Well in Time (40 page)

She had shoved a couple of votive candles and a book of matches into her pants pocket before leaving the orangerie. Setting the flashlight on the floor, she knelt and lit the candles. The two small flames threw weak illumination over the room, but their warm light was comforting after the harsh glare of the flashlight. She set them to either side, where they would not throw her own shadow over the work to come.

Then, pulling the shears from their holster on her belt, she rose and turned toward the mysterious tarp-covered teepee in the center of the room.

Old and rotten as it was, the tarp resisted the blades of her shears. She bore down until her fingers felt raw, cutting stroke by stroke into the covering, realizing that the shears would be sprung and have to be replaced after this night’s work. She managed to cut three long slits up the side of the mound before she developed a blister on her finger.

After that, she set the shears aside and began inserting her fingers into the rotted rips in the tarp. With sufficient strength and a few sharp jerks, she managed to open the rips into long vertical tears.

After about an hour she was covered in dust and grit, and the tarp hung in tatters but what lay captive underneath was still obscure. Taking up the shears again, she began to cut horizontally across the thin strips with a kind of desperate determination. As each strip fell away, a lengthening incision appeared across the face of the mound.

When the horizontal cut was a couple of feet long, the tarp suddenly shifted backward from its own weight, startling Calypso. She jumped back with a yip. It was almost as if human hands had tugged the covering sheet from behind. Then, her eyes fell on the incision again and she gasped.

“Oh my God!” she exclaimed.

Picking up the flashlight from the floor, she aimed it into the cut and then stared. Looking back, from where he was cradled on a sturdy arm, was an infant, smiling at her with sweet serenity.

She was frantic, then, to see the rest of the statue. Cutting, ripping and tugging, she managed finally to dislodge the tarp. With a final yank on its backside hem, she felt its inertia give way and in one sliding movement, it released its hold and crumpled to her feet. She raced around to the front and taking up her flashlight again, spotlighted the entirety of the statue.

What she saw took her breath away. Her legs buckled and she sank to her knees.

“It can’t be!” she breathed in wonder that bordered on terror.

Centered in the cone of the flashlight’s beam, a statue almost four feet high of a mother and child stood resplendent upon an elegant Louis Quinze table. Carved in wood, colored in polychrome, and shining with gold gilt, the Queen of Heaven and her Son gazed with divine, untroubled calm into Calypso’s astonished eyes.

Calypso shook her head dazedly and exclaimed, “
You!
”

She switched off her flashlight and let it fall to the floor. In the light of the two candles, the figures above her seemed to move and breathe in the soft, flickering light.

Calypso felt a hot wave of emotion erupt from the very pit of her being. Sobs spewed from her like molten lava. Cradling her forehead in her hands, she bent at the waist and with her elbows braced on her thighs, fell into an attitude of obeisance. Cries arose from her that even she could not interpret with what was left of her rationality. They ripped from her throat unreservedly, a mixture of grief and ecstasy.

She howled her stark amazement and disequilibrium. Her body seemed to fly through undifferentiated space at warp speed, with fragments releasing and falling away, until she was only a soul, hurtling through endless void like a comet. With one imperious glance, Our Lady had released her from earthly bounds and set her on a timeless and infinite journey.

When she returned from it, she found herself still kneeling before the Mother of God. Her knees ached, her thighs screamed for release, and her shaking hands were saturated with tears.

How she was able to climb from the depths and to lower and lock the door, she was never able to remember. The only image that remained of the time between her return to consciousness and her arrival back at the orangerie was of her own hands, moving as if disembodied, taking the two candles from the floor, and placing them reverently before the throne of the Queen of Heaven.

§

“This is truly remarkable.” Calypso read the e-mail from her friend Eleanore with weary, strained eyes, the day following her discovery. “If this is real—and of course we would have to do many tests to prove it—then you have discovered a kind of missing link.”

