by John Rechy
The others repeated the evil prayer: “Yes, let his blood be on us and on our children.”
Jesus closed his eyes. His body rocked as hands plucked at the shreds of his clothes. Judas hurled his own body forward, to reach him. But Jesus was already being led away to the place of skulls and death, to Golgotha.
“Let his blood be on us and on our children,” Madame Bernice repeated the words the savage mob had chanted. She spoke them quietly, hushed. I was enveloped by the heavy perfume of the grotesque orchids that had invaded the garden overnight.
Madame resumed in a controlled but angered voice: “Those gathered for the condemnation were brought there to assure that it would all proceed.” She sighed, shaking her head at the horror.
“They were sent by God, Madame.” I announced the verdict I had earlier withheld.
“Why would He want this brutality to proceed?” Madame’s voice brought immediate urgency to the events of centuries past. “Oh, Lady, Lady, I understand your weeping, but even through your tears, dear Lady, you must go on now. We’re again within the core of the Mystery we explored to Patmos.”
I choked my sobs. Ancient pain had resurged. Time — centuries — had not been able to alleviate it, the pain I had carried without surcease through all my life, through all my lives. The blame! All would be vindicated soon! I clung to that certainty.
Pushing against the raging wind and the searing dust, Judas and I followed along the road out of the City.
Still night!
“I have to be with him, to help him!” Judas cried. But each time he advanced, soldiers thrust him back. As the road turned to dirt and ascended toward the barren mountain of Calvary, waves of shifting dust and the mob encircling him blocked Jesus from our vision.
Then Mary was there. She reached urgently for my hand as I marched on. “Is it true, Magdalene?” she gasped.
John, the young disciple, had rushed weeping to tell her what was occurring and had accompanied her here. Then he fled.
Mary’s words affirmed what I now knew entirely: She, too, had been certain it would not proceed into pain and torture. “They’ve sentenced him to —” I couldn’t finish.
Pain etched her face. She wrapped her blue shawl about herself, holding it tightly against the wind’s insistent grasp. She raised her head. “God shall save him!”
The procession wound into our full view at a twist in the road. Wind had whipped the dust away. Men with torches lighted the ascent. Mary gasped. She saw her son bound, stripped; and — I realized this only now — he was being forced to carry a heavy wooden cross, his own, to Calvary. His strong body staggered under it, his muscles straining to keep him erect.
Madame Bernice’s sigh echoed from the present into my thoughts of Golgotha. “The vile cruelty of it,” she said. “To torture a human being like that.” She made a silent sign of the cross. Within her château candles lighted earlier were fading.
Following Madame’s reverential gesture, I made a sign of the cross of my own, but I withheld the words that revered “the Father.” I said, “In the name of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,” and, realizing with a jolt that this sign of remembrance did not honor Mary, I added: “And in the name of the Blessed Mother.”
“Oh, yes, she!” Madame crossed herself again, altering her words into mine: “And in the name of the Blessed Mother.”
With a strength belied by her fragile body, Mary pushed at the mob surrounding Jesus. Or — was it possible? — even they cringed before her awesome presence.
“My son!” she screamed, embracing him.
Jesus turned. “Mother —”
Mary struggled to support the cross. “I’ll help you, my beloved son.”
“No, Mother —”
“It is our burden.” Even when she fell to her knees, she reached up with her hands to lessen the weight on her son’s shoulders.
A soldier eased her away — gently, yes, responding to her wondrous presence. Mary said: “God will intercede!” She had intended to say that to her son in reassurance, I knew, but at the last moment she had flung the words at Heaven.
I did not realize until I saw him with us now that Judas and I had been separated during his attempts to reach Jesus.
Mary held his hands.
“Blessed Mother,” he said. He kissed her fingers, and I loved him even more for his reverence to Mary.
She touched him. “You’re trembling. Why? Don’t be afraid.” Her own voice trembled. “Jesus will be saved.”
