My story prompts her to divulge memories of her own newly-wed days. “But just wait till you have kids,” she says, smiling like she possesses a secret I don’t.
Her comment about children brings back the conversation Scott and I had on the Saturday before I left. I’d attempted a Greek feast in our tiny kitchen, billing it as the official farewell dinner and setting the table with candles and the good wedding china. Between the horyatiki (Greek salad) and the kotosoupa avgolemono (chicken lemon soup), Scott turned to me and said, “Let’s get a puppy.”
I went through all the reasons this was a bad idea just to keep us from flying out the door right then to get one. The apartment is too tiny; a dog needs a backyard with a fence; puppies equaled house training, vet bills, chewed-up stuff—but it was too late. In my head I was already trying out dog names.
“Get thee to a nunnery,” the woman quips as she catches up with her friends. It was the joke that got passed around the bus on the way here.
“Is that from Monty Python?” I ask Mom in all seriousness.
She tries not to laugh, but her voice cracks apart when she tells me, “It’s Shakespeare.”
It takes us all the way to the top of the hill to get the Monty Python comment out of our systems.
The entrance to the convent is four tall, wooden doors with an arched mosaic tympanum of the Virgin wearing an indigo-blue robe. It is flanked, weirdly, by two blue and white striped poles that remind me of pictures of the candy-cane mooring poles in Venice. They have small crosses on the ends. I stare at them while Trisha knocks.
Mom has told me her story of being here, about asking the Virgin for the thing at the bottom of her heart. Every time I think of doing that myself, I get an expectant feeling inside, a chemical reaction bubbling over a beaker in the pit of my stomach. What lies in my heart. It seems like I’ve spent two years trying to solve that puzzle. What’s really in there and what does it mean? Everybody deserves to ask those questions. I finally came to a conclusion about what to do with my life while kneeling before the Black Virgin of Le Puy, and it only seems to have solidified since then. This time, returning to Greece has not stirred up any of the old yearnings for a career in ancient Greek history. No ambivalence, no self-doubt. I still have an exceptional love for Greece and its past, but I’m sure I can find some avocation as a Grecophile through books, art, travel, and the occasional Greek feast in my kitchen.
I zoom in with the camera on the Virgin in the indigo robe over the door, on the gold polychromatic spattering behind her, then on her outstretched hands. I notice she has a yellow star on her forehead and one on each shoulder, just like the Queen of Heaven fresco I saw in the monastery at Meteora during my college trip. That fresco had initiated me into a world of Mary that I didn’t know. Now, she has become part of a trinity for me, along with Athena and Joan.
Last year, I found a lump in my breast. I was in the shower and there it was, a tiny hard lump. I turned off the water and, wrapping a towel around me, stood at the sink trying not to panic. I recalled every story I’d ever heard about breast cancer striking women early in their lives. In their twenties.
After examining me, the doctor ordered a mammogram. After that, an ultrasound. Hardly believing the lump had taken me all the way to the radiologist’s office, I lay on the table that day, perspiring despite how cold the room felt. You do not have cancer, I told myself. You are not going to die. But I didn’t know, and the longer I lay there not knowing, the more I started to pine for all the things I wanted that hadn’t happened yet. My wedding. My first anniversary. Motherhood. Writing. Another trip with Mom. I felt incapable of calling up the strength I needed to keep me from falling apart.
The treatment room was dark and quiet. I listened to the nurse’s comfortable shoes barely making noise on the floor and felt dizzy with fear. I wanted to feel loved. To be reassured and comforted. To find the resources inside myself to hold it together.
“This won’t hurt. Just relax,” the nurse told me. “Think about the beach.”
I closed my eyes, but I didn’t see waves and sand. Spontaneously, I pictured my mother on one side of me and Mary on the other. It was no surprise that my mother turned up in my image and no big shock Mary was there either. Since I’d felt her presence bent over my life in the cathedral at Le Puy, I’d thought of Mary as my spiritual heart, my ability to love myself.
