by Naomi Holoch
None of this is telling me anything I didn’t already know, and my feet are beginning to ache. In the museum, I take my shoes off for a moment to stretch my feet on the smooth wooden floor. What a motley collection we have here: grisset and candle mold, cypress chest and footstool, a copy of a will specifying what a certain widow would inherit from her husband if she did not remarry or have carnal knowledge of any man willingly (this last bit makes me smile), and a deer skull with antlers six feet wide. On a dusty shelf I find huge metal tongs, for stamping IHS on holy wafers. My heart begins to thump again.
Downstairs in the bookshop, I calm myself with a collection of photographs of Irish lakes. The girl assesses me as a browser and turns back to the phone, demanding (in an accent that I haven’t heard in a long time) to know who said she’d said she fancied that spotty eejit. I turn the pages, recognizing the heads of birds. I move on to the small history shelf, where I learn that the town’s most famous witch was, in fact, framed.
“Alice Kyteler (possibly a misspelling of Kettle, a fairly common English surname),” I read in one hardback,
was a victim of a combination of the worst excesses of fourteenth-century Christo-patriarchy. Threatening to men by virtue of her emotional and financial independence, this irrepressible bourgeoise, who always kept her maiden name through repeated widowhoods, aroused the hostility of avaricious relatives and a misogynistic Catholic establishment. As in so many other “witch trials,” powerful men (both church and lay) projected their own unconscious fantasies of sexual/satanic perversion onto the blank canvas of a woman’s life.
I can’t help smiling: blank canvas my eye. There is a grain of truth there, of course: before she ever trafficked with darkness, the citizens of Kilkenny resented the Kyteler woman’s fine house, bright gowns, every last ruby on her fingers. But that does not make her innocent.
The girl on the phone is eyeing me wearily. She is letting her friend speak now, the faraway voice winding down like clockwork.
How the twentieth century loves to issue general pardons. At this distance, it cannot distinguish the rare cases of serious evil from those of farmers’ wives burnt by neighborly malice. Dame Alice should not be lumped in with the victims. She was the real thing. She could be said to have deserved the punishment she never got.
Unlike Petronilla, not mentioned in the historical analysis. Petronilla, who should have been set free when the whole sorry mess was concluded. Why could she not have been shaken out like a wide-eyed cat from a sack, to run across country and live some ordinary life?
It is too hot in here, all at once; too cosy, with a tub of Connemara Marble Worry Stones going cheap beside the till and remaindered Romance stacked high on a table between the symmetrical stares of Décor and Archaeology. I replace the books neatly and leave.
Outside it is cooler, at least; the edgy breeze of late afternoon fills the town. I walk along the main shopping street, wondering where the jail could have got to. A hamburger carton impales itself on my heel; I kick it off. My toes feel crushed; my head is beginning to pound. Anything could have been built on the site of Petronilla’s last months: a hardware shop, a B&B, a public toilet. A jail is by nature anonymous; all it requires is four walls or a hole in the ground, a barred square of light if you’re lucky.
I pause outside a pub offering Live Trad To-Nite, staring at the five bars just above ground level, the darkness behind them. All they hide is a cellar of beer barrels, but if I close my eyes I can almost see her pallid hands caressing the iron. Petronilla in the shadows, crouched in her dirty smock, once good linen, a present after her first year of service. A face like a drop of honey, looking out of a bedraggled wimple—unless they shamed her by leaving her head naked. Did her pale hair come down at last, escaping coif and cap and veil, falling back into girlhood?
I rest my palms against the pub’s gray slate, ignoring the glances of passersby, and try to conjure up the rest of her. Would there be marks of torture, the telltale insignia on wrists and soles? Probably not; there would have been no need, since she seems to have told the whole story freely once her mistress had escaped to safety. Besides, they probably preferred to bring the girl unmarked to the stake, a perfect sacrifice to the fire-breathing dragon. Where would they have done it, I wonder—outside the jail, outside the city walls, or in the busy thoroughfare of the market square? Which supermarket sits on Petronilla’s ashes now? Pressing my fingertips so hard against the cement that they turn gray, I ask every question I can think of. Was there anyone there that day who, remembering alms or a kind word or just the turn of her cheek, had enough mercy on her to add wet faggots to the kindling? Was there enough smoke to put her to sleep before flames licked the arches of her feet?
