reaching into common dishes, passing wineskins around and around, torchlight and starlight lighting our faces, the air alive with jokes and laughter.

  After dinner, when our bellies were full, there would come a lull as people settled back, leaning against each other, sometimes dozing a bit, and generally digesting. I gazed around the circle, content to let everything be a little soft and blurry. Judith had taken charge of Ma, who rested her head on Judith’s shoulder. Reginus, once my fellow slave in Paulina’s household, reclined with his lover Timothy spoon fashion. I had my head in Berta’s soft, abundant lap, while Dido, my other sister whore, massaged my feet. I had met them both at The Vine and Fig Tree, the Roman brothel where I was first a whore. But all these stories I have told before.

  At the moment, you only need to know I was with my best friends, all of us exiles of one sort or another. Their friendship sustained me through all the years of longing and looking for my beloved. When Jesus appeared at our gate, more dead than alive, my friends rejoiced with me. They welcomed him and came to love him, too (Dido held out the longest), but I’ll tell you a secret: they loved me more. When I left to wander with Jesus, they loved me enough to let me go, and the life of Temple Magdalen went on in its quirky, practical, joyful way, whether I was there or not. That “way” never turned into an institution; it was, in some sense, the antithesis of an institution—which is why it was so wonderful, which is why you have never heard of it.

  After Sabbath dinner, we usually told stories, and in time I became aware of people turning toward me expectantly. I had been away for six months and turned up with a round belly, an eccentric mother-in-law but none of Jesus’s followers, whose company I had kept for more than two years.

  “Well,” Reginus prompted. “Are you going to tell us everything or what?”

  A little ungracefully, I sat up and rearranged my belly so that it rested between my crossed legs. I put my arms around the roundness and balanced it in my hands.

  “Yes,” Reginus acknowledged my centerpiece, “you are just about what I’d call perfectly pregnant. Does he, did he know before he….” Reginus trailed off uncertainly.

  I opened my mouth, but no words came out. I realized, for the first time, that I had never told anyone, anyone in the world, what had happened in the tomb, how the love that is stronger than death had led to new life in the most literal and intimate sense. Nor had I told my beloved, in so many words, what I was beginning to suspect just before he disappeared through the Beautiful Gates.

  “I, I don’t know. I mean I think he does …When he—”

  How to say it? When he talks to me from inside my body, my blood, my bones… I found that I couldn’t go on. I was the daughter of eight mothers, who spun wild, contradictory tales on the slightest provocation, and I suddenly had no story. Or I did not know how to tell it, not this part. No wonder I’d had so much trouble among the disciples. They were all busy telling his story, deciding what it meant, what parts to keep and what to forget, how it fulfilled this or that bit of scripture, and I was still tongue-tied.

  He was dead, and I bathed him with whores’ tears, and then we made love all night all day all night till the earth shook and the stone rolled back, and there we were under the tree of life at the dawn of the world.

  I looked up, dazed.

  “Better get the vial,” Dido, said to one of the younger whores. “It’s on the altar.”

  “Liebling,” Berta had her arm around me. “What happened to you in Jerusalem? We’ve been so worried, and when Joseph sent for Paulina, we knew something must be wrong.”

  I started to shake, and Berta held me closer.

  “She’s too tired to talk,” said Dido across me to Berta. “We ought to get both of them to bed.” She nodded towards Miriam. “Come on, honey.”

  “No,” I said, “not yet. I need to tell all of you something. I ran away.”

  And I registered it, as if for the first time. From the moment I bolted from the Jerusalem house I had been on a mindless trajectory, bent only on coming to safety, a bird tossed into a storm wind, flying blind. Now here I was, finally still, and some truth, some grief that I couldn’t yet name was catching up to me.

  “They want to take the baby from her.”

  Miriam’s voice startled everyone, as if the fire had spoken up, or the spring. A gust of sympathy and outrage went round the circle.

  “Do they know you’ve come here?” asked Timothy, clearly worried.

  “Where else would she go?” Berta demanded. “This is her home, we are her people.”

  My people. All at once I knew what was troubling me, beyond the instinctive fear that had driven me here. I had fled from Jesus’s people without a backward glance, the ones I loved, Mary B, Susanna, Tomas, Lazarus, and the ones I loved who didn’t love me, Peter, Andrew, Matthew, well, to be honest, most of them. Once not so long ago, my people and his people had gotten sublimely drunk together and danced at our wedding feast. I had called Jesus’s disciples my companions, I had shared the pleasures and hardships of the road with them, I had wept with them over his body. And so quickly they had become my enemies. Or I, theirs.