You’re scared, I know, but the three of us can handle this, I imagined Mary telling me. Gradually I felt myself grow calm. Mary and my mother held my fear until the doctor was able to tell me the lump was benign.
I’m hesitant to say this incident became a huge turning point in my life, but afterward I was very conscious of life’s gifts. I seemed to cherish the people I love more. I was a little more forgiving and appreciative, for a while anyway, though I don’t think the new cherishing I felt ever wore off completely. My writing pursuits intensified, too. Life seemed fragile, and this knowledge may have been in the back of my mind when I left my job at Skirt! a couple of months before this trip in order to write full-time. It was a risky decision—Scott and I would have to sacrifice financially. But life seems too short now not to pour myself into the work I love.
After the breast lump, I also felt more aware of my connection to Mary. I have faith that when I approach the icon in the tree and ask Mary for what lies in my heart, someone is listening. I don’t believe every prayer I toss out will be answered, but I like the idea of handing it over to someone. In my case, Mary. Whenever I pray now, it’s second nature to turn to her.
As I walk through the wooden doors beneath the tympanum of Mary, I keep the video camera running, lingering on the stone pavement in the courtyard, cracked like the bottom of a swimming pool. Lush, tropical-looking flowers bulge around the base of palm trees and spill over earthen jars. Looking at them, ROY G BIV crosses my mind—the word trick for remembering the colors of the rainbow.
Assembled on the stoops where the nuns live are wooden chairs with extra seat cushions, baskets of yarn, and knitting needles. A nun sits in the shade of a grape arbor holding a ball of black yarn in one hand and pulling a strand of it with the other, as if conducting a piece of music. It reminds me of a print I bought at a consignment shop that depicts Mary pulling a red thread from a spindle as the angel Gabriel surprises her.
Even with Mom’s description of the myrtle tree, there are some things you have to see for yourself. It’s decorated with tin votives the size and shape of playing cards. There’s a fence around the trunk, but I get as close as I can and discover the votives are etched with hearts, legs, arms, eyes, infants, and torsos of grown women. On one side of the myrtle, white twine zigzags through the limbs like a web, like the work of the mythical spider Arachne. I cannot figure out if it’s to hold the branches together or if it’s another offering. My favorite ornament is a row of sculpted clay birds strung between two limbs.
After I complete one revolution around the tree and turn off the camera, I see Mom sitting on a nearby bench looking at me, like part of her delight in being back is observing me take it in. I don’t know what to say, so I purposely make my eyes as big as spoons when I look back. We will go to great lengths to make one another laugh, resorting even to idiocies such as this one. I watch Mom’s expression, the way she teasingly lifts her hand and pinches the back of it, our family code for how to compose yourself during church: pinch the back of your hand as you imagine the suffering face of Mother Teresa.
Remembering the last time we were in Greece and how I struggled with sharing my pain about the rejection letter and the worst indictments about myself, it’s clear the partition between us has dissolved, replaced with an openness in which Mom feels like my best friend. And while I guess I don’t tell her everything, I feel I could tell her anything.
As I put the camcorder into my bag, a nun shuffles along the courtyard clutching loaves of bread under both arms like footballs. The sight of her returns me to why I’m here. I drop a drachma into the donation box near the
tree and light a spaghetti-thin candle-stick. Slipping away from the women clustered around the tree, I pull myself up onto a low wall, take out my spiral-bound journal, and begin to compose the prayer I want to say to Mary in the tree. I want to see the words in ink.
When I return to the myrtle, I stand in front of the icon, taking in the dried bougainvillea and palm fronds which have been draped across the top of it. Above the Virgin’s head is a small cross molded out of candle wax and smooshed onto the frame. Staring into the Virgin’s eyes, I tell her what is in the bottom of my heart.
I want to write a book about my travels.
The prayer is a green, unopened bud. And for once, it’s not about arresting my fears, but about fulfilling conviction and a desire that has been building in me. Inside, though, it seems like more than a single prayer; it feels like an induction.
