The Archangel

By Maryanne Khan

 

Xaviera Morelli’s fiancé decided that he was tired of rising at dawn to take the ketch out with the fishing-fleet, and that he would seek work elsewhere, in Germany. That was her last sight of him, a figure whose breath was frost in the December dawn, the tips of his fingers white with cold.

From the bus he called, ‘I will return.’

She heard ‘return’ blown through a small gap in the windows and knew that returning was something that people who had left, like people who had died, did not do. Once her father’s remains had been laid in his coffin, they had sealed him into the earth with a slab they had to raise again only two months later to accommodate her mother, who had mourned him mightily and in so doing, had mourned also herself. Like her parents, her fiancé may as well be dead.

Then, like an old goat seeking a warm barn wherein to lay her spindly body amongst the straw, her great-aunt Immacolata came down from the mountains bringing long, prying fingers and a suitcase full of superstition that reeked of camphor.

When this black-clad scarecrow prepared to install herself in the mother’s bedroom, the Padre was summoned, materialising on the doorstep with leather-bound missal and the purple stola edged in gold. After having resorted to prising the girl’s fingers off the bedpost once liberal ministrations of holy water had failed to subdue, priest and aunt sipped coffee by the fire, with not one, but four restorative lumps of sugar apiece whilst above their heads, Xaviera shrieked, until finally spent, she drew her shawl about her in the furthest corner of the attic, twisting the gold ring on her finger, seething.

At every opportunity, Xaviera disappeared while the aunt, her hair twisted into a murky grey braid that coiled itself at the back of her head like a sleeping reptile, directed household matters from the former master’s chair at the fireside brandishing the stick she claimed her dead husband had carved from a tree that had fallen on the stable, killing a goatherd. From there she held court, drinking bitter coffee with visitors who tormented the girl crouching overhead amongst the bins of winter wheat.

‘He’s never coming back, you’ll see!’

‘Oh, he’ll come back all right! —with a bella bionda Germanica.’

'Better for him he stays there.’

‘Much better. With her the way she is.’

The aunt dictated where it was proper that she might go, and where it was not; to whom she spoke; to whom she might not. Xaviera had no choice but to obey.

‘I bore my husband ten children,’ Zia Immacolata said. ‘Six of my dead babies live among the blessed. But the eldest is elevated highest, an Archangel, seated at the right hand of God,’ adding as they walked by the barren pear-tree in the garden, ‘Some things of creation are never intended to bear fruit, but are only placed on earth to fill the void left by those, more worthy, whom God has gathered unto Himself. It is their destiny to remain barren.’

Many winters passed, as Xaviera waited for the release her aunt’s death would surely bring. And yet the fearsome angel of her dread grew stronger as his mother grew weaker. Xaviera sensed him passing through walls and doorways and along the streets and into the piazzas to hover about her, following her every step.

The Archangel had spun a web around her that caught her hand, which faltered as she ladled stew. It clung to her thoughts when she found herself in the shop unsure of what she had come to buy—bread? cheese? She could not stay at home for fear of being ensnared.

She became one with the sea in the hollow of the bay, cupped in the hands of the Creator. She became the wanderer of the shoreline, who found her thoughts strewn at her feet, a line that followed the pattern of tides marked by seaweed, kelp-pods, and fragments of wood and shell. The long hair of sea-spirits wove about her like a veil. Her resolution quivered like a leaf struck with rain.

Xaviera floated through the days like a piece of driftwood hurled weathered and sapless on the shore. Her lips tasted of salt. Her hair silvered with brine—drowned-woman’s hair—her eyes empty, like the eyes of lifeless fish. She wandered under the distant gaze of the Archangel whom she perceived as an indigo shape on the horizon, the dark after-image of an intensely bright light that burned painfully into the back of her eyes.

She was cold.

She was hungry.

Suddenly the village was awash with gossip about the buyer of the big house in the piazza where the thousand stone steps clambered to the upper village on a spur jutting into the sea.

‘He’s from Rome.’

‘No, from Naples!’

‘The son of a Duke.’

Xaviera instantly recognised that here was her deliverance. Come summer, she would leave a basket of fruit on his doorstep. He would know who had left it—the Madonna would show him. She had entreated the Madonna to give her just one letter from her fiancé and none had arrived.

Now she lit hopeful candles every Sunday in the airless little church, and begged for this one favour.

She dreamed of living in the big house, although she had never crossed the threshold. It was as grand as a palace, and as beautiful. It had heavy walnut doors hinged with iron and the entire front wall under its magenta mantle of bougainvillea was whitewashed every Easter.

The windows of the façade shone like a string of lanterns. Behind the closed shutters flitted the secrets of the night as she wandered from room to room, the keys to each in her keeping. She dreamed of the man from Naples resting at noon, her hands become gentle smoothing his yet-unknown face. They would lie together at night, consumed by their own heat, limbs entwined.

Zia Immacolata took ill on her eighty-fifth birthday, and it fell to the girl to minister to her. Zia Immacolata kept a small brass bell by her bedside with which she summoned her carer with a silvery tinkle. Xaviera found herself jumping from her waking dreams at Mass when the altar-bells chimed.

