Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories (69 page)

She walked until she came to the forest of the Sainte-Baume. She walked until she came to the remotest part of the forest. There she found a cave. There she stopped. There she prayed. She did not speak to another human being, she did not see another human being, for thirty-three years. By then, she was old.

Mary Magdalene, the Venus in sackcloth. Georges de La Tour’s picture does not show a woman in sackcloth, but her chemise is coarse and simple enough to be a penitential garment, or, at least, the kind of garment that shows you were not thinking of personal adornment when you put it on. Even though the chemise is deeply open on the bosom, it does not seem to disclose flesh as such, but a flesh that has more akin to the wax of the burning candle, to the way the wax candle is irradiated by its own flame, and glows. So you could say that, from the waist up, this Mary Magdalene is on the high road to penitence, but, from the waist down, which is always the more problematic part, there is the question of her long, red skirt.

Left-over finery? Was it the only frock she had, the frock she went whoring in, then repented in, then set sail in? Did she walk all the way to the Sainte-Baume in this red skirt? It doesn’t look travel-stained or worn or torn. It is a luxurious, even scandalous skirt. A scarlet dress for a scarlet woman.

The Virgin Mary wears blue. Her preference has sanctified the colour. We think of a “heavenly” blue. But Mary Magdalene wears red, the colour of passion. The two women are twin paradoxes. One is not what the other is. One is a virgin and a mother; the other is a non-virgin, and childless. Note how the English language doesn’t contain a specific word to describe a woman who is grown-up, sexually mature and
not
a mother, unless such a woman is using her sexuality as her profession.

Because Mary Magdalene is a woman and childless she goes out into the wilderness. The others, the mothers, stay and make a church, where people come.

But why has she taken her pearl necklace with her? Look at it, lying in front of the mirror. And her long hair has been most beautifully brushed. Is she, yet, fully repentant?

In Georges de La Tour’s painting, the Magdalene’s hair is well brushed. Sometimes the Magdalene’s hair is as shaggy as a Rastafarian’s. Sometimes her hair hangs down upon, is inextricably mixed up with, her furs. Mary Magdalene is easier to read when she is hairy, when, in the wilderness, she wears the rough coat of her own desires, as if the desires of her past have turned into the hairy shirt that torments her present, repentant flesh.

Sometimes she wears only her hair; it never saw a comb, long, matted, unkempt, hanging down to her knees. She belts her own hair round her waist with the rope with which, each night, she lashes herself, making a rough tunic of it. On these occasions, the transformation from the young lovely, voluptuous Mary Magdalene, the happy non-virgin, the party girl, the woman taken in adultery—on these occasions, the transformation is complete. She has turned into something wild and strange, into a female version of John the Baptist, a hairy hermit, as good as naked, transcending gender, sex obliterated, nakedness irrelevant.

Now she is one with such pole-sitters as Simeon Stylites, and other solitary cave-dwellers who communed with beasts, like St Jerome. She eats herbs, drinks water from the pool; she comes to resemble an even earlier incarnation of the “wild man of the woods” than John the Baptist. Now she looks like hairy Enkidu, from the Babylonian
Epic of Gilgamesh.
The woman who once, in her grand, red dress, was vice personified, has now retired to an existential situation in which vice simply is not possible. She has arrived at the radiant, enlightened sinlessness of the animals. In her new, resplendent animality, she is now beyond choice. Now she has no option but virtue.

But there is another way of looking at it. Think of Donatello’s Magdalene, in Florence—she’s dried up by the suns of the wilderness, battered by wind and rain, anorexic, toothless, a body entirely annihilated by the soul. You can almost smell the odour of the kind of sanctity that reeks from her—it’s rank, it’s raw, it’s horrible. By the ardour with which she has embraced the rigorous asceticism of penitence, you can tell how much she hated her early life of so-called “pleasure”. The mortification of the flesh comes naturally to her. When you learn that Donatello intended the piece to be not black but gilded, that does not lighten its mood.

Nevertheless, you can see the point that some anonymous Man of the Enlightenment on the Grand Tour made two hundred years ago—how Donatello’s Mary Magdalene made him “disgusted with penitence”.

