Our Lady of Babylon

by John Rechy

  Cassandra looked ahead, beyond the Garden, east of Eden. “For some of His plan, yes, it’s too late. But —” She stared ahead.

  Lucifer urged her: “What exactly do you perceive, sister?”

  “More of fate already shaped, some of fate still shaping.” She studied the tense Garden. “He will destroy Eden.”

  “No!” Adam protested.

  “Can He be stopped?” I asked, knowing that Adam could still disbelieve because he had not heard God’s cruel whispered words to me, promising sorrow, pain.

  “No,” Cassandra said, “it cannot be stopped. That part of fate is too near its gqal. But there’s much more which He hasn’t determined yet, not yet set on its course — perhaps the worst part of His design.” I believe that it was only then that I saw her wry smile disappear, and only for a second.

  “And so we can change that!” Lucifer asserted, smiling reassurance at me and Adam. “My beloved sister has determined how,” he told us proudly.

  Madame’s words brought me back to the veranda of her château: “That will become clear, Lady, the matter of changing destiny?” She held her cup of tea midway to her lips, to punctuate the importance of her question, or perhaps because she was about to determine what I already knew, that this tea had been a mistake.

  “Yes, Madame, it shall all be clear when I narrate in full the truth about the War in Heaven. That’s where Cassandra refined her notion about changing fate. That’s when it first was tested.”

  Madame was excited: “Changing fate . . . ! I think I begin to understand . . . Lady!” Her excitement grew.

  “Madame?”

  “Oh, don’t you see? Changing fate — that’s what we, you and I, must do at interviews, change the course that centuries have been conspiring to assure — even more unjust blame!”

  “Yes!” I now shared her excitement.

  “I’m certain that Cassandra’s method will guide us, coach us exactly on how it can be done — when, of course, we discuss it during your account of the War in Heaven —. none of which is to say —” She became instantly shy even as she uttered her confident words; to Ermenegildo? She bent over toward where he rested at her side. “— that I, myself, attuned as I am to Cassandra, may not come up with the same deduction.”

  Ermenegildo stretched his neck toward her in assurance.

  “I’m sure of it, Madame,” I said. I would have to rehearse exactly how Cassandra had explained it all.

  In Eden, Adam informed the angels: “Whatever God intends now, there’s nothing to fear. Eve and I together possess a strength more powerful than each of us.”

  Cassandra gathered her cape even higher on her neck, a long, sensual neck, which she stroked. “So you must nurture all the strength that your love can give you —”

  “— and the strength that your desire can give you,” Lucifer reminded.

  Cassandra whispered to herself: “The Garden is so still, so beautiful, as if it longs to be remembered before it disappears.”

  “I shall never forget it,” I said. My eyes located the flower so glorious that it did not need the decoration of leaves, the flower with which Adam had touched me when I sprang to life on the bed of orchids on which we made love and which my eyes now sought.

  “Could He be so cruel? Create, then destroy—?” Adam still wanted to disbelieve, but he, too, had desperately searched out the flowers of our first encounter.

  Cassandra held out her hands. “Come with us now so you won’t see your paradise ravaged.” Again she spoke as if to herself, perhaps to her brother: “We must travel east of Eden to the end of this new unshaped world — and quickly.”

  “Where you can perceive further ahead more clearly into fate?” Lucifer understood.

  “Closer to its origin, closer to Him, to grasp the worst of His design.”

  Was it possible she could anticipate God’s plans? I would learn that answer later.

  A storm lashed at the Garden, cold winds colliding with heated currents, uprooting trees and flowers, tearing at them, scattering petals, their colors fading, leaves ripped away, yellowing, turning brittle, ashen, twigs breaking, dry, bunching into tumbleweeds that whirled madly about us, scratching, carving bloody streaks on our bared flesh. A torrent of dust pummeled us, blinding us, withdrawing suddenly to reveal that —

  The Garden had been annihilated.

