“I suppose,” says Joan.
“But Hildegard says that God told her—wait, I’ll find it—hang on. . . .” Blandine flutters through She-Mystics: An Anthology and, to Joan’s horror, begins reading out loud. “So God told Hildegard: ‘You, human creature! In the way of humans, you desire to know more about this exalted plan, but a seal of secrecy will be imposed on you; for you are not permitted to investigate the secrets of God more than the divine majesty wishes to reveal, because of his love for believers.’ ” Blandine closes the book, squints her eyes. “I don’t know. Seems like an easy exit, to me. God just loves believers so much? The hubris of it!”
Joan bristles. “Well, I don’t know.”
“Have you read Dante’s Divine Comedy?” asks Blandine.
Joan reacts like she’s being ridiculed. “No.”
“Read Purgatorio, if nothing else. It’s just like Vacca Vale. Like a travel guide. Honestly.”
Joan’s body contorts with the desire to be elsewhere, and Blandine sees it. She wants to stop haranguing this poor woman, but she feels like she’ll drown in a current of her own terrifying energy if she stops talking. “I’ve been reading about Catholic female mystics lately,” Blandine says.
“Oh?”
“Do you know much about them?”
“No.”
“They loved suffering,” says Blandine. “Mad for it.”
Joan picks a cuticle. Her nail beds are catastrophic. “Hm.”
“They were spectacularly unusual, the mystics. Blessed Anna Maria Taigi, for example? She said she could see the future by looking into this—this sort of sun globe? And Gabrielle Bossis—a French actress—she wrote a book transcribing her conversations with Jesus. Word for word, can you imagine? Therese Neumann never ate or drank anything besides the Eucharist. Marie Rose Ferron had her first vision of Jesus at the age of six. In Massachusetts, no less. And then there was Gemma Galgani. Daughter of passion, they called her. People were always walking in on Gemma in the middle of divine ecstasy, sometimes levitation. She had regular visions of her guardian angel and Jesus and the Virgin Mary—the whole crew—just kind of hanging out. She had a ‘great desire to suffer for Jesus.’ ”
A watery smile. “Too funny.”
“Blessed Maria Bolognesi’s another good one. She had a rough childhood—malnourishment, illness after illness, abusive stepfather, so forth, we’ve all been there—but then to top it off, she was possessed for about a year. There were the usual symptoms: afraid of holy water and priests, couldn’t enter churches, couldn’t receive sacraments, compulsively spat on sacred images. But my favorite part is that sometimes, invisible forces would pull at Maria’s clothes, and it would spook the living daylights out of her friends.”
Joan raises her eyebrows. “Invisible forces?”
“You know, that’s not even the part that strikes me most. It’s the friends. Maria maintained an active social life, while possessed.” Blandine places her hand over her heart. “Incredible.”
“Very unusual,” says Joan.
“Eventually,” Blandine continues, sprinting via language from the storm inside her, “a bishop snuck a blessing on Maria when she was on her way to a psychiatric hospital, allegedly exorcising her. A lot of the mystics were diagnosed with mental illnesses, as you’d expect. And just when things were looking up for Maria—demons gone, a spot of safety, a taste of health—she had a vision in which Jesus slipped a ruby ring on her fiancé finger.” Blandine pauses. She normally tries to avoid saying in which out loud, to minimize the number of people who find her insufferable. “And when she emerged from the vision, she saw the real, physical ring, right there, on her left hand. Bang.”
It’s clear to Blandine that this intrigues Joan against her will. “What did she do?”
“Oh, she freaked out. Then Jesus was like, You’re gonna sweat blood. And you know what? She did. All the time. Would stain the sheets and everything.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why sweat blood?”
“To suffer for Jesus, I guess.”
“But why that?”
Blandine considers. “The book never explains it.”
“Curious!”
“You know what’s even weirder? According to her friend, after Maria would do her thing—sweat blood—the whole room would fill with this . . . this kind of perfume?”
“What did it smell like?”
