by John Rechy
“Lucrezia Bor — !” Madame tried unsuccessfully not to stammer. “Poisonings? Incest? Extravagant vices?”
“Madame,” I reminded her, “we do not accept the rumors some call history.” I shall enter that, rephrased, into my Pensées. I knew she would be relieved by my next words, so I uttered them quickly: “Still, my memories of Lucrezia Borgia include only one redemptive incident, when she provided a nurturing love to the beautiful young poet Ariosto, who sat naked —”
“I’m convinced,” Madame ended that. “I think perhaps today we might deal with unfinished matters that were well on their way toward resolution, coming, so to speak, to a head.” As if she had not been obvious enough, she touched the silver platter on the table, although, catching herself, she extended her gesture toward the vase next to it, as if to rearrange the breath of lilacs that graced it today.
She still would not ask directly that I resume my account of the dance of the six veils to save the Baptist. Intransigence would meet intransigence. “The truth of my life as La Malinche?” I offered my fresh memories, which had extended even further during my walk here, providing details my earlier recollections had omitted.
Only the slightest irritation, quickly dissipated, greeted my substitution. Madame was fully “in the spirit” — an expression she had once used. “Let’s rehearse that life.”
This is how I, a maiden of fifteen, became the woman of the brutal conqueror of my people.
In the lush jungle, priests announced a time for the sacrifice of a young warrior to the sun. I would be that chosen warrior’s last earthly prize before his further reward, the guarantee of a special place in Heaven. I lay naked atop the highest pyramid. My proud breasts were bared to the sun. On each was the flake of a diamond, a glistening reminder of Heaven on each nipple. Sprinkles of splintered gold dusted the parting between my legs, where a white rose had been placed, a further virginal offering.
Priests chanted as the ritual proceeded.
A chorus rose from warriors volunteering to be sacrificed. “I’ll die gratefully for the double favor,” cried a bronzed youth, his hard organ emphasizing his sincerity.
Another warrior pled, “I shall enter Heaven through the love chamber of the most beauteous maiden.” He might have been chosen — one of the priests admired him especially — but, in his frenzy of desire, the young warrior came — and even so, gasped, “Please choose me, I can come again —”
Yet more petitioned.
The Warrior Xuan won because of his beauty, his elegance — and the resplendence of his headdress, feathers of myriad colors. His skin was golden brown, intercepted only by a strip of cloth that attempted to, but could not, conceal his regal member. Under his bare feet, the stones of the pyramid burned. Still, he walked gracefully, step by ascending step, to where I lay for him to take me under the gaze of the thrilled sun. Growing with each step, his arousal struggled with his brief covering, and won, finally disdainfully thrusting the strip of cloth away. It fell to the bottom of the pyramid, where a boy grasped it, praying on his knees for a day when he might be worthy of wearing it.
The Warrior was not afraid. Why should he be? He would enter me and Heaven. He stood before me, knelt over me, began to pluck with his mouth the petals of the rose between my legs, raising his head each time to release each petal, which floated to the base of the pyramid, where beautiful naked maidens scurried to claim one, to cherish forever until it would be given to their lovers as an added token of their gift of virginity.
The Warrior lingered over the last petal. Then he blew away the gold dust, glints sprinkling the pyramid. While priests intensified their chanting that courted the sun, and while they hoarsely approved the spectacle atop the pyramid, the Warrior parted his muscular legs and straddled me. When we would fuse, the sacrifice would be completed by a high priest, who, with his sword, would send the Warrior to his favored place in Heaven. The Warrior Xuan lowered his body to enter me.
I had fallen in love with him, yes, at the apex of the pyramid in those brief moments. My heart protested the imminent separation. “Stop!” I shouted, only to hear my word much more loudly shouted and rendered unheard.
“Stop! She must remain a virgin!” I blessed whoever had demanded that, not knowing it was the Conqueror from another world who had spoken those words, the man who would cause me to be branded forever a betrayer of my people. With him were his companions in exploitation, pale, hollow-eyed friars from his country, and squads of helmeted soldiers mounted on horses and carrying deadly weapons my people could not match.
