Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (45 page)

“So, you do think the Bible a good
thing?”

“Umm. Well. To be-labor my apiarian
analogy: the honey that’s dipped from that busy hive can be sweet and
nourishing, or it can be hallucinogenic and deadly. All too frequently, the
latter is confused with the former. Dip with caution. Reader be-ware.”

Domino studied him, but he couldn’t
tell if it was with appreciation or contempt. To break the silence, and perhaps
to win favor, he revealed that less than a year before, he had been considering
joining the Catholic Church. He didn’t mention Suzy.

“What?! Are you mad? How could you
possibly be a member of the Church and yet not belong or believe?”

“Easy. It’s the best way. To practice
a religion can be lovely, to believe in one is almost always disastrous.”

Understanding him to mean that to
practice Christ’s teachings and not believe in them was a finer thing than to
fervently believe in them but never put them into practice, she had to nod in
tenuous agreement. He was standing hypocrisy on its head. “Is that the way you
managed to work for the CIA?”

“Yeah, probably, now that you mention
it. It’s called participation without attachment.”

“But I don’t . . .”

“Because the CIA is an extremist
organization that has the unusual ability to function outside the compromising
channels of normal political and commercial restraint, it has the potential to
kick out the blocks here and there and help the world to happen. The original
teachings of Jesus and Mohammed et al are also extreme. If a person can participate
in those extreme systems without identifying with the humbug they’ve spawned,
without becoming attached to, say, patriotism in the case of the CIA, or
moralistic zeal, in the case of the Church, then that throbbing nerve that runs
from the hypothalamus to the trigger finger might be sedated, minds might be
liberated, and—who knows?—the logjam of orthodoxy and certitude might be
broken, allowing the—what shall we call it?—river of human affairs to gurgle
off freely in new and unexpected directions. Something like that. Cha-cha-cha.”

“Is that your faith then? Freedom and
unpredictability?”

He finished off his tea. “My faith is
whatever makes me feel good about being alive. If your religion doesn’t make
you feel good to be alive, what the hell is the point of it?”

For a moment, she seemed taken aback.
Then she snapped, “Comfort.”

“Heh!” He sounded so much like
Maestra he almost gave himself a bracelet.

“Hope.”

“I can’t do the math, but wouldn’t
x
amount of hope cancel out
x
amount of faith? I mean, if you have faith
the sun’s going to rise in the morning, you don’t have to hope it will.”

“Solace.”

“Solace? That’s why God made
fermented beverages and the blues.”

“Salvation.”

“From what? Aren’t you talking about
some form of long-term, no-premium, afterworldly fire insurance?”

Domino didn’t respond, and he worried
that he might have gone too far. “Of course,” he said, “I’ve also never seen
the point of chicken wings. Either for the chicken, who doesn’t fly, or for the
diner, who doesn’t get enough meat to justify all the grease it takes to make
them halfway edible.”

A sudden blink of wistfulness caused
her eyes to grow even softer than usual. “Tell me, do they still have the
Philly cheese steak?”

“You bet they do. There
are
some
things a person can count on.”

She smiled, and it was, he thought,
like a cross between the Taj Mahal and a jukebox. “Is there anything right now
that is making you feel glad about being alive?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. I’m in a
foreign country, illegally, in a mysterious convent, inappropriately, and in
conversation with the blue nude’s niece, improbably. What’s not to enjoy?”

Briefly, very briefly, she closed her
palms and fingers around the fists he’d rested on the armrests. “And in a
wheelchair, unfortunately.” She stood. “Okay. I must go now and visit my
auntie. The excommunication has hit Masked Beauty quite hard. Hit all of us,
really. But we will go forward.” She straightened the sweet-smelling sprig
behind her ear. She moved away.

