Sister Joanna was a woman in her middle eighties. It was a long time, an age or two perhaps, since her flight from Mexico and her abandonment of an active vocation in the Catholic Church though in fact she had been active, in a different way, as an ex-nun who drove herself into good deeds, numerous charities and social works. Her reputation as a good woman, a woman of good deeds, was known to all.
“It was kind of you”, he said, “to agree to see me. I wrote … I cannot remember when it was …”
“Just under a fortnight,” she said. “And I replied immediately making this appointment. I was sure then I could help you. And I felt today somehow, in spite of much that has happened to me since then, I could not let you down. I am an old woman and I have learnt now that a single minute, a day could turn into a signal compression of all our years, a signal plea. It’s the Mexican ritualist coming out. I am half Mexican.”
Her voice was much stronger now, half self-mocking, half deadly serious, and the oppressive sensation the Idiot had had at first of a formidable gulf between them, between her habit and his time, began to lapse into the irony of communication. She had become his echoing target, a voice that stood within him and confronted him with its inner face to his inner face, its outer death to his inner life (his inner journey).
“I am planning some research,” he said, “as I explained in my letter, into post-Christian ages, post-Christian foundations …” The words seemed heavy on his lips. Sculptured lips.
“Ah,” she said. “I can tell you about my own order. You will find in the end that what matters is a capacity to revise all your plans — however painful that may be — day to day — to respond without bitterness to self-contradictory tongues that speak with the voices of saints, devils and angels all rolled into one. I wish I had remained in Mexico. She did.”
The Idiot’s curiosity was aflame. “Why did she?”
“It’s a long, long story, young man. Her youth for one thing. We were ten, fifteen years older than she. And women are by training conservative. She saw darkly the need for an equation …”
“Between revolution and religion.”
“You have put the words into my lips, young man. Into my dead lips. For I am dead, my Fool, you are alive.”
“Do you think she succeeded?” the Idiot cried as if possessed by the dream, the language of a dream-play. Or as if he were deaf to her humour. How could she be dead and still speak to him except there was a mythical logic to deafness, to blindness, inserted into the spectre of order?
“She tried …” the voice was fading into a myth.
“Tried? Tried what?”
The voice returned with a struggle—“She saw what was pressing upon us. Beyond words. She tried to face a future everyone feared or shrank from. And I believe her trial counts in the end more than any success I have had.” Sister Joanna’s voice was shaking a little. There were tears in her eyes and the Idiot noted the texture of her skin, rather chapped, even coarse, and yet imbued with a kind of strength, a fabric that resisted to the end as if it were trembling on the edge of its grave.
“I know”, she continued with a surge of power, “that Beatrice may appear to have achieved little. The old walls she prized — we all prized — crumbled before her eyes. And in some quarters her legacy is viewed as dubious, even scandalous. I am told she instituted a new procession, a dream-play, and in the beginning there were elements in it which were deplorable and savage. I have heard all this. And other things have been kept from my ears. You see I correspond with one Hosé. He should prove an excellent guide. I know — I am sure of it — the seed she has sown is terribly, terribly important …”
“I do not follow,” said the blind Fool. “You are the one who, in practical terms, has achieved good works. You have done good. Not a breath of scandal attaches to you. Whereas she … What has she achieved? I am astonished …”
Sister Joanna gave a slightly abrupt, slightly coarse laugh like the latch of a window which the wind blows loose so that it rattles in the throat of space as it speaks.
The Idiot stirred, half waking.
“Remember,” she said. “Mark my words. You will revise your plans when you arrive. As I have come to revise in a flash, at the last moment, my estimate of every good performance I have given. All in the light of her scandal …” She was laughing still. Then she seemed to fade a little, grow still save for her voice which rose again out of the dumb furniture of place as though intent on its disconsolate, painful confession. “If I have done a useful body of work I am glad of it but I have no wish to erect a monument. It would be wrong to do so when this house (it has been my asylum) is the monument, the base for my good works in a country that is still by and large homogeneous and Christian rather than heterogeneous and post-Christian. The house by the way is run by a very strange man, a Father Marsden. And he and I worship good deeds though he knows as well as I that in Europe — with its long tradition of Christian charity — good works seem easier to perform than in other parts of the world we have known. More natural in performance, shall I say, and less imbued with contempt, of which we may be wholly unconscious, for the poor.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean there is a well-defined, a finished doctrine in Europe — though one is aware of new questions now being asked — that clears the decks for a vision of compassion in action. A metaphysic has been ironed out, fought over for centuries, and finally established lucid and firm for all to obey.
“This, in my experience, is not the case in Mexico (or in the lands south of Mexico) where a cleavage exists within the ethics of sacrifice entertained by divided civilisations, different cultures rooted in pre-Columbian, post-Columbian worlds, pre-revolutionary, post-revolutionary states. And within that cleavage action is largely meaningless until one strips away from it a body of encrusted habit that trades on the exploitation of culture by culture. Indeed action has become a bureaucratic succession of callouses between man and man. A technique, a technicality, nothing more. Except, of course, that there is pity, the obscurity of pity, which moves one man to reach out to another as though for a moment or two they lose themselves and become naked souls.”
“And don’t you feel”, said the Fool dimly conscious of his and her frustrations now, “that this is true of Europe and America too?”
“Not in the same way,” she said. Then paused. “I do not know. I have already tried to explain. Did you not hear me? What I do feel now”, her voice was struggling to maintain its paradox, its force like a displaced sibylline feud of pride and prejudice, “is that her trial of values, her scandal, her supreme trial of values, her supreme scandal, is the exposure of a dead world dressed in all the garments of history and even now — at this late stage — it has led me to conceive, miraculously conceive …”
“Conceive what?”
“Has driven me—forced me to conceive …”
“Force? Do you know what you are saying? Force is rape.”
“Forced me to conceive.”
“Conceive what? Conceive what Sister Joanna?”
“To conceive, as if for the first time, the very earth in which I lie, into which I run …”
The voice was running now, flying, running into the structure of a thorn that blazed in the Fool’s eyes as if lightning midnight candle flashed.
As if her eyes/his eyes had kissed and then parted into a door, into a sky that stood between them now.
The Idiot half-stirred, half-woke to the fact, the dream-fact, that he stood in the street, cobbled street, that he had lifted the knocker and struck the door once, carved into a thorn. He lifted it again, rapped, knocked.