Lucia's Masks (33 page)

“I learned that the abyss of despair is no mere metaphor. I swayed on its edge. I urged myself to commit self-murder like a man. I sound self-pitying, I suppose, despairing for my own condition, obsessing about the impact of the girl’s gruesome murder on me, rather than thinking of her.

“I can only assure you that I could not separate the two. I wanted her restored. I wanted her to be redeemed: to see her life force and beauty and wholeness given back to her. I wanted to be redeemed myself, purified of the slime and sewage in which I had willingly immersed myself. I wanted the very time in which we live to be redeemed.

“Everything I wanted was impossible: a child’s fantasy. Yet the despair was real enough. I stopped eating. I dismissed my staff. I lay in my bed, curled in on myself, yearning to be taken back into my mother’s womb, or into the womb of the earth. I was atrophying. I could not rid myself of the image of the girl, as she had been, and as she was when torn apart by fiends. I loathed my brain and my opposable thumb and my upright gait: everything that supposedly made me human.

“I think I might have died; simply willed my body to shut down. But salvation came to me in the form of a song. Or if not salvation, then at least an impetus to bear the burden of being human; to live out my natural span, but in a vastly different manner than I had to that point.

“The song came to me first by way of its rhythm. I did not recognize what it was right away. The tune comforted and heartened me. I found myself rising from my bed, summoned by its resolute beat. It was as if the various notes composed a living being, urging me to get up and move, to be courageous. I washed my face for the first time in many days. I ate a little. I made coffee. And still the thump and the roll of the tune stayed with me, inspiriting me and buoying me up. I had no doubt this music had come to me as a gift.

“Then I remembered who it was had sung this song. It was the woman who loved me and encouraged and supported me. And all the while, she was herself dying, wasting away. Despite the drugs, she sometimes suffered intolerable pain. It was then she would sing this song; blast it out of her frail lungs, and stomp about the house like a child pretending to be a soldier.

“The song was one she had learned in girlhood. ‘I am not a Christian,’ she told me. ‘But the truth in this song is eternal. It is about fearlessness. Fearlessness.’ She would repeat the word, hugging herself. In singing, in stomping about, she willed herself onward, with renewed fortitude, through the pain.

“When I remembered this, I also remembered the words, and I too began to sing. Do you know them?” he asks Lucia. And he sings softly:

Who would true valour see,
Let him come hither,
One here will constant be,
Come wind, come weather.
There’s no discouragement
Shall make him once relent
His first avowed intent,
To be a pilgrim.

Lucia shakes her head. “You sang this song when we were in the cave, I believe.”

He nods.

“To be a pilgrim,” he repeats. “I recognized that this was my salvation. I would take to the road. I would try, in some way, to make amends through a pilgrimage.

“I had not planned on the self-mortification,” he adds. “This need to inflict pain on myself is prompted by the self-hatred. There is no more to tell.” He bowed his head, as if waiting for her judgement.

“You did not murder the girl,” she says. “You had no way of knowing what they intended.”

“I was complicit. I felt the urge, the loathsome, barbaric urge to dismember a dead child.”

“But you did not,” she insists. “You resisted that evil. You are guilty of being duped, and of being present at the time an evil deed was committed. Probably every one of us these days is guilty of such things.”

“When it came to the act itself, you controlled the monster within you. You must hold fast to that truth.”

“Your strength brings us all great comfort,” he tells her. “Did you know that?”

She surprises him by asking: “Will you hear my confession now?”

He is staggered when she tells him of her erotic encounter with the plague doctor. He experiences as well, another emotion he cannot quite define. It resembles, but is not quite, dismay. Under the curtain of chaste moonlight, he moves closer to her on his hands and knees. He wants to comfort her, to tell her how negligible her perceived fault is. But he understands how huge she feels her disgrace to be, and he will not belittle her judgement on herself, however disproportionately harsh it may seem to him.

“I did not love him,” she says. “Without love, it would have been a soiled and brutish act.”

She buries her face in her hands. He draws her head toward his naked chest where his wounds are deepest. He strokes her hair. He is surprised when she lifts her face and touches her lips to his.