The old woman unburdened herself of accumulated ills, listing grievances for eternity, absolving herself of the need to forgive. Her room became close and putrid with the smell of bitterness, like rotting fish or wine gone sour.

Xaviera fled the house when the aunt slept and stood at the shore contemplating the line between sea and sky where there boiled far-off thunder and a turbulence of cloud. From the rocks at the seashore, she oversaw the preparations for the man from Naples.

She kept a distant vigil over stonemasons and plasterers, gardeners, and those who brought furniture shrouded with cloths. She knew that her hands, now busy forming loaves, existed only to soothe and comfort him.

That the eyes looking back at her from the mirror were destined to see into the depths of his soul. Emboldened, she promised herself to him. Her hair took on the sheen of polished stone, and she would spread it on his pillow to veil him from all trouble. She became increasingly beautiful, flowering in the tender embrace of minds.

Zia Immacolata also noticed this gradual blossoming, shaking her head and remarking, ‘Ah, but who would know what devilry is in the head of that one!’

Xaviera felt the flush rising and resisted the temptation to respond. But oh! how her heart soared at the deserted shore. The steps to the big house stretched up like a ladder to the sky and its stars hung rosy and fat like glowing insects.

At every opportunity, she left the house and its cloying stench and went to walk, windswept, where the waves spread with a silken slip-on sand and stone, luminescent in the morning, silvered black at night.

She was not cold, finally.

She was not hungry.

For one full week, the old woman refused all food, accepting only a few drops of water when the fever devoured her. When her time came, she found the strong voice of her youth to fling vitriol at her niece. ‘Your sins of pride and vanity will bring a thousand ruins upon your head.

Then, my son will show himself and visit upon your eternal devastation.’ Zia Immacolata’s eyes opened one final time, clear and bright as chips of black marble, and with her last beath, she called the Archangel’s name.

The next morning Xaviera unfastened the clasp of the gold chain of her bondage and dropped it into a deep pool in the rocks, where she fancied, she could see it glistening like fish-scales, occasionally revealed by shifting kelp.

Bubbles rose from the drowning necklace, releasing the final breath of hope that had been tenuously tethered with links of gold. She worked the ring from her finger and dropped it too into the throat of the pool to dissolve her promised marriage. The surface reflected her virginal face in a floating crown of cloud.
The autumn bore down, hanging bare branches with orange persimmons, impossible coals burning in the lily-grey mist like little stolen suns. Xaviera shivered in the slanting rain and called upon the man from Naples to end her solitude.

She had not been able to speak to him since the death of her great-aunt—the words of love no longer glimmered back to her, as if seen through clear water where joyful pebbles, like jewels, glistened on the sand. Her mouth tasted of despair. She feared that her heart, if opened, would reveal a crush of barren seeds like a pomegranate forgotten on the tree.

She turned her eyes to the house of the man from Naples, but there was no sign of his presence. The shutters remained barred under their coat of new paint. Her anger and impatience hung about the damp garden dripping after overnight squalls that slicked moss onto stones in the watery light of morning.

No lamp burned at his windows, and she began to fear that he no longer heard her. She feared that her voice had deserted her or that what she said was but a branch slapping against a wall. She began to write to him—short phrases of longing and welcome, which she kept hidden in her room.

Her thoughts took on substance as she transcribed them, her requests more real. Later, she pushed these scraps of paper through the crack under his door, where she imagined her words would greet him when he arrived, like white doves to mark his homecoming.

‘Oh, my best beloved’, she wrote, ‘why do you not come to me?’ She upbraided him for his neglect, for his new deafness in her regard. She stole back again at night and left messages retracting her effrontery, begging his forgiveness.

‘You must have patience with me,’ she wrote, ‘but I long for you so. I am nothing but a miserable girl who asks no more than to serve you in her love.’
But the house remained empty and the winter took root. The villagers ceased to speculate on the man from Naples, who dimmed in their imagination like the fading memory of midsummer festivals come and gone in a flurry of fireworks.

She feared she could not bear the new cold, the new hunger.

She began to ask questions openly in the village, upturning every stone for news of him.

‘No, no mail to that address.’

‘No, no more commissions for work on the house. ‘

‘No news, but maybe Easter.’

“He is not coming at all.”

“Not before Spring.”

Coming, not coming, he was never coming.

Xaviera raged and wept.

And suddenly, her forgotten fiancé wrote an unheralded letter from Germany. He was coming home.

She waited on the platform of the tiny station, risen too early, bewildered and wrapped against the cold, her family joyous and gurgling with happiness.

She stood amongst the celebratory crowd, her eyes straining to penetrate the ground at her feet to find the heart she had buried in its frozen depths. The train deposited a young man she barely recognized, dressed in the fashion of another place. His body had thickened; his hands flashed with rings. He held himself proudly, acknowleging the homage paid to the traveller numbered amongst the Magi, returned triumphant and bearing gifts.