The elders knelt, believing that this fair conqueror, in his blazing armor, must be the God long foretold.
Soothsayers had prophesied that his coming would be preceded by strange events. On the day he had first been spotted with his men at the edge of the ocean — and the sun had turned him golden — noon became midnight, and yet his hair remained gold, soothsayers quickly claimed; and pale children, specters in tatters, paced outside a nearby village, scattering birds, which turned black in flight as they flew toward a star that burned the edge of the night.
At the site of the pyramid, the Conqueror seized this time of terror and vulnerability. He would demand and be granted whatever he wanted, demands emphasized by his menacing weapons, already spewing out fiery blasts of warning into the sky.
And he chose me as his woman.
Xuan reached out, to hold me back, but I knew now what I must do. “Follow me secretly through the jungle,” I whispered to him. “When I signal you by looking back, remain there and wait for me. I’ll vindicate our love.”
I traveled with the Conqueror to his camp. Unseen, the brave Warrior followed. It was while the Conqueror and the others celebrated that I was able to penetrate into the jungle, to reassert my vows of fealty to the Warrior.
To remind me of our passion, he stripped himself before me. I welcomed his nudity with my own, our bodies darkened a deeper brown by the night and licked gold by the watchful moon. His desire for me had not abated. But nothing more must happen now. I must return before I was missed, I warned, begging him to promise to trust me. And he did, even as he informed me what I already knew: that my people were accusing me of having gone too quickly with the Conqueror; I should have struggled against our own compliant priests, they said. “And they’re saying that you’ll betray us, become his ally, reveal secrets, that will allow him to defeat our people. They’re calling you a wh —”
With a kiss I stopped Xuan from repeating the word that would wound him and me. How quickly I was being blamed.
“Wait here,” I told my lover. “I came only to reassure that I shall not betray you nor my people. I’ll return to you.” I sealed my promise with a kiss. I walked away proudly, knowing what I had to do to save my people.
That same night the Conqueror took me and fell into complaisant sleep.
I returned to Xuan in the jungle. Our bodies fused. I felt his life surge into me — as the Conqueror’s had not.
As I parted from my young lover, I longed to tell him what I must not: That although they would be his children whom I would bear, it must be believed they were the Conqueror’s.
“Lady, the Conqueror had already —”
“— yes, Madame, he had, but I had inserted in me a leaf as thin as a tissue to keep his seed from me.”
“Ah!”
“It was the seed of the Warrior Xuan that would bring me children. With the Conqueror, I always retained the thin leaf, but not with the young Warrior, whom I continued to see and love. Out of the union with him, not the Conqueror Cortés, would come a people who would overthrow the Conqueror . . . Oh, yes, he would have other women, and they would bear his children. But mine and Xuan’s would teach them to rebel against all tyrants.”
Madame was ecstatic. “Of course! I knew that the proud race that came from her emerged from an unbroken heritage. I always suspected something like that. That’s why I was sure your essence had existed in Marina —”
“La Malinche,
Madame,” I insisted. “We shall purge that designation, too; it was meant to have the same sting as ‘whore.’”
Madame marveled: “She — you — used a leaf. How extraordinary, that such a tiny bit of nature could become an ally.” She sipped her tea, bit on a cake, and added: “And then there are tulips.”
Though I did not know exactly how, I did know she was tantalizing me with an evocation of the Contessa in the garden with the Gypsy; her husband had cultivated tulips. It was an odd way to remind of our respective stories kept in abeyance by her intransigence. I would not comment, although she was clearly waiting for me to do so.
Ermenegildo rushed down the steps of the veranda, across the lawn, farther, farther, to the very edge of Madame’s grounds. He stood there, peering into the thicket of dark red oleander blossoms. He considered himself the keeper of the grounds, and so this must be a serious threat. Would he discover only a poor wanderer from the City? If so, since he undoubtedly shared Madame’s attitudes, he would allow the sad soul to rest on the luxuriant grounds. That wasn’t what he had found. He was running anxiously back to us. He pulled at Madame’s silk skirt. “There’s something there?”
