Lesefario and the others who saw him crossed themselves in the presence of the miracle, but all they got for their pains was pain, their foreheads and breasts like so many blazing crosses on so many lawns.
She was a modest woman, self-effacing, old- fashioned, downright shy. Intact. A virgin by temperament and inclination as much as compulsion or circumstance. More. Something actually spinster in her nature, a quality not of maiden since that term had about it a smell of the conditional, but of the permanently chaste. Something beyond chastity, however—chastity, in her case at least, not so much a choice as a quality, like the shade of her skin or the height she would be, fixed as her overbite. Something beyond chastity, beyond even repression.
It was one of the reasons she’d been chosen, of course. As Saint Joan had been chosen for the breadth of her shoulders, her sinewy arms. It was one of the reasons she’d been chosen, He’d reminded her, in their rare interviews. It was one of the reasons she’d been chosen. Yes. She agreed. It was the cruelest reason. To have to listen to the—to her—ironic litany, unceasing, continuous as the noise of summer. She would never get used to it, over it, the humiliation as stinging after two thousand years as the first time she’d heard it and realized it was she they meant. “Hail Mary,” she heard, “full of grace, blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.” Nice, she thought. A fine way to talk, excuse me, pray. Her most intimate parts called out as familiarly as her name, associating her with a femaleness she not only did not understand but actually repudiated, freezing her forever not just in fecundity but in a kind of sluttishness.
And for all the world she was The Virgin Mary, the capital letters and epithet like something scrawled in phone booths or spray-painted in subways. The snide oxymorons repugnant to her. Virgin Mother, Immaculate Conception. Her story known throughout the world, carried by missionaries to hinterland, boondock, clearing, sticks; parsed by savages, riddled by New Guinea stone- agers, all the bare-breasted and loinclothed who stood for whatever she could not stand, almost the first thing they were told after the distribution of gifts, the shiny mirrors in which they could see their nakedness, their dark, rubbery genitalia, their snarled and matted wool, the fierce, ropy nipples flaring against the stained, gross coronas of breasts prickled as strawberries, almost the first thing they were told, her shame a story, her story a legend, her legend an apotheosis, told through translators or in the broken pidgins of a thousand tongues, or with actual hand signs, the complicated history—“There was this woman, a girl, not even a woman, Mary, the wife of Joseph, betrothed of Joseph, the union not consummated, who learned that she was to bear God’s child.” “God’s?” “Yes. God the Father.” “The father?” “Oh Jesus, our Saviour. Wait. So this wife, this Mary, a virgin big with child. In a stable in Bethlehem.” “A stable?” “For the horses. In the straw. In the horses’ straw, in the pissed hay of the cows and camels. And this Mary, this Virgin, went into labor. You know about labor? Look, watch. Labor. They were poor. Humble people. Ragged. Her clothes didn’t fit, her shift was mean, tight across the burden of her belly, for she couldn’t afford to hide what would have been obvious even in commodious clothing. It was crowded. The town. People came from all over to watch her, to stare into her womb where the fruit was. Strangers. High-ups from great distances. Shepherds, locals who’d seen the bleeding, dilated cunts of a thousand enceinte dames but who’d never seen anything like this, an actual woman on actual straw, writhing not as an animal accustomed to straw would but wildly thrashing, bucking, not understanding what was happening to her, not really, a virgin, recall, who not only had never known a man but who had never even touched herself, understand, who wasn’t even curious about such things, anything but, and all this in the presence of eyewitnesses, her bewildered husband who knew he’d had nothing to do with it, who felt sold if you want to know, and then the Child came, pushing himself, I mean doing the pushing, having to climb up out of that fruity womb practically single-handed because she was still more virgin than mother, more virgin even than woman, who knew nothing of contracting, pressing, pushing, such exercise not only alien to her but obscene. And—” “But if she was still a virgin, how did God the father—” “Well that part’s the mystery, but—” —accomplished in a series of filthy, almost humorous gestures broad as actors’ that even the missionaries knew, would have to have mastered or actually invent, practicing them like a blasphemous sign language, behind their own backs if they had to, just to make them understand, give them something of the graphic hard-core detail they would almost certainly have to know if their attention was to be engaged later for the theology parts. So she was the Hook. Sex was. The Queen of Heaven. Some Queen. Some Heaven.
Something beyond even repression that the faithful could get past but not she. Not herself. Not Mary. Something beyond even revulsion.
She liked children well enough (though she could never look at one without being reminded of where it had come from, how it had got there, and “Yes,” God the Father had beamed, “that’s one of the reasons you were chosen”) and had even, by her lights, been a good enough mother, though she couldn’t have managed without Joseph. Who changed him, cleaned him, Mary—she couldn’t help it, she’d have been otherwise if she could—not up to it, unable in her fastidious purity even to wipe his nose or brush his lips with a cloth when he spit up let alone deal with the infant’s bowels and urine. If it had been possible she’d have had Joseph nurse it, too. That had been one of her more difficult ordeals, harder for her than the pregnancy, harder than the birth itself, harder even than the Crucifixion (Mary in the limelight too, her pietà postures and public tabloid grief real, felt—she’d loved him, she’d done more, she believed his story, not only mother to the Messiah but his first convert too, her belief antecedent even to Joseph’s who’d had a prophecy off an angel, some tout of the Lord, although—who knew?—he may have dismissed the report or, what was more likely, rationalized it, his belief defensive, self-protective, as if it had come from some tout of psychology, while she believed what she believed because the event had only confirmed what her body already knew—though the loss was everyone’s by that time, ownerless as hand soap), the nursing terrible for her, her breast offered reluctantly to those cunning lips, the strange, greedy mouth—the poor thing must have been starving; he wouldn’t accept the breasts of wet nurses, you couldn’t fool it with goat’s milk—the nibbling repulsive to her, awful. “Sure,” God had said, “that’s why I chose you.” (Because there was something no one knew, not Joseph, not Jesus, God, of course, though He never spoke of it. It was just that she didn’t understand either, as the savages hadn’t, as children didn’t, the mystery that was beyond the range even of the missionaries, of the popes, of the saints and martyrs. It was how He had done it, how it had been done. She had thought—it was silly, it was crazy, but God didn’t draw pictures, He didn’t make explanations—she had thought—it was stupid, she was ashamed, she was being alarmist—she thought—it was blasphemous—that the child had done it, that the Christ was somehow father to himself, had fertilized the egg himself, that he’d lived down there always, in the warm female bath, till even the milk he sucked was his own, milk he’d made, first passing it through all the loops and ligatures of her body, the body they shared.)