– Try to keep still.
– You moved!
– He’s right.
– I didn’t exactly move.
– What did you do?
– I twitched.
– Twitched?
– I didn’t exactly move.
– You twitched?
– Yes.
– Stop twitching!
– I’ll try.
– She’s killing herself.
– I’m trying.
– You’re twitching!
– Where?
– Down there.
– That’s better.
– Look at your thigh!
– What?
– It’s twitching.
– I’m sorry.
– You’re mocking us.
– I promise I’m not.
– Stop!
– The buttock!
– It’s twitching!
– Elbow!
– Wha?
– Twitching.
– Kneecap. Kneecap, KNEECAP.
– Twitching?
– Yes.
– Her whole body is twitching.
– She can’t control it.
– She’s tearing her skin off.
– She’s trying to listen to us.
– Yes. She is trying.
– She always tries.
– Give her that, Claude.
– Those thorns are ugly.
– They make an ugly thorn.
– Child?
– Yes, Father.
– We know you’re in terrible pain.
– It’s not so bad.
– Don’t fib.
– Did she tell an untruth?
– We think you’re up to something, Catherine.
– There!
– That wasn’t a twitch.
– That was a deliberate move.
– Bring the fire closer.
– Let’s have a look at her.
– I don’t think she can hear us any more.
– She seems so far away.
– Look at her body.
– It seems so far away.
– She looks like a painting, sort of.
– Yes, so far away.
– This is some night.
– Hmmm.
– Like one of those paintings that bleed.
– Like one of those icons that weep.
– So far away.
– She is at our feet but I have never seen anyone so far away.
– Touch one of those thorns.
– You.
– Ouch!
– I thought so. They’re real.
– I’m glad we’re priests, aren’t you, Claude?
– Terribly happy.
– She’s losing a lot of blood.
– Can she hear us?
– Child?
– Catherine?
– Yes, my Fathers.
– Can you hear us?
– Yes.
– What do we sound like?
– You sound like machinery.
– Is it nice?
– It is beautiful.
– What kind of machinery?
– Ordinary eternal machinery.
– Thank you, my child. Thank her, Claude.
– Thank you.
– Will this night ever end?
– Will we ever go back to bed?
– I doubt it.
– We’ll stand here for a long time.
– Yes. Watching.
15
Shakespeare is 64 years dead. Andrew Marvell is 2 years dead. John Milton is 6 years dead. We are now in the heart of the winter of 1680. We are now in the heart of our pain. We are now in the heart of our evidence. Who could have told it would take so long? Who could have told when I entered the woman with my quick and my wit? Somewhere you are listening to my voice. So many are listening. There is an ear on every star. Somewhere you are dressed in hideous rags and wondering who I was. Does my voice sound like yours at last? Did I assume too much when I sought to unburden you? I covet Catherine Tekakwitha now that I have followed her last years. I the pimp am I the customer. Old friend, was all this preparation for nothing but cemetery triangle? We are now in the heart of our pain. Is this what longing is? Is my pain as valuable as yours? Did I give up the Bowery too easily? Who tied the reins of government into a love knot? Can I ride in the Magic I enfueled? Is this the meaning of Temptation? We are now in the heart of our agony. Galileo. Kepler. Descartes. Alessandro Scarlatti is 20 years old. Who will exhume Brigitte Bardot and see if her fingers bleed? Who will test the sweet smell in the tomb of Marilyn Monroe? Who will slip with James Cagney’s head? Is James Dean flexible? O God, the dream leaves fingerprints. Ghost tracks on the powdered varnish! Do I want to be in the laboratory where Brigitte Bardot lies? I wanted to meet her on the leather beach when I was 20. The dream is a sheaf of clues. Hello, famous blonde naked, a ghost is speaking to your suntan as they unshovel you. I saw your open mouth hovering in formaldehyde. I think I could make you happy if we keep the money and guards. Even after the lights came up, the Cinerama screen continued to bleed. I quiet the crowd with a raised scarlet finger. On the white screen your erotic auto accident continues to bleed! I wanted to show Brigitte Bardot around revolutionary Montréal. We will meet when we are old, in an old dictator’s cafeteria. Nobody knows who you are except the Vatican. We stumble on the truth: we could have made each other happy. Eva Peron! Edith! Mary Voolnd! Hedy Lamarr! Madame Bovary! Lauren Bacall was Marlene Dietrich! B.B., it is F., ghost from green daisies, from the stone pit of his orgasm, from the obscure mental factory of English Montréal. Lie down on my paper, little movie flesh. Let your towel preserve impressions of your bosom. Develop into a pervert in our private. Shock me with chemical or tongue request. Come out of the shower with your hair wet and rest your crossed shaved legs on my one-handed desk. Let the towel slide as you fall asleep during our first argument, while the fan heaves the same long wisp of golden path every time it faces you. O Mary, I have come back to you. I have returned up my arm to the true swatch of black body windows, the cunt of now, soak of the present. I led myself from Temptation and I showed it happening.
