Four chapters from Bilocation
| 8.
9.
Andrew was reading Benavides’ “Origin of the Indians of New Mexico” and bemused to find that the friar thought the New World had been populated both across the Bering Strait from Asia and from Greenland, a curiously modern view, though prefaced by the usual proviso of faith, “insmuch as America, as well as the rest of the world, was submerged in the Great Flood, I leave the research as to whence it was peopled the first time to the many authors who discuss this subject.” Then Benavides went on to relate the story told by “ old Indians” how the population grew so great and was governed by one man, whose two sons killed him and began a long rivalry and war to be the “elder brother.” After years of bloodshed, “the devil, as instigator of this discord, …appeared personally to the faction called Mexicans and told them that he would lead them to the best land in the world, where they would not meet with any opposition, and that wherever he should appear unto them in the form of an eagle on a plant, which they call prickly pear, placed on a heap of stones, there they should settle …Subsequently they set him up as their god and made an idol or statue of him with the name of the same devil, Huisilopustli.” This was undoubtedly Huizopochlti, the “smoking mirror,” Andrew thought, twin brother of Quetzcoatl among the Aztecs and Benavides recounting of the stories he must have first heard during his stay in Mexico. But Andrew could not place the rest of the myth; who were the Teoas? that tribe that was dominated by the other brother? They too were visited by a demon, but a demon in the form of an old woman, very tall and thin. “Her mouth was large and filled with enormous fangs, which protruded; her breasts, sagging loosely, were long and flabby; claws on her hands, feet, and heels; her head covered with coarse, gray, matted hair.” So misogynistic, Andrew thought, that description of the old demonic woman, and so like the depictions of the Medusa; he remembered suddenly the art show his mother had taken him to when he was young, the “Legacy of Carthage” or something like that, when he had stared into a reconstructed mosaic, innumerable bright bits of stone arranged in the depiction of a Medusa, her thick powerful face surrounded by the writhing ringlets of snakes, a stare of formidable power. Though this figure, as described by Benavades, seemed almost pathetic, devoid of power. Except for what Benavides described as “an enormous and terrible boulder of iron” that she carried on her head. She told the Teoas to follow her and that wherever she dropped the boulder would be the boundary of their lands. So they followed her for “four hundred leagues from the lake of Copala, where they had first settled, to the valley which we now call Santa Barbara,” and “there the infernal old woman dropped the boulder and said to the Teoas who to this day still live in New Mexico, that their land extended to that point and that they should not go beyond it.” So much of it was dependent upon the Spanish mind that Benavides brought with him, that emphasis upon dominion and boundaries, the sense of all the land being governed by one monarchy that was shattered by the brothers’ feud, so that Benavides had thought of the tribes as having dominions and provinces when in fact many of them were nomadic so that the term Jumanos had been used by Espejo for the people at La Junta, for a plains tribe named by Zaldivar in 1698, for the Quiviras by Onate in 1601, for an Arizona tribe that was variously associated with the Apache (which was itself a term used to denote all “wild” or yet “uncivilized” Indians), to the “rayados’ or striped ones of Gran Quivira (itself a misnomer for the lost great city that Coronado never found) and the other pueblos of the Salinas area of New Mexico. And what was that about that iron boulder on her head? some rock formation? Andrew could think of nothing in his native state that matched the description, yet Benavides claimed to have seen it several times, stamped with “the marks of her claws, feet, and hands, as well as the nails of her hands, with which she appeared to have kneaded it as if it were of wax. Her very head with its tangled hair, upon which she had borne the globe, is there stamped.” The friar described it as weighing more than “two hundred quintals…as wide as the largest wagon wheel and … almost eight spans high”. Not much more than a large boulder really, Andrew thought, perhaps that was why nothing came to mind? Perhaps it was significant that it was described as made of iron, some ancient meteorite that had fallen to the earth, and therefore sacred to the Teosas? or was it only the friar who noticed that it was made of iron, the tribes not having iron knives or projectiles prior to the coming of the Spanish, so that the stone had practical value only to the friar and the conquistadores who travelled with him. Well, it couldn’t be a landmark, Andrew thought, for Benavides wrote that after a friar “exorcised it and said mass over it” the horses were no longer afraid of it and would even climb over it, a large stone somewhere out in a desert landscape full of stones. Fray Benavides went on to describe his meeting with
Maria Agreda (and here Andrew flipped to the page number he had written
in the margins of his notebook) “Mother Maria de Jesus, present abbess
of the convent of Conception, can not be twenty-nine years of age yet.
She has a beautiful face, very white although rosy, with large black eyes.
Her habit, and that of all the nuns in the convent - they number twenty-nine
in all - is just the same as our habit. It is made of coarse gray sackcloth,
worn next to the skin, without any other tunic, skirt, or underskirt. Over
this gray habit comes the one of white sackcloth, coarse, with a scapulary
of the same material, and the cord of our father, Saint Francis. Over the
scapulary there is a rosary. They wear no sandals of any other footwear
except some boards tied to their feet, or some hemp sandals. Their cloak
is of heavy blue sackcloth. They wear a black veil.” Where was the blue
baize of Father Massanet’s account Andrew wondered? Well, perhaps Maria
Agreda’s beauty and response to it was the angelic counterpoint to
Fray Benavides’ sense of the ugliness and his sense of revulsion to this
ancient mythic figure? Surely, the Teoas themselves would not have described
this ancient woman whom they followed across four hundred miles of desert,
so extreme that the Spanish renamed it the Journey of Death, the Jornada
del Muerto, and who granted them dominion over the land, with the same
revulsion? Her appearance might have been quite otherwise in their
telling, the claws and fangs not so much revulsions as powers granted from
the animal kingdom, as some Native peoples believed that the world had
been spun by a sort of grandmotherly spider. On the next page,
there was a black and white reproduction of Maria Agreda sitting at a desk,
wide-eyed and pleasant looking, while behind her a statue of Mary holding
the Christ child was ringed by stars. The picture had been owned
originally by Fray Garcia de San Francisco, who founded the mission in
Socorro, not far from the Salinas, even if those days by foot or horse,
and only later thought to be the depiction of Maria Agreda. She looked
different than in the other reproduction Andrew had seen, more round of
face, less nose, more eyes, a pleasant girl’s face, he wondered if it was
her, in either reproduction, for the other seemed oddly posed as if the
depiction of what the artist might think a mystic nun of that time and
background would look like. And why was Fray Garcia in possession of such
a drawing of a nun? perhaps his scraggly haired girlfriend, Andrew laughed
to himself, for whatever these friars may have felt within themselves,
it was inevitably caught up in the overwhelming miraculous web of the church,
so that he could envision a meeting among friars, where Fray Garcia’s accidental
disclosure of his nun would be asserted to be the miraculous appearance
of the face of Maria Agreda in the New World. Well, it was so complicated,
so confusing, The “kingdoms” (and kingdoms again, Andrew noted) that
Maria Agreda wrote of in her letter to the Friars of New Mexico “I call
these kingdoms with reference to our way of speaking, Titlas, Chillescas,
and Caburcos, which not been discovered.” Imaginary lands, Andrew
thought, and the friars never did discover these kingdoms of which
she spoke, but eventually concluded that she must meant those they did
find, only misnamed. No wonder, Andrew thought, the Appendix
commented ironically: “regarding the color of the baize so particularly
specified by the Indian (in Father Massanet’s account), it should be noted
that Benavides just as explicitly states that the habit of the nun was
gray, although the cloak was of heavy blue sackcloth. This no doubt will
prove sufficient to indicate the mental character of this nun.” Perhaps
Bellmore was right, perhaps it was no more than some affective disorder;
for the trouble, Andrew thought, was that he didn’t know himself, how could
he seriously argue for or even suggest in a dissertation that there
might be anything credible to these flights to another world, that anyone
could have this ability to be in two places at once? He’d be assigned
to the dim margins of parapsychology, like that vague and disturbing shore
where Medusa and her sisters, also gorgons, were said to have been banished
and confined.
