Читать книгу The Truth About Lou - Angela Von der Lippe - Страница 11

The truth is she loved to dance. She was only a girl growing into her own body when she learned that the flowing lines of her nubile form sculpting curves of a simple rhythm could send men into a frenzy. A girl with hoops in her ears and spangles on her wrists who saw herself as she whirled and whirled seized by an unending ring of blazing mirrors—their rapt eyes. She was everywhere when she danced, she was all theirs in the room of their body but as she peered through the gauze of her veils, seven veils no less, and felt the caress of eyes from afar, the undulating spasm of her hip, the kiss of air upon her belly, a moist dew forming between her lips, she let her silken scarves drop one by one, and feeling herself disappearing, disappearing ever so slowly, she stopped, becoming nothing before the fiery gaze, the claws, the fangs of the nameless one who would devour her.

The truth is she danced not for them but for the favor of her mother—a woman for whom there was no natural favor—no thing taken for which she did not extract revenge and no thing given for which she did not exact a price. Her mother had used her daughter, as parents are wont to do. So in this way Salome became the thing given to Herod to satisfy her mother’s revenge, her stepfather’s lust, in exchange for the head of the one man who had seen through her mother’s treachery—the one holy man who could have saved her. Saved her from her own aching need, from that silent cry for her mother’s embrace, from the insatiable grasp of anonymous men and from becoming the unwitting instrument of her own destruction. Alas, it was not meant to be.

And whirling through the centuries, through a veritable cult of Judiths and Lucretias who cultivated the baser instincts, killed for good or bad, collected heads nonetheless, a holy man here, a tyrant there—Salome would whirl and whirl enduring centuries of luscious desire and highhanded derision, til it ended with another Salome who knew her mother’s manipulation all too well, who loved that one holy man and who thankfully never learned to dance. She wanted only to be lifted in his divine gaze, and delivering to him the sword the others had used to decapitate so many, so indiscriminately, she gave him the strength he needed to consummate this, their holy union. And breaking the spell and anointing her his own in Christ, this Salome was reborn as “Lou.”

I wanted him to smile at least and he did through tears. His ageless cool northern command suddenly gave way to the fluid uncertainty of the moment. He seemed to be caressing the beads of a broken chain in his palm. He said in a soft considered tone, as if having worked his way to a conclusion: “But the difference, dear Lou, the difference with this Salomé is the man who finds himself blessed to be reflected in those soulful eyes of hers.”

I always knew I loved him but now I was sure that love was returned. Gillot had responded not to phantom palpitations of the heart but to the inscribed voice of my own words and I felt emboldened and protected by that.

Holding my face in both quivering hands, he drew me toward him in a long protracted kiss and as I sank onto his lap on the cot his hands began to travel up and down my vertebrae, as if playing a stringed instrument. My skirt. My breasts. And falling into him, I felt his loins stiffen.

It was a wild grasping of bodies as we seemed to swim into each other, clutching for some hold, some release. And feeling the full weight of his body on my chest smothering me, into me, I pulled free and sank to his knees and began to weep. I did not want to see his face. That would be too close to my shame.

I remember looking up to the distracted gaze of Cranach’s Luther and then lighting on a crucifix on the wall, on that ray of light, the clot of blood from his pierced side, the last droplets of a life that no longer flowed in him. And at that moment what came to mind was that among the witnesses of that long ago event with Mary and Magdalena was a Salomé too.

Gillot sat hovering over me and kissing my head said over and over again: “Dear Lou, dear Lou, no, no please don’t. Please don’t, it’s not you. I have been struggling with this for so long. I must talk to Katya [his wife], to your mother. There must be some future for us.”

As much as I wanted to believe, I could not. My mentor was a man, nothing more. And his savior had died—an icon on the wall. As changed as he became for me from that moment on, still I knew I would come back, but never the same. The lie, that promised now no future, but only an end, was back for only us to know, but never to be spoken of again.

EXCEPT of course until we would speak our final leave-taking. Two months later in a ceremony in Sandpoort, Holland, his birthplace, in the presence of my mother, Gillot presided over my confirmation. We had prepared a program deliberately in Dutch, a language my mother did not understand, but which we secretly devised as our lifelong nuptials. Drawing from Isaiah (the angry prophet who had descried my youthful heresy—not my choice), Gillot summoned me to Christ with the words: “Fear not. For I have chosen you. I have called you by name. You are mine.” And facing him feeling only the hold of impending death and not rebirth at all I responded: “You have blessed me. For I do not have you.” First love when lost is the lie that tells the truth—the one that haunts you forever, like a phantom limb always there but not, and so it was with me.

As the train made its chugging labored way across the Dutch flatlands through their glorious quilt of blooming flowers, I thought of Sandpoort, its vaulted cathedral at its center now empty, its neat cobblestone streets with everywhere squinting windows, mirrors allowing the eye within, lost in the glare, to observe the comings and goings on the street below. Did anyone recognize that day the grasping of hands between celebrant and confirmand on the steps before the closed cathedral doors as the rueful farewell of lovers? And if they did, would they not expunge the thought at once in a clean righteous sweep of what life should be? Not ours.

