Hunger's Brides (172 page)

Old Comedy: an outlandish form of drama that disappears with Aristophanes after the fall of Athens to Sparta. Often drawing throngs of over fourteen thousand spectators, it was perhaps the oldest and most popular theatre of all. Like its sister, Tragedy, Old Comedy sprang from the threshing floor of the harvest and the fertility rites of Dionysus, a whirl of ritual marriages, bawds and bacchanalian feasts, a threshing ecstasy turning to blood, from blood to raucous laughter—just the kind of transit that would appeal to her. As a form, it depended on ancient religious sanctions to escape censure for its deep obscenity, blasphemies, and seditious political commentary …

But mid-lecture, the scholarly paragon pauses, shaken, his index finger still raised to accentuate a telling point. Might she have seen not just the occasional chapter but her entire work as a comedy? Could this be? To have dedicated years of deep passion to a
joke?
One with a particularly savage punchline. Why does the mind, my mind, recoil—is this so difficult to accept? And why does it only get harder to make a joke of it, when this had always been my intention?

Because I was there that night. Because I was there. With her blood on my hands, in these pages. Because I close my eyes and see her every page signed in it.

Everything written is constructed, the scholar reminds himself, recovered now. It's what I've always taught. I hear her voice in the room, taunting, in the semi-darkness around me. Anything written can be
deconstructed, unless you'd believe we take our dictation from the muse. But what kind of mind constructs this?

Does she want to show me the mind of God? Is this what she's doing—
rehabilitating god?
A god of old comedies.

Stretch, Donald
, whispers the pupil to the teacher. Can't I read the signs?—the deliberately garbled allusions, mock-epic clash of tones, verse and prose in tangled collision, all the mangled midrash of a still more ancient tradition. Is this what I'm supposed to find, Beulah? Even
the pnigos
in the breathless patter of her journals—all constructed for me, her
agon—
her chorus split in two.

So that now to me falls the
parabasis
, the author's jarring attempt to win the audience's approval.

What gives you the right? Who gave
you
permission? What kind of insanity is this to
dedicate years
to a grandiose joke?

I don't want this.

No—no: all this is just your
nihilism
. That's what she's doing—putting me alone in a darkened theatre then offering up her heart's blood to the one person least able to accept it.

Was it less painful this way? For her to grope and struggle towards some doubtful revelation, armed with the absolute certainty that it would not be understood? She was so certain of me, then. Of my limitations. That I would be incapable of glimpsing the slightest trace of grandeur in the ruin she had built.

Why me, I ask now for what must be the thousandth time. Here then is my answer. This is how I am to serve. As the reminder of how little pity and terror is left to this spent millennium of hers—how little comprehension, how little empathy.

She leaves me here to agonize and cogitate in luxury. She leaves me.

She leaves me here to wonder: what is the parody of a parody of an ecstasy?

I am asked to play her one-man chorus, Elizabethan—to sing the part of hoary tradition in my fine castrato's voice. To parody
Murder in the Cathedral
and that great scholar Thomas à Becket. To be revealed as everything he was not, to be made a martyr without a cause, playing at agony, just managing self-pity.

Foil.

Jester.

Fool.

Oh Donald
, she wrote for me there in her diaries,
such a wonderful clown you'll make! Just what's it take to make you blink, just how much truth can you take …?

Saint Mary of Egypt Women's College … A hard school but holy. So here's the layout and your day's agenda.
¹⁶
Every day. Each single day of your lives.

1. Wake towards 4:30. Upon awakening, recall the material to be meditated on: run over each point without giving way to other useless, secret thoughts and shirking. Dress, giving thanks to God for having preserved you during the night from all evil and pray for liberation from all sin….

2. Once dressed, enter into prayer until Prime, preferably behind the chancel lattice, chastely screened, discreetly cancelled. There, read the points of meditation; that is, should they not already come readily to mind.