Penitence becomes sado-masochism. Self-punishment is its own reward.

But it can also become kitsch. Consider the apocryphal story of Mary of Egypt. Who was a beautiful prostitute until she repented and spent the remaining forty-seven years of her life as a penitent in the desert, clothed only in her long hair. She took with her three loaves and ate a mouthful of bread once a day, in the mornings; the loaves lasted her out. Mary of Egypt is clean and fresh. Her face stays miraculously unlined. She is as untouched by time as her bread is untouched by appetite. She sits on a rock in the desert, combing out her long hair, like a lorelei whose water has turned to sand. We can imagine how she smiles. Perhaps she sings a little song.

Georges de La Tour’s Mary Magdalene has not yet arrived at an ecstasy of repentance, evidently. Perhaps, indeed, he has pictured her as she is just about to repent—before her sea voyage in fact, although I would prefer to think that this bare, bleak space, furnished only with the mirror, is that of her cave in the woods. But this is a woman who is still taking care of herself. Her long, black hair, sleek as that of a Japanese woman on a painted scroll—she must just have finished brushing it, reminding us that she is the patron saint of hairdressers. Her hair is the product of culture, not left as nature intended. Her hair shows she has just used the mirror as an instrument of worldly vanity. Her hair shows that, even as she meditates upon the candle flame,
this
world still has a claim upon her.

Unless we are actually watching her as her soul is drawn out into the candle flame.

We meet Mary Magdalene in the gospels, doing something extraordinary with her hair. After she massaged Jesus’s feet with her pot of precious ointment, she wiped them clean with her hair, an image so astonishing and erotically precise it is surprising it is represented so rarely in art, especially that of the seventeenth century, when religious excess and eroticism went so often together. Magdalene, using her hair, that beautiful net with which she used to snare men as—well, as a mop, a washcloth, a towel. And a slight element of the perverse about it, too. All in all, the kind of
gaudy gesture
a repentant prostitute
would
make.

She has brushed her hair, perhaps for the last time, and taken off her pearl necklace, also for the last time. Now she is gazing at the candle flame, which doubles itself in the mirror. Once upon a time, that mirror was the tool of her trade; it was within the mirror that she assembled all the elements of the femininity she put together for sale. But now, instead of reflecting her face, it duplicates the pure flame.

When I was in labour, I thought of a candle flame. I was in labour for nineteen hours. At first the pains came slowly and were relatively light; it was easy to ride them. But when they came more closely together, and grew more and more intense, then I began to concentrate my mind upon an imaginary candle flame.

Look at the candle flame as if it is the only thing in the world. How white and steady it is. At the core of the white flame is a cone of blue, transparent air; that is the thing to look at, that is the thing to concentrate on. When the pains came thick and fast, I fixed all my attention on the blue absence at the heart of the flame, as though it were the secret of the flame and, if I concentrated enough upon it, it would become
my
secret, too.

Soon there was no time to think of anything else. By then, I was entirely subsumed by the blue space. Even when they snipped away at my body, down below, to finally let the baby out the easiest way, all my attention was concentrated on the core of the flame.

Once the candle flame had done its work, it snuffed itself out; they wrapped my baby in a shawl and gave him to me.

Mary Magdalene meditates upon the candle flame. She enters the blue core, the blue absence. She becomes something other than herself.

The silence in the picture, for it is the most silent of pictures, emanates not from the darkness behind the candle in the mirror but from these two candles, the real candle and the mirror candle. Between them, the two candles disseminate light and silence. They have tranced the woman into enlightenment. She can’t speak, won’t speak. In the desert, she will grunt, maybe, but she will put speech aside, after this, after she has meditated upon the candle flame and the mirror. She will put speech aside just as she has put aside her pearl necklace and will put away her red skirt. The new person, the saint, is being born out of this intercourse with the candle flame.

But something has already been born out of this intercourse with the candle flame. See. She carries it already. She carries where, if she were a Virgin mother and not a sacred whore, she would rest her baby, not a living child but a
memento mori,
a skull.