“Yes.” Judas’s single word was no more than a breath. He walked away. I reached my hand out to him. “Judas, wait —” He did not turn back. I followed him with my eyes as he moved farther away from us. When veils of dust parted, I saw him standing by the tree he had once pointed out to me, where he and Jesus had sat, alone, for treasured moments. Now dark wind obscured him.
Within spirals of dust, a man and a woman crouched with a crown of thorns toward Jesus. They pushed it onto his forehead, while others laughed and a band of young men and women scratched at his flesh like predatory birds. A centurion placed a mockery of a scepter in his hand. Jesus looked at it, startled. No longer able to reject this relentless reality? Or was it possible that he still hoped?
Grief swept over Mary’s face. Drops of Jesus’ blood had marked the ground where we stood. She bent to blot them with her blue shawl. She stifled a sob with firm words: “God will save him, Magdalene.” She held my hand tightly, ice on ice. I realized then how vulnerable she had always been, and how profound their love was, hers and Jesus’, love that had allowed the blind trust that had shaped the deadly procession to this mountain.
Dawn was beginning! It had finally managed to push away the terrifying night, yes; and the wind, which abated, was now clearing the sky, cleansing it of dust.
I looked back, toward the City. Now — this terrible violence exposed — the people would protest this secret sentence, would rush into the streets. But I saw squads of soldiers preparing to keep them away, gathering in a rim about the mountain, assuring that only the violent crowd that had appeared from the beginning, in Gethsemane, would rule to the very end.
We were on Calvary, on Golgotha. Nothing grew there, nothing had ever grown there. Gnarled rocks were scarred into the shapes of skulls, eyes hollow and black.
Soldiers yanked the cross away from Jesus and placed it on the craggy ground. Jesus’ body collapsed. He tried to lift himself, failed. He looked . . . terrified. No, disbelieving — no, understanding — no, not yet understanding — Terrified.
“Save him!” Mary screamed into the sky. “End it now!”
I prayed — yes, prayed — that Mary and Jesus would be vindicated, even as I saw his body trembling. His perspiration moistened the seared earth. He attempted to raise his head. He gasped with pain.
And still, God was silent!
Then with astonishing strength, Jesus stood.
The soldiers reeled back from his power. One extended a cup of wine with myrrh: “It’ll lessen the pain.”
Jesus thrust it away with his fist.
Even those who had come into the City to assure this atrocity pulled back from him, grew silent, spellbound. The magnificently uncaring sky — I saw that the night had abandoned one single star within dawn — even that uncaring sky, through which the rebellious angels had once soared beyond God’s wishes, even it allowed three glorious shafts of intersecting light to spill on Calvary.
Within that astonishing light — which extended to create an azure halo about Mary — Jesus stood triumphant.
Nothing moved, not even time.
Tearing his gaze away — and even that moment seemed to resist — a priest broke the spell. “Proceed!” he ordered.
Soldiers grabbed Jesus and laid him on the prone cross. Beyond, I saw Judas thrust a rope over the heaviest branch of the tree where he stood. I heard the pounding of nails. They were being hammered into Jesus’ hands, his feet. Judas, naked like Jesus, stood on a stone and allowed the noose he had shaped to
fall over his neck.
Judas, my beloved.
Jesus, my beloved!
I saw the cross raised with Jesus’ body nailed to it. Under it, the soil was drenched with blood.
Mary screamed back at me, “Magdalene! It is not happening. God promised!” When had she managed to break through the barricade of guards? She stood before her son.
The strength Jesus had regained earlier had grown. Even nailed to the cross, he was powerful and beautiful. The end of hope had resurrected all his strength, now that he no longer expected he would be saved from this unraveling torture — oh, how keenly I felt that realization with him. He stared enraged and defiant up at Heaven and he said:
“Your terrible will is done!”
Mary’s pain darkened into rage. She stood, rigid, and screamed at Heaven: “It was all betrayal and lies and deception!”
Jesus looked down at her, with love.
Judas stepped away from the stone. The rope tautened about his neck.
The naked bodies of Jesus and Judas turned toward each other and died.
I closed my eyes. I imagined them as they had been that first day by the River Jordan. Then I saw them again as I had watched them together at dusk while I sat on the slope of a hill covered with jonquils and joshua trees.