Sue
Palianis Convent-Crete
The convent at Palianis is just as I remember. Flowers in hot, sunburned colors. Grapes sagging heavily under arbors. Walls whitewashed from cleanliness to godliness. Passing three black-clad nuns in the courtyard, I peer at their faces, hoping one of them might be the nun from seven years ago, but none looks familiar.
Coming around the back side of the church, I spot the myrtle tree still festooned with dangling rosaries and ribbons and the glittering clotheslines of tin votive offerings, and of course, the icon of the brown-faced Mary tied to a gnarly old limb.
“You mean the icon stays in the tree all the time?” Ann said, when I first described it to her back home. I told her the legend of Mary repeatedly escaping from the church to the tree until the nuns gave up and let her live there. Happily ever after, it turned out.
As I gaze at the tree from across the courtyard, I realize why I love that story. It’s partly because I relish the cautionary note in it about severing divinity from nature and the rightness of grafting it back, and partly because it features Mary slipping out the back door of the church, shedding sectarianism and making off to the tree and the wide world.
Last night, I opened the shutters in our hotel room in Heraklion and saw the moon, bright-white, over the Venetian harbor and a cruise ship pulling out, strung with lights from bow to stern, and the sight brought back shards of memory from my first trip here. I told Ann about swimming in the Libyan Sea and hiking the gorge at Kato Zakros, about the lightbulb that went off in my head when I saw a fresco of Mary in Krista, holding a snake in the same pose as the ancient Minoan snake Goddess. I launched into a full-scale story about Terry and me being invited into the home of an elderly woman on the Lasithi Plateau, where she served us tea and octopus sandwiches and told us (in Greek) about her dead husband, repeatedly using the word “kaput,” and our slow realization that we would not be released until we bought her handmade doilies.
Ann followed my stories by pinpointing their settings on her map, making a geography lesson out of it. “The Lasithi Plateau is here,” she said, circling it in red. When I ran out of adventures and spots for her to highlight, she said, “What was your favorite place?” And I immediately thought of this place, of the unhurried world inside the courtyard, of the tree, and Mary out on her limb. “Palianis,” I told her, and the realization carried the sharp pang that accompanies homecoming.
Now, standing in the midst of the convent, I understand that in a way Palianis is a point of origin for me. It’s the place where I composed my prayer to Mary about becoming a novelist. It’s where my new creative life began—at least that’s how I’ve framed it for myself. That’s how it feels. I could also say the moments I spent in the Tate, contemplating Rossetti’s painting of Mary’s annunciation, are a point of origin. Both events allowed me to acknowledge a desire and a potential I’d held in abeyance and to finally state my intention out loud. Naturally, there would be nostalgia and homecoming attached to that.
The women in our group pool beneath the tree, circling the white iron fence around the trunk, taking in the twisting limbs with all the trimmings, then one by one stepping over to the icon for their private conference with Mary. I find a shady nook in the courtyard and sit down to watch from beneath the brim of my black straw hat.
There’s a particular scene in my novel that is always drifting back to me, like a radio song or a church litany one grows up repeating, and it comes now, just as it did in France in the chapel at Rocamadour: Lily is standing before the figurehead statue of the Black Madonna, pressing her hand to Mary’s heart, saying, “I live in a hive of darkness and you are my mother. You are the mother of thousands.”
I’m not sure why I go back to that fragment of the book in this recurring way. The obvious answer is that Lily’s words are my own avowal. You are my mother could be my own secret confession of faith, I suppose.
And the phrase You are the mother of thousands—that could be me groping for hope in the symbol of a loving, divine Mother. I do fantasize about what might happen if such a feminine symbol actually began to function in the big spiritual picture—in the minds and hearts of people, in cultural and political institutions. What if there’s truth to the theological notion that our picture of God offers a revealing glimpse of what we secretly value most in life, in ourselves, and in one another? What would happen if the picture widened out to include a creative, loving Mother or Sister who is all about compassion and relationship? Would it help invest us in the wise arts of the heart?