Near the door, she paused. “Now that
the patriarchal authorities have found our tiny band of desert nuns unfit to be
in their Church, we’re having to redefine our relationship to our religion. In
addition to that, we have been trying for some years now to redefine our
relationship to Christ, to Mary, to God. God is a fixed point, naturally, God
is eternal and absolute, God doesn’t change. But man’s concept of God, man’s
interpretation of God, the way we view God has changed many times over history.
Sometimes we think of him as more intimate, other times more impersonal and
aloof; in some centuries he was seen to be primarily angry and judgmental and
vengeful; in others, more loving and accepting. Our image of God evolves. Yes?
And what would our ideas of God, of religion, be like if they had come to us
through the minds of women? Ever think of that? We concentrate on such matters
here, and for that reason I very much appreciate my talk with you, for while I
may disagree with many of your absurd notions, you show me how it’s possible to
think freely, without constraints or limitations or preconceptions. That’s
helpful.”

“We absurdists are always pleased to
be of service.”

“I also appreciate getting to tell
you our own story. Because even though you refer to our convent as
‘mysterious,’ you now can see that our ceremony at the bonfire was a logical,
pragmatic thing, like all of our activities. We are as simple as a candle, Mr.
Switters. There’s no magic here, no mystery.”

“No, I guess not,” he conceded.
“Except, of course, for the document.”

Domino blanched. “Ah, yes,” she
sighed, after a time. “The document. The Serpent in our Eden.”

Maria Une delivered his lunch, and
after it had been absorbed by that ball of mystic white light that he imagined
to occupy his lower torso, its nutrients reconverted into photons, the chaff
transformed into what he was prone to label “dark matter,” as if bodily waste
were the ash from a dead star, he e-mailed Maestra an account of the curious
blue nude coincidence. Then, hating it all the while, he exercised for well
over an hour, turning his cot into a gym mat, a platform upon which he
performed sit-ups, push-ups, crunches, and other forms of self-torture as
required by the tyranny of maintenance.

So exhausted was he by the strenuous workout
that he fell asleep after reading less than a page of
Finnegans Wake
.
When he finally awoke, it was dark. His dinner tray had been left on the
bedside stool, and alongside the cornucopiate pita sandwich, there was a large
glass of red wine (tea, eat your heart out!) and a sprig of orange blossoms.

He wouldn’t see Domino until
morning, but when morning finally came (he had read most of the night), he
seemed so hale and fit (the workout had paid a dividend) that she proposed a
tour of the oasis. For the next hour, she pushed his chair around the grounds.

Against the thick mud walls of the
various buildings, yellow roses bloomed, and in the willows that surrounded the
large spring that was the centerpiece and lifeblood of the compound, cuckoos
sang. Irrigation troughs funneled water from the spring to gardens dense with
tomatoes, cucumbers, chickpeas, and eggplants. In groves scattered throughout
the oasis, there were trees that each in its own season bore figs, almonds,
oranges, pomegranates, walnuts, dates, and lemons. Chickens scratched beneath
jasmine bushes, as if doing a kind of archaic arithmetic; a solitary donkey
swished its tail with such regular cadence that it might have been a pendulum
for keeping the time of the world; and a few runty black goats bleated and
chewed, bleated and chewed, in a manner that suggested they were eating their
own voices. A great peace and a floral fragrance hovered about the place: it
probably was at least a low-rent approximation of Eden.

“The Syrian government doesn’t object
to your being here?” Switters asked, recalling that no country on earth with
the possible exception of Israel had experienced historically as many religious
massacres as Syria.

“
Au contraire.
Damascus loves
us. It can point to our token convent as an example of its tolerance and
diversity. We’re good, how do you say, PR for Syria. Damascus likes us better
than Rome does.”

Outside the arched and latticed
doorway that led into the dining hall, Domino formally introduced him to each
of the sisters. Each, that is, except for the one he most desired to meet. They
ranged from Maria Une—the oldest, save for the elusive Masked Beauty—to Fannie,
the youngest at thirty-four, and the most overtly friendly. In between, there
was Maria Deux, taciturn and pinch-faced; ZuZu, who resembled the wine-jolly
hostess of a TV cooking show; frizzy, foxy-eyed Bob, who might have been
Einstein’s twin sister; Pippi, who was cinnamon-haired, heavily freckled, and
wore a carpenter’s belt; and Mustang Sally, petite, plantain-nosed, and
festooned with the kind of spit curls that hadn’t been seen on a Frenchwoman
since BrassaÏ photographed Paris’s backstreet bar girls in the 1930s. In their
identical ankle-length Syrian gowns, they might have been a culture club, a
Greek sorority, perhaps, organized by mildly eccentric middle-aged Ohio
housewives in a chronic pang of misplaced aesthetic longing. On the other hand,
they were poised, tranquil, earnest, and highly industrious. They nodded
politely when Domino informed them that their guest was fully recovered from
fever, thanks to God and Pachomian charity, and would be departing their
company on the supply truck the following day or the day after. His presence
must have been a novelty, though whether welcomed or resented he couldn’t tell.
Certainly, with the notable exception of Fannie, the women appeared anxious to
return to their labors.

