Our Lady of Babylon

by John Rechy

  He bragged that his primary purpose in his constant seductions, the repeated movements, was to make his muscles grow.

  “. . . Eight! Nine! Ten!”

  And he kept stalking lions.

  I would teach him a lesson. While he slept, I took a knife and cut what he was proudest of.

  Madame’s cup of tea froze on its way to her lips.

  “His hair!” I finished. “That is recorded correctly.”

  Madame’s cup reached her lips. But they trembled perceptibly, and some coloring had left her face.

  “Madame?”

  She shuddered. “It’s nothing, Lady. For a moment I had a glimpse of something horrifying that might distract some of the interviewers unduly.”

  For days, Samson sulked, claiming his strength was gone.

  “But he was blinded?” Madame continued to insist that we retain the outline of long-accepted versions, even while clarifying with previously unknown details.

  “Blinded? Only by his hair and his vanity, and finally only because he hid himself, blamed me for his retirement, and made up fantastic stories to immortalize it — all because, he claimed, without his flailing hair he had lost his strength. Just insecure — he was embarrassed, that was all. After that, my essence moved on.”

  “Of course. Now about the Holy Mother —?” The abruptness with which Madame Bernice often introduced a subject to be most carefully rehearsed should no longer startle me. But it did. Being a mystic — although an unconventional one, like Cassandra — she assumes that others follow the rapid shifts and turns of her quick mind. She took another of the “breathy sugars” and waited for me to continue with my life as Magdalene:

  Mary guided Jesus away from us, me and Judas, that day after we had eaten the mushrooms on the hill and Jesus’ mind had exploded with visions of kingdoms and Satanic temptations. After that, we saw him less and less often, although we sought him out. Even then, he was quiet, pensive, smiling only when we reminded him of earlier times that evoked our closeness. Alone now when I did not go with him, Judas continued to wander restlessly among the revolutionaries we had joined with Jesus.

  Mary sought me out in the marketplace. I had bought a basket of pears, so ripe they were almost red. I sat eating one on the steps when I sensed the awe that Mary’s crystalline beauty always aroused. She was a beautiful woman, yes, one of the greatest beauties. You’ve seen her depicted in paintings. None does her justice.

  The day was hot in the market, and so we roamed, Mary and I, to a patch of grass shaded by an embrace of palms. We sat for moments, speaking idly about the especially hot summer that year. “One of hottest in memory, don’t you agree, dear Magdalene? Do you suppose we shall all survive it?” she asked me. The beauty of her voice matched the beauty of her presence; an observation as ordinary as that which she had just made assumed a resonant ring that turned everything she spoke profound.

  Courteously — “how kind, how thoughtful” — she took the pear I offered her; she had impeccable manners. She ate a tiny bite, another — “your choice sweetened it, dear Magdalene” — before she put it down, having satisfied all the requirements of a gracious acceptance of my offer. She waited a few moments before she said, “Neither you nor Judas must attempt to be with my son — that way — ever.”

  I knew what she meant by “that way.” Though our encounters had become fewer, desire remained, just as powerful as ever, perhaps more powerful than ever. When we met, our eyes sought anew the outlines of our bodies, especially when our flesh was licked by moist desert heat. Then the wind might conspire with us to expose a shoulder or the upper part of a leg, a starkly bare portion of a chest. When we emerged from bathing in a river, the flimsiest of coverings we retained would mold our bodies, flaunting the triangle between our legs, a faint darkening.

  “Why not, Mary?” I did not want to reveal the specialness — and pain — in our desire. Although my hunger abandoned me, I reached for another pear, something to hold in my hands, which were trembling.

  “Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, proclaimed by John the Baptist.”

  I bit into my pear, to do anything to lessen the impact of the words I was hearing. “You believe that, Mary.” I had forced myself not to make that a question.

  “The Angel Gabriel sent to me by God announced it,” Mary said.