Calypso could imagine Eleanore in her office in the depths of the Louvre, that was crowded with files and diminished by three looming walls of shelved reference books, bending in disbelief over the photos Calypso had e-mailed her. Her friend, an art historian of the Middle Ages, was almost as amazed as was Calypso.

“This image clearly draws its iconographic references from Egyptian prototypes of Isis suckling Horus,” Eleanore’s email continued. “If testing shows that it predates other Black Madonnas—and I suspect it will—then this image is a perfect example of the transition between the worship of Isis as Queen of Heaven and the veneration of Mary by the same title.” She ended the message with a question, “When can I see Her?”

Since her discovery, Calypso had been busy. Although Monsieur Signac had arrived with his crew of cleaners that morning, Calypso had declared the back entrance and its room off limits. Then, borrowing extension cords and moveable work lights from the builder’s shed and refusing all help from him or his assistants, she had made numerous trips up and down the stairs to the vault, setting up lights. Finally, she brought her camera and tripod from the orangerie and disappeared into the back of the house, locking herself into the back room, much to the mystification of the others.

Having taken shots of the statue from numerous angles, she downloaded the photos and sent them to Eleanore, who had an international reputation as an art historian and an impregnable position at the Louvre, because of her expertise. On a day when she had expected to be overjoyed with the progress on her new home, Calypso was largely oblivious to the work being accomplished in other rooms. As she dismantled the lighting and lugged it up the stairs, her thoughts were solely on Eleanore’s response.

Now, as she bent over the screen of her laptop, gnawing on a hastily made sandwich, she felt a wave of emotion at her friend’s evaluation. Living beneath her new home was an ancient and heretofore unknown aspect of the Divine Feminine, Her fire and compassion hidden deep in earth and darkness and forgotten, diminished or derided on the surface.

Calypso was certain that it was She who had called her to buy and restore the property; She who brought Calypso to defy even Javier and to risk their love in order to secure Her future.

How unthinkable that the property might have been sold for a housing development! What if She and Her vault had been mindlessly desecrated by a bulldozer and then simply covered over, never again to know human reverence? Calypso shuddered at the thought.

Accustomed to the power of the locket and to the sometimes shatteringly prophetic dreams is brought, still Calypso was amazed by the power of the call of the Black Madonna, as she had come to think of the statue. In Her, nature had become conscious matter—mere wood had become a living channel of the divine through the agency of human attention, love, and devotion.

In recognizing what drove her to buy and renovate the place, even at the expense of her relationship with Javier, Calypso had endured the eruption of an inner volcano of passion—her love for the soil of France, for its aesthetic, and for the history saturated into its soil—all now embodied in the statue of Isis/Mary. Furthermore, the uncanny realization that the image of the Black Virgin was identical to the one on the locket!

She brought up ancient images of Isis and Horus on her screen, side by side with one of her frontal photos of the statue. They were almost identical. Each held her Infant on her lap with her left hand and each had both breasts bared. The only difference lay in that the traditional Isis figure used her right had to guide her left breast to her child, while in the transitional figure, the breast in the right hand had been translated into a globe, which She extended to all.

Calypso stared at the orb in Her right hand, feeling she understood the iconographic shift. Divine consciousness, the milk of the Mother, would eventually expand to encompass the globe. Moreover, the globe was a mandala whose center
is
humankind, a center which is the consciousness humans bring to it. Spheric wholeness and completion are the milk the Goddess offers.

She flipped down the lid of her laptop and went to sit on the kitchen stoop to finish her sandwich. Her thoughts shifted to Javier and his patriarchal world of business, politics, warfare, and violence. She longed for a world at peace, where the inclusive values of the Feminine could be expressed—and she knew, in all fairness, that this was ultimately what Javier had expended his life trying to establish in Mexico.

She knew, too, that for all her love of France, it too had had long periods of violence, ignorance and warfare, as Father Xavier’s letter had shown. It was not Mexico that was the crucible of human disorder but throughout the ages, the human heart.

