There Your Heart Lies

by Mary Gordon

  Dearest Isa:

  I know you will find my actions horrifying. I must believe that you will understand. I have done what I have done with great deliberation; it is something I believe I had to do. The alternative would have been to take my own life.

  I cannot forgive myself for staying here in safety while you and so many others I have loved have suffered the unspeakable things you have described. I am grateful to you for providing me with this information. Nothing I heard here suggested anything but the nobility of the Rebels, the knightly character of Franco, the holiness of their cause, the chivalry of their every act. “Nuns are raped; priests are killed.” That was the only truth they were interested in our knowing; perhaps it is the only truth they believed in. But I believe you; I have always believed you of all people in the world, and your letters shook me out of my dream world, and I have explored what has been written about our country elsewhere; without you, I wouldn’t have had the courage for this. As you have been outraged by what has been done in the name of God, you must believe that I am even more outraged. But I have always known of the two of us: your outrage leads to action, mine to despair. I know I am too late to have put my body in the place of justice, but I can use it to witness, if only to myself.

  You know—or perhaps you don’t—that in canon law a priest can only consecrate the host if his right hand is intact. He must have a proper thumb and middle finger, or he is considered unfit to touch the Host. I got the idea for what I have done when I was working on Billy Devlin’s farm, my friend Billy, the one mad for studying new varieties of corn. He has an uncle who made a fortune in America and then came back to Ireland, bringing with him up-to-date American farming equipment. The old farmers didn’t want to use it, so he convinced Billy and me—you know I always liked fooling with machines—to learn about the new inventions, and as we were priests, if we were using them, maybe the farmers would think it was God’s work and they should use them, too.

  I felt I was going mad, listening to what people in the seminary were saying about what was being “done to God’s holy Church by the vicious reds,” and I knew they would call you a red, you and your friends, but I knew that you were all on the side of the poor. I found out that the rebels were given endless arms by Hitler and Mussolini, whom I know without doubt are evil. And I knew that you and people like you and your friends were in danger. And when you told me about what had happened to Antonio, and that it was happening again and again, and the Church was triumphing in it all, refusing to speak out or even acknowledge the horror, to say nothing of helping people mourn it…I felt I had to do something. I had to put my body on the line as you and so many people I loved had done.

  As I said, I was working on Billy’s uncle’s farm. Working the combine harvester. Do you know what a combine harvester is? Probably you don’t, why would you? I’m sure there aren’t any in Spain.

  There’s a blade that cuts the hay; it looks like an eight-foot-long pocket comb, but with two rows of teeth, each tooth shaped sort of like a pointed kitchen knife, but one side is thick and smooth, the other side is like a knife, it does the cutting. The blades open up like scissors. The knives slide back and forth in short strokes.

  As I watched the machine, I decided what I would do. When the work of the day is done, the driver has to bring the blade back up to a vertical position because you can’t go through gates and down roads with an eight-foot blade sticking out to the side. The blade has to be lifted by hand and pushed to its vertical position. We’d been warned that when the machine is off it looks safe to pick up the end of the blade and then push it the rest of the way up, but that, as it’s pushed up, the knives can get pulled by gravity and resettle themselves. Well, I didn’t leave it to gravity. I gave the blades a jerk; I knew they only needed to move a couple of inches to do the work I wanted. I put my fingers, the two middle ones, in the right place; the blades cut them off.

  Of course, everyone was horrified, and it was quite painful, and you know I’m not a stoic, God knows, you understand that better than anyone. But at the same time, I was relieved of the terrible pain I’d been feeling, my shame for staying safe, my shame for the Church I love. I know you don’t love it, but I trust you to understand what you can’t understand in my beliefs as I understand what I can’t understand in yours.