  Was the Gabriel she spoke of . . . a . . . real. . . angel? Or was he a man? It was known that her marriage to Joseph — a simple, kind, though somewhat dull man, much older then she — had been arranged. Consummated, ever? Had she, before that, been a fanciful girl, dreaming of a handsome young man, her “angel”? I could easily imagine her, her hair long, her lithe body yearning as she ran with open arms across a field of wild flowers to meet him, his strong arms stretching to embrace her.

  In Madame’s garden, that image of centuries past had become so vivid that I shared this observation: “Perhaps a great love story we shall never know, Madame, is that of Mary and her first and only lover when they were young and she was free of the burden of what she saw as her mission with her son. Can’t you see her lying among flowers, strands of her beautiful long hair over her lover’s shoulders?”

  Apparently, Madame could see that, and didn’t want to. She blinked. “I believe it would be enough to leave the subject with her running across the field of wild flowers,” she said. “Perhaps holding a bouquet of them in her hands. That is a lovely image.”

  “But, Madame, surely the Holy Mother sometimes flirted, when she was a beautiful young woman. Surely she laughed. Yet have you ever seen her depicted smiling? Surely she played, and disobeyed, and longed for happiness and loved life until — with what was surely unjustified guilt,” I emphasized, “she discovered secretly that she was pregnant —”

  “— or was informed of it by the Angel Gabriel.” Madame was firm in asserting the familiar account.

  That deceptively indolent afternoon when Mary had sought me out in the market and we sat under the shade of palms, the Holy Mother bit one more piece, a tiny one, of the sweet red pear I had given her. “Jesus was divinely conceived — purely — in my womb,” she aimed at my doubts.

  Looking at her, so composed, so resolute, I knew that, whatever the reality of it was, at that moment she did believe that she had been visited by an angel, who had announced her mission, and her son’s.

  Despite my reveries of her as a yearning young woman, who was I to say that what she claimed wasn’t true? Yet I had to question, that day near the market: “Dear Mary, did you only envision an angel . . . Gabriel . . . someone you once loved and came to remember as an angel?”

  So I had asked my question of Mary with all the kindness I put into my voice. I would have touched her hand, except that her crystalline aura made her seem unreachable.

  “Gabriel . . .” She sighed the name, and her vision seemed to travel beyond where we sat. Her gaze returned to me, her eyes unflinching on mine. “No, I did not envision an angel,” she said, with not a tinge of anger, her face tranquil. “The Angel Gabriel told me that I, also, was conceived purely, in my own mother’s womb, in preparation for the birth of the Messiah.”

  I said to Madame, who had listened with what I detected was more than a touch of apprehension: “I believe we must consider this, Madame. Those were vicious times. A mysterious child would be deigned the child of an adulteress, and she would be stoned —”

  “— but not the man,” Madame said.

  “— only the woman,” I continued. “That day with Mary, Madame, I couldn’t help thinking of that, and whether that was pertinent to what I was hearing.”

  On her veranda Madame Bernice sighed at the sad enormity. “What you’re saying, Lady — and with admirable taste — is that if the Blessed Mother had not been believed about the virgin birth, she would have been stoned, in the barbaric style of those days.” She did not even have to touch her forehead to signal the emphasis she was placing on our words just spoken. She only stared ahead. I thought her eyes might have misted.
We had entered a labyrinth of mystery we must eventually search through, but one she would prefer to leave unexplored. Quickly she cautioned: “None of which is to claim that the virgin birth was not announced to her by an angel.”

  “That is not the intention, Madame,” I agreed.

  Gray clouds had claimed the sun. The lawn was draped in mourning for a length of time so extended that I leaned back wearily in my chair. Everything in the garden had stopped, everything was quiet, everything had darkened.

  I waited for time to move.

  Finally it did. I determined that from the sway of distant palms.

  XV

  AFTER MY MEMORIES OF MARY and of Mary’s memories of an angel named Gabriel, Madame and I agreed to end our tea. We had reached a dramatic moment neither of us wanted to venture beyond, not today.

  I began to rise.

  “Lady, a word —” She changed her mind.

  “Madame?”

  “Each time we part after tea, I keep thinking that during rehearsals in your quarters, you’ll remember another blamed soul your essence surely located. She was known as —”

  “Marina.” I remembered that name from an earlier time when her reference to it had baffled me. “An Indian princess?”

