Traveling with Pomegranates (29 page)

In the room, I drop my clothes in a pile on the bathroom floor and step into the shower. Mom still has the light on when I fall asleep and dream what I will come to call The Dream.

When I open my eyes the room is filled with morning light. The awed feeling from the dream lingers in me, along with the picture of myself in the fire. I sit up slowly, afraid if I move too fast, the image will dissolve.

Mom’s alarm clock repeats four rapid beeps. I want to tell her about my dream, but before I pounce on her like our beagle used to do, waking her with his nose an inch from her face, I give her time to get up and find her glasses.

“I had a dream,” I tell her.

“Yeah?” She looks at my face and sits back down on the bed.

“When I was in Joan of Arc’s chapel in Notre Dame, I asked her to help me know what I was born to do.”

“Is that part of the dream?” Mom asks.

“No, that’s real. I’m just mentioning that first because . . . well, just because.”

Then I tell her the dream: the pregnancy tests, the walk in the woods, the fire in the stone circle, the realization that I conceived in the flames.

“I know it’s not an actual baby I’m having,” I tell her, and laugh.

Mom jokes, “That’s a relief.”

“So, help me understand it,” I say.

She takes off her glasses and cleans them on her nightshirt, which is a thing she does when she needs to think. “I guess if I dreamed that, I’d say the baby is some potential inside that wants to be born.”

“Um-hmm,” I say, and feel how that falls into place. I call up the image of the fire again. I associate it with the “necessary fire” that Mom had talked about. In the dream, the fire consumed me, but unlike the fire that consumed Joan, it wasn’t the end of me, but maybe the beginning. More like the emerging phoenix than the immolated girl-warrior.

My heart starts to beat very fast. “I think I know what the baby might be,” I tell her.

“Really? What?”

“Well, what if it’s . . . I’m not sure, but I think it might be writing.” Admitting this out loud for the first time makes me nervous, but also relieved.

Mom looks at me, surprised but not-surprised, her mouth parting and her eyes blinking wide, but that fades and she smiles at me like maybe she knew this already.

“By the way,” I say, “when I had that dream about the woman in
The Yellow Wallpaper
, did you make the connection between me and the character both being cut off from writing?” Once I finally noticed it, it seemed so obvious. I couldn’t imagine she missed it, too.

“I guess it did cross my mind.”

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“I didn’t know for sure. But even if I did, you needed to discover writing for yourself. You didn’t need me to tell you.”

I agreed. That seemed right. If she’d pointed it out, I might never have thought becoming a writer was coming from myself. Or felt like it was conceived in a necessary fire.

Mom hops off the bed, gives me a quick hug, and disappears into the bathroom. I walk to the window and stare out toward the woods, at the trees well into their long, autumn shedding, their orange and yellow leaves bunched around their trunks, the early morning mist already burning away.

Along the eastbound road from Sarlat to Rocamadour, our French driver pulls the bus to the side of the road. Standing in the aisle, he sweeps his arm toward the view in the distance—a gesture he accompanies with a little bow, as if he’s unveiling a European landscape he has personally painted.

Yesterday we had to call the bus company about him. Not because he fancies himself a tour guide, but because after lunch we noticed he was driving us around while smelling like a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon. It came to our attention when he tried to pinch the rear end of a nun who was traveling with us.

Trisha, Terry, and I took him aside for a stern talk, but in the excitement, Trisha’s remedial French failed her. She ended up rubbing her finger under her nose and sniffing at him, while Terry and I backed her up with vigorous nodding. The company threatened to fire him, and he vowed no more imbibing on the road.

Now, however, I notice Trisha, in the front row, lean in close to him and sniff.

Not again
.

Trisha glances back at me, smiles, and shakes her head, visibly relieved. “Okay, don’t worry,” I whisper to Ann, “he’s sober.” Like my two co-leaders and me, Ann has barely recovered from yesterday’s scare. Apparently he is only being a slightly flamboyant tour guide.

Ann and I migrate across the bus aisle and peer out at the vista. The medieval city of Rocamadour is clamped against a rugged four-hundred-ninety-foot cliff that rises out of the valley like some mystical province in the clouds. The Alzou River surrounds it like an old moat, the gorge floats in thin, austere haze, and the churches and houses appear to be bolted directly to the rock face. Crowning the summit is an actual fourteenth-century castle complete with ramparts.

Somewhere up there is the nine-hundred-year-old Black Virgin of Rocamadour—one of the venerable old Black Madonnas of Europe. She has secretly become the focus of the trip for me.

After breakfast this morning, in a meeting room in the hotel, I gave a little orientation talk to the group about why Black Madonnas are black or shades of brown. I’d discovered it’s not all about candle smoke, which was the automatic answer for a time. Summarizing months of research, I explained that most scholars believe the Black Madonnas’ darkness derives from their connections to dark-skinned, pre-Christian Goddesses once worshipped widely in Europe—Goddesses with African, Eastern, and Mediterranean roots.

