In Partial Disgrace (15 page)

When an Astingi girl approached puberty, she was taken by the older women to a central repository in the forest, and given paint to color their village houses as she would, a collection of deep-hued pastels which would give even a color-blind bear pause. In the late autumn, when the tribe returned from the mountains, they found the village houses glowing like jewels, and in each second-story window, chin in cupped hands and elbows on the sill, a young woman perusing the passing young men for her life companion.

Once betrothed, the compromises with the chosen men were worked out rationally. The women controlled the daily and generational markets, the shortest- and longest-term trading, thirty-day accounts and thirty-year mortgages, while the gentlemen were allowed to work off their slash-and-burn instincts in the large intervening middle-distance, an arrangement which apparently forestalled and managed crises better than in any of those bloody pockets of history that surrounded them.

You could tell an Astingi across a field, no matter how he was dressed, simply by his self-sufficient and dignified posture, punitive on the one hand, protective on the other. Their manners were based upon an ideal manliness so palpable they could dispense with any show of warrior virtues. Their survival was based apparently upon their absolute unwillingness to become a
folk
, their belief that folk wisdom is always wrong, those out-of-the money bets that tree moss reveals true north or that menses are triggered by asparagus. No faux naïve embroidery or window boxes full of one-dimensional pansies for them, no feast days (every day is a feast day), no hopping dances or gravitas processions, no moldy costumes in the attic. As a people they prided themselves not so much on their inclusiveness but on their aerodynamics.

In the summers the men would go to the mountains with their flocks and dogs. In the spring floods they would return to play pirate for a month on six-inch seas. In the fall, they would hunt and kill their feral pigs. In the short winter, they would renew fierce, earsplitting connubial relations with their women, who had come to ovulate every six months. While the men were off grazing or fighting, the women moved their entourage from town to town, reopening new ones or closing down old ones—it was all the same to them. And when they fought, the women and children were put in the first rank. If you have never heard an Astingi woman’s war cry, you have missed the human drama.

The Astingi theology was as vague as Ainoha’s peculiar status within it. All that can be said with certainty is that their bucolic and commonsensical existence had been disturbed in the thirteenth century by the Pope, who, for reasons unclear, sent them a crown as a bribe, and granted them apostolic status. They associated the crown’s crude craftsmanship with their tormented past, a kind of aesthetical pounding on the table which they had had enough of, and filed it away respectfully. Over the next few centuries, as the tribes further intermingled, Jesus and the saints coexisted happily with the devils and fairies, the forest pig and totem—and as a hedge on the safe side, white horses were still occasionally sacrificed on holidays. On every crossroads appeared the vulvar crèche with a sweating black Madonna, and while the rest of Europe cremated itself in the throes of feudal dynasties and religious wars, throughout the Dark Ages the Astingi were especially healthy and prosperous.

It cannot be said that they subscribed to the church in either its eastern or western forms. Of the Christians it was noticed that those who preached the Gospel of Love the loudest tended most piteously to destroy those reluctant to subscribe. And as for those who developed a principled resistance to the Judeo-Christian order (with its facile hyphen) those eastern cults which promised a utopia on this earth as an attractive heresy, it was noticed that they tended to show up at functions without being invited, manifesting an undifferentiated rudeness which even in those quarters where it most succeeded, made every simple social exchange a kind of torture. They knew all accounts of fallen warriors to be made up or worse. And they were suspicious of a vital oral tradition which could turn anything into a kind of pathetic, faded inner experience.

So it cannot be said exactly that the Astingi retained their loyalties to paganism. To be fair, they embraced the rituals of both churches—the perfume and sensuality of the East, without its liturgy and hierarchy, as well as the emotional asceticism and graphomania of the West, without its odd texts and even odder foreign policy. The Cannonians and the Astingi went to the opera on Friday nights and sang the same arias on Sunday to Bible verses. The services at Muddy St. Hubertus had the mysticism and iconography of the orthodox, but the music of the gothic, dispensing with tempo markings and adding thirty more characters to the Latin alphabet of the psalters, as well as an inscription over the altar: “All things are three.”