He nodded.
“For me?” I was already certain.
He nodded twice.
Before Madame could rise, I dashed down the veranda, to the edge of the grounds, where Ermenegildo had found —
— a sheaf of sheets tied with a coarse ribbon.
I looked through a parting of the dark foliage, to the château on the hill. I saw the new tenant moving up onto his veranda. Another shadow crossed behind him. A woman? The sense that even at that great distance our eyes — the man’s and those of whoever else was there — were connected was so intense that I reached out with my hand as if I would be able to touch the two distant presences. I pulled back.
I lifted the sheaf left there and returned to Madame, who stood waiting for me.
I looked at the first page, and I handed the sheaf to Madame to read what I had read: “The True and Just Account of the Abominable Seduction into Holy Matrimony in the Grand Cathedral and of the Murder of the Most Royal Count by the Whore: The Third Installment (in Which the Writer Exposes the Appalling Duplicities of a Renegade Nun and Presents Much More Evidence in the Continuing Case Against the Whore).”
“The writers are here emphasizing the nun who may know what occurred in the tulip garden!” Madame grasped at that.
But this had accosted me: “The continuing case —” I repeated those ominous words. I am on trial, as I have been through the ages! “Madame!” I had not intended hysteria to seep into my voice. “To what extremes will they go in their pursuit of me?”
Madame Bernice said, “The stakes are high. They’ll resort to anything, everything, even —”
“— even?” I did not want to hear.
“— even to . . . inverting reality.”
Inverting reality . . . I put my hands to my ears to indicate most forcefully that I did not want to know what she meant. When her lips did not move, cautiously I uncovered my ears.
“Madame! Another memory — no, no, that is a dream — has been recurring, a very disturbing one, a very assertive one, of a woman I don’t recognize. I cannot fully grasp the dream because it occurs in fragments. At times I dream I hear the woman’s voice — at other times that I hear only her sobs — or a scream — echoing in my quarters when I’m rehearsing. She, too, protests a harsh loss, a harsh verdict, a harsh judgment — but all unnamed — loss so deep, so terrifying that even when I’ve wakened, the dream seems to persist.” I was about to touch my face, to test the uncanny sensation that the tears of the forlorn woman in my dreams might have streaked my face. Rejecting the impossible notion, I reached instead to touch one of the lilacs in Madame’s vase.
Madame’s voice was so soft I did not hear her words until they returned to me as echoes: “At interviews, shall you consider her, the woman in your dreams?”
Madame’s words now seemed not to have occurred at all, and so I felt no need to answer them.
XVI
MEDEA! TELL US ABOUT MEDEA. Whatever Madame Bernice may feel about it, we’re ready to know how she was “unjustly blamed” for killing her innocent children! Try to convince us. We’re beginning to believe it’s you who are avoiding the dark life of the barbarian whore. Why?
You’re full players in my rehearsals now. You’ve become a jury? A chorus? If so, you’ve found an ugly voice in a group. No, not all of you have joined; others — my allies? — did not speak with you. It’s with Madame Bernice that I must first rehearse the life you demand, and she is not ready. You — yes, you — I do not like the way you smirk, I don’t like the way —
When you were Eve, did you have a navel?
I’ll resist your taunting. Few of you joined in that crude laughter. Madame Bernice insists I answer all questions, with dignity, even when they’re not asked with dignity. She has warned of the danger of allowing reckless anger. I evade nothing.
Of course we had navels! If for no other reason than that we, the progenitors of mankind, would have looked odd otherwise, especially in the paintings of the masters, the slight curve of my stomach undotted by the knotted flesh, the subtle separation between the two triangles of fine hair on my Adam’s chest and groin erased. You must know that no one has painted me more masterfully than my Adam, nor him more than I. Our longing eyes drew every line on each other.
