Our Lady of Babylon

by John Rechy

  “God can be lavish.” Cassandra smiled at the spectacle.

  “He’s trying to tempt you again into proceeding with His design,” Lucifer addressed me and my beloved. “We have to hurry before it’s unstoppable.” He reached for his sister’s hand.

  “You’ll end your own existence, too?” I asked.

  “Yes!” Lucifer asserted.

  “We’ll try,” Cassandra said. “It might be our particular hell that we must simply” — she shrugged — “continue . . .” With her brother she walked gracefully to the end of the cliff, where it toppled onto the rocks and hungry sea.

  My beloved Adam and I kissed, remembering the first kiss, cherishing the last. Our lips still open on each other’s, our arms pressing our bodies together, we flung ourselves over the cliff.

  We spun like stars as we fell, still embracing, whirling down, down, down, tossing, plunging faster, faster —

  — and then a current of fierce dark wind captured us, lifting us, tossing us violently about, releasing us, and —

  I woke on a clearing of rocks, my beloved beside me. Cassandra and Lucifer stood a distance away. I held my beloved’s hand, to raise him with me as waves of dark water swept over us. My Adam didn’t move. His beautiful body remained sprawled on the rocks.

  As I screamed with a desolation I knew would never end —would continue howling into time — I wrenched with pain and felt a stirring in my womb, and knew that only my Adam was dead and I was alive with the flesh God had cursed.

  How could silence be so loud? — the silence that captured Madame Bernice’s garden and devoured the squawking of a hawk I saw descend toward us and then veer away. I covered my ears, and still I heard the protesting scratching of distant palm fronds, the shrill sounds of birds trapped in a thicket of branches. Then all sounds ended as slowly as the distant howl of a wolf.

  Through that cacophony of silence, I heard, distinctly, Madame’s sorrowing words, and then everything in the garden resumed its natural sounds.

  “I understand your tears, dear Lady.” Madame was holding my hands, warming them as I conveyed the despair that had seized me the moment when I realized that I had survived and only my beloved was dead. “Go ahead and cry. Cry in sorrow and anger and protest. Yes, go on, Lady, I’ll hold you. They’re tears of loss and anger. And of regret that, again, fate wasn’t foiled!”

  I cried. Huddled in her arms, I cried, and cried more, sobs of endless mourning.

  “Cassandra has taught us how fate can be foiled, by ambushing its course at the exact time, in the exact way. She is with us, Lady, guiding us.” Madame thrust her chin up.

  The trembling of my body eased. I dredged at the hope Madame’s words had intended to arouse. “You believe that, Madame? Do you? — although it wasn’t possible, in Heaven, nor beyond Eden?”

  “That was then, Lady, and this is now!” Madame leaned back regally in her chair, so regally that Ermenegildo bowed as if greeting a newly crowned queen. “We shall undo it all at interviews,” she said firmly, and she snapped her Rogers at destiny.

  XXV

  “BUT WE HAVE NO TIME TO WASTE — Cassandra has taught us that emphatically, and so we must return instantly to Patmos,” Madame demanded.

  That afternoon’s tea setting — I had not even had a moment to comment on its elegant but simple design — remained on the table almost intact, that’s how intensely we had roamed through Heaven and beyond Eden.

  Madame continued: “In Patmos, that’s where the mystery we’re pursuing begins to unravel, that’s where St. John the Divine claimed the word itself was written on your forehead. To determine what that mystery is, we must find the exact connection between Patmos, and Heaven and Eden. So, now, Lady, roam back. Think! Remember! Bring the fragments together. Put it all in order. Remember exactly what happened and how it happened in Babylon and Patmos.”

  I did.

  The journey to Patmos began the moment I first saw John the Divine preaching to a throng on a street in Rome, during his sojourn there from Ephesus. He had come to confront the Emperor.