“People weren’t so willing to give up their old Goddesses,” I told the group. “In some rural areas worship went on into the fourth and fifth centuries, and the church often responded by placing a Mary shrine right on top of a Goddess shrine. In some cases, they seem to have simply renamed the Goddess statue Mary.”

As the bus takes the U-shaped curve up the escarpment, I think about the way the Black Madonna has taken on a big role in my novel, in the lives of my characters, and in my own life, too—a little like the queen bee in a hive, I’ve started to realize. I know some of my fascination comes from her kinship with these powerful Goddesses and how that might have shaped her image. Official stories about the Black Virgin of Rocamadour include miraculous healings, calming storms, saving drowning sailors, and freeing captives, but also famously receiving and forgiving heretics during a period of history when they were more often burned. I like her slightly subversive tendency. It puts her in league with other Black Madonnas who stood in for wayward, runaway nuns so they wouldn’t get into trouble; resuscitated unbaptized dead babies long enough for them to escape Limbo; and eased the pain of childbirth, which was not always looked upon favorably since it was considered God’s punishment upon women for Eve eating the forbidden fruit.

We arrive at the forecourt outside the Black Virgin’s chapel by elevator, bypassing two hundred and sixteen steps known as the Sacred Way. Arduously steep, the staircase was considered torturous enough for Ecclesiastical Tribunes to assign it as penance for heretics and prisoners, who then climbed it on their knees and in shackles. At the top, the Black Virgin freed them and a priest removed their chains. I’ve read that some of the chains still hang on the back wall of her chapel.

Trisha and Terry gave me the task of coming up with a simple ritual that would honor the tradition of the pilgrimages here, yet also evoke a way for each woman to have her own individual experience with the Black Virgin. I kept thinking about
chain
. I bought a heavy strand of it at the hardware store and had it cut into twenty separate links, which took up a precious amount of space in my suitcase, each one being roughly the size of a big, chunky hoop earring.

As we gather under the overhang of the cliff near the door to the chapel, I hand them out, recounting the role of chain in Rocamadour’s past. “If you’re inclined, you can let the chain symbolize something inside yourself you’d like to be free of—some conflict, or fear, or old pain, whatever chains you, so to speak—and like the pilgrims that came here, you can leave it with the Black Virgin.”

Saying this, I wonder if the idea is as simplistic as it sounds, too innocent-minded for the complex knotting that tethers us to old patterns and struggles. Well . . . yes, of course it is. But trying to unlace them starts somewhere, I reason. Usually with a very simple intention. And if setting the intention feels sacred and memorable, perhaps it really could start a shift of some sort.

“Should we literally leave the chain in the chapel?” someone asks.

“Sure, if you want,” I say, then consider that I have no idea whether it’s okay or not, whether a guard will wag his finger at us, whether there’s a place to even put twenty fat links of chain.

I press one of the two remaining links into Ann’s hand, then let the other drop into my coat pocket.

“I bet you’ve already figured out what yours is going to represent,” she says.

“Nope, not yet. I’m going to let it pop into my head when I get in there.”

“Wow,” she says. “Who
are
you?”

I laugh, then shrug. “So what’s your chain going to be?”

She opens her palm and stares at it. “Well, I have to
think
about it,” she says, and wanders to an iron bench in a nearby archway and sits down to deliberate.

Eager to go inside, but also wanting to wait for her, I walk to the edge of the balcony and peer down at the maze of steps and passageways, then up at a twelfth-century fresco high on the back of a Romanesque apse. It depicts an annunciation scene which, as the saying goes, I could not make up if I tried. In it, the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove pecks at Mary’s forehead in order to impregnate her.

My thoughts overflow suddenly with Ann’s annunciation, so freshly dreamed, and inventive in its own way—a conception by fire. I am not that surprised by the dream or the intuition it stirs in her about writing.

Seeing her over on the bench, journal on her lap, shoulders hunched, her hand moving furiously across the page, I am reminded almost painfully of myself. I think of her growing up with the same abiding need to write that I had, always with a diary or a notebook, penning poems and stories (where does all that come from?) as if some seed inside her simply started to sprout one day. Is there DNA involved? My grandmother, the one who sacrificed her parlor for the lavender chick, had the writing seed, though it never really grew into anything. Her poems were published in her college literary magazine and then she got married and that was that. It’s reminiscent of
The Yellow Wallpaper
, a story that has recently captured Ann about a woman’s loss of selfhood after marriage. My grandmother seemed happy with her choices, though, but I suspect the inclination to write dogged her all her life.

I have a flash of Ann’s seventh-grade English teacher taking me aside and saying, “Ann wants to be a writer, and I’m encouraging her—I really think she could be one.” I saw that in Ann, too. I praised her writings, but I did not encourage her to be a writer. Wouldn’t that sway her
too
much? Wouldn’t it come off like the overbearing father pushing his impressionable son to follow in his footsteps? She had to arrive at it on her own. Standing there on the terrace, though, I realize I may have bent the other way by my silence.