  “Oh, you do remember the woman of Cortés.” Madame seemed elated.

  “Cortés?”

  “Why, if you remember the beautiful Aztec princess branded La Malinche — traitor — you must remember the Spanish conqueror to whom she was given to pacify the brutality of his invasion.”

  “Oh, I —”

  Madame continued: “There was a young lover — you don’t remember? — a lover whom the princess-turned-slave must leave.”

  “Why, yes, Madame, I believe I do!” It was natural that my vast recollection of past lives would sweep over some, leaving them submerged, still to emerge, because as Madame spoke her own vague knowledge of the princess, her lover, and the conqueror — “Those were dangerous times for adventurous souls,” she commented, “and the brave princess was suspected of conspiring with her captor, having his child, betraying her people, or so I believe I’ve heard” — it all sprang into my mind!

  “Oh, yes. My essence lodged in hers!” In my future recollections, I must cope with this discovered factor: The memory of a past life is firm, but the names involved may be submerged. Now, here on Madame’s veranda, I relived the crucial moments — when, a captive princess, I stood proudly, refusing to bow, before the Conqueror. I would bring him to his knees, if only like this: I dropped from my shoulders the only frock I wore. I stood naked. The handsome Conqueror knelt on one knee. “I moved back, demanding both knees,” I was now speaking my fresh memories aloud to Madame, “and that he strip himself before me, equals —”

  “I suspect that, tonight, you will remember even more of your life as Marina, La Malinche.” Madame’s enthusiasm had grown at the infallibility of my memories.

  Although it was only dusk when I left, I noticed small fires pocking the distant landscape among the density of trees, fires already lit because this was as warm as evening would become. Shadows of those fleeing the cities crouch about the flames. They attempt even more to be invisible, Madame informed me, because the harsh roundups by mounted officials have increased. Where are the destitute sent? I had asked Madame. Away, she said, away . . . It occurred to me then that the dreaded Enquirer might be reporting on them in his role as Inquisitor, although it is clear Madame believes that she and I are the main objects of scrutiny. Those hunted, dissolute, displaced souls sometimes greet me now, with a word, a sound. They sense my compassion and they know I am not to blame.

  I found no message at my gates. I shall not be lulled into complacency.

  That night in my quarters, just as Madame Bernice has continued to exhort, I invited more memories, and they came, of Eden, Patmos, the River Jordan, the Black Sea.

  And I dreamt . . . I remembered the exact moment when, as La Malinche, I promised the young Aztec Warrior Xuan that I would return to him.

  I was so eager to recall for Madame that evolving memory that I awoke when it was still dark.

  I shall use this time to tend to my Pensées. Madame thought it “a smart idea.” In my journal, I write a question that has been nettling me for some time: “What is truth? What is a lie?”

  She’s trying to blur the distinction, convince us that her lies are truth.

  You spoke with a tinge of triumph. I shall answer you: Nonsense! But I’m delighted to know you continue to be eager to join me in these rehearsals.

  You’re a liar!

  Yes! I am!

  But —

  I startled you, disarmed you. Exactly as I meant to. Here in the intimacy of my quarters into which I’ve allowed you to rehearse with me, I wanted you to hear from me what you want to hear, and never expected to hear. You wanted to trap me by evasion. I wanted you to wince at the impact of what you dared accuse me of — lying; an accusation I thwarted though it struck like a bolt of cold fire. Why must you put truth on trial!

  You’re nothing but a whore!

  You dare —? Even now —? Oh, you anticipate. You’re being kind in your harshness. Should I thank you? You want me to rehearse for the time when that accusation occurs, inevitably, in interviews. I shall discuss the matter with Madame.

  But I had no time to do so when we met the next day for tea. She had hardly served it into my cup when she said with curious sharpness:

  “When your essence lodged in the body of Joan of Arc —”

  I stiffened. “Madame, I was never Jeanne d’Arc.”

  “— and you accompanied the Dauphin at his coronation, triumphant as —”

  “Joan of Arc was not a fallen woman, not called a whore,” I said the obvious.

