Ra Ra Rasputin

It wouldn't be summer on the island without a trifling little scandal to liven up the pages of the local newspapers--something more entertaining than the perennial July news of the heat or the annual arrival of the Spanish royal family, which happens to be disappointingly discreet compared to their Northern brethren. In this case, a Mallorquin government official happened to be on a trade mission to Moscow to promote tourism in the Baleares. A gesture of international goodwill and cultural tourism led him (and probably other more clever goverment representatives) to the doors of the Rasputin club, and the accomodating ladies therein. The affinity of politicians for women of ill repute being rather universal, the distinguishing factor here, without which it might not have become public knowledge, was charging the invoice to a government credit card. Apparently the risk of auditors and journalists discovering the caper represented less of a clear and present danger than using a personal credit card, monitored by his wife.

The true entertainment value of scandal lies in the associated production of metaphors and puns, in this case, Russian doll imagery for the unfolding layers of scandal and the ressemblance between the words "Rasputin," and the Spanish "putin" (diminutive for prostitute) and "puticlub" (sporting club for activities related to the aforementioned).

In the IT world, an alcohol-infused Microsoft caper has introduced me to the video elegy "Bye Bye Mr. CIO Guy" and the terms "rolling sod" and "black blogging," through this link and this link, sent courtesy of an industry journalist.

Picnic in the Countryside

To the Island

We walk along roads fringed by low orange-tinged mortar-less stone walls, away from the sea, towards the sierra, past hunting reserves, past fincas--some manicured with oleander and bouganvillea hedges, some wild terrains where goats pasture, the occasional bell or car rupturing the silence, past groves of olive trees with silvery green leaves, fig trees, past stalks of queen anne's lace and yarrow encrusted with snails. My daughter wants to take home some snails. "Remember the three shrimp you caught with your net in the rocks off the jetty yesterday? We took them home. They jumped out and the ants ate them and you cried." The argument fails to persuade a five year old in a fit of biological acquisitiveness. We settle on dislodging two snails that she places in her pocket. We continue to the stream, to look for the nest with duck eggs. Dragon flies and butterflies hover, and then, out of nowhere, bees. My daughter is stung. The antihistimine syrup I give her is far less poetic and works slower than the country remedy described later that day at the picnic at the finca.

At the Finca

The woman seated next to me at the table tells me the following story: "When my daughter was your daughter's age, she came across a nest of bees and wound up with eight or nine stings. The farm workers told me not to worry. They brought a jar of oil and rubbed it on her arm. Within seconds the pain disappeared."
"There must of been something in the oil, right?"
"Oh yes, there was. The trick was to drop a scorpion in boiling oil. Upon contact with the oil, it releases anti-venom into the oil. Venom, anti-venom, most antidotes are made from the poison, you know. Of course they didn't know why it worked, they just knew that it did."

The hosts and most the guests are Mallorquin. The house is not some retro-modern Iberian country chic fantasy built-to-measure by English, German, occasionally French, proprietors. It is a modest agricultural structure, half of which is a terrace shaded by a vine-laden ceiling trellis. There is an outdoor oven and plywood table covered in paper cloth. The food is divine. The meal starts at two-thirty with a caldo de mariscos, shellfish soup with saffron rice. I clumsily try to pry open the lobster and crab legs, bits of juice flying everywhere, the stinging in my fingers compounded by the irritant in the shells. No one seems to notice. The main course is lechona suckling pig, served with potatoes sauteed in olive oil and garlic, followed by salad, fragrant local melons and then pastries, ensaimadas and fluffy almond medrichos and finally coffee. It takes me the better part of the meal to determine the relationships of kinship and friendship of the twenty or so people gathered at the table. I am seated next to the Patriarch, who looks to be in his late seventies.

"Do you still work?" I ask him.
"Naturally, I'm the only one who works around here. Who do you think subsidizes all this," he points to the dinner table.
The woman on my left turns towards me. "Don't take him seriously. All of the rest of us were here this morning, cleaning up the spider webs and setting the table. At one o'clock, Papi arrived, sat down and opened up his newspaper."

All the food preparation is handled by three older women, one of whom, the excellent cook, is the Patriarch's wife. She and her two companions barely sit down for the greater part of the meal which commences at two thirty and ends at quarter of six. I am surprised to see these three women, two generations older than I, do all the work while the rest of us remain seated.

"Your wife works very hard."
The Patriarch responds. "For that reason, I keep her."
"I got married at fifty. Do you know why? One day, I was sitting at the Brisas bar by the port and the waitresses asked me 'What'll you have, grandfather.' So I got married. Of course, I regret it. Now here am with this old woman. Not that I'm not so young myself. No, I'm old as the hills. How it pains me to sit here with this broken down body." He looks towards the young girls at the teenage end of the table. "I want to be seventeen again."