“
Repentire
,” she says. “Can you say this word to me? Can we say it to each other with our bodies?”

For a moment, he is uncertain of her meaning.

“And is there love here?” he asks her. “Are you sure of this?”

“Yes.”

They come together more slowly and quietly than he has ever joined with a woman before. It strikes him that their lovemaking has some chaste quality in common with the moonlight.

As they make their way together in silence back to the camp-fire, he thinks: I am transformed. And not just because she has removed the nail from my breast and unburdened my thought. I am, he recognizes in astonishment, a man who dwells in love. I had not known before that love is a dwelling-place.

At daybreak, he forges ahead to break trail. He feels he is moving through some new element; that there is a different quality to the light, purged of haze, absolutely crystalline. What cinematic image would he use, he wonders, to convey this unaccustomed brightness in his blood and brain? The swift realization comes that it would be a close-up of Lucia’s hands, loosening and then braiding her long hair, strand over strand. He recalls ancient tales about the strength of maidens’ hair; how it could secure a ship to its anchor, or save a man from drowning.

As he forces his way through a dense wall of evergreen shrub, he sees a sight to gladden the heart of any pilgrim. Set on the plain below a range of mauve hills, seven tents of silk tremble in their confines and drink down the colours of the rising sun. He rubs his eyes. When he looks again, they are still there: the burnished tents of dawn that affirm he has been shriven.

Chapter Seventeen
Bird Girl Sees Eros at Work

W
HEN
B
IRD
G
IRL FIRST GLIMPSES THE
line of tents, she stops and stares in disbelief. They look sublime, like solidified tongues of flame that burn, yet do no harm. The great ball of rising sun stains their flimsy cloth in colours that Lola loved: the apricot, persimmon, plum, and burgundy of the sheaths and strapless gowns she had put on to inflame her many lovers.

Passionate, yoni-obsessed Lola would have clapped her hands in delight at the sight of this dazzling array of delta shapes. She would have made some suggestive remark about thrusting points and vaginas, then wriggled her skinny hips and let loose one of her raucous laughs. Candace would have plugged her ears. Bird Girl misses Lola keenly. She misses her sense of fun and life force, and the way she got up Candace’s nose. Lola loved the richly spiced drink of her memories. She loved to laugh. She loved Bird Girl. Bird Girl found herself wishing Lola hadn’t. The fact is she feels unworthy of the enormous gift Lola made her.
She sucked the poison into herself to give me back my life.
Bird Girl reminds herself of this several times a day.

In the first days of her convalescence, Lola’s death put such blackness inside Bird Girl that she could no longer see things in their rightful wholeness. The entire world looked dull and flat to her, even the faces and bodies of her travelling companions, and most certainly her own body. She felt that her powers to renew herself had all drained away through the gaping hole in her breast. The wound throbbed and pulled and made her set her teeth together. Hot pincers gripped her nerves, not just where the hole was, but throughout her chest and arms. Lucia tended her with balms and kindness. Bird Girl tried to tell Lucia her grief, but could not find words equal to the deadening ache of Lola’s absence.

“Try to accept her gift with grace,” Lucia told her.

Later Bird Girl thought that if she had brought a book of poetry with her, she might have found some grace and comfort there, some fitting lines to recite for Lola as a tribute. She tried to call to mind poems that had given her great pleasure: works tight and sleek that nevertheless held immensities. But nothing came.

All Bird Girl could hear was her mother’s voice on the afternoon of their final searing encounter. Every word Epona hurled at her that day was ugly:
slut, tart, degenerate
. And because Bird Girl felt so unworthy of what Lola had done for her, she started to believe her mother had been right. She was an ungrateful little whore. She was dirt. Hadn’t she called her mother “a maimed dyke?” When she remembered that, the wound in her breast pulled so hard, the tears ran down her face. Bird Girl’s mother had no left breast. It had been cut off to stop the cancer killing her. What an appallingly wicked thing to say to one’s mother, even if Epona had called her “a disgusting little tramp” and worse.