  Except for the single flower that grew only in Eden!

  I would run back, retrieve it!

  Adam restrained me, pulling me away from warring currents of wind. He held me tenderly, urging me to follow Lucifer and Cassandra away from our devastated paradise.

  I looked back, one more time.

  The blossom that was so beautiful it did not need the decoration of leaves was still alive! Then, instantly, it was dead. It had been left only long enough for me to see it wither and die, its color vanishing as if it had never existed — and it would not exist again, except in my memories and Adam’s. I turned away.

  Adam touched my eyes. I detected the first frown on his face. With one finger he traced a line down my cheeks. He looked startled at his finger. He touched my eyes again, my cheeks again, more urgently. “My beloved, what is this?”

  I kissed his fingertips.

  “They’re tears,” I said. “It’s the beginning of our weeping.”

  V

  MADAME BERNICE DID NOT SPEAK FOR A LONG TIME. She understood that I could not continue, must hold the rest for later. She placed a warming hand on mine; the memory of exile had chilled it. Remembered first tears had brought new tears. The afternoon drifted into early graying light as if the sky had begun to die.

  After a respectful interval that further honored the events in Eden, Madame eased away the silence with her typical graciousness: “Sad as that is, Lady, we must keep our joyous goal in mind, and that shall allow us to move on.”

  “As I am prepared to do now,” I agreed, although my heart lingered within the moment in Eden when I had looked back and had seen the glorious flower die.

  “From time to time,” Madame announced, “we must discuss preparations for interviews, anticipate all possibilities. Some interviewers may try to trip you up with trivialities.” She assumed the tone of a pretentious interviewer: “Who was the emperor who banished St. John the Divine to Patmos?”

  “I believe it was the Emperor Domitian.” I had not been political.

  “Domitian?” That was Madame’s real voice. “I thought it was Nero.” She considered the matter. “Let’s just call him the Emperor. You must not sound as if you’re dropping names.”

  “Dropping . . .?”

  When Madame explained the odd expression to me — she must have picked it up from one of the servants who goes into the City for provisions — I expressed astonishment that anyone would want to assume grandeur by claiming an undeserved close association with another’s life. Besides, she knows I’ve roamed with kings and princes, the Pope, and God.

  “I meant exotic names.”

  “Oh . . . At interviews —” I prompted. How totally committed I was to the interviews now!

  Madame was eager: “There will be many persons demanding to be in attendance. I shall select them as carefully as we shall determine when the right time for announcement has arrived. Everything must be exact, from attire to —”

  “My attire is always perfect,” I would not allow the tinge of a negative observation on my attention to style.

  “You didn’t let me finish, Lady. I meant that, for interviews, it isn’t only style —”

  She had read my mind!

  “— which you have in abundance — that must be considered, but the unique effect of everything — setting, even lighting — that emphasizes the grandeur of our goal.” She sighed wistfully. “It’s been said that my own attire is perhaps a trifle on the gaudy side.” She adjusted her coronet so that the emerald on it would not be so aggressive.

  I interrupted, “You have a flair, a unique flair, a beautiful flair.”

  M
adame gave me one of her endearing smiles, almost but not quite shy, a treasure.

  She again offered me another cup of the new tea. I rejected it, absently placing a finger on the rim of my cup.

  “I shall not order this blend again!” Madame snapped. “Of course, I’ve inferred your disappointment in it.”

  I thought it best not to deny it. I ate a pastry, displaying my pleasure in it.

  Madame was not mollified. She pushed her own cup away, a signal that Ermenegildo, idling within a lacy filigree of sun, must have taken as an indication that we had finished our tea, at which time he would feast on some crumbs remaining on the silver plate. Madame would not disappoint him. She crumbled a cake, fed it to him, and touched his comb, quite subtly smoothing the feather that immediately twisted away again from the others.