This is one of the times when I wish I still had the ability to cry.
Petronilla is not here. There is nothing left. I don’t know what I was hoping for, exactly: some sign of presence, some message scratched for me on the prison wall, some word from her walking ghost. I shut my eyes more tightly, but all I can hear is some inane pop song leaking from a taxi window. Hold on, the singer begs. Every word I say is true. Hold on, I’ll be coming back for you.
I let go of the wall; the pads of my fingers are scored and pockmarked. As I stare at them they plump into their usual shape. The daily miracle, the return to the same healthy flesh. How long must it go on?
I stride back to my car, through a crocodile of French school-children; in the carpark, I have some difficulty remembering what color I rented. Automatically I fasten my seat belt. I have never tried to kill myself; I am afraid to discover that it would not work. I shrug off my shoes and lean my head back on the padded rest. What on earth am I doing here?
My ring is cutting into my finger; I pull it off and stare at it. Rubies to stave off disease; this is my last one. Once in Birmingham someone tried to mug me, and I cracked his nose with this ring.
Time has not absolved me of anything. The clothes have been transformed, the name is different—I change it every fifty years or so—but the face in the rearview mirror is the same. And in almost seven centuries of exile I have not managed to forget Petronilla.
It’s almost funny, isn’t it? One would think that a woman who in her esoteric researches had stumbled across the secret of immortality would feel free. Exhausted by life’s repetitions, yes, starved for fresh food, tormented by the bargain she made, but in some sense free. To wander, at least, to move, to leave behind the quarrels of mortals. I never expected to be so haunted by one face that I would have to make my way back to Kilkenny.
More than any husband or lover or child; more than anyone I have hurt since I went into exile; more than anyone I left without warning (when they wondered why I was not aging) or killed with my bare hands (when they deserved it). Petronilla’s is the only death I still regret. Leaving her behind was the worst thing I have ever done.
I did no harm to my first husband, the richest moneylender in town; I bore him a son and fed him tidbits on his deathbed. As for my second, in my grandmother’s time I could have followed the old ways and left him after a year and a day, but under Common Law I was his for life, to stamp his mark on. I bent under his weight like a reed, and in the pool of humiliation I brushed against my power. He was sick already—the beatings were getting feebler—but the poison sped him on. My third … yes, I remember. I dispatched him in a night, after I caught him in the linen cupboard ripping the skirt off Petronilla. The night before his funeral I dropped his heart in the River Nore.
As for my fourth, John le Poer, he was a loving man who shut his ears to the rumors circulating about me. But by then, you must understand, I had signed with my own blood, and the sacrifice was called for. His hair came out in handfuls when I brushed it at night; his nails began to bend backward. Petronilla never claimed to understand the rituals, but she knew that whatever Dame Alice said had to happen. When John, made suspicious at last by the gossip of my dead husbands’ disinherited children, talked to Bishop Ledrede, it was my faithfu
l maid, my flawless echo, who repeated to me every word they had said. When my husband wrenched the key from my belt and burst into my room, finding and forcing open the padlocked boxes, I kept one curious eye on Petronilla. She wept because the story was almost over, but she showed no shame.
I was charged along with eleven accomplices, most of whom barely knew me to see. The seven charges told of dogs torn limb from limb and scattered at crossroads, fornication with Ethiopian hobgoblins, and a dead baby’s flesh boiled in a robber’s skull. The grease I used to keep my face soft was listed as a sorcerous ointment for the staff on which I flew across Kilkenny town by night. Bishop Ledrede was widely read and had a vivid imagination. He was not to know that power is composed of simple elements, once you have stumbled across it.
