After I left the temple, I walked out to the high valley and up the Kadisha mountains of the Lebanon range. A wild boar smelled the blood on my thighs and charged at me with his tusks. I bled and watched the river turning red all the way through the valley and down to the Mediterranean Sea. There was an instant bloom all over the land: cedars sprung like uncircumcised male genitals, and water gushed like springs between the Nile and the Euphrates. Everything seemed to thrust and climax with the beat of howlers and ejaculators who covered the land with white semen, evermore to be mistaken for sacred snow.
MARY (AGAIN)
I WASHED MYSELF
and called Mary. She sounded a bit incoherent on the phone. She talked about her husband, who had threatened that if the necklace was not returned . . . and she was crying, telling me I’d stolen from her and betrayed her. I assured her that I still had the necklace and would bring it back to her. I asked her to wait for me.
I took my rescue plane and flew towards her place. She hadn’t eaten in a few days, she said. And her hair was not washed; it looked lumpy. She was skinny, with bags under her eyes. I gave her the necklace and the medicine. She threw the medicine against the wall and said, This is shit. It doesn’t work. I am not crazy, I don’t need any pills for my head.
I held her, she seemed frail. I opened the fridge and took out a container of yogurt. I smelled it and tasted it and spooned some into a glass bowl and gave it to her.
I can’t leave the house, she said. I am afraid of all those creatures in their masks and their masquerades, smiling. They creep me out.
It is the Carnival, I reminded her.
No, it is hell. They are all demons underneath. I pray that they go away. I pray all the time. The virgin will help me. I will pray to her.
I asked Mary if she had someone, a friend, I could call. Parents, anyone.
No, she said. They are all gone. Dead. I’ll pray, she kept on saying. I’ll pray, because Jesus loves me.
There must be someone I can call besides Jesus, I said. Jesus hardly ever replies to calls, not for the past two thousand years.
Father Smiley. Call Father Smiley.
What is his number? I asked.
I don’t know.
Where can I find him?
In the church, she whispered.
Which one?
St. Mary’s Church.
I’ll find it, I told her.
THE CHURCH WAS
closed. I went around to the little house beside it and knocked on the door. An old woman answered. I guessed that she was the secretary, judging from her glasses and her busy desk. She made me wait and then, eventually, she showed me into the priest’s office.
Mister Priest, I said.
Call me Father John.
Mister John, I said. It’s Mary. She is not well. She sent me here to see you.
Which Mary?
Not that one, I said, pointing at the icon on the wall. The angelic Mary with black hair, I said.
Her family name?
I’m not sure, I never asked, but we are friends and she is not well.
Yes, but like I said, my son, there are many Marys. I myself know several.
What if I called her Reading Mary? She always has a book in her hands. Glasses, nice . . . well, nice smile, I guess.
Yes indeed, said the priest, and lifted his index finger towards the ceiling. I know who you are talking about now.
She is not well, I repeated.
I’ll come with you. Are you driving?
I am in a taxi.
Right. Let’s hurry up then, we wouldn’t want the driver to hike the fare.
WHEN WE GOT
to Mary’s, the priest sat down next to her, held her hand, and said, How are you, my child?
Father, she said, make them go away. They are all devils. They are everywhere, Father. They are all talking and moving around me at the same time. The voices . . .
The priest took me aside and whispered: She needs to be taken to the psychiatric hospital. I know someone I can rely on there.
When the priest asked her to come with him, though, Mary refused to leave the apartment. They are out there, Father, she kept saying.
Have no fear, I told her. Just hold on to the Father’s cross and zap them away.
The priest frowned at me, but my advice worked. Mary hugged the old priest with one hand and held the cross with the other and pointed it towards the neighbours’ doors and at every corner of the stairs and in the lobby. We managed to walk down the street and get in the car and drive.
At the hospital, Mary was helped out of the car by an attendant and she was taken away through a glass door.
The priest followed behind her, but I was not allowed to go in. I watched my Mary disappear.