10. Dave, who was he?, Loreen wondered, feeling the ache
of her knees against the cold concrete floor where she was kneeling
in the storage room. Andrew had been in a panic that morning over a permission
form for a school field trip which he couldn’t find among the papers smashed
in the bottom of his backpack beneath the school books or in the scattered
heaps of papers, drawings, printed out internet pictures of Pokemon and
Hamtaro figures, that seemed to be everywhere in the living room, on the
tv, in the corner, on the coffee table which was heaped with books and
bits of toys. So while she had reassured him that it didn’t matter, she
could always type one up and sign it, she had felt prodded by her own sense
of guilt to begin rummaging among the boxes in the storage room. Why don’t
I ever throw anything out? she chided herself, every school paper that
Andrew had done was in a box somewhere, she couldn’t bear to throw out
anything, for she could see him in the pictures that were colored sloppily,
spilling over the lines, always so pressurized at school to get the work
done, coloring carelessly as he flagged himself to meet the teacher’s sense
of haste, or in the neat flourish of his lettering on other papers,
how he had felt spacious with time and happiness. As she reached
into one box, a handful of loose photos had fallen out onto the floor,
and as she picked them up, she couldn’t help but be distracted by Andrew
at two, held awkwardly as if he were going to spill out of Dave’s arms,
Dave with his right leg cocked and resting on a railing. Andrew looked
distressed, his face folded up upon itself. Once, she thought, she would
have felt it was because of the way Dave was holding him, or perhaps the
toddler’s sense of his father’s irritation, for Dave was often irritated,
always, he said, from being tired or hungry or having too much trouble
at work. Why was Dave holding Andrew, his arm so tightly around his waist
that the baby was folded over; it was as if he were carrying a sack of
dog food, and what was that look but posing? A sort of defiant youthfulness,
she had thought once, but really the look of a juvenile delinquent who
has gotten away with it, smiling at her as if she were stupid, and, well,
no wonder, he had always implied that he knew more than she did, she had
been stupid, he knew what he had done in that eclipse of being which Loreen
could still not imagine, and so he was always smiling like that,
having gotten away with it.
***
“Titlas” Andrew thought, damn he had been wrong, wrong when he had given his presentation, and, worse wrong in his dream, that face behind the iron grille hissing “tiltas,” for the word that Maria Agreda had used in her account was “titlas.” How had the word so changed on him, as if it were made of some fluid material? He hated the mistake, and it did no good to tell himself that probably no one would remember the presentation anyway; he was more distressed by his mind’s alteration of what he thought he knew, as if the words were like the heaps of small stones that Benavides thought were used to mark their roads (“There are at intervals along all the roads, in particular places, heaps of small stones which nature has formed in a curious manner, and wherever they find them, they place feathers on them,” not knowing that the feathers were, in fact, prayers, as the rocks were, heaped up by other hands, vanished ancestors). Andrew had woken up in the middle of the night again, startled awake with his mind devoid of image or feeling, and then, sitting up in his bed, his head upon his knees which were folded up to his chest, his arms around him, as if he were the small boy he had once been hugging himself to himself, the mistake had occurred to him, like a small thorn, like those goatheads with their hard triangular heads above a quarter inch honed point that used to be scattered at random through the backyard, where he had insisted upon going barefoot anyway, all the while knowing they were there. Stepping gently upon the ground, if he felt the edge of one, he could draw his foot back quickly; the trouble was when he forgot and walked more decisively. The trouble, he thought, was always when he walked through the world as if he belonged to it. His mind hopping around on one foot, his arms flailing to keep his balance, his right hand reaching down to his uplifted foot to seize the goathead (titlas) embedded in it and pull it out, leaving a wince in his heel and a smear of blood. He hated these small mistakes, the way that they undermined any sense of certainty in himself, as if all the error in him had come to rest upon the head of a pin (or the head of a goathead, though this made him laugh, the idea of the theologians counting the number of angels that could dance on a head of a pin replaced by his wondering how many demons of error could dance on a goathead). Why am I afraid to sleep and afraid to dream? Andrew wondered, and why didn’t he dream of Intima anymore? There had been a time when the feeling of her being there seemed to be a drift of cloud that he felt in the cells of his skin, a kind of feeling of wakefulness even when asleep, as if he felt her there like sunlight falling on his arms, so present that he almost had felt he was somewhere else, some other place that was neither where she was, walking down a street in Granada past the gypsy woman who tried to place a sprig of rosemary on her palm to keep her there and pay to have her fortune told, nor where he was, snarled in his sheets like a fly caught up in the sloppy intertwinings of a spider’s web. He wished that he could dream of her, for it was easier to go to sleep feeling somehow consoled in some other place, no matter how distant or impossible it was; what was it that he had read in that dream dictionary that one who dreams of kissing another is either expressing feelings that cannot be said easily by daylight or is consoling himself? It was more likely the second, Andrew thought, for he had expressed his feelings to her sometimes by daylight, and been met by a sort of flatness combined with gestures of casual cheerfulness, or else cool and distinct definitions which often required that he then reassure her about the reasonableness of her remarks and his capacity for accepting them. The last such conversation had done something to him though, she had been so angry that he had forgotten what it was she had said while the feeling itself, that terrible anger, had seemed to seep into him, like black water, like black rain, to settle into the groundwork and foundations, so deeply saturating him, that it seemed impossible to think or feel or say anything of it. He hadn’t written to her for days, even though she had written twice wondering if he was all right, or if the mail servers on campus weren’t working. He felt stalled out between his desire to hear from her, and his reluctance to say or give anything more of himself to one who had so angrily refused it. Well, it wasn’t so much the refusal, as it was that sense in which she always implied that he was doing something terrible to her by saying the things that he had said, some way in which she suggested he was violating her and violating the natural order of things, that sense that she had that everything had to evolve of its own nature, which meant (he thought) according to her sense of time. It was always others’ sense of time that Andrew felt constrained by, the way they ran too fast or too slow, some of them as incremental as the time lapse photography of a bean cotyledon unfolding in a science experiment where the bean had been left on a damp paper towel, others of them racing like that delivery truck this morning trying to beat the light and so pulling around the rain-filled gutter and sending up a geyser of water that had drenched Andrew and made him have to walk back to his apartment to change, too soaked and freezing to go on to school, and always some issue of power contained in them, the delivery truck so large that it knew any smaller vehicle or a pedestrian like Andrew would not challenge it for the light, or Bellmore’s insistence that afternoon that Andrew make a hundred copies of the syllabus within the next thirty minutes, or that weird sense of failure that attended a fifth year phd student, like Greg, who not having finished his dissertation or having any sense of ever being able to finish it felt banished to some kind of limbo of misplaced