I left him there in the security of his earliest childhood memories, his birthplace, and set out under the pesky eye of my mother into the great unknown. We would travel south through the secular godless towns of Switzerland while Gillot would eventually make his way back to St. Petersburg and beyond to rescue souls from that infinity of solitude—the Russian countryside.

Mother Russia never tired of her holy men. They were legion, good men and bad men, no matter. Russia was not discriminating and always needed redeeming.

Mother wrote to me years later of one in particular—one who had raped the countryside and penetrated the inner sanctum of the imperial court to “cure” a child. Finally he took as his lover another young prince, only to get himself murdered by his royal paramour three times over—poisoned, shot and dumped into the Neva River. All this treachery to no avail—he couldn’t seem to die and his legend prevailed with the force of folk sainthood. Grigory Rasputin became the Russian symbol of evil incarnate and oddly of a certain peasant resourcefulness. It was a powerfully dangerous precedent for others who would follow.

AS I set out on untold adventures, I didn’t know that I would not see Gillot for many years to come—and only then under the most ironic of circumstances. This man who had given me so much and confirmed me in Christ would preside over my real nuptials. The one who had taken my innocence was forced to bear witness, indeed to give me away to my intended and how many others to follow. It was a curious closure to the body of my whole childhood irretrievably lost and yet still casting about like the soul of “first love” itself seeking the safe harbor of his blessing. I did not know what lay before me, but I had already discounted the beneficence of any love equaling the one that lay behind me. I was faithful.

From this side, I am told that when I died—that hunched over nearly blind woman, that famous writer in the large stucco house with the vineyard garden up on the hillside road—they burst into my apartment—the ones whose heels clopped brilliantly and in unison against the sun-bleached cobblestones—their hollow insurgency coming, and they emptied all my bookshelves into a huge heap out on the street. One of the brown-suited soldiers paging through a volume of poetry here, of prose there, addressed his officer: “Who was she?” he asked. “Her name was Salomé.” “Oh, like the one who danced,” he quipped. “Yes, only this one was not young and nubile. She was a wizened old hag who danced with swine. With Jews.”

Death has some dignity and that is to free one of life’s indignities. I am told that one of the soldiers became distracted by one volume and pocketed an inscribed edition of Rainer’s verse, dropping a match that instantly went out, as he left without so much as turning around to see if their work was completed.

So indeed many of those inscribed words did survive. Those that did not survive the countless other burnings survived the mind. Not unlike the childhood etched in memory. Not unlike the faith etched in the heart. Or the name he had given me in life, because he could not pronounce “Louisa” in Russian, so he christened me with a nickname that sounded like the Russian root word for “love.” The name I carried throughout my lifetime and translated me in death, to be spoken in so many tongues: “Lou.”

BUT I am getting ahead of myself as I was always wont to do. And though I left behind the things of a child—her form, her virtue, her first love, her faith, the girl in the mauve muff—I took with me something I could not squelch. It was a cry that sometimes woke me from sleep, a cry I recognized as my own but could not reach, could not calm. The cry, almost like a waking lullaby of who I was not, could never hope to be. Eventually it was muted and my pain gave way to that slow dance of the heart that beat and beat past my father and Gillot far into the future toward the dark grace of the one, with hand extended, the one true one, whose eyes would light my way . . .

INTERLUDE

A cold mother fearful of her only daughter, a crazy grandfather closeted away, a dashing tutor, a pastor no less abusing his influence. Familiar story. But still such a believer! A spunky girl, wanting to get out from under. A little girl who cries and cries, but doesn’t break . . . wants to keep it distant, order it all, push it away. Hide it.

I laid my head down into my pillows, safe in my North Country cabin, lit a candle on the night table by my bed, breathing in its citrus melon scents, staring into the flicker of flame as I did nights after writing, spying the light for the next word, glimmering feeling, some odd cranny releasing me into dream.

My God, what a shroud of secrets enveloped her. How could she, just a child, have found her way through that? All the unspoken deeds, the broken promises. What a stranglehold of secrets. “Don’t be so sanctimonious, girl. You probably have your own safely under wraps, ones you wouldn’t tell anyone, ones you’ve yet to discover.... You think writing can control them?” Quiet now, I’m the one writing this book. “You are, my dear, but not without me.” True, Lou, but I give up. Okay, so maybe it’s our story. Just not now . . . tomorrow. Those secrets—they’ll keep. Enough already. I need to sleep.

I blew out the flame, the voice inside my head, all those knots in pine walls blinked into dark and turning with a woomf I buried myself in the down comforter, dropping into a deep snore. Dar, my beagle’s sighing snorting body like a fur hat curled into the pillow above my head. Puppy love. Gotta cure him of that. Well, maybe later ...