The Witchery, page 10
How it hit me that first afternoon: Here I was amidst Society after having been a sister in solitude for so long. I had no need of society, per se—disdained it, in fact—and would surely have wandered sooner onto some quieter backstreet of the city had it not been for the date I’d set with Calixto; and though I was hours late, hours, still the most expeditious route toward the cathedral was wanted. Why then did I tarry?
Fear, I suppose. I was fearful of realizing what it was I’d done, and what it was I’d lost:
Friendship? Love, and the end of loneliness? Enfin, if I’d had a chance at any good thing I’d lost it, surely; for, yes, hours had passed since our appointment, and doubtless the boy—deeming me untrue—had abandoned both myself and his hope of ever having the strangeness he’d seen aboard the Athée explained…. I’d been alone all my life. Prolonged solitude was not a state worth hurrying to. (Cowardice, this was, really.) And so it was I even slowed my step as I neared the cathedral, and walked, nay, wandered the widest, most crowded avenues; till I came upon the Plaza de Armas as the hour neared eight. This I know; for always the band struck up at eight. So it was I sat upon an iron bench and watched as musicians in martial attire primed their instruments: flutes whistled, reeds screamed, and drumbeats cracked the shell of oncoming night.
The Plaza de Armas—a square, really, set before the Captain-General’s house, which I’d sought to avoid the day prior—was full of people. Society was in evidence, as were those men whose attire told of the island’s primary trades: sailing and soldiering. Of course, I dwelled on none of this then. Blind, I was, so little did I care to decipher such cloth-coding, such pomp and…silliness.
The band played passably well, even as they bound the music with that discipline that had been bred into them; for they, too, were soldiers, all. There sat their commander—the Captain-General—high upon his porch, seeming pleased. He applauded; whereupon, the crowd followed his lead. Had he dozed in the warm night, I’ve no doubt that all those present in the Plaza de Armas would have bedded down as well upon its bricks and grass-blades; for so it goes in a state thusly policed: The people, like cattle, both fear and attend the prod. This is unpleasant to witness; and so it was that I watched instead the fronds of the palm trees; for they swayed in time, to the wind if not the music, though the two did sometimes meet, whereupon the palms did seem to waltz.
…We sisters will make our own amusements, will we not, when life is lacking, and the heart has fallen into arrears? Indeed. And so it was nearly nine when finally I found myself on the Calle del Empedrado, devant la cathédrale.
Though the sun was low, and near to setting, still the stone and slate surrounding the cathedral—pavers, steps, and such—gave off their heat in shimmering, spectral waves; so much so that my first thought upon entering the church itself was this:
From whence have these inner walls stolen such cold? For, though warm without, it was chill, very chill within the church. Only later at night do such places grow warmer, when finally the heat of the day penetrates their stone; likewise, being always a half day behind the sun in its tour, those same stones hold to night’s coolness at noon, and thusly are worshipers drawn into them from under the broiling sun. Oh, but whether the air of such sepulchral places be chill or warm, it is always, always still. Deathly still, weighted with the dust of eons. Faith, too, weights such places, as though all the prayers ever loosed by their parishioners—words unheard, wasted—rise to push against the arched roofs before raining back down, unheard, upon the faithful. Such cathedrals as Cuba’s can seem verily littered with such palsied prayer.
Tomb-still and chill it was, within the cathedral; and appropriately so: No less a personage than Columbus lay within. There, near the choir space, under the alto-relief, behind a brief inscription of Spanish gratitude, were interred the bones of the discoverer. Or so legend holds…. Oh, but be wary, witch, of tales telling of the deposition of bones; for many a tomb sits untenanted. This I know.
Soon I acclimated to the darkness and the cathedral-cold, and for once I was thankful for the swaddling with which I bound my breasts when in men’s attire; for, though often it made me perspire, and itch, itch, itch in those tropical climes, now it gave a measure of warmth. It was then—warming, with eyes yet adjusting to the shadows composed of equal parts sun, moon, and candlelight, all of it off-color owing to the great panes of painted glass through which it passed, as in my room at the Hotel de Luz—…only then did I tell myself the truth:
He is not here.