intent and nagging resolves and procrastinations, so that wherever he went he would introduce his work sheepishly as if excusing himself from any serious consideration. Always one’s own sense of time felt so natural and organic to oneself, Andrew thought, but he felt that he had always been so caught up in the deadlines (and they were just that dead lines) of others and constrained by their sense of time, when he should speak, when he shouldn’t, that as a result it seemed to him that he had no sense of time. No matter how often he wrote the date on an attendance roll or in a grade book or wrote it on a check, or checked his watch, he could never remember what day it was, the students laughed at him for this, for asking for the second or third time (for they may have seen him asking the same question in an earlier class) what day was it? did anyone know? before he wrote it atop the attendance paper that then was passed around the class and filled up with signatures. The only time, I know, he thought, is 3:15 in the morning, it is always that hour, and I don’t know why. *** Bianca must have been eight or so in the photo, (when had she taken it, Loreen wondered, she couldn’t remember or even if she had) such beautiful hair, so black, all those curls falling to her shoulders, she was laughing upstairs in the kitchen, her body all akimbo, stretched out as if she were about to fall, her right hand on the edge of the table, her left reaching out, her hand upon Andrew’s arm, who looked about three, and was laughing back at her as he pretended to pull away, her smooth golden brown hand upon his pale smooth little boy’s arm. Had she taken it?, Loreen wondered, or was it David’s photograph, like this one, Bianca, her lips in the pout of deep sleep, on the couch upstairs, her hand falling to the floor, her hair a disorder against the red and black Southwestern pattern of the cushions, the blackness of the locks almost vanishing into the black of the geometric depiction of a sacrificial bird, the bright red highlighting other strands, so that she seemed to be sleeping in a pool of blood and shadow. David, somehow, Loreen thought, feeling her mind edging toward the edge of that abyss that she always felt looming within her, must have been leaning over her while she slept, so close, focused and intent, the camera lens like the first instrument of possession. No, she thought, I can’t think of this, and dropped the photo back into the box as if it were a burning scrap of paper that had singed her fingers. She looked back at the other one, Andrew looked so happy, she must have taken it, all of David’s photos were of children, and always a child alone, no matter how many other people, adults and children must have been in the room, always focused upon the sleeping face, that self-absorbed expression, that gaze out the window, that moment when a face became most mysterious, gravid and lonely and beautiful with its sense of self, and she realized, with a twinge as if a thorn had embedded itself in her, seductive. ***
Dear Intima, (Andrew was typing on his computer in his office)*** Automatically, instinctively, Loreen jumped when the doorbell rang, she was almost incandescent with alarm, she was afraid it might be Andrew, no it couldn’t be, he was in school, no, she realized she was really afraid it might be David, returned from wherever he was, standing in the doorway with his face turbid with some undisclosed emotion, so that he would hold his look down to the ground, until she said something, anything, hello, David, what is it? and then, having the excuse, his eyes drilling into her, a sort of cold and glittering stone, like those obsidian knives the Aztecs used to cut the still living hearts out of those they sacrificed, flaked and sharpened out of the molten flow of some ancient volcano into a look of extermination, the words spilling out of his mouth almost unheard, she could never remember them afterwards, just the feeling as if invisible blows were raining down upon her head and her arms, a barrage of incomprehensible syllables, that seemed so inexact and yet which seemed to strike her within herself, hitting this sore spot and that raw one, as if he knew every hurt within her, and managed to both distract her with that flurry falling in the air around her and to strike her exactly. What had he said? what had he ever said? she couldn’t remember, the words were so vague, rapid, too quick to catch, and she was always just stunned, something in her, still and motionless, unbreathing, for fear it would be exterminated on the edge of his look, of the continual threat of the sharp edge that would be driven into her. She looked up quickly through the glass that lined the door, damn, the door was unlocked, she had left it open for Andrew’s return from school since the door which was painted Barcelona Brown and faced south became so hot by mid-afternoon that the brass handle burnt to the touch. Oh, thank God, it was some young woman holding a baby, perhaps another lost soul, for the streets in Loreen’s subdivision were broken by other streets, so that the east branch of the street she lived on was three turns and four streets away, on the other side of the main highway, in an area of arroyos and scrub pinon and juniper trees. Or, perhaps she thought, relieved, it was someone selling candy bars or raffle tickets for the innumerable fundraisers at the local school and churches. When she opened the door, she saw the young woman, dressed casually in still summer clothes, a sleeveless blouse, a short skirt, holding the baby in a t-shirt and diaper on her hip, hanging back behind the other woman that Loreen hadn’t seen, a young woman with long blond hair, pulled back in a variety of pulls and clips, wearing a long charcoal skirt, purple shoes, a purple velvet blouse and holding in her right hand a book, the Bible. Oh, no, Loreen thought, probably Jehovah’s witnesses, and sure enough the young woman said her rehearsed speech, “Good morning, we are just visiting with our neighbors today to share God’s word,” and as she said it, she unbuttoned the clasp of the purple binder in which the Bible and several brochures were contained. Loreen would once have hesitated, torn between her desire to be pleasant and her refusal of the sermon, but she was still angry enough from having been made afraid, that she said coldly, “No, no thank you, I’m not interested.” The young woman tried another tack, “Are you all Bible readers?” as if she assumed such a house would be full of family, innumerable children, a husband, since it wasn’t uncommon, Loreen thought, for the local churches to be full of women while their husbands were at home watching a football game or out hunting Canada geese. But it was too much trouble to correct her, and since she couldn’t bring herself to lie even to get rid of an unwanted guest, she nodded, “Well, yes, I have read the Bible” though without saying the wiseacre addendum “at least once or twice” that made her smile to herself. ”That’s just what we want to encourage,” the smile, self-effacing and somehow aggressive, Loreen felt, “that’s just what we want to encourage, reading the Bible, and so we’re sharing something from Psalms with all of our neighbors this morning,” and the girl moved forward, pressing closer to Loreen, while her hand riffled through the pages to find her place. She held out the book as if it were a mirror in which Loreen could see herself. What would she think if she knew that it was only curiosity that made her look? for Loreen was suddenly thinking perhaps she would take this random message, this passage, for some kind of sign. “The psalm is to make us aware of the human being having the capacity to know God” and the girl read three lines from it. Loreen stared into the page, trying to catch the words on either side of the passage, but there was nothing, something about the “common flesh of all human beings.” ” Thanks,” Loreen said brightly looking up. “Oh thank you,” the girl said,” have a good one” so cheered at the dispensation , her job done, went off smiling. It was strange, Loreen thought, the way people approached others, knocking on their doors, calling on the phone, saying whatever it was they said, without knowing anything of where or how the person they approached was foundering. That girl who had so thought to spread the lightness of God’s word would never known that she had so awoken in Loreen: that mindless fear , knocking on the door like the return of a demon, that adrenaline lapsing into some sense of waste and exhaustion, and Loreen going through the rest of the day, imprinted, as if by someone else’s fingerprint disturbingly exact and vague on the rim of a once clear glass. *** The wound was terrifying, large enough that three of her fingers barely covered the black clots within it, the torn edges around the rim of it, as if something had been torn out of her, ripping the skin back as it went, though the lateral sides of the wound were cut cleanly, as if with something very sharp. Maria Agreda had woken up screaming, a terrible burning in her left side, and begun tearing off her habit, the rough sackcloth felt as if it were abrading her left side whenever she breathed, and she had thought of nothing, not gratitude for the thick walls of her cell which kept her scream from being heard, not wonderment at her trance, but only flailed out, tearing at her clothes, like a mad woman, in the same way that she had once seen a mad dog, its mouth a froth of foam, tearing at its own skin, grabbing it tightly between its teeth and peeling a long flap of skin and fur from its nearly raw leg. Naked, she stood shivering in the chill and unheated room, wondering at the wound in her left side, two fingerbreadths below her ribs, a hand’s breadth to the left of her navel, she was relieved it wasn’t bleeding, she didn’t know how she would hide the amount of blood that must have come from such a wound beneath her habit, it would surely have soaked through, and one of those sisters who was already watching her with a suspicious eye would surely have noticed. The wound seemed almost healed, except for the pain that seemed to burn and twist within it, as if something, invisibly, were still embedded in her, and what were those bits of green in the jagged edges of skin, she reached down and so tentatively lifted one out on the tip of her fingernail. It looked like the torn bit of a leaf, some kind of plant, intricate, almost herbal like. She noticed that the wound was filled with such tiny bits as if a poultice of leaves had been placed upon it and taken away, leaving the small fragments. “When they come to these places, weary from
their journey or troubled with any other burden, they pull the root of
any plant out of the ground and clean and rub themselves with it; then
they place it between two of the stones in the heap, and by so doing they
believe that they are liberated from hunger and weariness.” Andrew was
reading the account of Benavides of the various rituals of Teoas, rituals
which the friar found strange and incomprehensible, that when they went
fishing, they offered ground corn meal to the river, or when they went
hunting for deer, ground corn meal to the skull of a deer, or that they
worshipped fire, not really a mysterious thing, Andrew thought, given the
difficulty of dispersing and keeping fire in such time, particularly when
Benavides had previously described the Indians as killing all sorts of
animals and eating them raw. Every ritual the Teoas had was offered up
by Benavides as proof of their idolatory and their being in the snare of
the devil. The plants with which they rubbed themselves were undoubtedly
some herbal balm, Andrew thought, and which they used thinking the plants
had particular efficacies growing as they did among the sacred rocks. Prayers
everywhere like the turkey feathers that the Teoas placed in the anthills
of any strange land into which they travelled believing that it would keep
them safe from any enemies that inhabited that land. A hope or wish for
blessing, the same hope or wish one saw everywhere in every culture, a
feather upon the air, a feather implanted in a anthill or rock, like the
strings of feathers the Tibetan Buddhists tied on the mountain passes of
the Himalayas, like the swinging of the priest’s censure through
the air, distributing the smoke of frankincense on the air, all those invisible
blessings depicted by the smallest of ordinary things and gestures. And
yet Benavides had viewed it all as idolatory, had seen no similarities
between his own faith and the faith of those other peoples, he viewed their
society as divided between warriors and sorcerers and all their rituals
as no more than the thousands of idols of wood, “painted in the fashion
of a game of nine pins” that he burnt in the public square, though the
description made Andrew laugh, suddenly imagining a game “bowling
for demons,” each of the bowling pins with the head of an imp. He
had been right, he thought about the misogyny, there was a passage
about the “idolatory of the wicked women” which Benavides found “amazing
and ridiculous” for “when they are fat and lusty, if the men do not look
on them and give them blankets, which is their main desire, “ he described
how they would go into the fields and make an idol of a stone or a stick
and fast and drink the juice of palmilla, another kind of herb, which would
make them vomit, all the while flagellating themselves and feeding the
idol until they were so thin and feeble that “resembling the devil himself,”
they would go back to the pueblo, confident “that every man who beholds
them will crave them and give them many blankets and others presents.”
A sort of anorexia or bulimia, Andrew thought, but could this be true?
there were many practices among the Indians of purging and fasting as a
means of purifying oneself or gaining some greater power; he had the sense
that he was looking at some much more greater and sacred reality but through
a distorting and ridiculing lens. For Benavides went on to claim, “the
devil has so ensnared and blinded them that, although they know by experience
that not only do they not look inviting but that the men laugh at them,
and oftentimes they die from this, not even then do they mend their ways.”
So oxymoronic, that anyone would had died from such a practice,
could mend anything, much less their ways. And why would the women have
engaged in such practices if they knew from experience that the men would
laugh at them or find their appearance unappealing? It probably had nothing
to do with some strange ritual, so curiously modern, of becoming thin and
desirable, but rather was probably Benavides’ misapprehension of some women’s
purification ritual that had to do with the restoration or claiming of
particular spiritual powers. Something like the Sun Dance among Souix warriors
or the ritual of the sweat lodge among most of the Plains Indians tribe.
A way into vision and power in another spiritual world, for the Indians
too had believed in the possibility of bilocation, of being in two worlds
at once and thought that fasting and solitude was the way to open the door
between them. So odd, to think of two worlds engaged in the same
practices of opening the door to the other world, so that one could both
inhabit the reality of the plaza, that public gathering place in both the
Indian pueblos of the New World and the pueblos, like Agreda itself, in
the Old World, and finding each other incomprehensible. So that it
seemed to Andrew that both the tragedy and beauty of the encounter was
caught up in this parallelism, the way in which they found each other incomprehensible,
all the while their belief in another world, in bilocation, in the practices
that cultivated it, created an odd and mysterious correspondence. (Andrew
thought of the time he had visited Taos pueblo with some friends that he
and his mother were taking on a sort of mini-tour of the Southwest, by
accident, they had arrived on a feastday and the church at the pueblo was
full of people. They had stood outside, barred from entering the church
during its sacred ceremonies, like all tourists, and listened to that strange
sound, the Catholic Mass being sung in the piercing cries, the singsong
lilt of Tewa, so that it had seemed both familiar to Andrew and entirely
unknown and mysterious, the rhythms of the Mass conveyed in the beating
of the deerskin drums, like some animal murmur, the voices of the women
as sharp as bird cries in the thickets of false dawn). Though he found
Benavides hard to take, particularly when he was so unironic, so unaware
of what he said about himself when in commenting how “the women build the
walls and houses; the men spin and weave and go to war,” he concluded “Innumerable
were the rituals with which the devil had ensnared this heathen people."