It all happened the day her mother destroyed one of her most cherished books. She came home to find the ancient, treasured paperback in shreds on the floor of her room in the Armoury. When she saw what Epona had done (and she knew it could be no one else) she felt invaded, plundered and bereft. At first, she could not speak at all. It was as if, through the book’s destruction, her mother had robbed her of language altogether. If she had owned a pet and her mother had slit its belly open and dismembered it, Bird Girl did not think she could have hurt her more.

As Epona saw it, she was saving her daughter from infection. She was helping Bird Girl to keep her heart and mind and body free of taint. Bird Girl was free to read all the “improving” texts she wanted. That meant works on the dialectics of sexuality and histories of ancient matriarchal civilizations. The Armoury also had a plenitude of manuals on bike mechanics, the arts of self-defence, and weaponry use and maintenance. What Epona absolutely forbade were works of the imagination. “You’ll rot your mind, my girl.” She meant that literally. Bird Girl’s mother had no patience with metaphors.

Epona was wary of all forms of art. She saw them as trickery, a kind of despicable window dressing to obscure society’s multifarious evils. “Facts, my girl. We have to face up to and confront the facts.” She would aim her index finger at Bird Girl’s forehead. “You have to keep your brain-box clean. If you gum it up with this make-believe rubbish, you won’t stay sharp enough to survive. Don’t ever forget,” Epona would punch the air, a gesture aimed at the evil world outside the Armoury, “don’t ever forget what we’re up against.”

She meant the “pestilential City” that was The New Amazons’ battleground, and the hydra-headed sex trade which was their particular target. As she grew older, Bird Girl gradually perceived how her mother’s rigid ideology had killed off her natural affections. Epona would never let herself succumb to the power of melody in music, or in the written word. And she seemed to have nullified in herself that urgent curiosity, which was for Bird Girl a driving force in reading stories. What happens next? How will the character you care most about get out of this terrible fix?

Epona did not care, as Bird Girl knew to her cost, about unexpected plot twists or the suspense that can set the pulse racing — like the bone-chilling thrill when David Balfour mounts the stone stair in utter darkness in the spooky House of Shaws, sets down his foot, and discovers only a chill and windy void. In that instant, it dawns on the reader, as it does on David, that his clay-faced Uncle Ebenezer has sent him up this stair — not to bed — but to death. And with David, Bird Girl always groped her way down again “with a wonderful anger” in her heart that matched his own.

He was Bird Girl’s first great literary love and the first character whose skin she slipped inside so perfectly, she was able to look at the world through his eyes. She too stared in awe at the wild and treacherous Moor of Rannoch, and at the handsome face of Alan Breck, Highland Jacobite and inveterate gambler. She admired David’s self-possession and astute self-assessment, his honesty and articulate powers of description. She was jubilant as she ran with David and Alan through the heather, outwitting the Redcoats. She stood frozen, as did her cherished boy hero, when Alan urged him to leap over a thunderous river. “I bent low on my knees and flung myself forth,” David said, “with that kind of anger of despair that has sometimes stood me in stead of courage.”

When she first read that passage, Bird Girl thought these were the wisest and most useful words she had ever come across. She memorized them. In fact, she could probably have recited the entire book she read it so often and so hungrily. She was happy there, in the thick of David’s adventures, as happy, she thought, as she had ever been in her life. It was Laura-ofthe-Gashed-Cheek who gave Bird Girl
Kidnapped
on her ninth birthday. Bird Girl saw that her mother was not too pleased, but she let her keep the book. Doubtless Epona had given the text a quick scan to make sure the content was salutary. What she saw was an old-fashioned children’s adventure story she judged to be harmless.

But in the years to come, Epona would systematically censor or destroy books in her daughter’s possession she considered to be corrupting filth. In the beginning, Bird Girl did ardently try to appreciate her mother’s point of view. She gathered words she thought best described Epona’s character. She would hug this little collection of adjectives to herself in bed at night, trying to get closer to her mother. So she rhymed off to herself:
sturdy, resolute, adamantine, unswerving, fearless, mettlesome, incorruptible
. As she grew older, and the gulf between mother and daughter became evermore apparent, she added other, radically qualifying words to this list:
rigid, unsubtle, unbending, philistine, puritanical
.