What is the meaning of this creed beneath the inverted pyramid, the Astingi mystery, “All things are three”? It means, as far as I can see, the opposite of the hypostatic trinity, which promises only infinite regress. It means there
is
no unity, nor holy relation between the three, only contingency. For the human mind is capable of holding within itself only two beginnings, and can merely acknowledge a third, like a man waving his cap at a thundercloud. The Astingi went as far as they could go, acknowledging the Virgin Mary and the Holy Ghost, but not the Father and the Son—and of the four, they certainly found it easiest to accept the Ghost. After all, one can believe in the end of the credo “Look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come” without even considering all that hard-to-follow persiflage which precedes it. Does it really matter who begot whom? “Skip to the end, my sweet,” the Astingi proverb goes, and that is what my mother sang to me. The Astingi kiss is a triple kiss, plus or minus one makes all the difference, one on the left check, one on the right, and the third where you will. One’s feelings about a deed are of more interest than the fact of it; that is the Astingi philosophy. The Astingi’s only essentially religious idea, as far as I could tell, seemed to be that Europe’s biggest problem was
too
much Christianity—even in Cannonia, where Jews played soccer, Muslims made moonshine, and the Catholics were tougher than the Turks.

The great appeal of paganism, after all, is that it was not necessary to be loyal to it. It is simply an attractive guess at matters hidden from history requiring neither laws nor tithes, whose basic tenet remains that it is not worth dying or killing for. In any case, the oak trees were disappearing at a fantastic rate, and those little spirits, elves, and fairies reminded the Astingi too much of their own vulnerability. While one of the most attractive aspects of nature worship was its absence of clergy, they came to notice among their own self-appointed druids a certain smug sanctimony and conformity, which would infect for all time all progressives who opposed the prerogatives of Christendom. So while they recognized the lack of consistency in their own beliefs, they nevertheless came to miss the attractive mixture of pagan sexes, the little shrinelets in the forest, the lapidary and contradictory stories, the expansive gestures and the short parades, not to mention the grand entertainment of lesser deities competing for social standing with all their human foibles. This company of competing gods not only seemed to accord more to the reality of things, but also encouraged a warm responsiveness, rather than the wail of the saved. To replace this extended family of overlapping authority with one stout fellow who no doubt had his thrilling moments, but seemed to have taken on rather too large an entity to administer, encouraged a kind of immaturity where enforcement was concerned. Why replace this drama of contesting rulers with a
weak
omnipotence? Why cut down a forest and replace it with a lone tree with a single veinous leaf? The Astingi were thus rather pagans by default. And gradually their taste for slitting the throat of a white horse abated, one of those rare periods of history where the executioner does not willingly step forward.

The only Astingi shrine equipment consisted of unpainted biconical vases of local materials. While their now extinct neighbors had embarked upon an orgy of glazes and dyes, ransoming themselves to the markets of the trading routes, their ceramics remained severe as a note struck with a mallet, grouped together in the air, forest glen, cave, or vitrine, in no apparent order or necessary number, the new mixed with the old, unclear as to their original purpose—perhaps simply an object to gently remind one of one’s heretic self. (And that the self, too, is a perishable sort of commodity with shifting value; we appear on earth only for a second, while even our rudest utensil outlives us.)

So if Mother had a theogony, it would boil down to something like this: the long-term consists of a great number of short-terms, and truth, like the vases, can only be beheld as a somewhat manufactured and random entity. All creation is hybrid, no one is really chosen by anyone, there is no direct line of development, so the best one can hope for is to string together a medley of old favorites and new quirks, a genuine confusion of the higher and the lower—an arbitrary grouping of somewhat bedraggled epiphanies, each propping the other up—and this was just the sort of thing, a kind of music-hall review, which
ought
to be worshiped. It is wrong to use punishment in another world as a threat, because the world of punishment is in this one for each of us. The world is mostly inertia, where all the best-intentioned nurturing does not guarantee as much as a burp. Only the present is divine, and the fairest order a heap of random sweepings. The Goddess’s job is, after all, to turn the prayer into a blessing. And what is the prayer? “More life!” That is the prayer. Always, more life. And what is the blessing? “More life!
This
life!” So you can see there was nothing in the least mystical in our worship of her.