Andrew noticed that he mistyped “the women build the walls and houses”
as “the women build the walls and hours.” Such accidents of language
always bemused him as if some gap opened up in the words, some entrance
to another level of meaning, not necessarily truer, but just as true,
as if everything had become more mysterious and alive. Unlike error, that
thorn in one’s foot, instead, the mind always imprinting itself upon the
world, not so much imprinting, but faltering, opening itself like a wound
with every stammer or stumble. He always felt something in himself
opening up at such accidents, as if houses were full of hours, as if he
were full of time. A door blown open at the touch of some summer
wind, so that it knocked softly upon the lintel, like something seeking
admittance, so that whatever was knotted up in himself unravelled, this
love like some invisible winged and subtle thing that suddenly opened itself
to the sunlight and the infinite blue of the sky.
11. The river was thin from the heat, it had shrunk to brown trickles that still ran through the large round boulders and cleared only in the small pools that dotted its mud flats here and there, each one a still clear eye, abandoned by the current. A bug, sort of like a spider, skated across the surface of the pool closest to her, and she could see in the thick mud that lined the bottom, a small fish, no bigger than her smallest finger, a prickly spine on its back, its sucker mouth working through the mud and sending up tiny eddies, the whirls like inky currents in the clearer, almost tea-stained pool. It was odd, she thought that she could see this water spider so clearly, she could almost feel how it floated on the surface of the water, not breaking whatever it was that held the waters together, the movement of its legs leaving silver streaks that vanished almost at the moment they appeared, and yet she did not know where she was, she felt almost like an eye floating over the river. The banks of the river were thick with a kind of heavy brush, and behind them great towering trees, with many trunks, and broad palm-sized leaves, as if in the shape of hands, continually moving, flashing their undersides, a lighter green than the surfaces, which were so thickly veined as to resemble the lines in the human hand, or the veins in the hands of a man accustomed to hard labor, continually turning, like the birds, a flock of what looked like sparrows, so many of them, clouding the sky, that would abruptly turn at once, and create a kind of varying shape against the bright blue, everything moving in the breeze that seemed to follow the flow of the river. She saw the people last, three of them standing in a small clearing at the edge of the river, where the grass and the brush appeared to have been worn away from the passage of many people or animals to the water. They were brown, almost as brown as Moors, but with a sort of sultry dust to their skins, and their eyes were brightly black, glittering almost like obsidian or jet. They were hardly dressed, so she did no more than glance at their bare chests, glistening with a thin sheen of sweat, and looked into their faces. Startled like animals, she thought, that have been asleep in the field when a wolf or a strange dog runs up upon them, the muscles knotted in their arms, their legs so that they seemed ready to bound back into the brush and disappear. What were these words? they seemed to fill the air around her, and at first she thought it was someone else speaking behind her, some attending angel, but, no, it was her own voice that startled her, full of incomprehensible l’s, vowels that she found incomprehensible, she sounded as if she were speaking an animal tongue. At the sound of her voice, the three men seemed to become even more afraid, one of them, the youngest of them, she didn’t know how she had gotten so close to them, she didn’t remember walking across the river bank; surely, if she had, she would have felt the thick mud clotting up between her toes or the flap of her sandals getting stuck. He had something in his hand, it looked like a piece of sharpened rock, the same rusty color as the more quickly running trickles of the river, she could see the gouges on the side of it, intricate, as if it had been flaked off to fashion the sharpness that, drawing his arm back at the elbow,(it all happened too quickly, she thought) he plunged into her side. “The most incomprehensible aspect of Benavides’ account (at the moment anyway, for it just gets crazier and crazier, Andrew thought typing up his notes) is his claim that Maria de Agreda reported being martyred in the New World. There was one incident at a river where she encountered a number of Indians of an unspecified and unnamed tribe that, supposedly later telling the account themselves, met her sudden appearance in the air with a rain of arrows, though they weren’t certain whether they had hit her or not. But she herself, in her conversation with Benavides, went even further, declaring that she had been martyred “many times” for the faith. So that her claim of having bloated to the New World is further inflated by her claim to have been killed during these random encounters with various tribes, and then somehow restored to life. It’s curious that this doesn’t seem to have been problematic with Benavides’ orthodoxy as an officer of the Inquisition. For it would seem that if the theological terms of his belief are accepted prima facie, he would have shuddered at the suggestion that this nun, by virtue of having died and been resurrected many times, had surpassed Christ Himself who was capable of death and resurrection only once. The accusation of heresy or blasphemy was never attached to these claims of Maria de Agreda; rather much of the furor in the 18th century seems to have been focused on the ‘indecent’ nature of her description of the Virgin Mary’s nine months in her mother’s womb. Perhaps this claim of being martyred many times was not significant enough; there’s only Benavides’ account of a private conversation, rather than the volume that was the Mystical City of God and already being read by Phillip IV and therefore granted a certain authority. Benavides himself passes by her remark in a sentence. But skeptical of the tome of supporting and elaborated orthodoxy, a modern reader may wonder at these very brevities and elisions which are passed over so quickly. It seems curious that Maria de Agreda was never suspected of the heresy of presumption or pride, claiming as she did to be the autobiographer of the Mother of God, to bilocate some five hundred times to the New World, and to have been killed and resurrected on any number of occasions. In . . . “(here Andrew stopped writing, this was terrible, he thought, she must have been demented, utterly crazy, how was he ever going to accommodate this in any reasonable way? Professor Jaimson would wither him with scorn at his orals, Andrew’s dissertation wouldn’t even be met with that snort of derision or the false and hearty laugh with which Jaimson suggested that the poor scrap of a thing would pass, barely, hanging by no more than the thread of his good humor, no, Andrew would be met by silence, as if what he had written were so painfully bad that it hurt Jaimson to even glance in his direction.) Oh crap, Andrew thought, saving the file anyway, his head hurt, his sinuses ached, as if a finger had pressed too hard into the spots between his eyebrows and beneath them, and then again, at the sides of his head. Perhaps it would help to get something to eat; he rummaged around in the drawer of his desk and, scrambling among the paper clips and the pen caps which had long ago lost their pens and scraps of paper with various notes to himself, found enough loose change, $3.85, and scraping up the dimes from the corners with the edge of his fingernails, went out to the Vietnamese food cart that was parked out of the edge of the square. The air was already cold, as if autumn were being abbreviated and rushed into winter, and he could hear the clatter of the leaves, some of them already gone dry and brown, in the branches of the trees along the walk. Hardly anyone was out, a couple of students that he didn’t recognize, probably grad students for they were always eating here, able to afford something with the change they could rummage together from their drawers or pockets or friends. The steam was rising from the stove and the various pots simmering upon it, inside the dim interior of the metal trailer, a kind of vapor rising out of the open window where orders were placed, and Andrew felt suddenly ravenous, every smell in the air was so various and rich, full of spices and flavors that he could taste and smell though not name, he wanted to order everything and at the same time nothing, for that overwhelming richness on the air made him so aware of his own hunger, a piercing thing, that he was almost reluctant to relinquish it to some actual dish that would fill him with warmth and a kind of sleepiness, a drowsy state of being where he would not feel his own existence so sharply. In any case, there was hardly anything he could afford, a couple of types of soup, one which he already knew he didn’t like for its sour taste of curdled egg, but what was the other one? The clerk, who was probably the owner, had come to the order window and was leaning out, expectantly, with that quick respect with which he hurried to any the customer, his thinning black hair swept back on his head, sweating from the heat of the stove. Andrew ordered the other soup, wondering how badly he had mispronounced the words, and began putting his change on the counter; undoubtedly the man was used to counting the pennies of graduate students, but Andrew was embarrassed, so he put the coins down in contained circles--a dollar of quarters, a dollar of clustered dimes, a cloud of nickels, and the eighty-five cents made of various coins. The man opened one of the large metal soup pots and ladled a thick broth, golden colored, full of chunks and bits, with a long ?handled spoon, into a tall styrofoam cup, so