Some time passes. The Patriarch leans towards my father-in-law indicating the rest of the table. "How it amuses me to listen to the foolishness these people recount. All of them, except me. I am the only normal one here. Foolishness, yes, especially the women. He looks towards me--I have said little due to my rusty Spanish--and generously offers "Don't worry, I'm sure you can't help it."

He continues. "My daughter occasionally calls me the Dictator. All because I asked her to set the table. Can you imagine. I, who've never so much as broken a plate in my life. She's in Barcelona now, working as an architect. She's twenty-six. What I really want is a grandchild. She's had two boyfriends that she bothered to present to us. Supposedly there's another one now. One of those movie actors."

The Patriarch's godson interrupts: "Theater. He's a theater actor." Non-plussed, the Patriarch responds. "Exactly. Un canta-mananas."

Later that evening, I ask my in-laws about the exact nuance of "canta mananas," literally "sings in the morning," promises much, but delivers nothing. The English equivalent of "good for nothing" doesn't seem to quite fit.

"Yes, well "canta mananas" does convey more happiness than "pela gatos," my father-in-law reflects.
"Pela gatos? You mean cat-peeler? How does one peel a cat?"
"Ridiculous, but colorful. That also means one who does nothing, but with a nuance of low social standing."
My mother-in-law adds. Yes, it's not like "Un Viva La Virgen."
"One who shouts 'Long Live the Virgen?'"
"Yes, you know in those religious processions. There are those who carry the cross. And those on the sidelines who shout "Long Live the Virgen." Someone who lives life as a tourist."
My husband remarks. "Supposedly the Eskimos have twenty different words for snow. Well, they've got a lot of snow. You've got to wonder about a language that has so many expressions for doing nothing."

Back to lunch and the Patriarch.
Someone asks him about the extent of his property.
"A couple thousand meters squared. Several years ago a man came and offered me twenty thousand pesetas for this land."
Another person interjects "It's probably worth ten times that today."
The Patriarch reflects: "Perhaps. The point is that at that time I had a police dog on the property. I told the would-be buyer. Yes, well there's only one problem. If I sold you my land, where would I put my dog?"

At quarter of six, the Patriarch graciously rises. "Delighted to meet you my dear, but I must go now. Lovely to have so many people here and all, but it's quite tired me out." He swats away a fly. "Quite exhausting. Yes, it's time to tuck in for a little nap."

A Leafy Bower

The hydrangea outside my kitchen window changes shade imperceptibly each day. The blooms started out whitish with the slightest hint of washed out lilac, and subsequently have gone through the spectrum of blues from light, know there is a name for this shade, but the only reference that comes to mind is the sort of light blue car color favored by Oldsmobile, Lincoln or Caddy driving grannies. The color has now deepened to more of a purplish tone. In my mind's eye, I am constantly re-drawing my garden, if such the rather forlorn and randomly placed shrubs and trees planted by the house's original owners, could be called. I make for myself a leafy bower. I see trellises of jasmine climbing up the stark brick walls of the house, I build multi-tiered Frank Lloyd Wrightian brick planters with cement caps redefining the front yard, holding weeping cherry trees, the children's vegetable garden, my husband's tomatoes, with steps in between and borders like an oriental rug. I should like to have an outer border of crepe myrtle, lots of gardenias, and of course--a fountain. What I do have is one new low wall of planters to enclose the back yard of our corner lot.

The rain has been sparse this spring and I have to water the new plantings fairly frequently. It is the early evening and my daughter wants to help. The shade and partial shade garden form a border under the canopy of two oak trees. I stifle the impatience that wants to get this done in a relatively brief amount of time and take the time to teach her how to water the plants properly, indicating the name of every plant as we go--dogwood, camelia japonica, camelia sassanqua, azalea, lenten rose, fern, pieris, hydrangea, astilbe, columbine. By the end of this episode, the mosquitoes are as sated on our blood as the plants are quenched with water.

I make an association between teaching plant names to my daughter and the Loreena McKennitt song "The Mummers Dance" from "the book of secrets" CD, which I lost over a year ago, before recovering it in exactly the place I remembered it being, a place where I can remember having searched countless times. The song would haunt me several years ago in Northern California, right around the time my daughter was born. It got some radio play and I would catch snatches of it, but it was months before I managed to catch the part where they named the artist and title. My daughter likes learning the names of things the way I do. Physically, the only traits where she resembles me are the fair skin and a certain expression in her eyes, which are brown, and not grey-green. In an abstract way, she reminds me of one of the Infantas from Velasquez's painting "Las Meninas," something about the fair skin, dark eyes, golden hair and the set of her face. The faerie childe tosses her hair, the ropes of natural curls recalling the ribbons and leafy garlands in the song.

