By John Beckman
At the age of nine, in the year before my mother’s death, I had become exceedingly religious. My mother tutored me daily in catechism, and since my father and sister had never cared for religion (they spent their Sundays together at the beach), it became a sort of game between us — the litany, the Novenas, the Lives of the Saints. Jesus, for me, was a fearsome stranger — starving in the desert, tearing up the temple, dying in a ghastly scene of torture — but the Virgin, La Vièrge, was our common heroine, the eternally young and clear-eyed goddess before whose icon — a faded wood statue in my mother’s armoire — we would kneel and joyously whisper the rosary while the milky yellow light from the flickering votives danced on my mother’s tired young face.
She informed me of her cancer in a creative manner. I vividly recall the afternoon she did it. We were alone in the house, at the kitchen table, and the sky behind her, through the stark paned windows, was a single sheet of January metal. We lived in Arles, near the Mediterranean, and ours was one of a few special houses whose windows faced the Roman amphithéatre. The arches above the ruins’ dark vomitoria looked to me like arching eyebrows, the caverns like hollow, ghostly eyes. She told me, cheerfully, that she had gotten me a gift. As if knowing that it would have been in bad taste to wrap it, she presented it to me out of the box. She was called la Femme Visible, the Visible Woman, and she stood erect with her palms outstretched, the very size and dimension of our Virgin. Her body’s covering, from her nobly bald head to her firmly planted feet, was one smooth shell of transparent plastic, through which her colorful organs were visible: her brain’s gray walnut; her veins’ and arteries’ red and blue lace; her respiratory system’s thick creamy branches; her intestines’ sturdy, purple clumps.
Mother separated the shell at its seam and cheerfully explained each naked organ. (She did not remove them, though they were removable.) Her voice grew dry and artificially calm when she introduced the explicit sponges that were the icon’s C-cup breasts. I was old enough to have anticipated this conversation — the “birds and bees,” as you charmingly term it. I was feeling the tingle of breasts myself. I had experienced the spotting of my premature régles. Hence, expecting a lesson in puberty, I misunderstood her when she pushed it aside and tenderly drew my body to her chest. She was saddened, I believed, that I was becoming a woman. Even when she held me out at arm’s length, and studied my reaction with her watery eyes, her tragic look (unmistakable to me now) seemed the pangs of a possessive mother.
But then she sobered up, saying, “This is the body of a healthy woman. Each one of these organs is sacred and pure. Tu peux les voir — ils rayonnent! They glow!”
I knew she was speaking metaphorically. The plastic organs didn’t really glow, and I was rather disappointed that the toy wasn’t electric.
Here is what I heard her say:
“Justine, I have to tell you something. These days my body glows less and less. These days my body isn’t holy [saint].”
Here is in fact what my mother had said:
“These days my body isn’t healthy [sain].”
Saint and sain are homonyms; the terminal consonants are silent in both. To make matters worse, she went on to say:
“Your whole body glows with life! It is healthy (sain), it is holy (saint), it’s an instrument of God, it’s a healthy [holy?] instrument of God!”
I asked her bluntly if she had sinned.
My question surprised her. “Everyone has sinned.”
Why was my body holy when hers was not?
“It’s a mystery,” she said. “Only God knows.”
Persisting, I asked her what she had done.
My mother reassembled the toy. In my mind — the catechistic mind of a child — she was simply avoiding a difficult question.
Then she said: “I have cancer.”
I recall regarding my mother in judgment, transforming her cancer into the sin itself. I believe that on some level, for many years to come, I confused the cancer’s crusty tar with a filthy taint on my mother’s soul, as though I needed someone, even my mother, to take the blame for her early death. Only as an adult can I look back with clarity and see how carefully she had tried to break the news, and how my cold reaction must have broken her heart.
In her last year, my ninth, my mother’s thirty-sixth, her breast cancer had spread to her ribs and lungs, a dark evil cloud over the foggy white X-rays that, in my mind, was smothering her heart. I saw it as a painting of the Virgin’s sacred heart, the cancer’s black cloud encroaching on her lungs and intending to snuff my mother’s holy flame.
She sat among the parents at my first Holy Penance. I checked on her frequently from my line to the confessional. Her shoulders were frail in her chartreuse dress. The stiff brown hair from her page-boy wig scraped the tired lines of her face. She brightened into a smile when my turn came up and I bravely opened the confessional door. I vividly recall the cool, dim cabinet — the hard wooden kneeler, the carved wooden screen, the rasp of Père Phillippe’s slow breath. I recall the abrupt and lonely feeling of practicing this ritual without her friendship. That was what life would be like, that loneliness, once my mother was dead and gone, and that loneliness has been there ever since.
