The White Garden (16 page)

I felt the hand of God. He smiled on me. Dance little lady, shady lady, he said, and I took his hand. He smiled and I smiled and we twirled onto the dance-floor. We waltzed and we waltzed and we were as one. I felt the hand and heart and soul of God, and we danced in the moonlight and then it was over. And we popped a wondrous wonder-bomb of LSD and we fucked and fucked and fucked all night long, I think. He said that’s what we

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were doing. It felt like funny fun to me, but he was crying most of the time. I didn’t care. He said I was cruel, a cruel mistress, whore and slut.

Then God finally took unto Himself our saintly father, my Papa,
my King.

It was after Papa’s death that Celine recognised her vocation
and desired to enter the convent. At last the exiled dove came
home to the nest.

I repeat the words of St John of the Cross over and over: ‘I
drank deep within the cellar of my Beloved.’

When I was between seventeen and eighteen the writings of
St John of the Cross were my only spiritual food, and as I grew
older the works of most religious writers left me unmoved.
The Bible
and
The Imitation
of Thomas à Kempis — in them I find
hidden manna and pure, substantial food.

From
The Imitation
I took pages 121 and 123, and I tore them into little pieces and then I ate them for they are manna and spiritual food. In time I will eat the whole book. It only tastes like dust. What I have eaten so far, then is:

‘Forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before.’

Time and tide.

Where will it all end? Does it end? I have eaten:

‘When I am weak then I am strong.’

I will now have the power of the weak. Inherit the earth with the meek. So weak and little and poor and pale and frail and powerless, I will have
all
the power. I will have power over life and death.

I have eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and I have done this in secret, in such dark secrecy that the power is mine. I have given in, given all, and now I am able to take. I am eating
The Imitation of Christ
. And you are what you eat.

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‘Wouldst thou attain unto a blessed life: then despise the life of the present.’

I have given in, given all and I wonder what I’m getting out of it. A lot of shit I reckon. Blood and shit.

‘Grace is the mistress of truth, the mother of tears.’

I have wept. I have eaten two pages of the book. I will make a meal of it. Make no bones about that.

I have always wanted to become a saint, but I realised very
early in my life that there is the same difference between me
and a saint as there is between a great mountain and a humble
grain of sand trodden underfoot. But in spite of my littleness I
can still aim to be a saint. I look for a means of going to Heaven
by a little way which is very short and very, very straight, a
little way that is quite new, that I will invent. We live in an age
of inventions. We no longer need to climb the stairs because
there are elevators. I will find an elevator to carry me to Jesus,
for I am too small to climb the steep stairs of perfection. When
one day I read in Scripture the words: ’Whosoever is a little
one, let him come to me’, I knew I had discovered The Way.

I read on and it said: ‘You shall be carried at the breast and
upon the knees; as one whom the mother caresseth, so will I
comfort you.’

And so there is no need for me to grow up; just the opposite. I
must stay little and become less and less.

The angels with their wings coloured bright like Japanese dressing-gowns lifted me up and carried me across the waters, and the waters of the ocean were wild as night. I know nothing of love, but I know I must become less and less, fade out, die down, flicker. Think of the power of the spark. The spark will ignite the forest, start the inferno that will engulf the world. I’ll be in that. Reckless, feckless, flickering fucker. Look at her angel wings. Regard, if you will, the marvellous wings and curtains of her sweet pink cunt.

God likes to bestow His wisdom on babes and sucklings. He that

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is mighty hath done great things to me, and the greatest thing
was to show me my littleness. My greatest martyrdom remained
a secret from those around me for a long, long time. It happened
as follows.

It all began on Holy Thursday when I went to bed. No
sooner had my head touched the pillow than I felt a gush of
warm liquid fill my mouth. I raised my handkerchief to my lips
and wiped the substance away. I thought I was dying and my
heart almost burst with joy. I had just put out the lamp in my
cell and I restrained myself from lighting it for the purpose of
examining the liquid in my mouth, and I went peacefully to
sleep. When the bell for rising rang at five o’clock I remembered
at once that I had some good news to check. So I went to the
window and held my handkerchief to such light as was there,
and I saw that the cloth was sodden with blood. I was sure
that on the anniversary of His death my Beloved had let me
hear His first call, like a gentle far-off murmur which heralded
His joyful arrival. On that Good Friday I shared to the full
the austerities of Carmel, and they have never seemed so
delightful. The hope of going to heaven transported me with
joy. But the following months were not always radiant, for a
pitch-black cloud swept over my soul, and anyone who wishes
to understand how dark this journey is must travel the same
bleak, sunless tunnel.

My angels carried me like a parcel, skimming the waves, soaring to the stars. And inside the parcel my heart was ticking and pumping blood, round and round in the long thin tunnels of my parcel. Wrapped in white linen I was a small neat parcel of blood and bone and skin and sin. Up, up we go, flying with the Japanese angels. They carry their precious parcel through the fog of air and cloud. There is a pitch black sunless tunnel and we travel there. All light goes, like the light of life that fades from the eye when death has come. The lustre of life fades and drops away. I travel the sunless tunnel. Sometimes my head aches. And you can bet there are times when my cunt aches like anything, but it has to be worth it, doesn’t it? Travelling
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the sunless tunnel is no mean feat. Like Christopher Columbus discovering the new world.

In my belief in the bliss of heaven I was like Christopher
Columbus whose genius sensed the existence of a new world.