And he was not…. Of course, I refer not to Columbus—I cared not a whit about the carcass of the conquistador, fallen now to powder wherever it might lie—but to Calixto.
Not knowing where else to search the boy out—surely he’d not gone back to the Athée, and if he’d sought welcome amongst his scattered relations, well then, I’d lost him to the city, too crowded for even the strongest witch to Sight him by spellwork or wander, against all odds, hoping, merely hoping to find one man in that multitude—I crept further into the cathedral. And I do mean “crept”; for I’d been taken unawares in such consecrate places before, such that now it seemed safer to assume the presence of the disquieted dead. But there I stood, listening, sensing, and…nothing. If there were souls in residence alongside Columbus, they lay in repose, heeding—as the vast majority of the dead do—that most common of eternal orders, inscribed so often on stone: Requiescat in pace. Indeed, the dead within the cathedral were quiet, resting in peace; however, to my dismay, the living were less restful. And there were many of them, surprisingly so, given the hour.
I know not the day or date in question, and neither will I stop to back-conjure it—for this borrowed hand has been stiffening this last half hour, such that now it scuttles along these pages crab-like, growing harder to control (to which fact this penmanship attests, surely)—but there were people enough in the cathedral for me to surmise, then as now, that a mass or rite of some kind had recently been read. Too, tapers had not burned themselves down, and incense yet bit at the air; indeed, I saw in the dark the gray swirls—like ash upon the air—made by whoever had lately swung the thurifer upon the altar. The Church calendar having grown so crowded with saints, I supposed one had been feted not an hour past, whilst I stood watching palms waltz above the Plaza de Armas; and still parishioners sat scattered upon the squares of black and white marble flooring—pewless, the place was—as though they were chess pieces, pawns all, in a game played for the amusement of God. No: No pews broke the plane of the cathedral floor, though sculpture, relics, and Romish whatnots ringed it.
Dressed as I was, I made myself one with the few men gathered along the back wall of the cathedral, till finally I found myself upon a prie-dieu, padded at the knees and elbows so as to ease the physical pains of prayer. Beside me where I knelt there burned a bank of red-glassed votives, each flame an offering. By this roseate light I took in my surrounds.
Church-bred, still I could lose myself in the grandeur of such places, and sometimes take solace in them—not in those metaphors for which the faithful pine, no, but in the base components of same: the stone of statuary, the flame of tapers standing tall as a child, the flaking paint of frescoes, et cetera. I sought such solace that night; for, if there was a disquieted soul in the cathedral that night, it was mine. He’s not here. I said it again and again: a prayer in counterpoise. And on went this pitiable scene till I saw—nearby, standing in the reddened shadows—something, someone, enfin a statue that brought the past hurtling back, and in so doing spared me the pain of the present.
If there is a saint in whom Church and Craft meet, surely it is Sebastian—he of the martyrizing arrows, the deep-set and dolorous eyes, and the half smile speaking so eloquently of sufferance and transcendence; he of the firm and perfect (albeit pierced) flesh, so exquisitely rendered, whether by brush or chisel, whether by Raphael, Rondinelli, Reni, or Rubens, that he seems a boy-man, or man-boy, too beautiful not to suffer…. Granted: The historical Sebastian was an old, age-ugly man when martyred, but—as the priests and painters of the Renaissance knew—art must please in its particulars if it is to succeed at proselytizing.
Saint Sebastian had long been a study of mine, ever since I’d first seen him depicted in that tapestry that hung in a back hall of the convent school I’d fled. The tapestry might not have hung there at all, save for what I suppose was its worth, its value in francs. To the dark it had been consigned, yes, lest we girls see a man naked, in extremis, and exquisite. Of course, I—ever accustomed to the dark, if not yet the Shadows—had found the tapestry and visited the saint regularly; for I—and here I beg forgiveness, sister, for the excess sentiment of my youth—I felt myself persecuted as surely as the saint had been, run through not with arrows, no, but by the…the cruelty, the contempt, the calumnies I knew amongst those convented girls and nuns. Then, of course, there came the fateful day I met my own saint, or savior—not Saint Sebastian, but Sebastiana d’Azur. For me she somehow made bleed not her namesake but another tapestried saint—Francis, who bled as he knelt in stigmatic receipt of Christ’s Five Wounds—…bleed, yes, though he was naught but dyed wool, artfully wrought—thusly priming me for induction into the Shadows and showing me that truth I hold to still (and of which, I suppose, I myself am proof): There exists the inexplicable.