I heard Mary’s words: “It was all planned to deceive, from the beginning.” Her head rose wearily. Then, just as her son had done, she gained strength in those tortured moments. She stood proudly, encased in a glaze of azure light the sky allowed to bathe her and her son. That, I knew, was how I would finally remember her.
The wind, kept in abeyance by the rising sun, resurged, swept terrifying clouds across the sky.
In me, an ancient memory stirred . . . of another storm, of a beautiful garden destroyed . . .
I saw blood under me. I was bleeding . . . between my legs . . . where God had struck me painfully beyond Eden.
Within whorls of the storm that again controlled the sky, I heard whispered words I would remember only centuries later in the garden of Madame Bernice, words aimed at me — no, not at me, at someone else I had become for those moments, on that most cruel day on Calvary:
“All this because of your sin, the first disobedience of My will, the original sin — yours! You are to blame, Eve! For all of it! From the beginning of time! You, Mother of Mankind! You, Mother of All Abominations! You, whore!”
XXXI
“THE ANSWER TO THE QUESTION we’ve long pondered has fallen into our hands like a ripe plum,” Madame Bernice declared. “Your essence chose Magdalene so she would witness — and so finally tell — the truth of Calvary, the horror God designed to add unspeakable blame to Eve — to you, dear Lady. Whose testament more reliable than Magdalene’s? — herself called ‘whore’ though not blamed — and I don’t know how she escaped that.” She directed her last words at Ermenegildo, who shook his head in added puzzlement. “What more evidence do we need of God’s intended connections to form a chain of blame than His own renewed denunciation of Eve?” Madame’s words barely contained their rage as she repeated the accusation still ringing from Calvary: “‘All this because of your sin . . . You’re to blame, Eve! . . . You, Mother of Mankind! You, Mother of All Abominations! You —’” She stopped.
I supplied the last word: “— whore!”
I now grasped fully the dizzying moments on Calvary when I heard the whispering Voice that branded me whore, and I was Magdalene and Eve, and my rebelling essence soared back to the lost garden, forward to Babylon and Patmos, and it surged ahead on its journey to establish the continuity of guiltless blame to be finally exposed and redeemed at interviews.
Light from candles within Madame’s château flickered, about to die, surrendering even vague shadows to encroaching darkness. Very few stars glinted on the black horizon. Even distant fires of the wanderers had been snuffed for the night. Madame reached absently for a stale pastry. She withdrew her hand and sighed with the weight of our discoveries.
But this long, long tea would not end yet. We must continue, as if to honor with our own endurance the eternally long journey along the skull-shaped rocks of Golgotha.
“Oh, the gall of it!” Madame pounded the table with her bejeweled fist. “He allowed the ‘son’ He so grandly claimed to love — and who was really your son, Lady, yours and Adam’s — allowed him to be cursed, tortured, crucified —”
“— and sent the strange night people to assure it all on that hot windy night,” I said what I must have known that very night.
“— and yet what did He claim! That all the brutality was necessary to save mankind because of your ‘original sin’! That’s what He intended with the Crucifixion all right — and damned be all the innocent others who would be destroyed through the ages by His pursuit of Eve! Imagine, Lady! He would have gotten away with it — and has for very long — if your essence had not been there in Magdalene to witness the truth you’ll soon reveal.”
I calmed my sorrow by remembering the moment of glory when even the uninvolved sky acknowledged Jesus’ triumphant courage after false hope had died; remembered the dazzling shafts of intersecting rays of light that had graced him at their point of intersection and extended an aura to create a blue halo about Mary. Had a ray of that light touched Judas, too?
“Oh, I knew all along that the Holy Mother would be revealed as an unjustly used woman herself,” Madame affirmed. She whispered to Ermenegildo at her side: “I had a few uncomfortable moments about that along the way, though.” She said wistfully, “The beautiful blue lady . . . quite possibly a frightened, vulnerable young woman, a victim of barbaric times — and He cunningly chose her, and sent a lying angel to —”
I remembered Cassandra’s description of Gabriel’s gentle, sad eyes when he realized the rebellious angels would never again soar beyond the restricted boundaries of Heaven. “God lied to the Angel Gabriel, Madame,” I said with certainty.