I performed the ritual impeccably. I piously spoke my memorized lines and humbly lowered my head in prayer, but I sidestepped the principal task of the sacrament: I confessed only harmless and venial sins and held back the one sin I’d prepared to confess: my secret wish, my cruel desire, that my father would die instead of my mother. Throughout the sacrament, which was not my sacrament, this slithering sin squirmed around in my stomach, but then when the priest had given me my penance (which of course was not my penance), and I entered the multicolored light of the church (welcomed by my mother’s warm waiting embrace), I felt relieved and triumphant and truthful. The sacrament had been my own private matter. I had kept my sin, as my mother had kept hers, and for a time I even hoped it would give me cancer.
I have never since taken that Holy Sacrament. Confession has always been my own private matter. I choose my confessors with the utmost care, and even then I give dribs and drabs. I have chosen you, America, with the utmost discretion, as though I were confessing before the eyes of God. And for that reason, in time, I will tell you everything, and you will make of it what you will. For in a way I belong to you. I belong to you like a child of God. Christ knows you’ve already given me my penance.
On the morning of my First Communion she was bedridden, delirious. (She was to die only three days later.) Though my father offered to walk me to the church, I stubbornly insisted on going alone. My walk along the river, dressed in my pearled First Communion dress, was a private declaration of freedom. As I marched in prayer along the Quai de la Roquette, a cold fishy mist hanging over the Rhône, the twittering sparrows in the camphoric air seemed to follow me from tree to tree. I didn’t attribute this freedom to prayer, nor to my imminent Eucharistic sacrament (which I feared would taste like meat), but only to the sound of my shoes on flagstones, the insistent clip-clop of my polished white shoes.
My classmates rushed down the steps to greet me. They peppered me with kisses, made compliments on my dress. Certainly their parents had told them my story and thus made me an object of inspiration and pity. I received them with perkiness that would have pleased my mother, but in my mind I was steady and calm, as though I were carrying a nestful of eggs. I performed the ritual like a violin solo, as though each response and genuflection were a musical phrase written only for me. The Eucharistic host didn’t taste like meat, nor did it flood me with celestial light. My sip from the chalice didn’t taste like blood. But the sacrament brought about a quiet change. Later that day, standing in my dress beside my sleeping mother, I was able to see her as a dying woman. I recall stroking her hot, wet forehead with sympathy, a feeling I had never felt before.
After Mother’s death I kept praying to her icon — and saying the rosary, and lighting the candles that had illumined its face — but I also contrived new rituals of my own. Any observer (though I allowed no observers) might have condemned these rituals as blasphemous — particularly the seemingly sexual ones. Though blasphemous, I insist, these rituals were not. They were my efforts, my fierce attempts, to scale the unscalable walls of mortality in hopes of rejoining with my mother.
I wandered my town’s sloping streets, venturing ever farther from the spiritless house where my father grieved for hours in his study and searched his bonsais for new twigs to prune. Juliette, for her part, was never around, nor did she tell me where she went. My journeys into Arles had a vivid purpose: I was determined to return to Les Alyscamps. This Roman necropolis, which mother had shown me two summers before, glimmered in my mind like a lost diamond ring.
I was determined to lie in its open graves.
I acquired a map from the corner kiosk. It was small and flimsy, a tourist map, but in my possession it shone like pornography. I have it beside me as I write. One side features the entire Camargues — the marshes, the bay, the wide blue Rhône; a tiny black cross for Stes.-Marie-de-la-Mer, the seaside church I had visited with my mother, where piebald horses galloped splashing through the tide. The tankers looked like buildings on the flat blue horizon. The other side features the town of Arles, whose jagged white streets and passages and landmarks signified the obstacles between me and Les Alyscamps: a hilltop parking lot, two town squares, three steep flights of illumined public stairs that descended to busy boulevard Georges Clémenceau. Amazingly the distance is two kilometers, tops, though back then it was infinite, as big as France.
I memorized the map like multiplication tables. I took several days divining the stealthiest path and several more committing it to memory. (I knew a ten-year-old girl crossing town with a map was certain to raise a grown-up’s suspicion.) I would study a manageable part of the path then repeat it countless times in my mind. Eventually when I had linked up all my path’s pieces, I could make the journey on my bed, in my head —right on rue Gambetta toward the Théatre Municipale, across the lethal boulevard Georges Clémenceau, through the dark wastes of hospitals and warehouses beyond which lay the fenced-in necropolis.
I made my big escape on a weeknight in June. I stopped and listened to my father’s slow breathing then carried my white Adidas downstairs. I paused in the garden to study the house. Blue light from Juliette’s eternal TV flowered against her open window. The whispering sounds of the Pont de Trinquetaille’s traffic lay like a horse blanket over the town, muffling my trainers’ clicking on the snail-sticky stones. Our gate creaked open, squeaked closed behind me, and thus was I freed into the town’s black passages where my map appeared like neon underfoot.