Naturally I came to see my mother as a kind of work of art, no matter how strongly this was at odds with her own tastes. Just as my father had been put on this earth to take exception as a non-conformist, she was here to attest that the conventional wisdom of the herd is also deserving of representation. For if the key to life is only in resisting the herd, how can you learn to love? Mother, I suppose, played the Catholic to my father’s Pro
test
ant materialism, if for no other reason than the rules of the primitive matriarchy always gave the church pride of place. I never saw her near the prayer station in the corner of her suite with the chamber pot beneath, atomizers of cologne, earrings, and her favorite clepsydra (water clock) upon the altar. Nor as far as I know did she ever attend a mass. But a visit to the chapter house of the great cathedral at Razacanum would show every other face in its gallery of archbishops to be of Priam’s family. And yet a hundred years before, they had all been Protestants. One tends to forget that the Church was the most democratic institution of that time, offering advancement upon merit to the poorest man, and only in finance were there men more obscure and lowly. There seemed to be, at any rate, no hiatus in her adoptive paternal lineage, no waffling or skepticism; only conversion or reconversion. Her ancestors had gone from animal worship to pyrolatry to Catholicism to Protestantism and back to Catholicism, and in the section of her orbit in which I was acquainted with her, she was veering, come full circle from a lapsed high church infatuate back to a lush and goofy heterodoxy, her mysterious Naiad side, in which the point, apparently, was to be your
own
ancestor.

Our Christmases were thrilling; we gave presents on the twenty-first, the Solstice, the day of the unconquered sun, wore crowns of the Saxon holly and ivy while chanting the pagan
Dies sol invictus
with unremitting jollity. And if the choristers were out of tune or mumbling the words, Ainoha would give the conductor a consoling smile. Then we lit a huge bonfire on the front lawn, sacrificing the insipid pine to Odin’s sacred oak, put human masks on all the dogs, their snouts upon us. There followed twelve days of fasting and mourning, celebrating something much older and stranger than the birth of “
that
man,” in my father’s scornful mention, “who never wrote a single word.” I could forgive Christianity its fanaticism; it was its skepticism permeating everything that set me against it. As the Astingi know, there is nothing more amusing than playing pagans in
Purgatorio.

I shouldn’t leave the impression that Mother wasn’t maternal. It was only that her sensual self was so powerful, that it told her that she couldn’t protect us from the world, even for a day, as much as we all wanted to believe in her semi-divinity. So it was that she continuously pushed both my father and myself out from the Land Behind the Forest. After a hug, she submerged her instincts, renounced her status, and even in our most desperate moments turned us round face-out to the world. She wasn’t cold or diffident. It was simply a kind of reversal of the sexual. She just announced, as she had in her first labor pains, “
That
way!”

Like everything else in our world, I would not understand this until I saw the drama reenacted by beasts. In late January, the four brooks from the four valleys froze solid, the spider’s web of haze which hung over Semper Vero snapped, and blizzards stunned even the moles and beavers into inanimate submission. From my tower window, I could see the huddled aurochs up to their knees in the drifts, every curl on their faces blasted with frost, every breath turned into a small geyser. Their heavy heads and thickened necks were perfectly suited for smashing through the crust of ice and foraging for tufts of brown grass. At that time of year, the only sound beyond the wind was these animals’ labored breathing. The calves milled around their mothers, trying to share in the patch of grass they had just stamped out of the snow. But the females, already carrying next year’s calves, simply butted them away, telling them in effect to dig their own. The thaws gave up the ribcages of those who didn’t, not always the weakest by any means. And the mothers would mourn them, browsing around the skeletons and chasing away the foxes.