  I stared fascinated at the evangelist, a man of stark, terrifying beauty — his hips barely covered by a swath of haircloth, which succeeded in suggesting what it was meant to conceal. His arms were decorated with drawings, a serpent coiled about flowers, a dagger entangled in vines, a skull out of whose hollow eyes protruded a dove, decorations so carefully drawn that it was as if each detail had been refined by a dyed needle, a series of tiny punctures, one so fresh that what I thought at first was the eye of a snake was a drop of John’s blood, like a red bead coursing down his white skin. I followed its trail down his arm, and then looked up at him.

  His eyes sliced toward me, cutting so deeply that I heard only an echo of the words he had just spoken, his damnation of “all the evils of the earth — this Babylon.” Had he singled me out? Did he know that I was surviving the only way I knew, in the shadows of alleys, stealing?

  “God will soon expose a startling mystery. As His servants to record His exact words, He has chosen me and one other —” His steady look pierced me. “An angel and Our Lord shall bring His message to me.”

  In an alley that night, a merchant I had not been quick enough to rob flung me against a wall and raised my skirt — I was usually expert at enticing and eluding. His hands would have delved between my legs, but I wrenched free. He tossed a coin back at me as he walked away.

  “She’s worth more.” I heard a deepened voice. It was John the Divine’s. He had intercepted the merchant.

  “I only raised her skirt,” the man protested.

  “Just that is worth much more.”

  Alerted by John’s harsh voice, which contained strange laughter, the merchant tried to run. John pulled at something attached to the underside of his waistband — a knife! With it, he circled the man, backed off, approached in a taunting dance that he seemed determined to prolong even after the man emptied his purse for him. Laughing, John took the spilled money. He came to me and wordlessly gave me half of what he had extorted.

  “Why did you do that for me?” I asked, not daring to face him, longing for exact words of caring.

  “Because God has assigned a special role to you.” He turned his back to me and walked away. I followed him along the cruel streets, just as he knew I would.

  “A role . . . assigned to you.” Madame pressed one hand firmly to her temples, storing John’s curious words. “An assigned role.” She directed those words at Ermenegildo, who had earlier cocked his ear as if he had not quite heard.

  “Do you love me?” I dared to ask John as we sat that night on the steps of a crumbling building in the ghetto of the dispossessed of the City. I longed for the answer I would have given him. He was sharing his food with me. As he ate, he wrote words on a worn tablet he carried with him. Love poems? I allowed myself to wonder. Was the one he had just entered . . . about me?

  He smiled, a smile that seemed abandoned on a face etched with anger and sorrow. With his hand he wiped the paint I used on my face to entice men I would then rob and elude. “You’re beautiful, and so young, so unsullied despite everything, who wouldn’t love you?” I felt warm and safe at the side of this holy man. I longed to rest my head on his wide shoulders, but I dared not.

  Was it possible, was this the same man? That very night he sold my body on the streets, and I was taken on the ground while he watched. Afterwards, his strong decorated arms pinioned my hands, his feet clamped my ankles, spreading my legs, and as if I were only a target for his anger, he pierced me — once, fiercely, discarding my virginity as if it had been trash.

  Swiftly, I rubbed my ankles, my pained hands, readying to run away from his cruelty. He burrowed his head on my breasts and he . . . wept, forlorn cries of pain. With his lips he soothed my ankles and my hands.

  Oh, remember that in Babylon — and by then I, too, thought of the City as that — I was only a girl, a girl of fifteen years. I had never known a mother, never known a father. I knew only the stre
ets. Remember that, when you ask why I loved this man, why I stayed with him, why I worshiped him. Because he had said, or I thought he had said, that he loved me.

  Daily he returned to the streets to preach. Now to his curses he added blunt judgment on the House of the Emperor for “the gross fornications of a dynasty of lust.”

  Nightly he sold my body under the arches of the City, vaunting my sexual assets, holding my breasts up in his hands — “Look at their shape, perfect, the firmness of her nipples, just ripened!” — running his hands down my thighs — “Look at her flawless flesh, so smooth, ah, the touch of it” — raising my skirt, allowing a glimpse of my flesh — “the sweetest nectar for your delectation” — lauding each part of my body as he increased the price for it.

