Martin sighed. He took Angelica’s hand in his and squeezed it, then grabbed her in a bear hug. “Well, I better go. But I’m gonna miss you, Angelica.”
She laughed, her bronze hair falling across his. “Oh, you’ll see me again, Martin. Don’t worry.”
She hadn’t asked him to stay on. She knew he would refuse. The truth was that she no longer needed bodyguards. She no longer needed anyone. The house at Huitaca would be closed after tonight. Despite what Angelica had told Martin, Sunday would not go to Huitaca alone, so Angelica had given the housekeeper an envelope with a month’s wages and a false promise that she would call her when she returned in the fall.
And that was that. She had already turned off the water and notified the electric and telephone companies that she was canceling their services. The oriental lilies and freesia that had been slowly deteriorating in their Waterford vases were gone, tossed into a patch of ocotillo outside. Before leaving, Sunday swept the floors clean of sand and cactus needles, folded Angelica’s linen shifts and the embroidered camisoles of honey-colored silk, and set them inside drawers among little muslin bags of sandalwood and dried orange peel. Angelica had seen to the last bits of tidying up, putting back on the proper shelves the notebooks containing so much of her work. Translations of the Sybaris tablets that she had made at the National Museum in Naples, with their invocation of the Queen of the Underworld. The copy of the Demœric Hymn to Othiym from Keftiu, where night after night she had sat bowed over her desk, bathed in the light from a smoky clay lantern, its wick a calyx of false dittany floating in olive oil. One by one she had transcribed the cuneiform tablets, and returned them to their resting place in the tombs beneath the house. Hand-lettered sheets and Xeroxes of parchment pages, drawings she had copied from vases and rhytons and frescoes, from forgotten temples within the rain forest and subway platforms near the great necropolis in Paris: all of them would now be carefully interred at Huitaca, to be given over to whatever priestess next claimed them. For Angelica herself, they had no further use.
Looking over all her things for one last time, Angelica sighed. For nine days now she had been fasting, as the ritual commanded. She had grown so thin, and her skin had taken on an almost luminous translucence: as though her blood was already fleeing her, as though whatever strange raptures she had given herself to had purged her flesh of color and sinew and bone. When she gazed into the mirror her uncle had given her so long ago, the face that gazed back was no longer her own, but that of a caryatid or kouroi—beautiful, ageless, inhuman. For a long moment she stared at herself, touching the heavy mass of her bronze curls and seeking in vain for a grey hair. Letting her fingers brush against her cheeks, the skin smooth and cool as faience, unlined, unscarred. To look at her, one would never think that she was a grown woman with a grown son; but neither would one see anywhere within her the memory of the girl who once upon a time had astonished her friends with her explosive laugh.
“It was so long ago,” she whispered, and set the mirror back amongst the curling photographs and antique silver frames, the papery nautilus and cowries and rose-colored sea urchin. As she removed her hand something fell. She heard the chime of breaking glass, and with a low cry reached to pluck a photo from a sad heap of shivered crystal.
It was a picture of herself and Baby Joe and Oliver, Baby Joe smiling for perhaps the only time in front of the camera, Angelica in the middle and Oliver at her other side. His arm was draped across her shoulder, his eyes were so bright they might have been lit from within by candles, like a jack-o’-lantern.
“Oliver.” She bit her lip and blinked tears from her eyes. “Oh, Oliver…”
She thought of the poem that Sweeney Cassidy had liked to quote back at the
Crazy drunken Sweeney, already seeing the end of things, but oh, Sweeney, if you only knew!—
Angelica wept. Bowing her head and sobbing until her chest ached, she clutched their photos to her breast and wept for all of them. Oliver and Sweeney and Baby Joe and Hasel and Annie and Dylan, but for herself most of alclass="underline" Angelica di Rienzi, like her poor dead friends given to the night.
It was twilight when she finally composed herself. No more time to waste. She wiped her eyes and brushed her hair, turned away forever from everything that might remind her of that other life and went to the bed where her clothes were laid out. There she readied herself for what was to come.
First she drank the kykeon. On her bookshelf was the recipe, garnered from a tablet she had found in the museum at Athens. Barley and honey and the crushed purple bracts and pink flowers of dittany of Crete, fermented in a vessel of fired clay; the same beverage the initiates had drunk at Eleusis millennia ago. It had a pleasant yeasty taste, the honey’s sweetness offset by the dittany’s raw earthiness. After drinking she wiped her mouth on a piece of cotton. She anointed herself with ground coriander and sandalwood, rubbed a fist-sized chunk of amber against the hollow of her throat until it released its musky resin. Then she drew over her head a simple shift of linen shot with gold thread, and piece by piece slipped on the sacred jewelry she had amassed over the years: bands of ivory and gold and sweet red sandalwood, rings shaped like serpents giving suck to children, bracelets heavy with steatite figures of women giving birth. Last of all she took the lunula. She turned to the window, raised the shining crescent to the eastern sky where the moon waited and cried out.
Victory to the Mothers. Victory to the Dark Mother. She slipped the lunula around her neck, and glanced around to see if she had forgotten anything.
The floor was swept clean, the gauze curtains had been drawn across the other windows. On her bed was an envelope containing a one-way ticket to Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C. It was dated the thirty-first of July, the eve of the ancient feast of Lammas.
But that festival had more names than Angelica had hairs on her head. In India it was called Kalipuja, by the worshipers at the Temple at Dakshineswarand and in Calcutta—the city whose name is actually Kali-Ghatt, “the steps of Kali.” In Finland it had been the day of Kalma, “odor of corpses;” in the Antipodes that of Kalwadi, who devoured her own children and then gave them rebirth. On Coatepec—Snake Hill, in Mexico—there gathered followers of the serpent-skirted lunar goddess Coatlicue, she who wore upon her breast the moon and from whose girdle dangled dismembered hands and beating hearts, Coatlicue who danced upon the entrails of her son while wearing his flayed skin. Upon other hills, the sun-gilded mounds of Tuscany, the good fairy Turanna still brings children balloons and bells and Nintendo games, while her Etruscan companion Zirna strews the floor of their bedrooms with tiny sugared crescents.