Our Lady of Babylon

by John Rechy

  XX

  A DARK NIGHT CAME INSTANTLY, snuffing out the single star that dusk had offered. I had stopped my recollection of my life with Jason, but its sorrow extended. I would, of course, continue, perhaps tomorrow. I prepared my lantern for my dark way home.

  Usually, when we announce our leave-taking, we part in a quiet ritual of temporary separation. For all our closeness, we adhere to amenities that are disappearing from the world. I had already draped my cowl over my shoulders and was about to proceed down the steps of the veranda when Madame startled me:

  “A moment, Lady, to deal with another matter I was able only to mention earlier.”

  Was she still trying to dissuade, even into tomorrow, my continuation of the life I must roam through?

  At the bottom of the steps, Ermenegildo, waiting for me, looked up quizzically at Madame. Wondering what was possibly coming at these late moments? Recently, he had begun to escort me a few steps along the road. Then he would hurry back, concerned at leaving Madame alone for long.

  “It’s surprised me, Lady, that there’s a certain life you haven’t mentioned —”

  There were enough. In my urgency to be on my way, to invite the return of our usual silent ritual — yes, I was tired — I almost stepped on Ermenegildo’s tail, but before his unique feather twisted in protest, I apologized. That caused me to stall and to allow Madame to continue:

  “When you leave each time 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” — she spoke each word with exceptional precision — “the Xtabay.”

  “The X —?”

  “Xtabay.”

  The ghostly woman she had mentioned earlier, roaming jungles? “I don’t re —”

  “Perhaps not yet.”

  “Another Indian woman, blamed?” The moment I spoke those words, I remembered . . . something . . .

  “You knew!” Madame couldn’t restrain her delight at this indication of an emerging new memory. “A woman of great beauty.”

  “Of course.” Another spark of recollection stirred.

  Madame proceeded to display her own knowledgeability of my still shaping memories: “A soulful woman of such quiet ways — or so I’ve heard, and you’ll correct me if I’m wrong — that is, if, of course, your memories guide you there — a woman of such soulful ways that her jealous husband was incited to suspect her of —”

  “— infidelity, of course.”

  “Ah.”

  “But the woman was not unfaithful, though she was accused,” I knew.

  “Why, Lady, your memories are taking you to that same distant shore as that of another blamed woman, of the same country, the woman known as —”

  “— La Malinche.”

  “Yes, she! Lady, did the husband of the Xtabay believe malicious gossip instigated by those in her village, gossip that led to violence? Oh, how they must have envied her — and her loving husband, to turn him against her —”

  “Yes, they envied us both, and he believed their lies.”

  “Remarkable, the persistence of memory, even when we think we’ve forgotten,” Madame observed. “Perhaps the life of that blamed woman will return to your memories this very evening. After all, her life did extend into a long, long night, within which she searched vainly to be redeemed. Surely you will remember the truth of it all.”

  And I did.

  As I rehearse with you now in my quarters, it all returns:

  Yes, the men and women of the village resented me and my husband, because they perceived our vast love. And his jealousy. I first became aware of their piercing eyes of envy on a warm day as we strolled into the village near which we lived. Until then, I had not been aware of the enmity my hauteur — that was what they named my quiet, shy independence — had aroused.

  I was wearing a tunic of white muslin, my brown breasts like ripe fruit, my nipples resisting even the soft press of light cloth, so that if I had breathed more heavily they would have been bared. My dark hair was tied into one thick braid, through which wound a strand of beads my beloved husband had given me, beads that then extended into a necklace whose pendant nuzzled the deep demarcation between my breasts.

  Beside me, he swaggered, challenging the admiring stares of others at me even while he invited them, proud to be the sole owner of my beauty, oblivious to his own beauty, his skin just slightly browner than mine, his bare chest and legs darkly furred. A white wrap of the same muslin I wore hugged his slender hips. A woman and her husband selling pottery — I had dismissed the man’s advances once without even a look — lured my husband away on a ruse of having acquired “something special” he might want to give his woman as a gift. Others gathered about them.