generously, a little of the soup spilled down the sides, the man put a lid on the cup and wiped off the soup around the sides with a white rag that was stained enough to make Andrew wonder how often it had been used. Placing a plastic spoon and a paper napkin on top of the cup, the man set it down on the counter, assessing the coins and scooping them up quickly. “What’s in it, anyway?” Andrew asked. “Oh, very good soup, pork, vegetables, good pork soup,” the man said smiling, pleased to have the chance to say something about his labors. “Oh,” Andrew said, feeling a twinge of revulsion, he should have asked first or not asked at all and just eaten it, unknowingly, but the man was still waiting, so he said “thank you,” and the man nodded “have a very good day.” Andrew turned back toward his building, holding the cup of soup in both hands; it was too full, sloshing at every step he took and bubbling out of the small square opening in the plastic lid, leaking down the sides of the cup, hot enough to burn his fingers, so that he kept moving his grasp, shifting from one side to the other. Pork, he thought, oh well, he was too hungry not to eat it, and there was no reason he shouldn’t really, except that odd childhood prejudice against pork, so that he had thought for a long time that he was secretly Jewish, as if some gene from some vanished ancestor were lodged within him, mounting some obscure protest in his nerves and sensibility. He stepped on a rough seam of sidewalk and a spoonful of soup poured out on his hand, burning it slightly. He winced and decided to sit down on one of the wooden benches along the walk where he began eating, blowing on each spoonful until it was cool enough not to burn his lips and tongue. It really was good, subtle and full of touches of spice, a light thing despite its thickness; he had thought that the pork might be too strong, an overpowering animal flavor. He began eating the thick bits of vegetables out of it, carrots, bits of broccoli, celery, water chestnut. He ate as quickly as it cooled, and, finally finished the broth, tilting the cup back and draining the last bit of it, though since he hadn’t eaten any of the pork, the small chunks of meat clustered at the bottom of the cup fell upon his lips. Andrew pulled the cup away quickly and, without thinking, spit: a small bit of meat clinging to his lip flew onto the ground. He got up and went back to work with a vague feeling of distaste. Like the kiss of a dead thing, he thought. *** the filthy Jew that I am out of whose womb issues all manner of foul utterance and misbegotten and misshapen words and creeds, that orifice that is both mouth and wound that does so wound and afflict the world with irreverence and hatred of Him who is all good and worthy of all my love and to whom I am espoused, who does so confine me with His justice and fidelity to His love that I cannot breathe or eat or sleep or hear a bird whistle in the sky without thinking of Him, who am caught up in the infinite web of His love, who betray Him constantly by with all manner of diverse thought and feeling, for whatever I feel or think that is not Him is mine alone, and does betray His infinite love for me, preferring as I do my own existence to His existence within me, guilty as I am of loving the cry of the bird or the smell of the flower for its own sake, when I ought to love nothing but Him, and to love nothing but for His sake, does make me so like unto the Jews who called out for His blood and who preferred to save the thief, as I am a thief among the flowers and the cries of birds, flattered by the praise on my sister’s lips, or caught up in the smile that another gives me, so moved by pride or vanity, so loving the things of the world for their own sake, so loving my own thoughts and feelings for my own sake, that I am guilty always and at every moment of infidelity and betrayal of Him, like unto those Jews, who remain forever damned by Him who sought to be Lord and the True Spouse of every breath that we take, so given to Him that there is no thought or feeling or shadow of thought and feeling that does not belong to Him, begin in Him and return to Him Maria Agreda was relieved to read what she had written
this time; she had feared it would be another page full of blood, full
of unintelligible symbols, something like a circle turning upon itself,
an orb like a misshapen egg, a stick figure of a man playing something
like a flute and she realized obscene with an erect phallus, and what she
thought might be words, strange and unintelligible, so she was relieved
that this was written in ink and in her own language, and that there was
nothing in it that she could not have said, and gladly, while she
was awake.
*** Loreen was almost out the door, her arms full of the hand-outs (the poems of Emily Dickinson, Nature is a haunted house/ Art, a house that tries to be haunted) that she had to go to the college and copy for tomorrow’s classes, when retrieving her glasses (sprung out, she could see the unevenness of the earpieces as the glasses lay on the table, she should get them adjusted, no wonder they kept slipping down upon her nose whenever she tried to read, so she was always pushing them back with her finger) she saw Andrew’s planner, the checks of completed assignments, the blue circled ones left undone, on the table where that morning he had been eating a waffle by tearing it into small pieces and dipping into a bowl with syrup in it, while looking at a catalog full of children’s expensive and educational toys, which was still open to the pretzel making machine that had intrigued him. He would undoubtedly worry over the missing planner; he already disliked his teacher, a woman from Texas with three sons in the Marine Corps who felt that the 5th grade was the moment at which children should learn the rigors and necessity of work. Loreen wasn’t clear, but there was some elaborate system of detentions and being kept in for recess that resulted from missing papers, so she scooped up his planner, she could stop by his school, she drove by there anyway, and drop it off. She had woken up feeling as if a boulder were upon her head and shoulders, so tired that she had decided it was useless to try and read or do any of the writing that required a functioning brain and that she might as well spend the morning running errands: they needed milk, Andrew’s lunch this morning had had only three snacks instead of the four or five he liked, and there were the copies for class tomorrow, and a trip to the bank. Perhaps accomplishing even those mindless tasks would make her feel better, for she felt overwhelmed at times with the sense that there was an endless drift of tasks waiting upon her in every corner, the upstairs floor needed to be swept, and when had she last mopped the kitchen? not to mention the rooms downstairs, so full of Andrew’s toys and projects that she hadn’t vacuumed for days. *** The worst thing, Andrew thought, was this feeling that something had died between him and Intima in that last angry exchange, as if much of the play and affection had gone out of their correspondence; he felt incapable of flirting with her or even teasing her unless he surrounded it with enough laugh indicators and smiley faces to frame it obviously as play, and he didn’t know, sometimes his sense of loss was enough that he felt that their relationship was just sort of a relic, like that saint’s arm, whose was it? St. Vincent’s, on display somewhere in a glass case in Spain, testifying to some vanished and wholer life, and kept because of the various powers that believers attached to it, to heal their various ailments or to speed their prayers on more quickly, but which he could not see without thinking of the lost body, the life from which that limb was torn, and sometimes he still felt that it would be better just to bury the entire corpse and stop writing to her, but then she would write warmly as she had this morning, and he would feel sorry for her for caring about him and have the sense that his withdrawal, which could not help but have some edge to it, would hurt her, and it wasn’t so much he realized that he minded her accounts of the sugar with tiny ants in it at the local café that morning or her reserve with him, as if she couldn’t smile or flirt, without his being carried away with it into some passionate declaration that would make her feel impinged upon and guilty, but the loss of himself. He felt as if he were mourning for the loss of his own laughter and play, his feelings like ghosts still haunting him so that he couldn’t speak, and perhaps he didn’t even feel it within himself anymore, perhaps only the sense of loss haunted him, and perhaps he was just waiting as if for some improbable resurrection of himself. *** I hate my father, he has acted so bad, I would
like to hurt him, he makes me so mad that I’d like to kick and punch him,
Loreen had remembered at the last minute, that Andrew this morning had
said almost cheerfully that if she wanted to she could read what he had
written for the psychologist, though only while he was gone at school,
as if his feelings were so singular to him, that she could have access
to them only in his absence. He’d scribbled furiously in the notebook the
night before while sitting in his sleeping bag, for he’d been sleeping
on the floor ever since the last visit to the psychologist’s, and, though
she had reminded him, as tentatively as possible, that he had promised
to write something for the psychologist, he would just say, in that
cheerful self-possessed way of his, that he “had forgotten.” But
last night, he’d been unable to sleep, wanting her to check all the windows
and doors in the house a dozen times, she thought, within the space of
a few minutes, and when she’d talked to him, he’d burst into tears and
began punching the pillow. So when she suggested that perhaps it would
help him , and not to worry about showing it to her or the psychologist,
that he didn’t have to, but could whenever he liked, and if that was never
fine, to write something down, he had written furiously for twenty minutes.