  Then she poured herself another stubborn cup of tea. “This brew is really not that bad.” She refolded her napkin on her lap, fussing with its swirls of embroidered initials. “I suggest that here and there, during the narration of your many lives, you hint at what’s to come, keep some matters in abeyance, always, of course, assuring that all will be revealed eventually.”

  “I understand exactly.”

  “An example?” She had already prepared one. “When you narrate the truth of your dance of the seven veils —”

  “Six.”

  “Seven.”

  “Six.”

  Madame almost dropped her cup. “Everyone knows there were seven.”

  “Six. Madame, I was there!”

  “Perhaps at times we should adhere —”

  “— to lies? Because they’ve been” — I chose her own word — “entrenched? We’re involved in correcting lies.”

  Madame made an airy gesture with her hands — dazzling; every move of her ringed hands is dazzling. “It just seems to me, considering our formidable task, that at times we shouldn’t dwell on certain matters that are minor but too well established.”

  “The matter is not minor, Madame, and I’m surprised to have to remind you that truth lies in exact details.”

  “Well said.” She smiled, but at the same time she made a sound I hesitate to call a grunt — perhaps only signaling the beginning of a backache, from which she suffers occasionally; she had straightened up and placed her hand firmly on her back. Ermenegildo stiffened his own back, as if to share her pain.

  “I shall say this to any skeptical interviewer — ‘I know you believe, like everyone else, that there were seven veils in my dance. There were six. Soon, through my dreams —’”

  “Memories.”

  “‘— memories; soon you shall see me remove each veil, and then you shall view me draped only in the sixth as I set into motion my strategy to save John the Baptist.’”

  “To save John the Baptist!” Madame relished the prospect of finally correcting a gross untruth.

  I considered this a harmonious time to end our evening. When he saw me rise, Ermenegildo rushed to the foot of the veranda, preparing to escort me. Madame walked me there. In the softened voice she had used before when we were about to part, she said:

  “When you return to your quarters, continue to rehearse. Pretend a few select people are with you, helping you prepare, the way I do. Soon you’ll find that the imagined audience will begin to speak, even to express doubts, questions — and they’ll have many. Roam through every single detail for exactitude.”

  “Madame!” I heard myself pronounce the word in fear.

  “Lady?”

  I thought the day sighed as it dimmed. “Clarify for me again. My essence —?”

  Soothing my unexpected urgency, Madame reminded in what was now a near whisper: “Your essence has roamed throughout time in the various bodies of women outrageously and unfairly blamed.”

  “In the present, now, I am both body —”

  “— and essence.”

  “My dreams are —?”

  “— memories.”

  “My dreams are memories,” I repeated.

  I was still repeating those words when I returned to my quarters, to evoke, as Madame had instructed, an invisible chorus of listeners to my rehearsals. How easily done!

  I hear them!

  Oh, can you believe it? She’s trying to convince us that she was all those women, and that —

  — that I will finally redeem them, yes! . . . Strange, that one must convince that truth is true. Tomorrow, I must tell Madame that in the suggested rehearsals, I much too quickly encountered hostility.

  I informed her of that, at tea the next day.

  Madame dismissed the matter with a wave of her hand. “To be expected. It will change.”

  I realized why she was nervous. Either through sheer doggedness or by mistake — I preferred to think the latter — she was serving yesterday’s unsuccessful tea again. She said testily, “It is not bad.”

  Under Ermenegildo’s glare, I sipped the tea, knowing that nothing secures order more surely than that ritual of civility, sharing tea. Still, I found it too bitter for a second sip.

  “You don’t have to pretend. I know you don’t like it,” Madame snapped.

  Well, I would try to pacify her continuing discomfort over her mistake. “Oh, Madame, at times everyone is unsure about one thing or another. Even Mary —”

  Madame’s dark brows soared, then crashed above her nose. “The Holy Mother was unsure?”

  “Yes.”

  “You must stay away from the subject of the Holy Mother and insecurity,” she interrupted.