Ledrede did not do it for the money his spiritual court could hope to confiscate; like myself, he was motivated by wrath and glory. And so, when I had indicted him for defamation and sailed to England with all my jewels, when my son William had agreed to pay for the reroofing of St. Canice’s as a penance, and when the other accused accomplices had melted into the night, then the bishop focused his gaze on Petronilla. She was all he had left.
It was not that I could not have brought her with me, torn her out of prison somehow; I simply never thought to. That is my crime; that in the urgency of my flight, full of the sense of my own devilish importance, I did not even condemn my maid deliberately, but carelessly, as I might have said, “Pick up that sarsenet gown.”
I have had plenty of time to think of her since. In almost seven centuries of wandering I can make an informed comparison: I have met no one who loved so well or was so betrayed. She was not a natural killer: she ground poisons together out of mute loyalty, and what purer motive is there than that?
It is so long since I killed, I have almost forgotten how. It is not worth risking nowadays. They lock you up, take down what you say, and never put an end to it. Oh Petronilla, how I envy your death. Not the manner of it, the pain and squalor, but its definition. How it took you by the hand and led you away before your bursting youth could dwindle.
Unless I am casting a web of glamor over the story to lessen my guilt? But that’s not how it works. My envy and my guilt pin each other down. Petronilla’s, short and powerless, is the life I did not lead, and cannot lead no matter how long I drag on, and will never fully understand. Petronilla’s exultant face I cannot leave behind me. She follows behind, just out of view, and all the rippling voices are hers.
Quiconques veut d’amors joïr
Doit avoir foy et esperance
Having had faith and hope enough to last her short lifetime, did it come down to love in the end? Was that what she feasted on, among the rats in Kilkenny jail? How could I be loved by such as her?
For all my sheer elastic skin, I am a hollow woman. My ribs are an empty cauldron now; my breath couldn’t put out a candle.
I start the car. My one faith is that I will find some trace of Petronilla. My one hope is that she will teach me how to die. My one love now, the only one whose face I can remember. There, around some corner, she burns, she burns.
Sylvia Molloy
One of the most important lesbian novels to date in Latin American literature is Certificate of Absence (En breve cárcel) (1981) by the Argentine author Sylvia Molloy. Reflecting the fusion of Latin America and Europe that is characteristically Argentinean, Molloy writes with an intensely psychological focus. In this novel, a woman alone in a room attempts to write her way out of the confines of the past and present, a process that paradoxically threatens to strip the future bare. Molloy, a critic as well as a novelist, has done extensive work on Latin American women’s writing and on the construction of sexualities. A striking aspect of the novel excerpted here is the fundamental yet neutral presence of lesbian relationships, a structure through which issues of memory, desire, loss, and exile express themselves. In this passage, the narrator struggles against the current of early memories and family ties and the impending loss of her lover, Renata, whose inability to understand the narrator’s native language underscores the lost intimacies of childhood.
from CERTIFICATE OF ABSENCE
WHY is it difficult to speak of her mother, her sister—Isabel and Clara—when she speaks fearlessly of other women? In one of the versions she foresaw for this story she would have spoken a great deal of her sister. She does not know exactly in what way: she would have wanted to keep her in the margin, regulating her appearances in the story and keeping her in childhood where she remembers her best. She would keep the Clara she whipped for looking so blond, the Clara whose tiny pubis she saw in the bathtub, the Clara who played dolls with her, but few other images. However, there are also dreams: Clara comes back to her often at night. More than once, when sleeping next to Renata, she awoke with a start near dawn and could not return to sleep. She had said something out loud, something Renata did not understand. How could she understand it? She had just spoken to her sister in a language that Renata did not speak, calling Clara’s name. Renata quite rightly turned over and went back to sleep, while she was left with fragments that slowly dissolved. Someday she will rescue those fragments. She feels tempted to do so tonight.