  “She feels guilty,” Miriam announced bluntly. “And yet, Holy Isis, my daughter-in-law thinks she’s not Jewish.”

  No one seemed to know how to respond to that remark, so we left it to Isis.

  “Don’t worry, honey,” Reginus came and knelt behind me, his arms around me. “We’ll protect you.”

  Just then the young whore, who was new to Temple Magdalen, returned carrying the vial in h
er hands next to her heart, gazing at me with a love and reverence that perplexed me until I remembered what Susanna had told me about Dido and Berta’s training methods. Apparently, they told aspiring whores my story, as I had once told it to them in the whores’ bath in Rome, as that story had unfolded, leading to us all to Temple Magdalen. I smiled at the dark, round-faced young woman as she held out the vial to me.

  Dido and Berta had sent me the vial just before Jesus was arrested. I had poured out every last drop in the tomb, bathing his every cut, washing his mortal wound.

  “Whores’ tears,” Old Nona had said. “Cure anything.”

  When I had returned to Galilee with the disciples, I had brought the vial back to Temple Magdalen. Now I held it in my hand again, gazing at it till I couldn’t see. Then I unstopped it, handed the tiny blade to the young whore and let her harvest my tears.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  COUNTING DOWN

  FOR A TIME after Ma and I arrived at Temple Magdalen, I enjoyed a kind of edgy peace. At first I hourly expected Peter or James to show up and stand belligerently at the gates of Temple Magdalen; then I expected them daily. When two Shabbats had passed without so much as a word from the ecclesia at Jerusalem, I warily began to relax. I experimented with hopeful explanations: The apostles had decided the baby couldn’t possibly be Jesus’s since I was such a notorious slut. Or perhaps it had dawned upon them that the best hiding place for a scion of the House of David and the heir of the Jewish Messiah (upon whose existence the Romans would surely frown), might be a pagan whorehouse. Beats bulrushes, if you ask me. But no one was asking me, and after a while I did not find my own speculations reassuring. They tended to engender counter theories in the middle of the night. Jesus was right: there was enough trouble for each day and I was better off as a blooming lily of the field, so to speak.

  So I gave myself over to blooming, or ripening might be a better analogy. I got rounder and rounder as the weeks passed. Grapes squished under my weight as I helped with the winemaking; I also lent my bulk to pressing olive oil. I did my part at the clinic, too, but the fire did not flow as freely through my hands. It re-directed itself to my womb where it gently rocked and swirled, more like water than fire.

  The only aspect of Temple Magdalen life I did not resume was serving as a whore, receiving the god-bearing stranger, which omission felt strange to me, despite my advanced pregnancy. If you want to know the truth, it was not my idea to refrain, but Dido and Berta’s. They decided it would upset Miriam if I returned to fornication, however holy, while her son was not yet cold in his grave, (which he wasn’t in anyway), and while I was carrying his baby. They probably had a point, although as you may have noticed Ma didn’t have much concept of conventional morality.

  For myself, I had no notions about proper behavior for the widow of a savior. All through the years as a whore, holy and unholy, I had received all men as if they were my beloved in disguise. He himself had said: if you give food to someone who is hungry, you have fed me. How is lovemaking so different?

  Maybe you think I should have stumbled upon the principle of transcendence by now? Become more spiritual, less physical, if you insist on making such distinctions. Listen, pregnancy is an intensely embodied state. Inside my body, taking its substance from my body, another body was growing, another soul becoming incarnate. Transcendence was just not on, as far as I was concerned. But I was too languid to make a fuss about the niceties Dido and Berta wanted to preserve.

  And if I was not a practicing whore, I was still a priestess, and at times almost an object of veneration. Every morning and evening after the hymns to Isis, the little girls liked to plait flowers in my hair. Instead of vesting me, as we did the statue of the goddess, they would ask me to take off my tunic, so they could see my belly. The whores loved it, too, and massaged my breasts and belly with oil to prevent stretch marks. I enjoyed these ministrations for the most part, but I could never forget how upset the young Esus had been when the other students at druid school paid the same kind of homage during my first pregnancy. “It’s as if they’re worshipping you!” he had protested. And the witch Dwynwyn also had once warned, “Some people will want to worship you. I’d nip that in the bud if I were you.”

  But really what everyone worshipped was new life, new possibility, something hidden yet whole, unbroken, mysterious, round. What else is an Easter egg?

  I was in just such a posture one morning when a visitor came to see me.

  “Priscilla!” I called out to a small, dark woman with a face lined from long squinting out at the changeable lake weather. Peter’s wife—yes, Peter, the rock, the erstwhile Galilean fishermen. You never hear about her in the Gospels, but she existed.