  Always, afterwards, he would penetrate me, roaring his strange laughter. And always, still later, he would hold my face, kiss it, tenderly, over and over. “I’m preparing you for a special role chosen for you,” he reminded me.

  “Again, a role —” Madame mulled John’s words. “A special role. A part to be played.”

  “His baffling words exactly.”

  “All according to God’s careful instructions,” Madame seemed to speak her thoughts aloud.

  His preaching, his pandering — John kept them separate until one night on a shabby street as merchants milled about choosing among bodies for hire; he announced loudly, his resonating words startling the solemn nightly ritual of the hunt:

  “I need witnesses to the word of God, to His choice!”

  Alerted to something extraordinary, a shadowy crowd gathered about us. John invited them: “For a price, you may watch this performance with” — he paused, selecting each word — “the chosen woman of Babylon.”

  After he had collected all the coins for the “witnessing,” he led the men into deeper shadows in a corridor that receded from the alley. At the top of a step — to enhance a sense of performance, or sacrifice — he stripped my body and his. With the swath of haircloth, bunched, he covered the parting between my legs so that, shivering on the cold stones, my body appeared for moments even more naked than if it had been entirely exposed.

  In one violent motion, he pulled the cloth.

  He took me over and over — while I fought and the others watched and goaded and pushed themselves higher up into the crumbling corridor. When it had ended, John stood over me while I covered myself with my shawl. His decorated arms thrust up. He shouted:

  “Behold this woman is on a special mission for the Lord! I have taken her where we all are, where you are, where we all belong, in the filth, the mire, the garbage, the spillage of a violated paradise! And it shall all be written.”

  In Madame Bernice’s garden a puff of white butterflies seemed suspended, trembling. “‘. . . the spillage of a violated paradise,’” Madame repeated.

  Increasingly, John the Divine was tortured, in his mind, his heart. Those times, he sought out the numbing white powder available on the streets, powder he used and sold. When he extended it to me, I only pretended to take it. Holding the arm that bled from the still-fresh decorations, he spoke as if dazed. “It makes it bearable, takes me to another world, sometimes violent, but never more hideous than this one.” His weary eyes would glance in disgust at the street.

  During another of his increasing invitations to sexual “witnessings” with me on this street of bodies and powders for sale, a group of five eager burly men pushed through the listening crowd.

  “We’ve heard about your spectacular performances,” one spoke for all, “and we’d like to see for ourselves.” Gladly paying twice the price so that others would not crowd them out, they watched hungrily, exposing themselves eagerly. All came openly, spilling themselves on the dirt. Erasing their semen with their feet, and restoring their clothes, they revealed themselves as the Emperor’s soldiers and arrested John the Divine — “the hypocritical preacher of lust,” the decree by the Emperor read.

  For frantic days I huddled alone in the ruins and waited for John to return. I wept myself into troubled sleep. I learned he had been imprisoned in a cell where, daily, crowds would come to mock and ridicule him, those who had heard him preach, those who had bought his numbing powders, those he had solicited for my body in alleys and hallways. I saw him — through a small window in his barred cell. He looked more beautiful, stranger than ever, as proud as ever. He smiled at me, and I loved and pitied him.

  In Madame’s garden, I stopped my account of that painful encounter with St. John in prison when I heard her preemptive cough. She was leaning her inclined head on her fist. That sometimes indicates she’s about to introduce a contentious view. She did.

  “I was just thinking, Lady. We must be careful that we don’t make St. John too . . . pitiful. I believe that the word ‘proud’ serves no purpose in your description there. It’s just, Lady, that I think we must be careful not to turn him too . . . hmmm . . . sympathetic.”

  “Madame!” I halted her words. “Must we go through this again? I am committed to the truth. He did look proud.”

  “I just don’t think we should risk deflecting the thrust of our discoveries,” she said.

  “Are you aware, Madame, that at times you tend to be . . . intransigent?” I had considered calling her impossible.

  “I am not” She folded her arms across her bosom, then quickly uncrossed them.