Domino resumed the tour, pushing him
out past the grape arbor, generator shed, burn barrel, and compost heaps, out
to, and then around, the parameters of the high, solid wall that separated her
gentle green island from the harsh sandy vastness that surrounded it.
Eventually they arrived back at the great gate, and it was there, as she slowed
to impart some fact or other (she seemed to enjoy wheeling him around: women
love these fierce invalids home from hot climates?), that he noticed on the
ground to the right of the gate a pair of wooden poles that had wedges attached
to them about eighteen to twenty inches from the bottom.

Switters pointed. “What are those?”
he asked.

“Those? Uh, in French they’re called
les
échasses
. I can’t remember the English. The nuns use them to be tall enough
to look through the hole in the gate.”

“Stilts,” he whispered. “I’ll be
double damned.” He swatted his brow smartly with the palm of his hand. “Stilts!
Of course! Why haven’t
I
thought of that?”

To Domino’s astonishment, he stood
on the seat of his Invacare 9000 XT and had her, protesting all the while, lean
against the upright stilts to steady them while he climbed onto their
footrests. At his signal, she stepped aside, and off he clumped, moving the
right stilt forward and then the left—before he went sprawling onto his face.
He’d covered less than a yard.

But he insisted on trying it again.
And again. Covering a greater distance each time before he fell. Domino was
beside herself. “You’ll break an arm! You’re ruining your nice suit! How can
you stand on these cotton-pick . . . , on these damn stilts when you can’t
stand on the ground?”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll explain
later. Let’s go. I can do this. I did it when I was a kid in Redwood City.”

She couldn’t restrain him. He was
like a puncture in a high-pressure hose, spurting in all directions, spuming
with an irrepressible puissance. The longer he remained upright, the more
excited he became. Soon—well, whether or not it was soon depended upon one’s
perspective: to Domino it seemed longer than a journey across purgatory on a
lawn tractor—he was staying up for two or three minutes at a time. He wobbled,
he lurched, he teetered and toddled and sprinted. He scattered goats and
chickens, crashed into a date palm, got entangled in a laundry line (Oh, those
ancient bloomers!), and, through it all, cackled like a lunatic.

Disturbed at their agricultural and
domestic chores, the defrocked nuns gawked at him in disbelief and, perhaps,
something close to alarm. Domino, running along behind him, pushing his empty
chair, urged them breathlessly to ignore the spectacle. As if they could.
Fannie, though, gave him an encouraging wink, and once, when he’d adroitly
sidestepped a panicked nanny goat, Sister Pippi actually applauded.

In the Gascony region of southwestern
France, where Pippi was reared, stiltwalking was somewhat of a tradition.
Gascony farmers had once used stilts to wade in marshlands and cross the
numerous streams, and were said to be able to run on stilts with amazing speed
and ease. Asked to build a set of portable stairs to enable the sisters to see
through the sliding peephole in the gate, Pippi, in a fit of fun and nostalgia,
had made these stilts instead.

Struck by Switters’s persistence—he
kept at it literally for hours—and delighted by his improvement—by late
afternoon he was stilting with authority, if not exactly grace—Pippi beckoned
him over to the roofed but open-air area at the rear of the storehouse where
she maintained a small carpentry shop. “I’ve been saving these for a special
occasion,” she said in her Gascogne French, and as Domino squealed
“Non,
non, non!”
Pippi produced from beneath a lumber pile a pair of stilts more
than twice as tall as the ones on which Switters had been practicing.