“Of course!” Madame understood. “In that way the trusting angel would be convincing when he assured the Holy Mother that she was ‘pure,’ a declaration she was eager to grasp, especially since it was accompanied by the heady promise that her son was chosen as Savior.” She added with deep sorrow in a quiet voice: “When the gentle blue lady referred to you as a prostitute and you felt separated from her — that was part of God’s plan, Lady. You understand that now, don’t you?”
I did, and I loved Mary more than ever.
“By convincing Mary that she herself had been immaculately conceived,” Madame extended her careful phrasing, “she would become the only woman untouched by Eve’s ‘original sin,’ the only woman who was not Eve’s daughter. Lady, it’s so clear. He intended to sever allegiances, separate the Holy Mother from all blamed women. Why? In order to make her an unwitting ally in His conspiracy aimed at adding —”
“— judgment on Eve,” I finished.
The garden mourned and turned so dark that not even silhouettes survived.
“But he didn’t succeed in separating you, Lady!” Madame said triumphantly. “The Holy Mother saw the deception at the last, and you and she were there, together, close.”
“Yes!” I welcomed the rediscovered conciliation between myself and the Blessed Mother.
The solemnity that had befallen the garden lifted. A gentle breeze whispered among the flowers. Weariness was a pool in which I only managed to swim. I leaned back and closed my eyes.
“Yes, rest, Lady. Yours has been a long journey.” Madame’s voice was so quiet I thought she was speaking in my dreams.
I dreamt —
I dreamt that the woman who screams in my recurring dreams finally spoke. She said:
Redeem me!
I echoed her words aloud: “Redeem me.” Oh, I was still dreaming. It was she, that forlorn creature in my dreams, who had repeated her own exhortation, silently. I only thought I had spoken her words. I realized that now, when I was truly awake, facing Madame on her veranda.
“Did you speak, Lady?”
>
Then I had spoken the words aloud. “I thought that I was dreaming; that she had spoken in my dreams.”
“The unknown forlorn woman?”
“Yes.”
“Lady —”
“Madame?”
“Is there . . . just perhaps, only perhaps . . . one more life we didn’t rehearse? Another blamed woman, oh, so very unfairly blamed.”
“No, no!”
“Not one more life pleading to be redeemed? Not one more?”
“Oh, she — the forlorn woman? She exists only in my dreams.”
“Ah! Still, in redeeming the others, shall she be redeemed?”
“I believe that, then, yes, her screams will end in peace at last.” I closed my eyes, to test my words. “I believe I hear them . . . fading.”
“Because she is not to blame.”
“No, she is not to blame.”
“I suppose that the mysteries of great events are much more easily solved than the secrets of a single violated heart.”
“Madame, you whispered —”
“I was musing to myself, Lady, wondering whether we should leave in ambiguity what the heart can’t solve.”
“Yes.”
“I understand, dear Lady. Yes, I understand, and I would say you’re entirely ready for whatever interviewers may ask.”
So puzzling, when things are not what they seem. Now that I was surely awake, I thought my dream had extended until now, that I had dreamt, earlier, that I had wakened, but had awakened only now — and into a greater lucidity within the subdued light: The dim gleam of candles veiled Madame in such a way that she glowed within the darkness, a luminescent silhouette.
I saw, in that mist of bluish light, another face: that of a pretty young woman with a wry smile, and — a candle glimmered, creating a delicate further radiance as it prepared to fade entirely — I saw that she was draped in an elegant cape, azure! It was the same impression, somewhat, but now even clearer — yes, that dusky perception contained its own sharp clarity — that I had had, on that very first day when I met Madame, when she had watched me from the slight incline that spills from her château as I sat weeping on an elaborate bench at the periphery of her lawn! I smiled at this new impression, this new yet not unfamiliar presence, and she smiled back.