And navels?
Yes!
As I stand this morning by my window, I notice that Madame is not in her garden at her usual time. I’m not alarmed. She told me yesterday that her cook was preparing “something especially scrumptious” to accompany today’s tea. Madame is probably overseeing that.
I shall make use of this interim to rehearse: When I was Camille —
She’s a fictional character.
She existed before she was written about. I was she! —Violette Lacomme! You didn’t know her true name?
When I was Camille, Armand was certain his love was powerful enough to resurrect me even while I lay dying. My hand had fallen, limply, toward the floor, spilling petals from the withering camellias I had held. He kissed my fingers, my arm, weaving a necklace of kisses till he reached my breasts. He tried to resurrect my fading breath by licking my nipples alert. When they hardened, he dredged at hope. All night he remained inside me, giving me his strength, keeping me alive that way, forcing himself to remain erect to the very point of exhaustion, succeeding in extending my life for precious moments.
Still, I died, having been judged a whore.
Her accounts are riddled with inaccuracies.
Were you there?
No. But historians and literary —
Were they there? They thrive in finding lies in each other’s accounts. You believe them? I was there.
Read to us from the new installment of that “Account” you detest so much, the one everybody’s talking about in the City. We saw you read silently from it last night.
And I was sickened even more by its lies. Still, I accept your challenge.
I shall read aloud a passage that reveals how cunningly the writers attempt to defuse truths they suspect I know and they’re afraid I might reveal, including the Pope’s secret.
Read about the Renegade Nun.
Notice that there is ample evidence for Madame’s contention that the falsifying writers of this “Account” must deal with —
Read about the Nun.
Notice ample evidence that the falsifying writers must deal with the “outline of truth.” Into it, they squeeze their lies.
More about the Renegade Nun!
I withhold nothing!
No one who has read the title of this record of corruption, The True and Just Account of the Abominable Seduction into Holy Matrimony in the Grand Cathedral and of the Murder of the Most Noble Count by the Whore, might be blamed for continuing to wonder, during the restless nights this Chronicle necessarily produces in the cleansed of heart, how s
uch a seduction could have been permitted not only to culminate in the rites of holy matrimony in the Grand Cathedral but to be performed by the most worthy High Prelate of the Holy Church. Abhorrent as it is, murder is more readily grasped than the blasphemy of sullied Christian nuptials.
The astute Reader may recall that in an earlier Installment in this True Account, reference was made to a Pious Nun. The Writer here publicly confesses, having already confessed in the quietude of his soul and been forgiven by a Mightier Power, that he erred violently in his designation. Subsequent events have proven that his longing for holy allegiances and virtues led him to an incorrect conclusion about the Nun. She was not pious.
Why would a Nun sworn to a holy life of meditation and prayer — it was claimed that she was quite pretty, with spicy nipples that did pert battle with her habit — fall into a pit of villainy that only the Unholy One would welcome? It happened like this:
As a young woman, she had been discovered in a terrifying situation with a family friend. The Writer will save himself the need to dwell upon the matter by simply identifying the place of the encounter: a stable in the family estate.
Fearing for her well-being — and they determined that what had occurred had occurred in a moment of rare weakness (which, however, must not be allowed to become less rare) — her virtuous family (whose close allegiance with His Holiness had earned them a special pew in the Grand Cathedral, a pew into which His Holiness, in added appreciation, had commissioned to be carved romping little angels in all their natural splendor) encouraged her to remain in her room, carefully becalmed so that the troubling encounter would not cause her more grief than that which a Righteous God intends to befall transgressors.
During that period, she fell into a state of amnesia. Fortunately her moral family recalled with astute exactitude everything that she forgot: Repentant, she had announced her decision to become a Bride of the Holy Mother Church. She herself did not remember that, until she woke one day (with a sob of gratitude) to find that she had become Sister Celestine, a member of the Holiest of Convents, a silent one, the one she had herself most fervently chosen during her period of lost memory.