– You needn’t have, says Mary Voolnd.
–No?
– No. It’s all included in the so-called fuck.
– I can imagine whatever I want?
– Yes. But hurry!
16
We are at the heart of the winter of 1680. Catherine Tekakwitha is cold and dying. This is the year she died. This is the big winter. She was too sick to leave the cabin. Secretly starving, the thorn mat continues to bounce her body like a juggler. Now the church was too far away. But, le P. Chauchetière tells us, she spent a part of each day on her knees or balanced on a crude bench. The trees came to beat her. We are now at the beginning of Holy Week before Easter, 1689. Holy Monday, she weakened considerably. They told her she was dying fast. As Marie-Thérèse caressed her with birch, Catherine prayed:
– O God, show me that the Ceremony belongs to Thee. Reveal to your servant a fissure in the Ritual. Change Thy World with the jawbone of a broken Idea. O my Lord, play with me.
At the mission there was a curious custom. They never carried the Holy Sacrament to the cabin where the sick lay. Instead, they carried the sick people on a bark stretcher to the chapel, hazardous as the trip was. The girl was definitely too sick for the stretcher ride. What were they to do? Customs were not that easily come by in early Canada, and they longed for a Jesus of Canada dignified by convention and antiquity, as He is today, pale and plastic above the guilty traffic tickets. This is why I love the Jesuits. They argued about to which they had the deepest obligation, History or Miracle, or to put it more heroically, History or Possible Miracle. They had seen a strange light in Catherine Tekakwitha’s mucous eyes. Dare they deny her the supreme consolation of the Body of the Savior in His Viatique Change, the Wafer Disguise? They gave their answer to the dying girl, hal
f naked among her thorn-torn rags. The crowd cheered. An exception was justified in the case of Perfectly Shy, as some of the converts had begun to call her. To dignify the occasion, we have the humble detail, Catherine asked Marie-Thérèse to cover her with a new blanket or anything to hide her half-nakedness. The whole village followed the Holy Sacrament as it was borne to the cabin of the invalid. The crowd pressed around her mat, all the converted Indians of the mission. She was their best hope. The French were murdering their brethren in the forests, but this dying girl would somehow certify the difficult choices they had made. If ever there was gloom thickly laced with unmaterialized miracles, it was here, it was now. The voice of the priest began. After the general absolution, with ardent filmed eyes and bruised tongue, she received the “Viatique du Corps de Nôtre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ.” Visibly she was dying now. Many of the staring crowd wanted to be remembered in the prayers of the departing girl. Le P. Cholenec asked her if she would receive them individually. He asked her softly because she was in agony. She smiled and said she would. Throughout the whole day they filed by her mat with their burdens.
– I stepped on a beetle. Pray for me.
– I injured the waterfall with urine. Pray for me.
– I fell on my sister. Pray for me.
– I dreamed I was white. Pray for me.
– I let the deer die too slowly. Pray for me.
– I long for human morsel. Pray for me.