He seemed able to speak only when he was under some great emotional pressure,
and he was always resisting that pressure, recovering so quickly, and then
would not to want to think of it. Unlike his usual handwriting, this
was a scrawl of oversized letters that spilled over the lines. Anger, it
was only anger, even if a terrible thing for a ten year
old boy to feel for his father. Still she worried, even though Andrew had
undoubtedly overheard, while hiding in her room with the television on,
Dave’s episodic rages before she had asked him to leave the house, this
almost homicidal rage seemed to call for some other, more terrible, origin
in Andrew. She was afraid that some terrible event, felt or witnessed,
was buried in Andrew, like a mouldering corpse, the vapours of anger
and fear rising like ghosts from the rotting body that the psychologist
felt would have to be exhumed before it could be permanently laid to rest,
all the while he was engaged in exorcising the feelings that spilled phantom-like
from it. Loreen didn’t know whether to believe in her feeling
of momentary relief or not, for as much as she feared the reanimation of
that corpse, its eyeless sockets, its tongueless jaw, its skin hanging
from its limbs like torn and decaying wings, she was also afraid that,
in learning how to disperse the ghosts which haunted him, Andrew would
be free enough of his distress to bury the corpse even deeper within himself,
so that it would reappear only later in his life, and with even more terrifying
effect for having been denied so long. It was funny, she thought,
so many visits to the psychologist ‘s, the man always trying to persuade
Andrew to speak, until she too had thought (or really had hoped,
with so much longing,) Andrew’s writing or saying something would be a
sort of a conclusion, and it was really just another beginning, (which
she dreaded, she realized) some other thread just beginning to unravel.
*** “Maria de Jesus,” the Abbess turned toward her, her face struggling with something, she reminded Maria Agreda of the black and white pig that Maria had briefly as a pet as a child, partly because of the paler blotches on her face, where the darker pigment of her skin had faded, but also too because the pig had been so inquisitive and friendly that its pink snout had wrinkled up as if it were trying to say something as if snuffled at the grain in Maria’s hand. She seemed to be sorry at what she was about to say, as if she were aware that it was Maria’s presence here that had founded the convent itself, from that one donation by an unnamed patron, having grown into the stone walls and the hushed hallways, Maria’s sister and mother and aunts among the nuns, a sort of miracle really, like the parable of the loaves and fishes, so many being fed from a couple of loaves and fish. “Yes, Mother,” Maria Agreda hoped that this would make it easier for the nun to speak, in the same way, she had coaxed the pig to her by saying “puercocita, puercocita” over and over again. “Oh, it has been reported to me by several of the sisters that they have found you sometimes in a strange state, as if asleep, while kneeling at vespers or at the table in the kitchen where you were assigned some cooking chore, and I am somewhat concerned about this, whether you are suffering some misfortune of health or of your spirit. You are the youngest one here, and, while I am most grateful for your many spiritual gifts to which this convent is indebted, I am not unaware that the rigors of spiritual life can sometimes exert an exacting toll, particularly upon the young and impressionable.” “Yes, I have sometimes been in such states,” Maria wondered how much she should divulge; she was more concerned that the Abbess in her state of alarm, which was compounded of concern and fear, unlike the envy and resentment of the sisters that had undoubtedly been whispering this to her, would become overzealous, following after her too closely as puercocita had, when she didn’t want to pay attention to the pig, and it would follow along behind her snuffling at the calves of her legs and sometimes even nipping at her skin, leaving a slaver of saliva that felt unpleasant and gooey, until it dried off in the heat. “They have been described to me as if you were so asleep as to be dead.” “Yes, well, I cannot say how they appear to others, I can only say that to me after much prayer and spiritual effort, I have become convinced that these states are the gifts of God, a way in which He calls me to do His work, and not misfortunes of the spirit or of my own poor being.” “You aren’t being tormented by those various evils which the devil can send to tempt those particularly devoted to God?” “No, Mother, I am not, and I have prayed much about this and have been reassured by God that these states, which are mysterious, are the gifts of His presence, and that I should keep to His sense of the mystery of this until such a time as He allows me to reveal it.” “Well, it is true that there is a continual struggle sometimes among the envy and fears of others, and upon which a careful vigilance must always be kept, and you have an excellent spiritual advisor in Father Alba, in whom you can confide and upon whose guidance you can trust.” “Thank you, Mother, and do be most assured that I will continue in my spiritual discipline.” “As I well know, Maria, for I have noticed myself, unlike the whispering of others, that there is no one so diligent at prayers and all the disciplines to which our love of God calls us, as you. Which is why I hesitate in even asking you about such matters.” The Abbess seemed concerned, as if by intruding, she might have incurred Maria’s ill feeling; she was afraid of offending this girl upon whose faith the convent was built, this girl who had been marked out as blessed, among all the town people, from the age of four. “I am most grateful for your concern, which is really like unto that hen which Christ described as the presence of God’s love, longing to nourish the people of Jerusalem beneath its wings.” “Yes, and such love to such a hard and unrepentant people, who are still guilty of His blood.” The Abbess was also talking to herself now, as if thinking of something else. “Oh, do rest assured that your kind and motherly concern does not fall so vainly upon me,” Maria said, smiling at the flourish of the words. The Abbess brightened too, the white patches on her face turning a pale pink at the compliment, so that she looked even more like puercocita, Maria thought, her nose wrinkling with delight as she jogged up and down on her short stumpy legs in her pen when Maria whistled to her. *** “Andrew,” Bellmore had stuck his head out of his office as Andrew had hurried by, scurrying almost, he thought quietly, so he wouldn’t be noticed and given some last minute impossible task on a Friday afternoon,” can you come in here?” Andrew entered the office, Bellmore was walking around quickly, taking a book off the shelf and throwing it into his briefcase, the lid up, lying flat on his desk, selecting a paper out of a heap of papers on another shelf. How did he know which one it was, without looking? Andrew wondered. He could see the sweat stains on Bellmore’s western shirt, those long sleeves too warm now in the chill that had suddenly been replaced by a revival of summer, the temperature ten degrees above average for that time of the year. “Yes?” Andrew asked, hoping that the question would persuade Bellmore to stop long enough to convey whatever it was that had kept Andrew from escaping down the long hallways. Andrew had a date with Elena, well, not exactly a date, a number of them were meeting at the local pub for happy hour, draft beer and really thick medium rare hamburgers, but