But I believe the real reason that particular scene from my novel gets caught in my thoughts so often is not because of either one of those two phrases. I believe it’s because of their preamble: I live in a hive of darkness.
When I wrote those words for the novel, I wasn’t thinking about a global hive. I was focused on Lily’s private pain. It was only later, recently in fact, that I began to associate “the hive of darkness” with the world at large.
The year 2000 had dawned with so much hope, yet at the same time, it seemed no different from any other year. Threats of terrorism, wars, environmental disasters, religious and cultural clashes, ethnic cleansing, human rights violations . . . the images streamed across the television. Watching them made me sad, then angry, and sometimes sick to my stomach. When I grew tired of my senses being assaulted, I resorted to cynicism. “Humans,” I would mutter, as if we were a hopeless species. When the cynicism began to veer into bitterness, I would turn to denial. “Cut off the TV,” I would say to Sandy. Maybe there is wisdom in limiting one’s daily intake of bad news, but out of sight did not entirely prove out of mind for me.
Was the hive actually growing darker, or did seeing so much ceaseless news just make it seem so? Or, was this some newly heightened sensibility emerging from inside of me? So yes, I find myself brooding more about the planet these days. I believe all this new concern of mine is partially age-related, as if my biological clock is resetting itself for grandchildren and I’m disturbed about what sort of place it will be for them. It’s as if my developmental clock is resetting itself, too, demanding to know what I plan on leaving behind, what drop of light, what response to the darkness in the hive.
And that’s why the scene in the novel flares up so regularly, and why it flares up now. I look around for Ann’s blue shirt and spot her on the ledge of a wall near the myrtle tree, her journal open, her pen sweeping over the page, and my memory lights upon a similar moment in France when she sat with her journal outside the chapel at Rocamadour, trying to come to terms with what to do with her life.
She has been writing for nearly a year, doing it with commitment and steady, hard work. That does not surprise me, but it is quite something to witness this sort of maturation in your child—the adult settling-in, the taking-on of life. You raise them for it, but honestly, when it happens, you can’t help marveling a little. I’ve been reading pieces of her writing and each time she hands me the pages, she prefaces it: Tell me the truth, give it to me straight, I want the good, the bad, and the ugly. She read in one of her writing books that a writer’s job is to serve his or her work—not the ego,
but the writing itself. She took this to heart.
As I sit here with twenty-two years of writing behind me, thinking of Ann and the way she has plunged into her apprenticeship, which is what she calls it, I mull over the idea that a writer’s job is to serve her work. This notion consumed me for most of my writing life—for nearly the first two decades. But now it flips over in my mind and I find myself wondering what the work ought to serve.
A breeze swirls up, ruffling the swag of tin offerings in the tree, causing light to dart and scatter. I take out my new black journal so I can set down some of my thoughts on paper, but pause first to read the Rumi quote I recorded on the front page: We are pain / and what cures pain, both. We are / the sweet, cold water and the jar that pours.
Putting an epigraph at the beginning of this journal felt compulsory. I did it for the other two trips, I reasoned. How could I not come up with another one? Except every quotation I found seemed artificially induced. Just words I was plucking out of a book and imposing. The lines from Rumi, though, reminded me of the dream I had before Ann’s wedding about dispensing water to dying mothers. They sparked against something on the inside of me.
Rereading the words now, it’s apparent they also resonate with the brooding I’ve been doing about the world and the questions that have begun to simmer inside of me: What will I leave behind? What will become of the world? What indentation will my work make? Why do I make myself audible like this? For what purpose?
I’ve always written because I wanted to. Had to. Because it was the necessary fire. I don’t imagine any of that will change. But now, with the years moving by so fast and the darkness in the hive growing, I do find myself drawn to this poetic notion of Rumi’s about being the water and the jar that pours it.