  Remaining at a distance, I heard only whispers. I detected the woman’s covert inviting glances, shifting between my husband and someone else unaware of her: another man, also handsome, clearly new in the village, idling nearby, his eyes devouring my beauty. I rejected his stare, and so I did not see the malice that had sparked there, malice already festering in the two potters still whispering to my husband.

  Soon after, when we had finished making love — and I retained my husband in me, keeping his desire warm — he shocked me: “How many others have you lured? — along with the potter, who resisted your advances, and the new man in the village who claims he’s only the latest?”

  “There’s been no one but you.” I released him. Forever — but he did not know it.

  “Liar. Others in the village confirm it.”

  I was too outraged to deny it.

  “You were right not to, Lady,” Madame approved the next day. She had been so eager to hear whether I had remembered this life further that she had poured my tea before I had even sat down, a breach that caused Ermenegildo to remain standing quite formally beside me until I was seated. “It was a baseless accusation. Those were terrible times, weren’t they? Gossip was capable of inciting a lover, not to say a husband, to extreme violence, joined in by the monstrous people of the village.”

  “Yes. But I did not give them the opportunity to harm me. I left the village, by myself that very night. I wandered into the jungle. I gathered black orchids, which I held close to my heart, and there, in the jungle, I willed myself to die.”

  “Lady, I don’t think that’s —”

  “— what you may have heard? Madame, I was there. I’m correcting untruths.” I continued:

  I willed myself to die, but life thrived in me and I did not succeed.

  “Oh, what speculations that must have aroused in the village. Gossip travels fiercely, especially when fueled by inevitable false sorcerers. There are always those in such villages.”

  Madame was correct.

  Incited by the potter’s wife, a woman who claimed to be a sorceress roamed frequently now into the village. She, too, envied my beauty and pined for my husband. Subsequent events revealed this:

  When she saw him alone in the village one day, she dared to speak to him. “Oh, and where is your wife?”

  “She likes to wander into the jungle, alone,” my husband told her.

  The woman knew I did that; she had followed, hoping to discover secrets she might use against me. “Alone?” she asked him. As if just remembering it, she added, “I believe I saw the handsome new man in the village venturing there, too, earlier.” She added more poison: “Perhaps if you go there, you will discover —”

  “What?” My husband was enraged with jealousy.

  “— whatever you shall find,” the Sorceress said.

  I had gone alone to a river outside the village. Frequently, I longed for the exquisite solitude of the jungle, exulting in the call of exotic birds, the rhythm of a stream. I would roam naked along bending palms, gather wild flowers, rampant mariposa lilies, and lie on fields of meadow-foam blooms, a misty yellow cloud on the ground, and I would laugh and cry with the joy of existence, and with love for my husband.

  He had foll
owed me secretly. Seeing me naked with my arms extended to a deer hidden from his sight, he assumed what the Sorceress intended, that I was meeting a lover. He returned to her.

  “Your wife is restless, depraved, an evil woman, a whore. She lures her lovers to the jungle, then drives them to despair. The new man in the village, the man she was seeing, I’ve learned he’s disappeared. You must have seen her with yet another. She’ll drive you to the same madness — I see in your eyes that she has already begun to incite it — unless —”

  “Unless?” My husband wanted to hear other than the fatal words he heard.

  “— unless you kill her, for the sake of others she’ll entice; most of all, for your sake.”

  And so — accusing me — he did kill me, with one almost graceful sweep of the machete he used to gather corn —

  Ermenegildo nervously lowered his head.

  “— murdered me after he had forced himself upon me one more time and shouted, ‘Whore!’ The last word that I heard.”

  “Such terrible, terrible injustice!” Madame shared Ermenegildo’s outrage. He had uttered a sound of protest. “Such unjustified blame! So horrible it might even cause a ghost to roam the jungle in sorrow —”

  My ghost roamed the jungle at night wailing in desolation, a ghost accused beyond death.