Whose Saint Sebastian it was in Colombus’s cathedral, I cannot recall. What’s more: It doesn’t matter; for every Sebastian I’d ever seen—whether in life or in libraries—had become mine of an instant, as did he in Havana. Though no depiction—and certainly no statue—had ever drawn me so.
This Sebastian took unto, nay, into his marble flesh the light from those votive candles, such that he appeared…pink: quickened, animate, alive. The stony saint stood six, seven feet tall in his shallow niche, and was turned to accommodate the wrought-iron arrows that pierced his flesh; thusly: through the right biceps and into the chest, pinning his arm to his side; down and through the smooth and oblique muscle of his abdomen; through the right thigh and calf, the arrowhead of the former lost within the flesh but that of the latter reappearing, its tip gory with gold leaf. There were other arrows as well. Of course, I’d seen worse-suffering Sebastians, some with pierced necks, one wherein the martyr has suffered an arrow shot up, up through the jaw to protrude through the cheek, and isn’t it Tintoretto’s saint who’s taken a shattering arrow to the forehead, an inch above his wide-staring eyes? But the Havanan Sebastian bore a grace all his own; and moved though I was, still I knew it to be a most artful depiction of those hours after Sebastian has suffered the worst of it and knows, knows that by some godly intervention he has survived those arrows shot into him by his fellow soldiers, those praetorians commanded by Diocletian, Emperor of fourth-century Rome and Killer of Christians.
Those soldiers (or so legend holds) had left Sebastian tethered to a tree, presuming him dead—a safe assumption, this, seeing as how they’d emptied their quivers into him. However, returning on the morrow, they found their fellow not only very much alive but seeming only slightly discomfited by the arrows bristling from his body. The emperor, who’d condemned Sebastian for his supposed conversion to Catholicism of certain aristocratic clans, sentenced the saint to die a second time. No arrows now: This time it was to be a blow to the head, delivered quickly and quietly, at night, atop the Palatine hill, lest any sect rally round the man who would defy death once but, hélas, not twice: His skull crushed, and the arrows ripped from his flesh, Sebastian was disappeared into a cloacal pool.
Oh, but perhaps Sebastian had not died at all. Perhaps he lingered on in life’s mirror: dreams; for he is said to have appeared that very night to the widow of another martyred Roman. She—name of Irene—heard from Sebastian himself where it was she’d find his ruined body; and this she fished from the muck, the shit and stink of the sewer, conveying it out along the Via Appia for secret interment beside the bones of Peter and Paul, where it would be venerated from that day to this.
…Enfin, there I sat, sorrowing before this statue and wondering why, how it spoke to me so; but, dead though I am, immortal, Missy lets it be known I haven’t the time to list all those things for which I alternately punished and pitied myself. Suffice to say that I found myself rootless and blue, destined, surely, to live out my days alone and without love. All that I was—a sur-sexed witch somehow allied to the dead—I wanted not to be; and all that I coveted—as embodied in Calixto—I had lost. Or so I thought.
And if I suffered an emotion then aside from sadness—my habitual melancholia—and confusion regarding the stony saint’s appeal, it was anger. Not at myself. Nor at Calixto, who’d no doubt waited according to plan, and who now I’d have to find by whatever wiles and sisterly ways availed themselves. Sebastiana? Perhaps; for, once again—as she had in New York, with the Duchess—it seemed she’d consigned me to the care of another…. Q., then? Yes: He was the locus of my anger. How dare he use me as he had? Indeed, this Q., whom already I distrusted, had some answers of his own to give, non? To him, to said answers, I’d hasten, finding and following the flight of those birds of light.