  I asked the people at Maynooth to contact our uncle, the bishop. I made my confession to him. I told them that I wanted him to be sure that I would not be given a dispensation to consecrate the host. I know you don’t respect him, but you must, because although he said that I had committed a grievous mortal sin, he believed that I was not in my right mind. He said he believed I was not in my right mind, but he no longer knew what a right mind was, so he would do what I asked: make sure that the dispensation was denied.

  I will come back to Spain. I will live with you in Altea. Together, we will bind up wounds, because in all our suffering, we are not alone. I’m not talking about God, don’t worry. I’m talking about you and me, the love that we have for each other that is part of what Dante says moves the earth and the stars.

  Marian puts the letter down. She can’t meet Isabel’s eye. What possible response could she give to this letter, this extraordinary letter, most of it taken up with physical details, the justification of an unjustifiable action; the explanation for what must be inexplicable.

  Only two words come to her mind, and she knows they are the right ones. “I understand.” She feels the rightness in her spine, on the palms of her hands. But what does it mean to understand something like this? Perhaps, that the motivations are traceable; they can be connected like points on a map. What she doesn’t know is how to name an action such as this. Madness? Heroism? The categories seem clumsy, inflexible, but the alternatives are far more unsatisfactory. What comes to mind is a word from a way of life she will no longer allow into her understanding: martyrdom. She will refuse, then, Adam’s task. She will not name. All that is required from her is this physical sensation she calls understanding. She tells Isabel the story of Johnny.

  Isabel nods. “Your brother. I understand.”

  “Will you tell Tomas that you have told me and I understand?”

  “I will,” Isabel says. “And then there is no need for us to speak of it again.”

  •

  What she learns from the brother and sister comes to her in different modes, at different tempi. Isabel’s words about her past rush out in torrents: there would be a deluge of revelations, and then nothing, perhaps for months. But what Tomas tells her comes in trickles, usually when they are on their way home from collecting. And some things she learns almost casually, a calm stream, because the brother and sister speak freely in front of her. She isn’t sure always if they know she’s there.

  Tomas asks her, when she is writing the Latin name of a species, how she learned Latin. “Is it because you had a Catholic education?”

  “The Madames of the Sacred Heart.”

  “Ah,” he says. “The aristocracy.”

  She tells him about Mother Kiley and Mother Gomez and Mother Labourdette, and in return he tells her about his uncle.

  “I owe him a very great deal. He was the first to interest me in botany; he’s a rather fine amateur botanist, and he arranged for me to study in Maynooth. Isabel has no use for him, but Isabel can be—though she could never admit it—too hasty sometimes. She doesn’t like to believe that he uses his power to protect her, that he has said words in the right places so she can practice medicine here, so she can live in whatever freedom is possible in this country. She doesn’t like to admit that she can live as she does because she is under the protection of the Church and the state: our uncle, the bishop, and her brother-in-law, an economist in the Franco government. It’s important to Isabel that she forget these things. It’s important that she not be reminded.”

  Tomas is the only person in Spain who asks Marian about her personal life. When he inquires about her family, her words, like Isabel’s, come out in a torrent.
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  “I don’t love my family. You think that’s a terrible thing to say, but I don’t. I never felt they were really connected to me.”

  She tells him about Johnny.

  On his face is that look of bottomless sadness. Usually, when she sees that look, she wishes that whatever has been said to occasion it had not been said, that whatever has occurred to prompt it hadn’t happened. But now his sadness is a comfort to her; it accompanies her own; he says nothing to suggest that the sadness will pass or that it somehow should be pushed away.

  “I am very sympathetic to suicides; sometimes, I think they are the most courageous ones.

