The Passion of Mary Magdalen. Elizabeth Cunningham
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You cling so tight to your memories—as if they are air and water—and then one day you open your hand and find nothing there. My dream troubled me. He whose gaze held the mystery of the heavens, whose very hair felt alive to my touch, how could a coffin contain him? He was not dead; he could not be. But if I lost hope of finding him again, I would die. I had to find some way to keep the story alive.
So one day I yielded to Berta’s curiosity and began to tell the story to the other whores during our baths. It was far too grand a story for one sitting, so I told it in daily installments.
The response was gratifying.
“And so, Red,” someone would prompt. “What happened next?”
“Where was I?” I would pretend not to remember.
“You got to the part about the three black-robed priestesses standing on the cliffs watching you in your little boat. That made my hair stand on end.”
“And the birds in the sky,” someone added. “They spelled your name—and his.”
And I would resume the story, spinning it out fine, so that they could see, hear, and feel it all with me, so that I could live it again, believe that it was true. Though my mothers had told me everything but the truth about my own begetting—and I had come to great grief because of it—there was part of me that still accepted their axiom: A story is true if it is well told. So I gave it all I had.
And then, one day, my story was done.
“Ah, liebling,” sighed Berta, wiping away her tears. “So romantic. Now you can be faithful to your Esus forever.”
“Berta,” said Dido, raising one perfectly shaped eyebrow. “She’s a whore.”
“That is what I mean. Wife to all men is wife to no man. A whore is like a virgin. In her heart she belongs only to her true love. Like me and my poor butchered betrothed.”
No, I wanted to shout. I am not like you, and my beloved is not dead.
“I will find him” was all I said.
“Yah, liebling. Sure you will.” Berta patted my arm.
I wanted to scream.
“Listen, Red—”
“Dido,” Succula pleaded. “Be nice.”
“I like you.” I could feel Dido’s gaze, but I wouldn’t look at her. “We all like you. You’re a good sport. You told a good story. Whether it’s true or not is beside the point. I’m telling you this for your own good. Get over it. He’s gone. You’re here. That was then. This is now.”
An aphorism not invented at the turn of your millennium. I looked down at my navel. Little flakes of faux woad floated in the water. Domitia Tertia had agreed to let me dress—or undress—the part of a barbarian. The past few nights, I’d dispensed with my toga and gone to work in blue paint. I felt ashamed now. I had betrayed my people—and my warrior queen namesake—by play-acting a stock character in a Roman fantasy.
“You do know,” Dido continued, enough kindness in her voice that I couldn’t just hate her, not hear her, “that if he survived the journey—and it must have been a long and dangerous one—and made it back to his own people, he’s probably married by now. Maybe he’ll always remember you; maybe he’ll even love you, for what that’s worth. But Red, honey, life goes on. Don’t waste yours.”
“I don’t have to waste it.” I could taste the bitterness of my words; I savored it. “Domitia Tertia is wasting it for me.”
“Diobolara!” Succula, my sometime lover who had been nestling beside me, drew back and practically spat. In case you are wondering, she had just called me a two-bit whore. “You are spoiled, as spoiled as our baby Queen Helen of Troy here.”
“Eat me,” said Helen languidly, not ruffled at all.
“Maybe you like it here, because you’ve never known anything else,” I shot back. “Though how you can defend a woman who raised you just so she could sell your virginity to the highest bidder is beyond me.”
“You know nothing about it, Red, so shut up. We’ve all heard your story, daughter of the shining isles. Not one mother, no, she has to have eight. You want to hear my story? I wasn’t exposed as a baby,” Succula hurtled on, “though if my mother had been looking out for herself, she should have left me in a ditch. So I know about the streets. I lived on them till my mother died under a bridge, right where the sewer empties into the Tiber. There’s no dole in Rome for women and children. Did you know that, Red? Only for men. My mother worked the streets till she got sick. Sometimes we rented a room, mostly not. I tried to take care of my mother. I begged. I stole food, but she died anyway, and I was all by myself, fair game for any and everyone.
“That’s when Domitia Tertia found me. This great rich domina in a stola—she never did wear a toga; she likes breaking stupid laws. And you know what she did, hard-ass, kiss-my-ass Domitia Tertia? She paid for my mother to be buried properly in a catacomb with her name inscribed on a plaque. And she gave me a place at the Vine and Fig Tree. I had food every day and a warm place to sleep.
“When it came time for the auction, I wasn’t ignorant. The other whores had been getting me ready, training me. Before the auction there was a party for days and days, and I was the queen of it all. It was like being a bride but better, because I wasn’t going to have to leave home to be some man’s property and see his ugly face day after day. I was going to have a nicer room and more clothes. I was going to be one of the whores.
“And it wasn’t like just anyone was allowed to bid. Honey, it was invitation only. You had to be rich. You had to be a gentleman. You had to pass Domitia Tertia’s personal—and I mean personal—inspection. On the day of the auction, while the men were bidding up front, I was in back with the whores. Remember, Berta?”
“Yes, I was there, still a novica. We had wine and the best cakes I’d ever tasted.”
“And I stood in the middle of you all, and everyone oiled me and perfumed me and put flowers in my hair and made wishes for me. And sweet Isis, I didn’t feel like a whore or a bride. I felt like a goddess.”
“You were, liebling, you were.”
“I was so high, I wasn’t really scared. Or only a little. My cherry burst with a tiny ping, and I thought well, that’s that. No big thing. While the senator thought he was on Mount Fucking Olympus with Aphrodite in her nightie.”
Everyone laughed, and the tension was dispersed for a moment.
“That’s a good story,” I said to Succula.
“And it’s true. Do you understand now, Red. Why I was so mad at you?”
“Yes, but—”
I didn’t finish the sentence, and no one pressed me. Succula leaned against me again. I looked up and found Dido still watching me.
“What about you, Dido?” I asked. “What is your story?”
If eyes are the windows of the soul, she had just drawn the curtains.
“I don’t tell my story, Red. It’s the one thing I have that’s all mine.”
I don’t think Dido meant to wound me, but her words went in deep, piercing me in all my vital parts. No, it wasn’t the words; it was their truth, a truth I already knew. Now my story was outside of me, dispersed on the air; worse, given some fixed form, like those Roman statues, lifelike but not alive. So why am I telling you my story now? Did I learn nothing from that loss? Yes, I did. Only now I know more. Dido knew one secret: don’t tell. In time, I discovered another. Tell, lose, tell again. Live, die, live again. Let the story change. Let the story change you.
Then, all I knew was the loss.
Losses that are invisible or unreal