The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [84]
We can reclaim our own saints. Wilgefortis (or Uncumber), for example, a virgin martyr who just may be an example of earthy, female humor. To avoid an arranged marriage, she grew a beard, a crime for which her father had her crucified, and now she serves to help married women become unencumbered of evil husbands. All you need is a prayer, and a peck of oats. And there is St. Perpetua, a martyr of early-third-century Carthage, breast-feeding her child in prison before being fed to the lions; and the aged deaconess Apollonia, probably a widow, who is seized by a crowd that beats her, breaks her jaw, and tears out her teeth. Physical virginity is not the issue, and it never was. Reading between the lines of the tortures the virgin martyrs endured, it seems obvious that they were raped. Scholars of the early church now confirm this. The real issue is that these unprotected women dare to make an outrageous claim—that as Christians, they have been made in the image of God—and are thus greatly feared by governing authorities and punished to the full extent of the law.
We can use these stories to remember the extent to which women have always been feared by male authorities, and to better recognize the ways that this fear translates into violence against women. We can remember that no woman is safe, or respectable, once she claims for herself the full psychic power of virginity. The noblewoman Ruhm responds to news of the massacre of her husband and other Christians in her town by walking bareheaded with her daughter and granddaughter into a public square: “She, a woman whose face no one had ever seen outside the gate of her house,” gives a speech so powerful that the king is shaken by it. He wants to execute all the townspeople “for letting her go on at such length and thus lead the town astray.” When Ruhm refuses to deny Christ, the king has her put to death, but not before he has killed her daughter and granddaughter and poured their blood into her mouth.
That story comes from sixth-century Syria; a witness to a horror closer to us may be found in Mark Danner’s book about a massacre that occurred in December of 1981 in El Salvador, in the hamlet of El Mozote. Most of the peasants killed were evangelical Christians, and among the stories the soldiers told, years later, was that of a young girl, a story remarkably similar to accounts of the virgin martyrs:
There was one in particular the soldiers talked about that evening (she is mentioned in the Tutela Legal report as well), a girl on La Cruz whom they had raped many times during the course of the afternoon, and through it all, while the other women of El Mozote had screamed and cried . . . this girl had sung hymns, strange evangelical songs, and she had kept right on singing, even after they had done what had to be done, and shot her in the chest. She had lain there on La Cruz with the blood flowing from her chest, and had kept on singing—a bit weaker than before, but still singing. And the soldiers, stupefied, had watched and pointed. Then they had grown tired of the game and shot her again, and she sang still, and their wonder began to turn to fear—until finally they had unsheathed their machetes and hacked through her neck, and at last the singing stopped.
One wonders: will the “usual spring” appear on the site where she died? Will this strange story of a powerless young girl who has the power to make soldiers afraid be embellished over the years, as the soldiers try to live with the