  My husband, now my murderer, heard my sad crying nightly. One such night he hanged himself, naked. Screaming with frustrated desire, the Sorceress attempted to make love to his dead body, forcing him into her, blood having engorged his groin. She was slain, still impaled on him, by the people of the village for her sorceries . . . And I wandered on, wailing in the night, blamed even for my husband’s death.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if her wailing — your wailing in that life — gave rise to wild speculations of violent transgressions even after death,” Madame voiced what I had been about to convey.

  “They claimed I seduced hunters.”

  “You must have remained as sublimely beautiful as you had been in life.”

  “I did.”

  How wondrous, to have a mind like Madame’s, to be able to anticipate another’s memories when they’ve just begun to form, poised to be recalled.

  And I recall every detail now that I’m back in my quarters rehearsing with you. Yes, our tea this afternoon was short; I had arrived late, so attentive had I become to my new memories evoked in my rooms.

  More sex.

  What?

  More sex.

  You’re amusing in your interruption. Oh, I see. You want more intimate details to verify that my essence lodged in the body of the Xtabay and extended into her ghost.

  More sex.

  My ghost walked naked in the night, its outline as if brushed with silver. When the moon parted hovering clouds, its light licked my breasts and the mound between my legs. Sweaty with lust, naked hunters waited for night in order to penetrate the jungle and my luminous form. I retreated from them as far as I could, to the very edge of a cliff. Believing me trapped, they attempted to grasp me and push into me, only to find that I had evaporated into the dawn and that they were lunging, aroused, to their deaths.

  I have now satisfied your requirement to verify my truth with details only I can know. Now I must move on. Time is narrowing! There are other matters that must be rehearsed, my life as —

  I’m battling a terrifying mood. You sense it? You’ve come to know me that well? Perhaps . . . to care for me? I spoke that slowly because I’m not sure. At times during these rehearsals I feel isolated, alone. No, I am not alone. I am with —

  My memories. My memories of —

  The Crucifixion.

  That memory pulls me deeper into the threatening mood. Senseless death, senseless violence, senseless cruelty always depresses me.

  Jesus, you haunt me.

  Judas, you haunt me.

  Blessed Mary, you haunt me.

  Jesus spent even less time with us as his following grew. Often Judas and I would stroll through the City, remembering where this or that had occurred when all three of us were together. We wandered out into the desert, to see the new blooms that summer had brought out: We lingered over a velvet cactus, its yellow blossoms so strangely delicate among piny thorns. Nearby, red godetias flared as if ignited by the heat. Judas pointed to a gathering of trees near a small pool of water, beyond which a mount rose, gray, bare, stark, ominous. “See that tree, Magdalene, the one with that large branch? Jesus and I sat there one afternoon, just sat there quietly —”

  “—without me?” I pretended surprise. Was I truly hurt? I had long accepted the special union between them.

  Judas adjusted quickly, “You had gone to the market, and we were alone.” He said with a seriousness that turned the hot afternoon cold: “If I ever lose Jesus, entirely —” He shook his head, rejecting the thought. “Oh, I can continue to live desiring him, only desiring him — and you, Magdalene,” he added quickly. “But if I ever lose him entirely —” The thought persisted. He stopped it again. “Our lives — our love, his and mine — are interlocked. It was so from the moment I saw him, by the River. We sensed in each other — what? — shared doom.”

  “No!” I rejected.

  “I meant shared destiny,” he said.

  Those stealthy footsteps outside my quarters! You heard them, too, recurring. I must speak softly during these rehearsals, give nothing away to whoever is listening. Madame continues to remind me that sudden circumstances may force interviews to begin sooner than anticipated. Shall I get my gun, go to the door, unlock it, and see who —?