  Beyond my wishes, I had been touched by sorrow for John — and by the memory of what I had thought was my love for him. “John was once a dreamer, a poet, Madame. Reality assaulted him. I believe he yearned for peace, but he couldn’t find it in the horror he saw about him, and joined.” His eyes always seized the most brutal sight. I would see tears he tried to disguise. Once, as we waited in a darkened street for a man he had solicited for me, he said, “If I could wipe out all existence, and restore the purity of nothingness, I would.”

  Madame had been studying her rings as if they yielded more clarity than John’s actions. I was certain she was trying to determine what might pull me away from the pain that the memory of John always aroused. She looked up, allowing a sly glance: “Of course, I suppose we mustn’t think only bad about a man bold enough to tell us that God sent an angel to command him to eat his own book,” she evoked that familiar passage in John’s Book of Revelation. “Now isn’t that one of the oddest of God’s odd commands? What to make of it? — asking an author to eat his own book?”

  I laughed gratefully at her attempt to pull me away from my darkening mood.

  “That was very good, wasn’t it? — my remark.” Madame rarely congratulates herself, but this time she even turned for more congratulation from Ermenegildo, who — I thought — smiled his approval. “Nevertheless, Lady —”

  “However I may pity him now and then, nothing wipes away John’s cruelty,” I said.

  “That’s all that I required to be kept in mind,” Madame said.

  Soon, John returned to me. The Emperor — no longer amused by putting him on display for the thinning crowds to heckle — had ordered him into immediate exile.

  We journeyed the long road to Patmos. The leering soldiers who had watched us and then arrested us led us out. John said to me, “Today, your mission, and mine, will be clarified. God has promised it. The Mystery will be solved.”

  “You must be certain of his exact words, Lady!” Madame Bernice exhorted urgently. She had been listening so attentively that for long moments she had not even sipped her tea. “Did he say, ‘The Mystery will be solved’? Or — which is much more likely, everything considered — ‘the Mystery will be announced’?”

  “I’m sure now that he said, ‘The Mystery will be announced,’ not ‘solved.’”

  “Of course, of course, dear Lady, I knew it, yes, of course . . . You’re equally sure he said that your mission and his would be clarified? ‘Clarified’ does seem logical.”

  “Entirely certain, Madame.”

  On the cliff on Patmos, we lay naked on my shawl of ocher and indigo as I held a
shimmering goblet of wine I did not drink from. That was when John stared at the ebony stone I had found in the City and had sewn onto my headband. And that was when he stood and waited as if to receive a command from the edge of the sky, which was setting in a burnished blaze while shadows lengthened into a tangled noose about us; and then the day turned dark with black clouds out of which bolted distant streaks of lightning, so distant that I could hardly hear their muffled thunder.

  John stared into that vortex of darkness, stared longer, stared, turned his face away as if in aversion, and then again faced forward, in acceptance.

  “Don’t look, John,” I begged him, fearing the darkness into which he was staring. Did I hear whispers? Exacerbated, excited, cruel.

  “It is time,” John said. That was when, touching the pendant on my forehead, he whispered one word:

  “Mystery.”

  “What mystery, John?”

  “The most profound,” he whispered, “the Mystery of the Whore! Whore!” he shouted at me.

  My essence —

  “You forced me to become that! Why?” I stood up, gathering my shawl to cover myself from his accusing gaze, to pull away from his extending riddle aimed at me:

  “Whore, arrayed in purple and scarlet, decked with gold and precious stones, a golden cup in your hand full of the abominations of your fornications!”

  My essence began —

  He tore the shawl away from me, pulled me down to face him as he knelt before me. “Remain exposed, like me,” he said. “Let God utter the final judgment He has chosen me to record on you . . . woman!”

  My essence began to stir —

  He threw himself on me, straddling me, looking back briefly at the summoning horizon, charred black, and he pushed himself into me, adding words to his curse with each brutal thrust:

  “Mother of Whores and of all abominations of the earth!”

  My essence rushed back in time to the first garden, embarking on its journey from there forward to vindicate all fallen women unjustly blamed for great catastrophes from the very beginning —