“I don’t know. They say it was sweet.”
“Horrible,” says Joan darkly.
“I know. But it wasn’t all bad. Jesus helped Maria prophesize the end of World War II, got her little sister a job . . . personally, I find the engaged-to-Jesus rhetoric creepy as hell, incestuous at best, but it’s quite a phenomenon. Most of the female mystics report similar experiences. Jesus appears to them and—you know—proposes.”
Sweat is blooming from the woman’s face. “I don’t like that.”
“A lot of them had stigmata—where you bleed from the wrists and feet and side? For no medical reason? Holy Wounds, they say. Wounds corresponding to the ones Jesus received during crucifixion.”
“Is that so?”
“According to accounts. But who’s to say, really? Most of the female mystics starved themselves in favor of ‘purer nourishment.’ They were always very sick. A lot of them died young. Skeptics say that their visions were really just migraines. I think that we see whatever we fear, whatever we want. We look at the world, absorb thirty percent of its data, and our subconscious fills in the rest.” Blandine cracks her knuckles. “I’m not sure I believe in God.”
Joan removes her glasses and massages a lens with her long skirt. “Reading can be a nice pastime.”
“Sometimes I think they were just hungry.”
“Who?”
“The mystics.”
Joan considers. “Possible.”
It is Joan’s reluctant engagement with the conversation, not her protest against it, that motivates Blandine to muster all the willpower she possesses and force these leaping, punching words to stay inside her head. It’s like closing a cellar latch against the winds of a tornado, and her knee springs wildly as she does it, but she succeeds. Joan appears relieved.
Among the many objections Blandine harbors against the Catholic female mystics, the one she can’t overcome is the fundamental selfishness. The individualism operating in their lives. Even within religious communities, among the mystics, there was a premium on seclusion, and it’s clear to Blandine that when a person is in the middle of divine ecstasy, she’s really just interacting with herself. An elevated form of masturbation. Many convents devoted themselves to people who were poor, elderly, sick, displaced, ostracized, imprisoned, disabled, orphaned. But the mystics—the ones Blandine admires—they didn’t get out much. They viewed solitude as a precondition of divine receptivity. Most spent their lives essentially alone.
So how, wonders Blandine, would a contemporary mystic challenge the plundering growth imperative, if that were her goal? She’d have to break out of her solitude. There’s no way to overthrow the system without going outside and making some eye contact. No matter how small your carbon footprint, you can’t simply forgo food and comfort and sex all your life and call yourself ethically self-sacrificial. In order for her life to be considered ethical, thinks Blandine, she must try to dismantle systemic injustice. But she doesn’t know how to do that.
Blandine sighs. She always knew that she was too small and stupid to lead a revolution, but she had hoped she could at least imagine one. She takes a deep breath, attacked by an awareness of how impossible it is to learn and accomplish all that she needs to learn and accomplish before she dies. She’s spiraling down thoughts of the albedo effect and the positive correlation between climate change and most mass extinctions on the geologic record when Joan drops her detergent cap. It rolls beneath a machine. Blandine stands and retrieves it for her.
“Here.”
“Thank you,” replies Joan. “How old are you?”
“Eighteen.”
“Eighteen!” Joan exclaims. “But you can’t—are you really?”
“Yes. Why?”
“You don’t seem eighteen.”
This accusation depresses Blandine more and more each time it is leveled against her.
“I don’t know how else to seem,” she mutters.
“You just . . . you don’t sound like you’re eighteen.”
You can’t exist, the world informs Blandine daily. You’re not possible.
“Well,” says Blandine. “I am.”
“You’re very . . .” Joan squints at her as though she’s an abstract painting, then trails off. “Are you going to college?”
Blandine touches her neck, upset to find it there. “No.”
“Oh, well,” says Joan sweetly. “It’s never too late. You should think about it. They have a lot of people like you there. I went to VVCC, myself.”
Vacca Vale Community College. “That’s nice,” says Blandine. “Maybe I’ll apply.”