  “I know that I myself am drawn to it, but I am a physical coward, and I wouldn’t do it to Isabel now; she’s suffered too much. I might have done it when I was younger, but then I was more pious; I questioned then very little of what I was taught. But I understand your brother, please know that I understand. I’m sure suicide isn’t a sin, I’m sure Jesus would never punish anyone for their sorrow. I know that Judas is in heaven, in heaven because of his sorrow, and I hope that I will be someday because I know I am a Judas. I betray the just men who died fighting injustice, who were tortured and killed by monsters. I protect the monsters. I keep the secrets they tell me in confession, and, because of me, they are safe from their secrets, as those who fought for justice were never safe. And on the other side, I keep the secrets so they can tell someone that they know their life is false, that they participate in the great lie—but I don’t encourage them to fight again, because I believe that would be hopeless. And so, I am a Judas in that way; I betray them, too; I betray them to hopelessness.”

  “No, Tomas, you give them whatever hope there is. You give them consolation. But who can console you?”

  “I am distractible by the natural world. That is my consolation.”

  One night after they have finished dinner, a night when Isabel isn’t home, he says to her, “There is nothing sadder than seeing something you were born to love degraded.”

  —

  On Saturdays, at confession, the line in front of his box is huge, and after three hours, he comes out, sweaty and exhausted. Aged. Once, when he looks particularly spent, Isabel says, “Maybe sometimes you can tell Father José you can’t do it. It takes too much out of you.”

  He turns to her with the nearest he gets to anger. “You don’t know. You can’t possibly know. No one can. You don’t know what I’ve heard. I no longer have the comfort of believing that the brutality was only on one side. You say you’ve seen horrors, heard about horrors, but you have no idea what people have confessed to. I can tell you about fascists starving nursing mothers, so they had to watch their babies die before them; I can tell you about Republicans shoving a crucifix through a priest’s eardrums so they broke, and then choking him with a rosary; I can tell you about fascists holding children in front of their own bodies so they themselves will not be shot, and shooting teachers just for being teachers—would they have shot our mother?—and I can tell you about Republicans digging up the skeleton of a nun, dressing it in whorish clothing, and dancing with it, and where does it end, where does it end, will you tell me how it is possible to bear this, even to think of it? And yet, I come back to Guernica: the planes, the animals, the frenzy of the mothers, the killers safe in the air; nothing the Republicans did was as terrible as that. But maybe it’s only because they didn’t have the arms. Perhaps if they had, they would have been no different. But, in fact, they didn’t have the arms, so there is a difference. I think…but how do I know what makes a difference…I don’t know…I don’t know.”

  “Go to bed, Tomas,” Isabel says. “You must sleep. You must try to wipe it from your mind.”

  “Forgetfulness would be the greatest betrayal. I must remember.”

  “But you must live your life.”

  His voice goes uncharacteristically bitter. “My life,” he says. “My life.”

  He leaves the room. Isabel and Marian sit silently, terrified that in the morning they will find him dead, because it seems impossible that someone should suffer so much and live.

  —

  She only hears Isabel angry at him once. She is in the kitchen, and Tomas is in the sitting room, talking to Marian. “I love the Spanish people because of their suffering.”

  A glass breaks. Marian hopes that it’s just an accident; just something slipping from a wet hand. But Isabel comes into the room, pulling at her wild hair. She speaks in Spanish. Is Spanish the language for anger, as if it were their childhood tongue?

  “I hate to hear you talk like that. This goddamn Spanish worship of suffering. The cause of so much suffering.”

  Then she looks panicked and says to Tomas, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t speak like this.”

  “You mustn’t worry, Isabel. You can say whatever you like to me. Your words can’t hurt me; the words that hurt me are the cold words of cold hatred, that’s what kills the spirit. Your words are words of outrage, and your outrage is holy.”

  She throws the towel she was holding to the floor. Her face is nasty as she says, “Holy, holy, holy.”

  And suddenly, the two of them start howling like wolves. They sit down because they’re laughing so hard, they can’t stand up.

  They tell Marian the story of the parish priest’s dog who would wait for him outside the church, and when the bells rang for the Sanctus, the “Holy, holy holy,” the dog would start howling, and the priest would just talk louder to try to pretend it wasn’t happening.