3. It being the hour, say prayers with the same clear expression, voice and tone of the others in community and with attention—interior and exterior—reverence, modesty and silence, as someone who is speaking to God in the name of Holy Mother Church. As Saint Theresa herself has said: This is the hour to negotiate with Christ and iron out any outstanding matrimonial disputes, by correcting your own numberless faults.

4. Return up to your cell, rest, break fast, read, meditating on some passage from
Contempt for the World…
.

5. At eight, attend main Mass, and until nine make devotions. If the community celebrates Mass at another hour, perform instead labours to the accompaniment of saintly discourses read aloud, visit the sick or see to ordinary errands.

6. From nine to eleven (or else eleven to twelve): labour, say the rosary of the Virgin, make devotions and visits to the altars of the Holy Sacrament. Conduct general and particular examination of the conscience.

7. At 12:00, proceed either to the refectory or back to the cell to eat a frugal meal, appetite firmly fixed on the mildness, mortification and presence of God, on the memory of the bitter gall and fasts of Christ and on the poverty of His Mother.
Buen provecho
.
†
Sorry Father, can we say this in Latin?

8. Lie down some while if such is your custom or need; rest without the slightest exercise or mental care until two o'clock.

9. From two until three, devotions and new visits to the Holy Sacrament.

10. From three to four, manual labour, cell-keeping or the work of special duties and offices.

11. At four, visit an invalid or the Holy Sacrament again, or bless the dormitories,
etc
.

12. From five to six, spiritual readings.

13. From six until seven, pray aloud while conducting an interior examination.

14. Between seven and eight, attend to one's prescribed needs, devotions, exercises or
special mortifications
.

15. From eight until the half-hour, dine and rest a moment in holy conversation.

16. From the half-hour until nine, general and particular examination of the soul and preparation of the items for the dawn prayer.

17. At nine, prepare for bed, thinking of God and the morrow's prayer, and pray to the Guardian Angel to protect and wake you….

H
ARLEQUIN:
F
IFTH
B
USINESS
        

I S
TUDIOUSLY AVOIDED
knowing her, but how closely she was studying me. Not just for the pleasure of plotting my humiliation but of calculating how I might be brought, willingly or not, to help her carry it out. Yet somewhere along the way I've stopped believing this is only about revenge—first Beulah's, then mine. Something more, then, something else … but what?

And somewhere I decided to help her tell her story by folding mine into hers. But where, when did this sea change come? I try to remember, to find the turning. I can't. I can't find it. I've missed the moment. This, and so many others.

What an odd little life mine has become. Disdaining religiosity yet craving my tiny armageddons—final farewell tilts at foreign travel and languages, honest scholarship, bachelorhood, then at infidelity itself. And, oh yes—ambition. In the end, leaving every last battlefield on the run.

When exactly did I become fifth business? … a type to cast in summer stock, the harlequin. How does a man let it happen but not really notice? Become a player just fit to swell a progress, angling for a bedroom scene or two.

But now she offers me a real role, a meaty part with a striking costume: tragicomic jester's mask, split right down the middle. How she must have found her paradoxical harlequin irresistible: humourless yet mocking, craven yet arrogant, cynical yet ambitious. One more critic with an unfinished novel in his desk. Now I presume to finish hers.

Am I to play Salieri to her Mozart, then? To steal her music and pass it off as mine? Salieri publishes his concerto, his great new work, a new direction! Then Mozart recovers, the genius comes back from the dead, and plays for him, plays the unfinished music that should have been. Plays for him. And he sees that he understood so little. Plays for him. And there is more, infinitely more.

Plays for him.

At least Salieri …
heard
.

If the mask I'm handed fits so well, why not also wear it well? It's as she predicted, you see, the prophet can no longer tell Providence from Irony. Her satire annihilates me. How can I face her?
I am defaced
.

Let him wear it then, the jester's mask she proffers. Let him put it on. There, at last he thinks he sees: the real difference between tragedy and comedy is not up on the stage.

It's in the audience.