BURIAL
EARLY THE NEXT
morning, I picked up a clown from the street. Or at least I thought he was a clown, walking with a wobble and a smile. He was drunk but I didn’t notice: even I, a guesser who had grown up among performers and impersonators, failed to see the tragedy beneath the disguise. The clown entered my car and collapsed on the back seat. I tried to wake him but he chuckled and cried and then passed out. I feared that he had died, until I finally heard him puff and snore. I was happy he was alive, so I took off my jacket and covered him.
I drove aimlessly until I arrived at the city shore. I left the clown sleeping in the car and walked towards the river and lit a cigarette. When the bearded lady died, after a long and painful illness, I kissed her beard and left her in her bed, then I bought a shovel and returned in the middle of the night. I wrapped her in a quilt, carried her small body on my shoulders, and laid her in the back seat of my delivery car. I drove outside of town. I passed the cemeteries and all I saw was rows of marble and a legacy of stones. The herd always lies together but the Jinn passes through the night alone, the Arabs would say. I stayed in my car and waited for the dawn. I made a hole in the ground. I climbed a nearby tree and swung like a monkey; I hoofed the ground like a horse, sprinkled dust like an elephant, and mourned like an owl. I dropped the quilt like falling curtains, I applauded for the final act, I turned off the sign on the top of my roof, I covered the rearview mirror with a little piece of cloth, and I drove back to the city alone.
When I went back to my car, I saw the clown walking towards the water. He dropped his pants in an attempt to merge his body fluids with that of the river’s moving current. I waited until he was done, then I whistled.
He walked back to the car and got in.
Where you are going? I asked.
He could barely mumble “the Dream Inn” before he passed out again. I drove him to the Dream Inn Hotel. I gently woke him, took him to reception, and left.
I WENT STRAIGHT
home and lay on the carpet. The phone rang.
Yes, I said, bitter at the interruption of my brewing fantasy. I was about to join the Red Brigades in Italy. The Italian minister was in the back of the van, all tied up and about to die. The woman beside me, driving, had pulled over and handed me a number. I’d stepped out of the van and into a phone booth and, just as I imagined the police sirens were coming towards me, I realized that it was the phone in my house ringing.
I answered as I buckled up.
Hello, a voice said, this is Miss Such-and-such (I didn’t catch her name) from the diocese. I am calling you on behalf of Father Smiley at St. Mary’s Church.
Is Mary okay? I said.
Well, I believe so. But it is the Father who wants to speak with you.
Let him come then and speak, I said.
Well, he is in the hospital.
With Mary?
No, I believe Mary has left the hospital.
To go where? I asked.
I think the Father needs to talk to you concerning a few matters, she said, ignoring my question.
Fine, I said. Which hospital?
He is in St. Mary’s Hospital.
Not the church of St. Mary but the hospital of St. Mary. Am I correct?
Yes, Miss so-and-so said.
Okay, should I meet him at the St. Mary’s Restaurant inside St. Mary’s Hospital?
No, you can go straight to the room.
The number of the room?
It is 107.
Perfect.
Thank you. God bless you, she said.
I hung up the phone and went back to the van and discussed it all with the Red Brigades girl.
Plan B? I said.
She nodded and looked seductive in her assertive way.
I’ll show you how to get to St. Mary’s Hospital, I said. We could always drop the minister there.
And the manifesto, the ransom? she asked.
I’ll see if the Church will pay it, I told her. The Vatican’s citizens are wealthy.
I took my car and flew below the clouds. When I spotted the hospital, I locked my wheels and took a kamikaze dive towards the lot. I walked inside nonchalantly and took the stairs and entered the room.
I hardly recognized the priest. He looked as if he had been kidnapped by aliens and tied up in plastic wires, and he also looked frailer and older than he had the last time I’d seen him. Behind him sprouted a jungle of flowers and a row of get-well cards picturing bowed heads, a collection of Marys, and crosses and little houses. I went straight to the window and checked on my car. I had left it parked in the Doctors Only lot as a protest against favouritism and privilege. So far, the car was still there, safe. I stretched my neck and looked out the window, but I didn’t see any tow trucks coming my way. Nothing alarming, only an ambulance siren rushing towards the emergency doors.