  Marian feels a piercing envy that this sister has a living brother, who, however much concern he causes her, still breathes and moves beside her. Isabel has Tomas; Marian has lost Johnny. There is no one with whom she shares a private language. There is no one for whom she comes first.

  •

  It is the beginning of her understanding that she won’t stay in Spain forever. She grows more determined when, knowing she has no choice, she attends the ceremony of Ignacio’s induction into the Young Falangists just after his confirmation, when he is twelve years old. The morning of the ceremony, she hears her son and her mother-in-law twittering like birds with delight and excitement.

  She stands next to her father-in-law, whose sadness is unlike Tomas’s: his defeat is entire; he has no distractions; his humiliation is complete. The sound of the bugle and the drums, which the others applaud, makes her wish she could run raving through the streets and tear down the grandstand that has been built for the leaders of the party. They stand together in their blue uniforms, giving the fascist salute. Flags snap in the cold wind. She looks down the line of young boys in their Falangist uniforms. It is all she can do to stand still next to her father-in-law. Forced to applaud, she will not cheer.

  —

  For years, she and her son have barely spoken. They are polite, strangers who pass each other coming and going in shared corridors, the sharing not their choice. The only gifts he gives his mother are holy pictures with swoony-eyed saints on clouds that look like the kind of candy he loves best: marshmallows, garishly dyed pink. For Marian’s birthday, he presents her with a scapular and the indulgences attached to it if one wears the cloth with stamp-sized images next to the heart and prays special prayers each morning. She pretends gratitude, looping the string around her neck, tucks it into her bra, and promises falsely that she will pray daily.

  For his confirmation name, he chooses Tarcisio, after a Roman child beheaded because he would not surrender the sacred host he carried in his bosom. Tarcisio allowed his young head to be separated from his body, and the soldiers fell to their knees, instant converts.

  The Christmas he is thirteen, Ignacio writes a play and organizes its performance in the nave of the church. It is called The New Tarcisio. She asks to be spared the details of the play, pretending that she wants to be surprised, but fearing that she won’t be able to keep silent. She asks Tomas to accompany her; she demands that Isabel stay away.

  Ignacio appears in the front of the church, dressed in his
young Falange uniform. His classmates, his costars, are dressed in rough, ragged clothes; around each neck is a red bandanna. They threaten the young Tarcisio with their broomsticks, the points sharpened to look like bayonets. “We are the soldiers of the Republic,” they cry. “We understand you are carrying the host. Give it to us so that we may feed it to our dogs. Or we will cut your head off in the name of the Republic, for we hate with every fiber of our bodies all that is sacred, all that is holy, all that is dear to the Catholic Church.”

  The young Tarcisio bows his head, offering his neck to the swords, which are not bayonets after all. “I will die rather than allow you sons of Satan to touch the sacred host.”

  The broomsticks fall on the young head. Tarcisio is covered with a sheet, his legs and feet left visible. He twitches and expires. The audience breaks into wild applause.

  Marian vows that she will leave the country.

  —

  That spring the stranger appears. The almond blossoms are at their most beautiful.

  On one of the old Moorish trails, they see him: a young man standing in front of an almond tree, sketching. His blondness shocks Marian: it is out of place in this dry country; it has been, she thinks, years since she has seen such light blue eyes. She wonders what language he will speak. He greets them in Spanish.

  “You’re American,” she says.

  He laughs. “I travel thousands of miles for the experience of Spain, and I meet an American.”

  “I, however, am not American,” Tomas says. “Half Spanish only, I’m afraid. The other half Irish.”

  Of course Tomas invites him to lunch.

  They discover a greater coincidence. The young blond, whose name is Theo (is this a visit from a god?), is from Rhode Island. But not, Marian is grateful to hear, from Newport, but from the other side of the state, a village called Avondale, near the ocean, abutting Watch Hill, an enclave of the second-best rich. Watch Hill, whose houses are grand but merely mansions and not, as in Newport, châteaux.