Suddenly, her longing for Javier was almost unbearable. Each of them, in their desire for that elusive peace, was creating a sliver of it in their chosen corner of the world and each hoped that the other would share in it unreservedly. In their desire to give one another this anointing in the Divine Feminine, they had almost torn their love apart. She didn’t know whether to cry or laugh.

On impulse, she went into the house and made a call to Rancho Cielo, even though she knew it was already late at night there. The phone rang and rang and rang. With a sad heart, she replaced the receiver and went to see how the house was coming along under the ministrations of the cleaners.

As she walked down the garden path, her hand went automatically to the locket beneath her sweater and she fingered its cool orb to calm her agitation. How could it be that the image on the locket was the same as the image in the vault? Although made perhaps three thousand years before the statue, still the Isis of the locket held an orb in her extended hand.

Overcome by this strange synchronicity, Calypso sank onto a stone bench, her mind singed by an echo of the delirious flight of consciousness of the previous night. What was time, really, or consciousness or matter that was shaped intentionally to expand it? It was all an unfathomable mystery.

She sat for many minutes until the feeling of dizziness passed. Then she pulled herself together, rose to her feet and went toward the house, vowing to focus for this afternoon on cobwebs and sawdust only.

§

The house was nearly clean. The crew had started at the top, on the
troisième étage
and worked downward. When she arrived, they were on the ground floor. The smell of lavender soap hung in air damp from still-drying floors and windows. She found Monsieur Signac tinkering with a window latch to assure its perfect functioning.

“Is there anything left for me to do?” she asked.

“No, Madame. I think all is well in hand. We can even begin moving in furniture upstairs if you would like. Luc and Jean-Pierre can be spared from cleaning now, I think.”

As if a switch had been thrown, Calypso found herself suddenly as eager to have her house in order as she had been driven, that morning, to photograph the statue.

“Are the drapes hung up there?”

Monsieur Signac nodded.

“Yes. All the draperies are hung on the second and third floors. We are waiting for the windows all to be cleaned before we hang them here on the ground floor.”

Calypso gave him a radiant smile.

“Then let’s get going!”

§

It took four full days to move into the house. Luc and Jean-Pierre worked like Trojan slaves, heaving and wrestling into place the massive armoires, chests of drawers, tables, and desks. The rest of the crew, liberated from cleaning, brought the boxes and bags of treasures she had purchased during the months of renovation, in a long procession from the orangerie through the garden to the house.

In the kitchen, ivory-handled knives and silver flatware were washed, polished, and carefully laid down in newly painted drawers. In the salon, study and bedrooms, paintings were hung, chairs and couches posed in groupings, and beds assembled and made up. Calypso ran herself ragged, going up and down the stairs to the calls of the crew, asking if the placement of a table was correct or if she liked the positioning of a painting before it was hung.

Each night she collapsed into bed with a growing feeling of joy, made inexplicable in the face of her longing to see Javier. It was as if the two were growing in direct proportion to one another: the more finished and delightful her new abode, the more, too, her heart pined to see and touch the man of her heart.

§

It was late Friday afternoon when Monsieur Signac finally released his crew. He and Calypso did a quick tour through the rooms beforehand, to make sure that last minute cleanups were finished and all was in perfect order.

“Well, Madame, do you approve?” Monsieur Signac asked when they reached the salon.

The rays of late sun slanted in almost horizontally, touching glowing parquet, polished furniture, and gleaming accessories with a nostalgic golden glow.

“It’s perfectly beautiful!” she exclaimed. “You’ve created something special, Monsieur Signac. I can’t imagine that anyone else could have done what you’ve done. I can’t thank you enough.”

The builder smiled in genuine pleasure.

“It was nothing, Madame Searcy. A house like this, it is so well made even an old broken-down carpenter like me couldn’t spoil it.”

Rather than reply, Calypso reached for his hand and held it in both of hers. Their eyes met, and the deal they had sealed with a handshake so many months before was completed without a word said.