The Passion of Mary Magdalen. Elizabeth Cunningham
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man and noticed details I had missed before. He was beginning to grey; his face had some deep lines, but in this moment he looked young, terribly young.
“I won’t hurt you,” was all I could think of to say.
He shook his head; then he covered his eyes. When he uncovered them, I saw that he was back from wherever he had gone. He knew where he was—in a tiny room with a whore who meant nothing to him. But his face was so bleak, instead of feeling relieved I felt my own sorrow stirring.
“Forgive me,” he said and turned to go.
“Is that what you need?” I asked.
The man stopped in the doorway; very slowly he turned around, and looked at me, really looked at me, as he had not before.
“What did you just say?”
“Do you need someone to forgive you?”
He didn’t answer right away, but he remained in the doorway.
“I cannot be forgiven.”
I sighed. If I had had a watch I might have looked at it. What did I care what this man had done? He’d had his time with me; let him pay and go.
He is a stranger, the voice inside said.
He’s strange, all right.
The god-bearing stranger, but the god in him is wounded.
Not this god shit again.
Yes. Will you help him?
I have a choice?
The voice inside was silent. There would be no force here. I looked at the man, the stranger, and suddenly I remembered how everyone at druid school had called my beloved the Stranger; they feared him, too; they thought he was a god; they tried to make him one—on their own terms.
“Tell me,” I heard myself speaking to the man. “Come and tell me.”
“Are you a priestess?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, surprised by my certainty. “Come closer to me.”
For I suddenly knew I needed to hear whatever he would tell me not only with my ears but also with my hands. Without instruction from me, he knelt before my low bed. As he spoke, I put my hands on his heart. He poured out what seemed at first an ordinary tale of youthful indiscretion—a love affair with a young married woman, no more than a girl, really, whose marriage had been arranged by her father. A typical story. They were caught, of course, and brought to trial. Guilt meant a fine for him, divorce for her, and separate exiles for both. Or so he thought, persuading himself that once outside of Rome they could meet again and begin a new life.
“The night before I left, I bribed my way into her husband’s house in secret. She begged me not to leave. ‘He’s sending me back in the morning,’ she kept sobbing, ‘back to my father’s house.’ But I didn’t understand what she was saying. I went over our plans of how and where we were to meet. She clung to me and wouldn’t be comforted. I was afraid we’d be caught again, so I tore myself away and headed for the port to board my ship in time for the next tide. While I was sailing free into the rising sun.…” He paused and seemed not able to breathe for a moment. I waited, silent, my hands burning on his heart. “…her father strangled her.”
My throat closed, too. All my muscles tensed. I wanted to fling him away. He had left his beloved to be killed by her father. Killed by her father. I would not forgive him; I refused. He was right; he could not be forgiven—even if it was not his fault.
As I looked at the man kneeling before me, trying to control my rage, I saw Esus galloping across the Menai Straits, not looking back, leaving me alone to face the druids, to face my father who reviled me as his daughter and wanted me dead. My father would have killed Esus, too. Made him a holy sacrifice. I had forced Esus to go; I had commanded him to go. It was not Esus’ fault, not his fault that he had left me.
I hadn’t known until this moment that I blamed him.
Suddenly it dawned on me: What if Esus blamed himself?
Esus could not know that my father had killed himself. He could not be certain that I had survived. Why had I never thought of that? This man trembling between my hands was unable to forgive himself. Could my own beloved be suffering this way?
I closed my eyes and had the dizzying sense of being able to see everyone’s story—this man sailing away while his beloved died; the girl staring into her father’s face as his hands closed on her throat. Esus seeing the hard, exposed Cambrian rock rise up before him as a huge, black tidal bore swept the straits cutting off his pursuers. And I saw myself, calling the storm, howling as my water broke and my childbirth began.
Then all the images dissolved as I saw everything through the eyes of the one who weeps rivers, the one whose lover drifts away in a coffin.
“Since then,” the man was saying. “I have not been with a woman. Whenever I have a woman in my arms, I see her face; I hear her begging me not to leave her.”
He fell silent and stayed motionless with his head bowed, waiting for my judgment. I became aware that I was breathing evenly again, a great steady tidal river of breath. The fire flowed through my hands into the man’s heart. But something more was wanting.
If you are willing, the inside voice said, I will open the way.
I am willing.
Again I saw through the eyes of the one who had known all sorrow.
“Beloved,” I answered in her voice. “I am the mistress of the living and the dead. Speak to your love, and she will hear. Comfort her and be comforted.”
I raised him from his knees, and held him in my arms while he called her by name and wept. When he entered me, she received him; I received him as the lover I had lost.
One morning not long after this encounter, I woke early feeling cold. Outside the wind stirred, wakeful like me. I could hear the dried, fallen leaves of the atrium’s vines and trees scudding along the stone.
It was almost Samhain by my reckoning, my people’s new year, the season of my birth, the time when boundaries between this world and the Other World shimmered and thinned. Soon the Pleiades would rise again in the night sky; wandering bards and bands of warriors would find a place to winter; the cattle would come down from the hills; the migrating flocks of birds would disappear. The thought of all this movement made my tiny, stale room unbearable. I took my mantle and coverlet and went down to the atrium where I sat in a corner and leaned my head back to see what I could of the sky. It was that dim indeterminate color that dawn watchers know goes on and on before the light quickens. I pulled my wraps around me and decided to wait for the sunrise. Olivia the cat found her way under my cloak and curled against my heart.
I must have gone into a light doze, halfway between sleeping and waking. I became aware of a low tuneless humming, a humming almost like human purring. Or maybe it was only Olivia. It went on and on, and a whispering rhythmic sound became part of it. The sound soothed me, like the sound of small waves on a pebble beach. Then I heard a song, or maybe I dreamed it.
I am the mother of the living
I am the lover of the dead
From the womb I knew my lover
Now I seek him in the riverbed.
The song rose and receded, rose and receded, the waters of a river, the river I had dreamed before, the dream of being tangled in the weeds. Now I drifted in a boat shaped like a crescent moon. In the shallows I would reach into the water and pull out a hand, a foot. I felt no horror at my finds. I was aware only of a diligent sorrow and the song going on and on until I knew the song was mine.
I am the mother of the living
I am the lover of the dead