it was enough of a date, he had called her up and asked her to meet him there, for Andrew to be buzzing with a feeling in which nervousness and excitement seemed so intermingled, he could not tell one from the other. “The Conference in Madrid, next month, you’re going, aren’t you? Do you have a ticket yet? You have to be there, I’ve spoken to Dr. Rodriguez about your dissertation and research, and it would help greatly if we had a sort of “Spanish” presence in our contingency.” Andrew was startled, he knew of the conference of course, one of those networking occasions which so much of the critical reception of one’s work and attendant funding depended on. He was tempted to blurt out that no one had said a word about it to him, but it wouldn’t be good to draw attention to his own peripheral significance. Bellmore probably thought he had mentioned it, and he would undoubtedly take it that Andrew was drawing attention to his oversight or forgetfulness, since he not only thought he knew everything but remembered everything, Andrew thought, with a sort of distaste for his own growing scorn and awareness of the politics in the department. “No, I don’t have a ticket, I’m not sure I have the funding to go,” Andrew wondered how, reserving so many other considerations to himself, he could say so little, and it would be sufficient. “Don’t worry about that, I’ll get the funding, Just leave a letter of intent with the secretary. Nothing fancy. A paragraph will do. I’ll have the funds by next week. We’re leaving the 10th and back on the 15th, however if you want to stay a day or two longer and actually visit Agreda, it might be most helpful to your dissertation. You could see the Lady in Blue herself,” Bellmore snorted at this; the body of Maria de Agreda was still incorruptible, and having been buried in her own time in an ordinary coffin, she had been exhumed and placed in a coffin of glass that was half emergent from the earth so her unperishability could be marvelled at by visitors to the chapel, and why did anyone else ever go to Agreda except on some religious pilgrimage? “Ok, thanks, I’ll turn it in Monday morning, have a good weekend.” Andrew felt sort of dazed as he wandered down the
hallway. Perhaps Bellmore didn't think so badly of his work after all,
he had been so quick with the offer of funding, perhaps Andrew wasn’t
hovering on the cliff of parapsychology after all; the sense of academic
blessing, like a papal dispensation Andrew thought wryly, was almost
enough to make him not notice that he was also being used: that token
of the ‘spanish presence’ would make their hosts look more favourably upon
Bellmore and the department. Though it would be terrific to go to Spain,
Andrew thought elatedly, and I could go to Agreda and see the Lady
herself, that would be interesting to see if she was depicted in that ancient
volume of her work, or in the portrait of Fray whatever-his-name
was, though the word “Lady” made Andrew sink a little, he realized that,
behind all of his longing, was the thought of seeing Intima, he could meet
her finally, a kind of leap of happiness followed by a sort of circling
and deepening dread, behind everything, that bright phantom, a ghost or
an angel, though he believed in neither, only that feeling of something
transparent in himself that both longed and feared to be embodied.
*** “Oh, hi, Loreen,” Loreen had forgotten that Angelina would be at the school, working in the office, she was smiling and moving from behind the desk to the counter where she stood across from Loreen , the wooden counter top between with its clipboards with permissions to take children to and from school and for the signing in of visitors. She looked different again, Loreen thought, perhaps it was the make-up, those touches of colour upon her cheeks, mascara on her eyelashes, it was hard to say, it was so subtle, that richness in her face felt almost like the richness of feeling, her gaze seemed so open, the blue of her eyes dusky with widened pupils, perhaps it was the light in the office, shaded at it was on the north side of the building. Oh dear, thought Loreen, wondering why she had to explain everything to herself so that it always became some accidental trajectory that brushed against her. Something in the Angelina’s delight at seeing her, those eyes so candidly looking into hers, did not seem meant for her. She looked down at the clipboards, the green one must be for visitors, as once at school she had always disguised her shyness by the pretense of being busy at something else, so that if she stood alone at lunch recess as was often the case, she would refold her paper lunch sack carefully over and over again. It had been ridiculous, to the point of where sometimes she had glanced again and again at the watch on her arm, only she had no watch, and was merely pretending its existence, as she pretended her disinterest and preoccupation, in order to evade both the sense of her self-conscious aloneness which seemed a kind of torment, as if alone, she were always watching herself alone, and her shyness when anyone spoke to her, which seemed another kind of torment, awakening in her all those subtle nothings of hope and wanting to be liked. “Hi, Angelina. . . Andrew forgot his planner so I brought it by, do I need one of those passes?” the school had instituted all sorts of security passes ever since 9/11, all the side doors were kept locked so that anyone visiting had to enter through the main entrance, and the last time she had dropped by with something Andrew had forgotten, Loreen had been given a plastic pass with an id number on it to wear around her neck for the three minutes it took to walk down to his classroom and back to the office to turn it in. “Oh, no,” Angelina laughed, so that Loreen looked up again, though she found it harder to look away, Andrew said that Tim’s mother was always too bright, smiling too much with those pearly teeth and leaning forward toward whoever had made her smile, but Loreen felt so drawn to that same brightness that she often looked away for fear of becoming entranced. It wasn’t so much that she felt the trajectories of others bouncing off her, as that she felt caught in their gravitational fields, that sense of lightness and gentleness in another felt almost terrifying to her, more terrifying than her certainties of another’s darkness and violence which she felt she could manage in some way. That had been sort of the problem with Dave, she thought, that mistaken sense she’d had of understanding what was knotted in him, and her own certainty of being able to unravel it in some way. Beauty was terrifying because it was winged, unbound, and it made her feel all the more, as if she were a loose collection of feathers, drifting up and stirred in some ruffling breeze that she was incapable of. “Would you like to go to lunch sometime?” Loreen was almost startled by her own voice, so ironic and low key as if the answer didn’t matter. There, she had asked it. When she walked back to her car, she was still startled
. Angelina had said yes, she’d love to, so they were having lunch next
Wednesday, and Angelina would try to think of somewhere pleasant enough
to go, for the town, tending to fast food chains and noisy bars,
had a poverty of restaurants that were good for conversation. Loreen noticed
that she felt no longer crimped over with that boulder on her head,
she remembered vaguely days and weeks when she had felt so full of energy
that she seemed to hum her way through the market and to the bank, her
words splashing over like an exuberant fountain which startled and
amazed her students. Perhaps, she thought, I am not dead after all.
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