The Passion of Mary Magdalen. Elizabeth Cunningham
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No! I wanted to speak. He is not dead. I saved him; I sent him away across the straits and raised the tide to protect him. But the song kept singing through me, and the boat kept drifting through the reeds, blown by a hot, malodorous wind.…
I opened my eyes to find an old woman’s face inches from my own. Her breath stank and whistled through the gaps in her teeth. She held a tiny glass vial, from which she pulled a stopper that proved to be a tiny blade. With it she delicately but firmly scraped my cheekbone, just below my eye. She held the blade poised for just a moment; it held a single, intact tear, which she carefully slid into the vial. Then, with the same precision, she harvested two more tears before she sealed the vial with the stopper.
I had been too astonished to speak, but now, as she drew back (and I could breathe again), I saw that old Nona the sweeper had accosted me. I had seen her only rarely; she swept while the whores slept, and went to bed around the time the house opened.
I managed a feeble, “What the fuck?”
“Whores’ tears.” She grinned, displaying all three teeth. “Cure anything. Couldn’t waste ‘em.”
“I’ve never heard that claim before,” I said with more resignation than indignation. My life had been riddled with crazy old crones. It was as much a relief as an irritation that one of them had caught up with me here.
“Old Nona’s the onliest one who knows,” she crooned, and then she cackled. “How do you think I live so long?”
She was speaking Latin but with an accent I couldn’t place—or it could have been the effect of her near toothlessness.
“Those are my tears.” I felt ornery.
“Not anymore.”
Nona slipped the vial, which she wore around her neck suspended on a string, inside her tunic where it rested between whatever was left of her breasts. Then she picked up her broom and began sweeping the fallen leaves into a crescent shape. She hummed while she worked, and I recognized the tunelessness. It was her voice that had threaded through my dreams.
“Who are you?” I demanded. I had met old women before who turned out to be goddesses or close relations. You couldn’t be too careful.
“Nona, Nona, Nona. No name Nona,” she replied unhelpfully. “That’s what everyone calls me. I don’t remember my other names.”
She started to sing.
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.
“You sent me that dream,” I accused.
“What dream would that be, dearie?”
“The river, the boat, searching for my lover. You know!” I insisted.
My tears welled again, and I knuckled them back into the ducts before she could come and steal them with her tiny scalpel. She paused in her sweeping and eyed me intently, her eyes black, her head cocked like a bird’s. Then she laid her broom against the wall, crossed the atrium and prostrated herself before me. The next thing I knew, she was kissing my feet.
“Stop!” I protested. “Are you crazy?”
I hardly needed an answer, I thought. But she did stop, and when she got up again, she plucked my hand.
“Stand up, domina,” she urged. “Come.”
Domina? I was too confused and, I confess, curious to resist. Besides, this tiny old woman’s grip had the fierceness of a newborn’s, and the authority of a mother’s. Dislodging Olivia, I stood and followed where she led me. I was disappointed when we only went as far as the Lararium, a miniature temple, a sort of dollhouse for the gods. All Roman households had one on display, a locus for the care and feeding of the family’s personal gods. The Vine and Fig Tree’s Lararium, complete with miniature columns and a fresco depicting Mount Olympus, was tucked away in one of the smaller reception rooms. It was quite crowded both with such jolly well-known types as Venus and Bacchus as well as more obscure figures crudely fashioned by the whores and other house slaves to represent the gods they remembered from home. Bone’s many breasted—or, as he insisted, testicled—goddess was displayed prominently, and there was a Priapus, whose enormous prick was garlanded with single earrings that had lost their mates. Even the cats had a deity, a stately obsidian cat Dido had introduced as Bast.
I’d never had more than a nodding acquaintance with any of these figures and had not added to the population. My gods, untamed, shape-shifting gods, did not belong here. I would never insult them by giving them a fixed form and cramming them into a little box, as if they, too, could be confined and controlled, as if they, too, were slaves.
Nona dropped my hand and beckoning me to look more closely, she pointed to a figure in the back that I hadn’t noticed before. She stood a little taller than the rest or maybe it was just the horns she wore that cradled the star-like flower. She was robed in gold, just like the statue in the Temple of Venus Obsequens. In one hand she held a sistrum; in the other an ankh.
“Almighty Isis,” said Nona.
“We’ve met.”
Nona just nodded. Then she reached into her tunic, lifted the vial from around her neck and handed it to me. I looked at her uncertainly.
“Pour some for her.”
“But I thought you said you lived on whores’ tears,” I argued for the sake of argument.
“These tears are her tears,” said Nona. “Pour the tears over her.”
I shrugged. There was no harm in humoring her. Taking care not to knock anyone over, I reached into the Lararium and poured a few drops of the salty water on the figure’s head. It pooled in the petals of the flower, then overflowed and began to trickle down her terracotta face.
“Her tears,” Nona repeated.
I closed my eyes, and the dream came back, the boat curved like the moon, the river, the mud, the severed limbs, the sorrow.
“When the moon is full again, it will be the Isia,” Nona announced.
“The Isia?” I felt a prickling at the base of my skull. Whatever it was, this Isia happened at the same time as Samhain.
“The mysteries, the sorrows. We who belong to Isis mourn with her, search with her. The priestesses go in moon-shaped boats to seek the Beloved in the waters. When he is found, we rejoice. We embrace the stranger, and everyone eats.”
I suddenly understood—no, that’s wrong; I didn’t understand anything—but I knew: I had been dreaming Isis’s story. Why? Why was this goddess pursuing me?
“Little Bright One,” she called me by my mother’s name for me, and I could no longer see, but I felt her take the vial from my hand. How could a flood fit in that tiny container? “You belong to her.”
Before I could argue, Old Nona was gone.
“All right,” I said when my sister whores and I settled into the bath.
“Tell me everything you know about Isis.”
“Why do