I remember, I’d been watching a hawk. There was an immense sky of the most innocent blue, blue of a bowl from which a child might just have drunk its morning milk and left behind a few whitish traces of cloud around the rim, and, imprinted on this sky, a single point of perfect stillness—a hawk over the ruins. A hawk so still he seemed the central node of the sky and the source of the heavy silence which fell down on the ruins like invisible rain; an immobile hawk so high above the turning world that I was sure he would see a half rotating hemisphere below him; and, over this hemisphere, scampered the plump vole or delicious bunny that did not know it had been pinioned already by the eyebeam of its feathered, taloned fate imminent in the air. Morning, silence, a hawk, his prey and ruins. If I try very hard, I can also add to this landscape with my little tent, my half-track and, piece by piece, all my naturalist’s equipment … I must have gone out to collect samples of the desolate flora of this empty place. Above the green abandonment of the deserted city, where the little foxes played, a rapt hawk gathered to himself all its haunted stillness.

Hawk plummets. He’s unpremeditated and precise as Zen swordsmen, his fall subsumed to the aerial whizz of the rope that traps me.

I am sure of it—beat me as much as you like; I remember it perfectly. Don’t I?

The Count sits in a hall hung with embroideries depicting all the hierarchy of hell, a place, he claims, not unlike the Scarlet House. Soon, everywhere will be like the Scarlet House. Chaos is coming, says the Count, and giggles; the Count ends all his letters “yours entropically” and signs them with the peacock’s quill dipped in the blood of a human sacrifice. Why did you come to these abandoned regions, my dear, surely you’d heard rumours that I and my fabulous retinue had already installed ourselves in the ruins, preparing chaos with the aid of a Tarot pack?

But I had no notion who the Count was when his bodyguard captured me. They stood around me as I writhed on the ground and they showed their fangs at me; they all file their canines to a point, it is a sign of machismo among them. They wore jackets of black leather brightly studded with cabbalistic patterns; tall boots; snug leggings of black leather; and slick black helmets that fitted closely over the head and over the mouth, too, leaving only their pale eyes visible. Their eyes glittered like pebbles in a brook. They were armed with hand-guns and their belts bristled with knives. Each carried a coil of rope. A silence so perfect that it might never have been broken resumed itself after the hawk fell.

They hauled me off at the end of the rope they tied to the back of one of their motorcycles and made me run, tumble, bounce behind them on my way to the Scarlet House, though I must admit they drove quite slowly, so I was not much injured. The Scarlet House was built of white concrete and looked to me very much like a hospital, a large terminal ward. A few days in bed there, and the gravel rash, the grazes and bruises healed.

I remember everything perfectly. I know the ruins exist; at nights, I can hear the foxes barking in New Bond Street. That sound confirms the existence of the ruins though, of course, I can see nothing from the windows.

Meanwhile, in this blind place, the Count consults maps of the stars with the aid of his adviser, whose general efficiency is hindered by the epileptic fits with which he is afflicted. Though at the best of times his wits are out of order; he drools, too. His star-spangled robes are dabbled with spittle and spilled food and other randomly spattered bodily effluvia, for he’s quite shameless in his odd little lusts and pleasures and the Count lets him indulge them all. He’s the licensed fool and may even pull out his prick and play with it at mealtimes, and woe betide you if you flinch from one of his random displays of slobbering affection, for that’s a sure sign you aren’t in tune with chaos. But I’m not sure if he’s a fool all the time; sometimes his eyes focus on me with the assessing glint of a used-car dealer. Then I am afraid he may be wondering what I can remember.

When he’s been a good fool and made the Count chuckle, the Count tells Madame Schreck to give him access to one of the youngest of the girls. There are girls as young as twelve or thirteen and Fool likes his women just out of the shell. The Fool takes his present down to the dungeons. We won’t see
her
again.

But was she not almost as good as dead the moment she set foot inside the Scarlet House? The moment of capture had sealed her fate.

As for myself, I am sure I was captured by the bikers, in the ruins. I am perfectly confident that is how I came to the Scarlet House. Yet the Count assures me, with equal, if not superior confidence, that I am mistaken, so that I am not sure which of us to believe.