He greeted his well-wishers, as Xaviera stood wearily awaiting the moment he would look into her dead eyes and see shadows. She sat next to him in silence, gaze directed at the hands, white-knuckled, that lay clasped in her lap.

Endlessly he recounted the litany of adventures, the wonders of Bonn, the abundance of food obtained by means other than by breaking one’s back hauling nets or turning the unforgiving sod. She, however, was plunged backwards into a past she no longer inhabited. The only love she had known lay yellowing on the floor in another house, scrawled on scraps of paper drifting through its halls, like leaves dropped from a tree.

And like a withered tree, Xaviera could not force herself to bud. The tide of days washed her towards the impending wedding. She sank below the surface and gazed at the shifting patterns of underwater light, through stands of kelp entwined with little ribbons of tiny, flashing fish.

People speculated on her new life:

‘She will be the Gran Signora!’
‘A fine house!’
‘Fine shoes!’
‘And many jewels!’

She was borne along, listless and detached, on the tumultuous current of the wedding celebrations. And so, they were wed.

Unwillingly, she was forced to carry out the rites of love that she had imagined performing with another. Her husband took her to his bed and left her defiled, lying awake in the tangle of sheets and longing to plunge into the cleansing sea.

Her day of grief dawned the morning a visitor brought news that the man from Naples had arrived in the village. He was from France, and his name was Monsieur Claude Villeneuve.

She slipped off to the cemetery, where wild-eyed and rabid, she screamed curses upon her dead aunt, who had returned from the afterlife with her prying fingers to seal her misery. She was unworthy now of flinging open the Frenchman’s doors to him, unable to unlatch the shutters and dispel the stale odour of waiting and trembling cobwebs, to welcome him with the blessed sunlight washing over his walls.

Her secret letters were discovered and the entire village was enthralled. She busied herself in the kitchen as it was discussed.

‘This man, he is from France. He does not read l’italiano. So, he takes them to the padre. Oddio santo! If you heard the shameless filth that fills these letters! I would repeat it, were it fit for the ears of women.’

‘The Padre said that the words of lust had burned through the very paper they were written on.’

‘The shame of it!’

‘Maledizione! Quale disgraziata!’

‘Who knows who it is?’

Xaviera bent over the sink, lest they see her face.

‘Oh, you can be sure she will be found out. She can only be from here!’

Xaviera took to leaving her sleepless bed and returning to the seashore; to watch the house she had inhabited in days and nights of longing. She caught glimpses of her promised one moving behind the shutters, the hint of his form behind curtains billowing through the windows like the sails of the boat that was bearing him away.

She kept vigil until the last light was extinguished and the house stood fastened against her, its stony silence broken by the slap of waves on rocks. She returned to bed; her feet sugared with sand.

In the village, her past enquiries about the owner of the house stirred in the collective memory until finally, her husband cast these accusations at her feet.
‘They are saying you were asking questions before he arrived. Many, many questions. If it is not you, explain to me what you do every night!’ he shouted behind closed doors. ‘Our bed is unfit to lie in with the dirt you bring in wandering till dawn.’

Eyes lowered, she offered denial upon denial, but dark doubts crept across the façade of his prosperity, tiny cracks that threatened to widen should he press his wife further. He found himself ever less eager to touch her, crippled in the seething knowledge that she had deceived him—she was never his to have. Whispers in the village flew around him, so that he found himself draped in the tattered mantle of shame until he decided he must remove himself from the torrent of scorn. He would take his wretched wife to Germany. Immediately.

The preparations for departure were swift and secret.

‘I have come back for you, and because of your shame I must leave like a thief,’ he said. ‘I kept my vows, yet my honour is destroyed because of you—you and your treachery and lies. I come back to find I have married a madwoman!’

He spat at her feet and left her to pack. He procured a car for the trip and unseen, they departed. As the distance grew between him and the home to which he could never return, his resentment swelled. The rising sun moved behind a cloud, a lost glimmer of the triumph that had been his.

‘Look at what you have done to me!’ he cried. ‘Puttana!’

He turned to her in fury, striking her hard across her face, losing control of the wheel. He did not see the laden hay-wagon emerging from the bend ahead until the world tore apart around them, reeking of benzina and burning hay. Xaviera found herself lying in the dust, all but senseless.

She felt the heat on her face and opened her eyes and recognised the Archangel standing before her, wings outspread. She had expected the form of him, but never the glorious intensity of colour in the wings. He walked towards her, a dark silhouette emerging against a sun rising fearsome and molten red, the many shades of blood. The wings were tinted with all the jewels of the world.

The hair that lifted about his face rose and fell in dark waves of onyx. His breastplate was of iron, his sword of gold. He bore a single dark star on his brow; his eyes plumbed incandescent depths. This was the one who had left a hollow place on earth that she could never fill, the angel Severinius.

She found the power of him terrible and irresistible to behold. He folded his fiery wings about her. Her lips parted, her breath extinguished in the greater glory of his blaze.

 

Maryanne Khan from Australia is published in literary magazines in the US and Australia. After having lived 25 years in the EU and USA, now resident in Australia.