The Habitation of the Blessed - Catherynne M. Valente [78]
From six or seven broken words (ash-basket, bitter-gourd stew, bombax, moths, stars) I surmise they made their next night-camp in an open field of red-silk cotton flowers teeming with moths, under a wheeling, starry sky, and Hagia telling the last tale.]
“John, listen to me. Look at me. No one else is awake. No one will know you acknowledged that I live.”
I suppose Saint Thomas might have looked on her without fear or shame. I could barely turn myself halfway toward her, barely place an ear in the path of her voice.
“Why won’t you look at me?” Her voice pleaded; my resolve stammered in my breast.
“You are naked,” I whispered. And those were the first words I spoke to my wife. In shame, my soul aflame.
She fell silent. “I have seen you discourse with other blemmyae. With Oro.”
I felt myself blushing furiously then, and gave thanks for the dark of night, and the flutter of moths on orange flowers, that hid me. “Oro is… unformed yet. She is innocent. And the males of your kind… they are not voluptuous. A man’s naked breast is made in the image of God. A woman…”
I knew she would not like such an argument, but I could not help but make it. What should I have said? It is only you I cannot bear, and I cannot yet face the reasons why? I wonder if you have any kind of mind or soul, when you have no head, the seat of reason? I fear you have only a ferocious heart, and that it, like your belly, has teeth.
Through clenched teeth she answered me, cold and hard: “I cannot help how I am made, John. I do not ask you to put your face away before I can summon up the strength to speak to you. I do not ask you to go blind for my comfort. A body is just a body, and all bodies are naked before God—how could any God count as shameful her own creations?”
“God is not a her.”
“So you say. Neither are you—I cannot think this is a coincidence.”
Hagia moved swiftly across the gap between us—despite her size, she moved so quickly, like the turtle who sees the spider, suddenly, and dashes. She seized me by the shoulders and then the cheeks and dragged my eyes to her breasts, her full and heavy breasts, and the eyes at their tips, black in the dim starlight, fringed with long lashes, and her lips below them, the mouth in her flat belly, and oh, I tried to look at her belt, and I feel such shame now at my shame then, when I prayed fervently in my heart that God should preserve me and pluck out my eyes to spare my soul one glance at her.
“John, look at me, look at me. I am not ugly, I am not a demon, I am Hagia, just Hagia. I copy manuscripts and I know how to take care of trees and I’ve read everything you can even think of. I am no different than a woman of your kind. I wear cucumber flowers around my waist sometimes, because I like the smell of them, and how they are just a little green, as though they know what they will become. I loved my mother and my father, just as you did, and I came with you, I came, first of anyone, to help you find your saint, to find your way. Qaspiel itself, whom you revere, has flown with me in its arms and you will not even look at me, please John, look at me.”
I looked. I believe God has forgiven me for it. She looked back, her eyes wide and clear. I let my eyes move over her, taking in everything I had refused to see. Her muscled shoulders, her arms and her hands stronger than my own. A place where her head might have been, (and I wondered then what she might have looked like with a face like mine—would she have been beautiful, plain?), where some shadow moved beneath her skin, a fluttering. Her powerful legs crouched near me, sheathed in their flowing black trousers, her jeweled belt. And her mouth, frank and friendly, her body warm and smelling of something odd