But as for me, I believe my mother blinded herself before she ever saw me, because starting in the Santa Fe hospital when she turned her head away as I took my first breath, and ending in that Paris apartment, it seems that was the way she wanted it. And if this is true, and Inga Beart managed to put out her eyes in time to spare herself the sight of me, then I suppose there will come a day in the not so distant future when I will choose to believe she had her own good reasons. Maybe I’ll be sitting out in the old truck watching the pond, thinking it over. How my Aunt Cat pushed me, five years old and flushed with fever, under the table when she saw what was about to happen; and my child’s mind fixed not on the screams or the blood but on my mother’s shoes and a china teacup falling to the floor. Other people will assume that it was shame transformed into a kind of crazed resentment that made Inga Beart blind herself rather than look her child in the eye, or see a face that had her nose or—I’ve been told—something of her smile. And yet. As I look out at the cattails or walk down to the water’s edge, maybe I too will find myself able to choose what not to see.
They say that once her eyes were gone, for her last few months Inga Beart was happy. The experts may someday take a second look at what she said before she died, starting with the interview she gave to a reporter after they’d transferred her to a hospital for the blind in another part of Paris. She was tired of reading, she told him. They may find the account the ship’s doctor gave of the voyage back to New York a month or so later, in October 1954, and think again about what he said: Inga Beart had contracted an infection on the boat, and as she lay on fever-soaked sheets, her face still in bandages, she covered the wall beside her with words. According to the doctor, who told a reporter about it later on, she recorded a kind of hallucination. He said it was hard to read exactly—something about bodies marked with ink and how blindness shut out what she’d rather not see. When they got her to New York they realized the infection had gone to her brain and none of it was taken seriously. But it might be time for a young Ph.D. student somewhere to argue that, for Inga Beart, who said once that she’d been trapped into a life as a writer, blindness was an escape.
But there will be other articles to write, and the scholars might never get around to it. I may decide that, as the only witness left to wonder, maybe the puzzle is mine to solve. When I get home I’ll walk down to the pond to see how much water has been lost in the time I’ve been away, and I’ll sit a while, turning it over in my head: My mother chose darkness rather than be made to look at me. I’ll measure the space at the edge of the pond where the water has receded and the mud is cracked and dry, and a thought will strike me, a perfect explanation. I don’t know just yet what it will be, but I have time. The rain will come, the pond will fill on up again, and one of these days I’ll find a way to see it as an act of love, the kind no one will believe.
{MAGDALENA}
Santiago de Compostela, July
The pilgrimage had ended but Magdalena was nowhere near the sea. They had come to the town of Santiago de Compostela, finally finishing in front of a big church. Everyone else was hugging or praying or looking for a place to charge their phones, and Magdalena stood in the middle of a ring of souvenir stands selling scallop shells, wondering if she’d misunderstood.
“Where is the place where the bodies come up from the sea?” she asked Rachel, then Brit and Olaf. They didn’t know. But a Filipino nun from another group told her that she’d better continue on along the Camino Fisterra, the old pilgrim route to the town of Finisterre, if she wanted to see the place where Saint James had washed ashore covered in scallop shells. Some people would be leaving together the next morning.
Rachel stayed in Santiago, praying in the saint’s cathedral to have her sins erased. Magdalena didn’t have the heart to tell her that, as far as she could tell, they were all still there. Brit and Olaf decided to go with her, and they and Magdalena joined the Filipino nun, a German couple, and Father Malloy, a convict from Londonderry who said that so long as he was violating his parole he might as well make it to the end.
They left just as it was getting light, walking west. Olaf had a compass set into the top of his walking stick, and he called out directions as they went—west-north-west, west-west-north-west, west.
As they walked, Father Malloy talked. He wasn’t cut out to be a criminal, he said. In another life he might have been the philosophic type, but in those days there was no escaping politics, and he’d been caught running guns for the IRA. In prison he’d been such a model inmate that the guards used to drive him out to the bogs and leave him there, with a bag of crisps and a bit of plastic sheeting in case of rain, to give the dogs some practice. Father Malloy would walk for a while, then find a dry place to sit, maybe read the paper, and wait until they found him. Only Magdalena believed Father Malloy’s stories. Most of them were written out verbatim on his arms, in between homemade tattoos.
He had entered the priesthood by way of a correspondence course while he was in prison, and when he first started holding Mass in the exercise yard the attendance was low. But pretty soon other prisoners began coming to him for confession, or anointments, or to have him sprinkle holy water on handwritten appeals.
It was in prison that Father Malloy had learned about the pilgrimage of Saint James, and as Magdalena and the others walked through little towns where thick-legged women stood in doorways and watched them, expressionless, as they passed, and lichen slowly chewed the stones of ruined castles, he told them things from the books he’d requested at the prison library. If the pilgrimage to Finisterre wasn’t made during one’s lifetime, it was said, then it would have to be made after death, the soul traveling no farther than the length of its coffin each day.
“Look here,” he said, pointing to the faint outline of a cross carved into stone. The Crusaders had followed this path, leaving the sign of a cross to mark the way. The pilgrimage even had its mirror in the sky. That band of stars we call the Milky Way was called the Way of Saint James in medieval times, he said, because it guided pilgrims from the north toward Spain, and because those stars themselves were said to pave the path Saint James had taken when he rode down from heaven to help fight the Moors.
Father Malloy talked, Brit and Olaf and the German couple took pictures, and when they stopped to rest, Brit handed out granola bars. As they walked Magdalena picked yellow flowers off the scrubby bushes that grew along the road, rolling the petals between her fingers and counting her steps, as Father Malloy said the medieval travelers had done, using their pilgrim staffs to keep an even stride so they could measure the distance of their journey.
It took three more days to walk from Santiago to Finisterre. The roads were mostly empty and there were fewer pilgrims’ hostels. They walked farther each day than they had before, looking for a place to sleep. Father Malloy bought olive oil and anointed each person’s aching feet.
On the afternoon of the second day they saw the sea, still far off in the distance. Father Malloy climbed to the top of a rocky ledge and named it Montjoie, as medieval pilgrims had called the hills from which they first caught sight of a holy place.