But at the time of the fatal Easter, quite suddenly, the mists of
my dark adopted country sank into my very soul and smothered
it. My knowledge of heaven vanished and I was left in a world of
darkest despair.

When I sang of heaven I got no joy because I was singing only
of what I wished to believe.

Since entering Carmel I often thought the fate of Noah’s
dove would be mine unless Jesus took me to heaven quickly. By
this I mean that unless death came when I was young, I would
surely be sent far away to live in exile among strangers in a
strange convent. One day Jesus would open the window of the
ark and tell me to fly to heathen shores, carrying with me the
olive twig. This thought of being a missionary made my spirit
soar.

To all intents and purposes I have had a happy life. I was the youngest favourite daughter of a very good family. I had the best education, and the best of everything that money could buy.

You’d wonder where all this went wrong. Some faulty gene, some wicked fairy, some poisonous plant eaten by mistake or design in early childhood. Therese Gillis, they’ll say, went round the twist and was put in a home and mixed with very bad mad company. She pretended she was raped by the very doctor who was there to help her. She changed by metamorphosis into a fine French saint, who was in turn a rose bush, which was in turn a raving slut. She was getting on so well, but then she up and committed suicide. It was so tragic, such a sad thing for the family. They never got over it. Never got over it.

Never ever. Went round on their knees begging forgiveness and wondering where they had gone wrong and thinking perhaps if they had insisted on her doing more piano practice. The studies of Czerny have been known to work wonders for the souls of wayward girls. Or then perhaps there had been too much piano?

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Had continental culture been overdone in her case? Who can tell. Therese Gillis was found hanging in the garden, and lots of foul stuff was running out of her and falling in a slow stream on the ground.

If the Blessed Virgin cured me of my illness, I wanted to answer
the appeal of our community in Hanoi. I dreamt of a convent
where I was unknown, and forced to endure the pain of exile.

Suffering itself becomes the greatest of all joys when one seeks it
like a precious treasure.

I have eaten page eight.

‘Though I understand all knowledge and have not charity I am nothing.’

Well that’s right. I am nothing. No thing. Therese No-Thing.

And once upon a time I ate the Mona Lisa. That was a time and half. There she was, hanging around the wash-house door, and I opened up my mouth so wide, and slipped her head between my teeth, two rows of teeth cared for by expert dentists, and I lowered my tongue and let my gullet widen, widen until gulp!

snap! like a crocodile with yellow eyes I swallowed her all up and she was gone, gone inside to inhabit me. Where do you live, they say to her, and she says, in a little voice that you can only just hear if you’re lucky and if you have sharp ears, she says she lives in Therese No-Thing, and people are satisfied by her answer. It’s a good one.

Sometimes I feel attracted to one particular sister and I go out
of my way to dodge meeting another. But Jesus tells me it is the
second sister I must love, and that I must pray for her, even
though her manner tells me she has no love for me. There was a
time when one of the nuns irritated me by whatever she did. So
I made it a practice to be near her as often as I could, and never
to betray my dislike. She asked me one day, with a beaming
face, why I was so attracted to her and why I always gave her
such a charming smile. I told her it was because she reminded
me of God’s love.

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Bees fly on beelines, knowing where to go. My head aches, and I do not know the way. I feel my heart beating within me, my ears thudding with the thunder of my blood, and somewhere in a distant room a lunatic is playing a piano, drumming the low notes over and over in a dreadful ecstasy of droning rhythm. My hands over my ears — and the sound of the piano — is it in a cellar — is it in my ribcage — the sound of the piano goes on, and on, and on. It beats like the waves on the seashore, beat, boom, beat.

I have eaten page seventeen.

‘Temptation comes upon temptation.’

I twist and turn in a torment of temptation. I am forever tempted by the sweet, sweet smell of death. Death is all around me in the writhing, groaning bodies in the beds, beneath the eerie light of the green glass lamp.

In the Sleeping Beauty Chamber I must mimic sleep, must ape the princess who pricked her finger and fell into a slumber for a hundred years. And princes came crashing through the hedges of prickles and vines and roses and blackberries and with their flaming swords they parted the curtains of the bedroom and parted the legs of the princess and with an elegant and princely gesture they insinuated their gold and silk and velvet members into the princess herself. Like jackhammers and jackasses the princes pleasured themselves with the body of the sleeping princess. You’d think she would wake up or die, or call for help, but no, the spell keeps the princess under, and so the tale goes on for a hundred sleeping years.

I remember when I was a postulant I sometimes longed to seek
my own satisfaction and enjoy a little pleasure such as spend-ing time with my beloved Reverend Mother. This longing was so
strong that I was forced to hurry past her cell, and to clutch the
balustrade to prevent myself turning back.

I have a perfect memory, intact. But assembled in many, many different ways. Today I will remember silver roses, and tomorrow they will be gold, last week glass. I loved the glass roses, so

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fragile, resembling rain. I will never forget Violetta, a cut glass Italian girl who wore the face of love. The face of love is the face of death, as anybody knows.

My memories of the French convent twist and knot with recollections of my Melbourne schooldays. I see the snow in the garden, the man beside the wash-house, the Mona Lisa shadow girl — and the doctor turns to me, his hands red with the invisible blood of women he has murdered with his magic sleep. My mouth is stopped with silencing drugs and I cannot cry out.