– I made a grass whip. Pray for me.
– I got the yellow out of a worm. Pray for me.
– I tried to grow an ointment beard. Pray for me.
– The west wind hates me. Pray for me.
– I darkened the old crop. Pray for me.
– I gave my rosary to the English. Pray for me.
– I soiled a loincloth. Pray for me.
– I killed a Jew. Pray for me.
– I sold beard ointment. Pray for me.
– I smoke manure. Pray for me.
– I forced my brother to watch. Pray for me.
– I smoke manure. Pray for me.
– I spoiled a singsong. Pray for me.
– I touched myself while paddling. Pray for me.
– I tortured a raccoon. Pray for me.
– I believe in herbs. Pray for me.
– I got the orange out of a scab. Pray for me.
– I prayed for a famine lesson. Pray for me.
– I dirtied on my beads. Pray for me.
– I’m 84. Pray for me.
One by one they kneeled and passed her bristling Lenin couch, leaving with her their pitiful spirit luggage, until the whole cabin resembled one vast Customs House of desire, and the mud beside her bearskin was polished by so many kneecaps that it shone like the silver sides of the last and only rocket scheduled to escape from the doomed world, and as the ordinary night fell over the Easter village the Indians and the Frenchmen huddled beside their barking fires, fingers pressed to their lips in gestures of hush and blowing kisses. Oh, why does it make me so lonely to tell this? After the evening prayers, Catherine Tekakwitha asked permission to go into the woods once more. Le P. Cholenec granted her the permission. She dragged herself past the cornfield under its blanket of melting snow, into the fragrant pine trees, into the powdery shadows of the forest, on the levers of broken fingernails she pulled herself through the dim March starlight, to the edge of the icy Saint Lawrence River, to the frozen root of the Crucifixion. Le P. Lecompte tells us, “Elle y passa un quart d’heure à se mettre les épaules en sang par une rude discipline.” There she spent 15 minutes whipping her shoulders until they were covered with blood, and this she did without her friend. It is now the next day, Holy Wednesday. It was her last day, this day of consecration to the mysteries of the Eucharist and the Cross. “Certes je me souviens encore qu’à l’entrée de sa dernière maladie.” Le P. Cholenec knew it was her last day. At three o’clock in the afternoon the final agony began. On her knees, praying with Marie-Thérèse and several other whipped girls, Catherine Tekakwitha stumbled over the names of Jesus and Mary mispronouncing them. “… elle perdit la parole en prononçant les noms de Jésus et de Marie.” But why didn’t you record the exact sounds she made? She was playing with the Name, she was mastering the good Name, she was grafting all the fallen branches to the living Tree. Aga? Muja? Jumu? You idiots, she knew the Tetragrammaton! You let her get away! We let another one get away! And now we have to see if her fingers bleed! We had her there, nailed and talkative, ready to undo the world, and we let the sharp mouths of the relic boxes gnaw at her bones. Parliament!
17
She was dead at 3:30 in the afternoon. It was Holy Wednesday, April 17, 1680. She was 24 years old. We are in the heart of the afternoon. Le P. Cholenec was praying beside the new corpse. His eyes were closed. Suddenly he opened his eyes and cried out in amazement, “Je fis un grand cri, tant je fus saisi d’étonnement.”
– Eeeeeoooowwww!
The face of Catherine Tekakwitha had turned white!
– Viens ici!
– Look at her face!
Let us examine the eyewitness account of le P. Cholenec, and let us try to suppress our political judgments, and remember that I promised you good news. “From the age of four years, Catherine’s face had been branded by the Plague; her sickness and her mortifications had further contributed to the disfigurement. But this face, so battered and so very swarthy, underwent a sudden change, about a quarter of an hour after her death. And in a moment she became so beautiful and so white …”
– Claude!