There were two nuns in the back of the room whom, at first, I didn’t notice, or smell, for that matter. When do you think the priest will regain consciousness? I asked them.
We don’t know, they replied in a synchronized chorus.
Is he asleep? I asked.
Yes, he is, they said.
Should I come back later?
If you like, sang the duet.
I’ll go down for a cigarette, I said, and return in an hour. By the way, have you seen Mary?
Sister Mary?
No, that Mary is Caucasian, I said. Mary the reader, the one who reads all the time. She always has a book in her hand.
The nuns looked at each other and said, You’d better speak to the Father.
I went down to the cafeteria, bought a coffee, and looked at the slim rows of books in the gift shop. There was nothing I could read there, inferiorities to numb the mind from the pains of the world.
I went outside and joined the company of the shivering expelled smokers. Hospitals are a carnival of death. A masquerade of haggard eyes gazing at the white, purgatorial walls, a faint chaos of hunchbacked mothers chasing orderlies, of doctors disguised in aprons, pointing magic wands at nurses in angelic uniforms and muffled tap shoes, waving bandages mistaken for egg rolls. Hospitals are asylums with flying ambulances, bed bells to summon the physician’s spirits, sponge baths above white linen, janitors swinging mops over hazy floors, evening moans at the last sunset, and fridges full of ice for arrested hearts.
Sir, I said, are you up yet?
Ah, you’ve come, the priest said with difficulty.
Yes, I am here. Now what?
I wanted to ask you, son. Do you think of God, life, and death?
Yes indeed, all the time. I think that your god doesn’t exist, but death does; so does life.
Then the priest started to cry. Son, something very meaningful has happened to me.
I nodded.
I died and I came back.
Like Jesus, I said.
Well, yes and no. I wouldn’t put myself in the same category. I am not worthy. Something miraculous happened to me the other night. I had a severe heart attack and my heart stopped. I went through a tunnel and I saw a lake, and my father, and my uncle. It was peaceful and serene. But then something pulled me back. I went through the tunnel in reverse, I could feel someone dragging me and I turned my head and I saw you, and it was you who was bringing me back here, to this life. It was you whom I saw, son.
Well, I don’t know what to say, I told him. Sorry I interrupted your dream.
It was not a dream, it was very real.
Well then, I have many people who could testify that I was here on this planet. I stopped and ate at Café Bolero, but otherwise I was working, driving my cab to keep my life in order. I picked up many clients who are here for the Carnival. All kinds of lost souls, Father.
Yes, yes . . . but, son, do you believe in the other side?
I believe in others, and in humans, and in a world of wandering and of constant change. And I believe that I am here now, and that one day I’ll leave just like the butterfly leaves, never demanding anything more than the air it has touched with its own wings.
I believe that you are more than that, the priest said, breathing noisily through his tubes. I believe you are a force. I believe you rule this world but not the next. And you brought me back. I believe you are some kind of demiurge, and, I suspect, a lost one. Maybe even an evil one.
Well, Father, I think the only evil is you and your lot of delusional believers who make women suffer, who tell Africans to abstain from sex and not to protect themselves. I believe you are a hater of misfits, a suppressor of clowns’ laughs, scissors to the ropes of mountain climbers, chains to the wanderer, and a blindfold to the knower: a hater of men. But you are also a lover yourself, a lover of power and buffoon dictators, a protector of arms dealers and thieves, pardoner of hypocrites with pious tongues and dirty hands . . .
May God forgive you, my son.
May your god, if there truly is one, forgive himself for these inferior creations. I am leaving, but I need to know where Mary is.
Mary is gone, he said.
Gone where?
We arranged to send her to a convent overseas.
Where overseas?
I won’t tell you. Your company is not good for her. She is in good hands, with people of faith. Good people. Her people now.
I want to know where she is. I want to send her a few books.
There is only one book that matters in her life now: the one that saves us.