  “But, Madame, Mary was unsure, during a poignant moment when —”

  “There are certain subjects that —”

  “— certain subjects that I shall not — I repeat, Madame, shall not — avoid, and the subject of Mary, exactly as I knew her, is a foremost one. Without that, I cannot tell the true story of the Crucifixion.” I plunged ahead: “And I shall deal with that, and her pain — and her sorrowful guilt!”

  “Guilt! The Holy Mother felt guilty!” Madame Bernice reared back as if she had been charged. “I may consider that it might become necessary to deal with a certain amount of insecurity on the Holy Mother’s part — during a poignant moment — but guilt!”

  I’ve become accustomed to Madame’s occasional silences accompanied by the crossing of her arms before her chest, and by the lifting of her stubborn chin. I remind myself then that although it is she who has clarified the matters we are now about, even she, now and then, must be convinced, not of our goal, nor of our means of achieving it, nor of the justice of our journey, nor, certainly not, of the truth of my memories; no, she must be convinced that we must deal with certain ingrained lies she herself has come to cherish and so tends to want to retain unchanged. Today I decided to ease her out of her staunch silence: “I came to love Mary, to understand her, to believe, yes, that she was . . . holy.”

  Madame’s arms remained crossed.

  I folded mine, and we both sat back in our chairs.

  Madame uncrossed her arms. “Well, they are your memories,” she acquiesced.

  As she does when she feels that her position may have been compromised — now, because she had unfolded her arms first and had tacitly conceded that we might have to deal with the subject of Mary’s poignant uncertainty — Madame proceeded in her most brittle tone: “During interviews, watch that you don’t ramble.”

  “Ramble!”

  “Yes.”

  “Madame, if anyone rambles —”

  “You interrupt too quickly, Lady. Have you observed that, that you interrupt too quickly — before I’ve finished? I didn’t say you rambled, I said, watch that you don’t.”

  I sat in determined silence. My delight in the silver florets the sun was creating on the tea setting helped me to keep my temper.

  A shot rent the still countryside!

  Madame’s hand on mine stilled the fear aroused by the memory of the murder in the Cathedral. Quickly, she reached for her opera glasses, always on the table.

  Fixed on
the man in the château nearby?

  Madame’s glasses scanned the territory, from the château of the new tenant to the thicket of trees beyond the road that connects our châteaus, a mixture of trees possible only here. What allows elms to grow alongside oaks, eucalyptus, weeping willows, and the palms that loom along the road is that here in the country we experience a vicissitude of sudden climatic changes, sudden seasons. It is not rare for a sunny day to turn without transition cold and gloomy, a transition that often, I’ve noticed, reflects my moods. At those times, fog veils the countryside in false dusk. I’m certain all this is an atmospheric matter for which there’s a scientific explanation. These moody changes in the afternoon — one was occurring now — always confuse the sad derelicts from the City into believing that sheltering night is about to descend. That emboldens them to straggle out of their hiding places to find more comfort in the night. Even without the aid of Madame’s glasses, I could see their outlines. I can now recognize them from the slow movements of their shadows.

  “Recently” — Madame still peered through her glasses — “I heard the clap of horses’ hooves. One of my servants claims officials from the City are being sent in to pursue —”

  “— those sad souls?” I protested, in shock.

  Madame Bernice shook her head in outrage. “There’s so much cruelty in the world. Who better than you knows that, Lady?”

  The countryside was still again. Madame tried to brighten: “It was only a hunter — at times they’re reckless in the country.” I noted that she had shifted her opera glasses. “The new tenant in the mansion down the road — he’s there now, on his veranda.”

  Ermenegildo fixed his attention in the same direction, his head tilted suspiciously.

  Had the new tenant fired the shot at someone who had wandered onto his property? People in the City had begun to do that. Or had he fired — if he had — as a signal to us of his presence? I looked through the glasses Madame had just replaced on the table. I saw him, again no more than a silhouette. He stood on his veranda, very still, looking — if this was an impression, it was a strong one — at me.