  Had Madame Bernice been caught in a giant gaffe? She mumbled: “But, Lady, you would be broadening your subject of exploration by including Joan of Arc. After all, she was very badly and unjustly treated.”

  “That is, of course, true, Madame, and we would find many, many such women, used, abused, but I cannot claim my essence lived where it did not.” Ermenegildo was aware that she had managed to annoy me; he had become increasingly conscious of my sensitivities, a fact I relish; he doesn’t give his loyalty easily. If I did not know better, I would say that at that moment he leaned toward Madame and said, gently, Shhhh.

  Whatever — it accomplished its purpose. With a wide smile, Madame leaned toward me and said: “Of course, I know Joan of Arc was not a fallen woman! I was keeping you on your toes, and you are, Lady, you are on your toes.”

  I decided her good motives overrode my irritation at her testing.

  This time she assumed the overtly interrogative voice of an interviewer: “Lady! Where were you born in this present reincarnation?” “I am not involved in reincarnations.”

  “Excellent!” Madame applauded. Misinterpreting the source of her approval, Ermenegildo, who had at that moment gracefully perched on a small pedestal on the veranda — even when he’s playful, he displays unassailable elegance — fanned his tail once, twice, again, a display that caused Madame to extend, now to him, her genteel applause. Then she cleared her throat, to prepare for the firmness with which she addressed me: “The word ‘reincarnation’ must not be allowed. The key word is —”

  “— essence,” I finished firmly.

  “Let’s go through that succinctly now, Lady. That is the most complex part.” Once again, she was a harsh interviewer. “When did your . . . essence” — she furthered her performance by sniggering — “when did it first most strongly manifest itself to you, in retrospect, of course, after the interlude in the Cathedral?”

  I answered with dignity: “In Patmos. During a late orange dusk. With St. John the Divine —”

  “And that was when he called you a whore, the mother of abominations?” Her own question jostled her to mull her earlier stored considerations. “Why was that girl so vastly blamed? For what catastrophe? What mission did St. John choose her for �
� you? What ‘mystery’ did St. John read on your forehead? — a mystery he himself proclaimed the ‘most profound’!”

  I continued my own rehearsal: “It was then that my essence rushed back to the beginning of time, to Eve.”

  “At that timeless moment —” Madame rejoined my rehearsal.

  “— my essence embraced all fallen women blamed for great catastrophes.”

  “Perfect word — embraced.” Madame applauded my rehearsal.

  Again Ermenegildo performed on the pedestal, even more effortlessly this time.

  Flush with the prospect of success, we finished our tea. A festive moment, indeed. Flowers promised to bud right before our eyes, new ones bloomed on the vines nearby, others sprouted more petals, tiny flames of blue fire. I love the time in spring when nature makes its promise of summer most aggressive and even an occasional coolness asserts it.

  “Now, Lady —”

  “Now, Madame?”

  “Let’s itemize some of the matters we’ve kept pending —”

  Oh, she was at it again. She meant my saving of John the Baptist’s virginity. It was still not the direct exhortation my pride demanded. Much as I love Madame Bernice, I was not going to allow her to get her way in this stubborn evasion.

  “Perhaps the full story of the War in Heaven,” I offered. “I have barely begun it.”

  “Yes, a very important matter that requires one whole afternoon.” It was now midafternoon. “What else?”

  “The sad eternal interlude” — my voice lost all its joy — “that occurred at the edge of the world with Cassandra and Lucifer, and my beloved Adam.”

  “Most certainly that.” Madame borrowed my sadness. “That will require a less joyful mood in the day . . . Where else?”

  “Calvary.”

  Madame bowed her head for a length of time saturated with anticipated sorrow. “Much too vast before the afternoon declines. What else?”

  “Medea.” I knew Madame would turn her head. A grayness cloaked the veranda and spread throughout her grounds. If I had been tempted to convince myself that I had imagined the moment, Ermenegildo would have dissuaded me. He stared into the darkened sky until the sudden cloud that had swept across it released the sun. I moved on: “Guinevere, Lucrezia Borgia —”