…Anger, yes; for I’d hoped that day would be one of truth telling, of soul lightening brought on by the setting aside, the discharge of lies; but now, at day’s end, here I was at the cathedral not with Calixto but alone, very much alone, and newly determined to search out some ill-met monk, another denizen of the dark, of the Shadows, a keeper of secrets I would come to wish I’d never learned.
Out I stepped into the night; and from the cathedral I wended my way back through the moonlit streets—redolent, I recall, of piss and patchouli—in search of my room at Señora Almy’s and a locked door behind which to think, to plan, and to put to purpose what Craft I could in pursuit of both Calixto and Q.
From that room, from that same windowsill from which I’d seen him the night prior, high atop his turreted lair, only from there could I situate myself and find Q. I’d tried, upon leaving the cathedral, to plot his whereabouts upon the city’s grid. No luck. I’d have to see that strange tower, maybe even see him atop it, if I were to make my way toward it, toward him. I wondered, would there be another sign? Light-bright birds to descry against the night, like shooting stars? I’d look, yes, but I’d do so through closed shutters, lest those hummingbirds come with their blistering beaks. (And thoughts of their stinging serum assuaged my anger not at all.)
I was but three, maybe four steps inside the Hotel de Luz when I heard the voice of my hostess:
“Señor,” said she, as yet unseen.
I continued toward the stairs as if I had not heard her, but again the call came—“Señor!”—as if now she were offended; and I stopped with one foot upon the first step, by which pose I hoped to convey a disinclination to discourse. I looked this way and that, but saw no sign of the woman. It was then she appended to her “Señor” the name I’d given her not thirty-six hours prior; but still…where was she? The reception foyer was half the size of my room above, and—save for a profusion of palms and flowering things—as sparsely decorated, and…Ah, there she sat. A bangle upon her fleshy wrist had betrayed her; for I saw its glint in a small mirror affixed to the far wall. Yes: Too rotund to rise with speed, Señora Almy sat behind the high, bamboo-fronted counter, yet she missed not a trick owing to a spying system of mirrors quite carefully hung.
“Oui, madame,” said I, moving to peer down at her over said counter, upon which sat a small triangle of iron, which no one, I’m sure, had ever had to ring, so…solicitous, so watchful was the señora. “Oui?” I repeated, hoping with a show of French to stanch the flow of words set to come from the woman.
Oh but wily Señora Almy soon had the advantage; for—fleetly, fluently—she answered me in French, saying that a package had arrived for me. This she handed over the counter—ever seated, she was—and I received it with a nod and a mumbled merci. Of course a hotelière in the heart of old Havana would have some French—had I not seen all the world’s flags flying over the harbor? Doubtless she’d ten other tongues as well.
“Eh bien,” said I, making a show of the seamstress’s label upon the package, “le petit cadeau pour ma soeur.” To which the señora responded with what seemed a knowing smile…. Indeed, I’d have to take care with this Señora Almy.
Soon I was upstairs, doors and shutters locked and latched, unwrapping upon the bed that dress sewn of bolan. A tug at the seams testified to the seamstress’s talents. Oh, I was glad to have it, and grew giddy, verily giddy at the thought of seeing it upon my “sister,” though there loomed the larger issue: How would I, how would she pass Señora Almy, who no doubt slept upright and wide-eyed in her espial station? No matter. I was a witch. I’d find a way.
The seamstress, artfully, had turned the bolan this way and that in sewing the ensemble; that is, the blue and white stripes descending from the shoulders to make the bodice of the dress were set perpendicular to those of the skirt. If it sounds…busy, it was not. “Brilliant,” said I aloud. Too, she’d fashioned a type of jacket—more of a wrap—its stripes matching those of the skirt. Here and there, at the throat and cuffs, she’d added sprays of navy-blue lace. “Well done, indeed.” Had I set out to sew myself such a dress, I’d have run all the stripes north-south, surely, and the dress would have seemed sewn of mattress ticking. Already I’d forgotten what I’d paid for the seamstress’s time and talents, but it was worth it, and how I burned, burned to slip into a proper dress; for I’d been too long in men’s attire and coveted a change. Too, it seemed wise to disguise my manly self: If someone sought me…alors, it was Herculine, not Henry, they’d see upon the streets.