I navigated the old town without much trouble, but I froze in the shadow of a wide camphor tree and shrank from boulevard Clémenceau’s yellow lights. I was a motherless girl, alone in the dark, preparing to leave the Centre Ville. It would have been any grown-up’s duty — obligation or horrible privilege — to snatch me up in his camion or car. Even today the dry smell of camphor brings that lonely fear sneaking back. But whether I confronted that terror at the time or merely held tight to my pinpoint obsession, I made a wild dash through an opening in traffic, exposed on all sides by craning yellow lamps, and continued with zeal into the industrial zone.
Bigger, older, stronger, bolder, I crept along desperate rue Emile Fassin, a dimly lit corridor of walls and fences. The farther I stole down that road’s cool darkness, drifting ever farther from the security of home, the reality that Les Alyscamps may have been guarded by dogs, or may have been a hangout for teenagers or thieves, rose before me in graphic detail. I stopped at the gate of l’Arène des Alyscamps and listened for voices in the ancient breeze, but I heard only trees and the drone of tree frogs. I said a Hail Mary, then another and another, the looping trochees bringing my mother ever closer.
I climbed the fence with strong hooked fingers, never doubting I would make it over, and I landed hard on the cemetery ground. Rising low, brushing needles from my palms, I cast about the shapes like another night animal. I followed my instincts into the necropolis, into an apparent cathedral of trees where great stone containers — higher than my belly — shone like bathtubs along the path. These were the tombs, just as I had remembered. Their great stone lids, thicker than dictionaries, had entombed dead clergymen and first-century burghers, enclosing their bodies in darkness and dust.
I walked alongside them, brushing their damp lids. Soon I reached the ones I came there for, the vandalized tombs whose knocked-in stones allowed me a glimpse of their shallow interiors. Naturally these broken ones were empty of corpses, having been robbed many centuries before, though some were still cluttered with broken slabs of stone. I had come there seeking an uncluttered tomb, one whose bed was open to the stars, and it wasn’t long before I found one.
Peering down into its silvery rock, its dark floor softened by pine needles and moss, its cool air ripe with mushrooms and mold, I thought of it not as one man’s tomb, boxed and frozen like all the others, but as the portal through which all dying people must pass. In my vivid ten-year-old mind, America, enthralled to have reached my forbidden goal, this tomb was the very manhole of death, the secret, sacred mouth of death that thirstily drinks the life from your body. Even before I had stepped inside it, I could feel the sharklike slurp of its mouth. Kneeling there, relaxing, safe to explore the night, as safe as the bat and the slippery snail, feeling invisible to the eyes of the world, I touched my hand to my satin shorts, then underneath my shorts to my body, and I opened myself to death’s vibrations. I have said that some of my rituals were sexual, but that poor word only muddies the water. Vibrating and wild, I knelt in the grave. I knelt on the stone, cleansed of all fear, and I surrendered myself to the ecstasy of prayer. I was masturbating, worshipping, call it what you will, but in truth I was sailing on the ripple of death, the singing threshold that my mother had crossed — that razor-sharp unflickable line — and afterwards when I reclined on the puffy needles and looked into the infinite silence of stars I knew I had sensed an unearthly wisdom to which I may never in life return.
At some point that summer, without father’s permission, I moved mother’s Virgin into my armoire and assembled a private shrine of my own: my First Communion dress hung behind her like a curtain, votives and dead roses lay at her feet, and my mother’s and grandmother’s antique rosaries were gaudily festooned between coat hooks. Beside her I placed la Femme Visible, whose veins and organs glowed like flesh in the wavy, private candlelight. In my mind the icons were one and the same — le saint et le sain, the holy and healthy — and I prayed to them with equal fervor.
I don’t recall those months as a period of mourning; I recall being consumed by religious certainty. The instincts that had led me to les Alyscamps had taught me to worship La Femme Visible. I counted Hail Marys on her ivory beads. I cracked open her body along the sharp seam and snapped free her blueberry-smelling organs. Her entrails were healthy and pure of function. Her breasts were clean and rejuvenated. Her reproductive organs hovered in space — three pink satellites sending signals back and forth — a healthy, holy, virgin trinity. Inside my own body was a similar machine, and privately I would probe my abdominal muscles and try to locate my magic organs. In secret I probed my lines and creases and shivered myself on the edge of experience. For in my young mind, to climax was to touch God’s hand.
La Femme Visible also had a detachable pregnancy, a horrid little fetus that expanded her belly and inhabited her body like a parasite. This I stashed in the back of a drawer, never quite brave enough to toss it in the bin.
John Beckman’s publications include a novel, The Winter Zoo, and a cultural history, American Fun: Four Centuries of Joyous Revolt. He is a Professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.