Le P. Chauchetière came running, and a village of Indians followed him. As if in peaceful sleep, as if under a parasol of glass, she floated into the dark Canadian afternoon, her face serene and bright as alabaster. Thus she launched her death, upturned face of white, under the concentrated gaze of the village. Le P. Chauchetière said:
– C’était im argument nouveau de crédibilité, dont Dieu favorisait les sauvages pour leur faire goûter la foi.
– Shhhhhhh!
– Hush!
Two Frenchmen happened to be passing by later on. One of them said:
– Look at that pretty girl sleeping there.
When they found out who it was, they knelt in prayer.
– Let us make the coffin.
At that precise moment the girl entered the eternal machinery of the sky. Looking back over her atomic shoulder, she played a beam of alabaster over her old face as she streamed forward on the insane grateful laughter of her girl friend.
18
Red and white, skin and pimples, open daisies and burning weeds – pace, old friend and all you racists. Let it be our skill to create legends out of the disposition of the stars, but let it be our glory to forget the legends and watch the night emptily. Let the mundane Church serve the White Race with a change of color. Let the mundane Revolution serve the Gray Race with a burning church. Let the Manifestoes attach all our property. We are in love with a tower view of rainbow bodies. Suffer the change from red to white, you who weave insignia, which is all of us in our night. But we are merely once upon a time. Another second from our raw fingers, now we are in love with pure flags, our privacy is valueless, we do not own our history, it is borne away in a shower of tiny seed dust and we filter it as in the network of a high drift of wild daisies, and our fashions change beautifully. A kite climbs over the hospital, some O.T. prisoners follow or ignore it, Mary and I, we slip into the orgy of vase Greeks and restaurant Greeks. A new butterfly rollercoasts on the jerky wax shadows of the greenery, small circus falls like air-pocketed kite, the village parachutist essays the tipping fern, plunging in blur Icarus postage stamps. Montréal laundry flaps from the high rent – but I fail perfectly naturally, since I’ve elected to swell the Fact Charity. Here is good news for most of us: all parties and churches may use this information. St. Catherine of Bologna dies in 1463, a nun of fifty. Her sisters buried her body without a casket. Soon the sisters felt guilty, wondering about all the wei
ght of mud on her face. They were given permission to exhume the body. They scrape her face clean. It is found to have been only slightly distorted by pressure of the mud, perhaps a collapsed nostril the only trophy of 18 days’ interment. The body smelled sweet. As they examined it, “the body that was white as snow turned slowly red and exuded an oily liquid of an ineffable fragrance.”
19
The funeral of Catherine Tekakwitha. Anastasie and Marie-Thérèse worked softly over the body. They washed her limbs, stroked away the dried blood. They combed her hair and rubbed oil into it. They dressed her in white beaded robes of skin. With new moccasins they covered her two feet. Usually a corpse was carried to the church on a bark stretcher. The Frenchmen had made her a real coffin, “un vrai cercueil.”
– Don’t close it!
– Let me see!
The crowd had to be satisfied. They longed to contemplate her new beauty for another hour. We are now in Holy Thursday, day of sadness, day of joy, as her biographers observe. From the church they carried her to the great cross of the cemetery situated beside the river, where the girl loved to forge her prayers. Le P. Chauchetière and le P. Cholenec had argued about the location of the grave. Le P. Chauchetière wanted to bury her inside the church. Le P. Cholenec wished to avoid this singularity. During another grave-digging in which Catherine had participated, the priest had heard her state her own personal preference – beside the river.
– Then I give in.
The next day was Holy Friday. The missionaries preached the passion of Christ Jesus to an audience seized with the deepest emotion. They wanted to weep for longer time. They wouldn’t let the celebrant get past the first two words of the Vexilla.
– Vexilla re-No! No! Sob! Arrgghh!
– Vexilla Regis–
– Stop! Time! Sob! Please!
That whole day and the next day, the priests witnessed the most excessive mortifications that they had ever seen.
– They’re tearing themselves apart!
– It’s happening!
On Friday night a woman rolled on thorns until the morning. Four or five nights later another woman did the same.
Beautiful Losers Page 19