  “Under no circumstances will you open that door other than when you’re ready to come for tea, Lady, and then you will walk along the path you always take, as if you’re out for a stroll, not arousing suspicions of anything else,” Madame told me at tea when I informed her that I had been tempted to open the door last night. “If interviews are forced to begin suddenly, I shall choose one of our prepared ways to inform you immediately, and, if urgent, I shall rush over. Even so, don’t open the door unless you verify it’s me.”

  It was late in the afternoon when Madame said that. I had told her the rest of my memories of the wailing woman.

  Our teas are lengthening. So are the days, now that summer is almost here. The strange orchid lilies in Madame’s garden continue to proliferate, daily more aggressive in their distorted reminder of the perfect banished flowers that shared exile with me and my beloved, flowers that remind, too, of a bloodied wedding veil. I had not mentioned them to Madame, because she’s proud of her garden. I didn’t want to risk saying anything about them that she might interpret as criticism. She had never remarked on them, although they seemed to have grown overnight, and usually, when she plants a new bloom and it begins to bud, she comments on it. She seemed not even to see these.

  As my attention had paused on the mesmerizing orchid lilies, Madame had begun discussing “small but important details that must be tended to when interviews begin.” She enjoys going over that. She calls such interludes “necessary lighter moments.”

  “Of course, interviewers will be dazzled immediately by your beauty,” she stated. “We must use that to our fullest advantage.”

  Ermenegildo chose that exact moment to spread his tail especially dramatically. Understanding, Madame lowered her head and whispered to him, “As they shall be dazzled by yours.”

  To add his own assertion of that fact, Ermenegildo located himself near a cluster of birds of paradise, those glorious flowers named after the Garden of our exile. His beak assumed the exact tilt of those scandalously gorgeous blossoms, clearly to call attention to the similarity between them and his stance, but more, to his own greater beauty.

  Madame had continued: “Of course, Lady, some interviewers will pretend not to be impressed, in order to attempt immediately to unnerve you. Some are cynical, and we all know there’s something about beauty —”

  There’s something about beauty! I shall adapt her words into my Pensées later, perhaps connect
them with Mademoiselle Léonie’s observation when she arranged my hair, simply, for my first night at the opera with the Count: “Beauty needs a frame only so it will not spill out into ostentation.” If I include that, I shall of course give her full credit.

  Madame resumed her discussion of our presentation — she likes to dwell on this at times before we move on to more important matters: “We’ve agreed, Lady, that you shall choose your own appropriate attire with your usual impeccable taste. And I” — she became charmingly shy, a trait, you may have noticed, that is not usually in evidence in her — “shall choose most carefully what I shall wear.”

  “Whatever you wear, you shall look resplendent!” I told her.

  “Well,” she smiled, “we both do know — don’t we? — that we must not gild the lily.” She composed her taffeta dress. Although it was somewhat heavy for the season, I assumed it was a favorite of hers; her fingers frequently and lovingly located the strip of gold lace that decorated it.

  “We shall both look breathtaking,” I assured Madame.

  “We’ll arrange the drapes exactly so, in your quarters,” Madame opined excitedly. “Not that you need special lighting, the way other great stars do.”

  “Great stars?”

  “A wonderful phrase — don’t you think? — for impressive presences?”

  “Oh, yes, and I believe I shall borrow it, with your permission.”

  “Given.”

  Madame ended our banter with her assertive, “Now, Lady!” and went on: “One matter we mustn’t rush, and must rehearse at length — and get to very quickly — now! — is the War in Heaven.” She did not even pause to acknowledge the immense challenge.

  I was ready. “In Heaven, Cassandra abruptly —”

  “A moment, Lady, please, before we go there.”

  I braced myself.

  “I assume you’ll be dealing with tumultuous events?”

  “Oh, Madame, hail and fire mingled with blood, and a great mountain was cast into the sea, and burning stars —”

  “Precisely my point. In dealing with such events, there’s always the risk of melodrama, even in the tone of delivery.”