  “Don’t get up!” she laughed. “You look like a beetle on its back.”

  She came and knelt beside me, giving me a kiss and patting my naked belly herself before the girls could bring me my tunic.

  You might think that the wife of the Rock on which the Church was founded would be more reticent with a gentile woman of questionable reputation, even if I had somehow managed to marry a nice Jewish man. But our relationship, while based on discretion, had little to do with reticence.

  I have mentioned that many people came to Temple Magdalen for healing. Women, especially, sought us out, including desperate, otherwise respectable wives. We had a reputation for being able to cure infertility, which could be a source not only of sorrow but of ruin in a woman’s life. In Priscilla’s case, my healer’s hands quickly told me that she was healthy, fertile and in need of no herbal tonics. One day I put it to her straight, and told her exactly how we might help her. And so in the name of Yahweh—Isis, I am happy to say, is not a jealous goddess—Priscilla put on the veils of a whore-priestess and received the man the Most High picked out for her. And, lo, a son was born.

  And when light dawned—or lightning struck—and Peter figured out that there had been some intervention, divine or otherwise, to his everlasting credit he did not put aside his wife or repudiate the child. If Peter found it helpful to hate me, I didn’t hold it against him.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t come to see you before,” Priscilla said.

  “You knew I’d come back?” I asked. For if she knew, then Peter had to.

  “Of course. Everyone on the lake knew within a week,” she said. “Word travels faster on the water than anywhere else.”

  “True,” I sighed. “I suppose that’s why Jesus spent so much of his time in a boat. At least at first.”

  “Not a boat,” she said a little sharply. “Peter’s boat.”

  I looked at her, and noticed that she was not just weathered by wind and sun; she was tired, strained.

  “It must be hard, having Peter gone so much.” I patted the ground beside me, inviting her to sit.

  “I’m managing,” she said shortly. “Peter sold his share in the boat to one of my brothers. Did you know? He’s made provision for me, but….” She stopped herself.

  “But he’s not here,” I finished the sentence. “He hasn’t been for a long time. Not really. It’s Jesus’s fault.”

  I stopped wavering between statement and question, wondering if I should apologize for my husband or if it would be absurd and presumptuous. In either case, I knew whatever I said would be inadequate.

  “Don’t get me wrong, I loved Jesus, too,” she said quickly. “You know I did. I would have done anything for him. I did, too. In the early days I would put them all up on a moment’s notice, cook for them, deal with the crowds pressing into the yard, pissing everywhere, trampling my kitchen garden. I did it gladly, I tell you.”

  “You put up with a lot,” I said. “Remember when I tore apart your roof, so we could lower the paralyzed man?”

  “And Peter finally had to fix the leaky roof after that,” Priscilla said wryly. “But I mean it, Mary, I didn’t mind about any of that. What I minded is the leaving. He—I know this is going to sound terrible—he didn’t ask me if he could have my husband. Not that any man
ever asks a woman anything, but when I was with him, well, it felt like I wasn’t just a woman, I wasn’t just Peter’s wife. I felt as though I mattered as much as anyone. Do you know what I mean?”

  I nodded.

  “So I think… I think I’m angry with him.”

  I didn’t ask her if she meant Jesus or Peter. I knew.

  “All those stories he told about not being fit for the kingdom if you turned and looked back over your shoulder, if you so much as went to say goodbye to your family, well, did he ever think what it was like for the people who were left? Or were they just not worthy of the kingdom, because they didn’t drop everything, too? Was I supposed to drop Peter’s mother, leave her to fend for herself, abandon the baby, the animals, the vineyard, the trees, all the things I tend to. What did he say about that?”

  I wracked my brain. Jesus had always done the leaving. What did he know about being left? He had repudiated his own family, claiming as kin those who did the will of his father in heaven. In one of his rants he had gone on about bringing not peace but a sword that would set brother against brother, mother against daughter. Really, if you delve into the gospels, there is no mention of “family values.” None. They don’t call Christian theology apologetics for nothing.

  “Oh, Mary,” she said before I could answer. “I’m so sorry. Listen to me going on and on. And here you are about to have a baby—and he’s, he’s…”

  “Not here,” I finished. “Not so as you’d notice.”

  “He left us all,” Priscilla said, sadly. “It’s so confusing. Peter came home after Jesus was, well, killed. He was a broken man, broken to pieces. But he went back out on the boat, and I told myself, he’ll heal. He has me, Gabriel, the boat. Then came that strange time that was like a dream. Was it a dream, Mary? When Jesus was with us again, and we all ate and laughed and danced for days and days. Did it really happen?”