Once more she spends peaceful, almost sleepless hours, haunted by a precise, reedy music that plays over and over. It was a strange, exhausting day. She spent it with Renata and realized once more that she loves her. She also realized that their meetings had changed and lacked their former violence. It is clear now that they speak two different languages. They will never come together in this story, which started out with hope, then turned to fury, and even now is changing. Tonight she accepts, or almost accepts, the idea of parting with Renata, foreseeing the end of the road: because of her mistakes, or Renata’s, it does not lead anywhere. Before the final good-bye, which she is already planning, she knows there will be painful moments. She believes she has the strength to survive them: they will be tests, ordeals. She does not want to guess at the pain and the difficulty and write about them, since she will have to live through them in any case. That is why she seeks refuge in her sister’s blurry figure. Clara calls to her, the Clara to whom she now knows she always wanted to make love.
She writes of her with sadness. She sees so little of her sister, perhaps will not see her again. There is something in Clara against which she must defend herself. Tonight, unable to sleep, she suddenly remembers Clara’s insomnia as an adolescent, the nights she refused to turn out the light. She also remembers her listlessness. Clara at eighteen would spend hours lying in bed, saying she needed nothing, wanted nothing. On those occasions she was only able to hold Clara’s hand. She loved her dearly but could not stand that image of surrender: she had seen it before, in their mother, when she told her daughters she wished she would never wake up. In spite of the insistent images that return to haunt her, she knows she must save herself. And yet, there is something about Clara that makes her want to protect her, wherever, whenever, despite all her fears.
Tonight she remembers Clara for something she prized in her father, in her Aunt Sara: her sense of humor. If that is Clara’s best feature, why not guard it? She would like to recover the complicitous language she and Clara shared, the private fantasies they built together, and, most of all, the laughter she needs so badly. What she really misses today, more than Clara’s sense of humor, is that irrepressible laughter that bound them together as children. She remembers how, at meals, their faces puffing up and their eyes watering, they winked at each other in silent agreement. They would hold back their laughter until the others left the table. Once alone, they were free to finish the meal at their leisure, picking a section of tangerine, a peeled grape, eating some grated apple. (She still has one of her mother’s apple graters, shaped like a fish.) It was then that their laughter exploded. They noisily spat out the peeled grapes, which they used as missiles, trying to see who could shoot the farthest, who could hit the target.
News has just reached her that the house
where she grew up has been sold. She will not see it again. Better said: she will not return to it again in her writing, as she has done up to now, peopling it from a distance. In her mind she goes through it in detail as if it were a dead body, as she looked at the dead bodies of her father and her aunt, as one day—hopefully not too near at hand—she will look at her mother’s dead body, like an untidy heap of bones that has finally lost the appearance of a whole.
She remembers the first time she saw that house, a few months after her sister was born. She herself was about four. Her father had to go over some papers with the former owners before they moved and took her along. She remembers a dining room full of people for tea, as it would so often be later, full of other people. She was given a cup of weak tea and a dry cookie she crumbled up, knowing she would not be able to swallow it. She looked at the dining room fireplace, telling herself that this was her new home. An old woman presided at a table she remembers as huge; she also recalls many other children, lots of noise. All of a sudden, as the family began to disband, the old woman changed places and sat down next to her. She talked to her, making her forget the cookie she could not eat. She took her outside to the front yard and showed her a jasmine bush, asking her to take care of it for her. But she did not take care of it; she was four years old and did not know how to take care of plants. She did, however, go look at it regularly, until one day that spindly jasmine, which probably would never have done well anyway, suddenly disappeared. Had it grown, it would now reach the balcony of the room where she and her sister slept and might even touch the window of their parents’ room. Jasmine: there are so many kinds. For childhood the star jasmine, with little flowers, like the one she should have taken care of, or the other one that covered the shed in the backyard where she and Clara kept their toys. For later in life, the Arabian jasmine, with fleshy white flowers that always die gloriously. There are also the others, which most people do not know now. They have sky-blue flowers, barely scented (that is their defect) and the best name of all: jasmines from heaven. They used to twine around a privet hedge in her yard, next to the wild plum.