When in the springtime of the year, when the trees
Are crowned with leaves. When the ash and oak, and
The birch and yew are dressed in ribbons fair.

When owls call the breathless moon, in the blue

Veil of the night, the shadows of the trees appear
Amidst the lantern light

We've been rambling all the night, and some time of
This day. Now returning back again, we bring a
Garland gay.

Who will go down to the those shady groves and
Summon the shadows there, and tie a ribbon on

Those sheltering arms, in the springtime of the year.

Ah, the evocative power of naming. The CD insert reference to mummers comes from John Frazer's book The Golden Bough, according to which "mumming has its roots in the tree-worshipping of the peoples who inhabited the great forested regions of a Europe now long gone. Mumming usually involves a group of performers dressing up in masks (sometimes of straw) and clothes bedecked with ribbons or rags, and setting out on a procession to neighboring homes singing songs and carrying branches of greenery." I also looked up mummer in the Collins English Dictionary, where it is 1) one of a group of masked performers in folk play or mime 2) a mime artist 2) humorous or derogatory, an actor. Apparently the word derives from the old French momeur, from momer to mime, related to momon mask. I looked up two similar sounding words--mummy, an embalmed or preserved body, deriving from Old French momie, from Medieval Latin mumia from Arabic mumiyah for asphalt, and originally the Persian word mum for wax. In the Collins Dictionary, there were no linguistic origins given for mummy, the English child's word for mother. The potential associations there are boundless and, occasionally, disturbing.

Saturday Night in Sin City

In the era of Nouveau Vegas, this casino has a nineteen fifties seediness to it. Even the chips look cheap, their pastel colors and Monopoly printing mocking the denominations they supposedly represent. It is an hour and a half wait in line to get into the night club. The investor, who presumably knows the cost of everything, handles the negotiation. It occurs to me that there are multiple paths to this destination a) "immediate" reserved for habitues, celebrities, the preternaturally cool or beautiful b) the "short" line for those with the knowledge, confidence and economic wherewithal to master the system and c) the regular line for, well, for people like myself. "Wasn't he offended when you offered him the cash," I ask the investor, once we've been shepherded into the five-mintue line. He responds matter-of-factly "Are you kidding, there's no way you could offend these people. The whole reason they work that job is to get spiff." I stand corrected, I guess the possibility of a Las Vegas bouncer being offended is rather preposterous. "Well," I ask "how did you know how much to pay him? Did you ask?" He answers "There's a difference between handing him a twenty at which point he'd ignore you and handing him a $100, where he'll take care of you. I just handed him $30 per person." Hmmh, there is a short line and it costs $30 per person, I absorb the knowledge that I will never apply. I imagine myself trying the same manoeuvre and, low point of humiliations, being snubbed by a Las Vegas bouncer who takes me for a gauche out-of-towner, either offering too little or too much, and who even if she offered the right amount, couldn't master a petty bribe with panache.

Once inside the club, it is apparent why the normal line has an hour and a half wait. The bodies are packed in every single part of the club, not just the dance floor. A hoochie girl carelessly stabs the back of my foot with her heel. Wincing with pain, I give her a sharp look. She defiantly glares back at me. I'm not going to get an apology out of her and educating her on the polite and civilized course of action, given the circumstances would be an utter waste of time. The music is modern hip hop, the lighting set up evokes a sort of late seventies retro future look, with frames that spin around and every now and then shoot out fire. The voice booms "It's Saturday night in Sin City." Oh really? Presumably people are happily sinning in many other locales, but hey it's all about branding. I look around, taking in the tableau of "sin" that offers itself up at this Las Vegas nightclub. It reminds me of something. I tap one of my companions. "All that's missing, is for the blood to start coming out of the ceiling sprinklers." He gives me an indulgent smile. He either a) hasn't seen "Blade" b) doesn't think I'm funny c) can't hear a word I'm saying against the booming music. I survey the rhythmically throbbing bodies. The hoochie heel mutilator is rather representative of the crowd, whose dress code and appearance leans more to North Jersey than vampire chic. It's Saturday night in Sin City.

Life Lived for the Retelling--Milan Kundera's "La Lenteur"

I first bought Milan Kundera's "La Lenteur" on impulse in a Paris rail station some years ago, and subsequently read it on a trip to Brussels. I looked up the English translation of the book title and was surprised to see it as "Slowness," which is technically correct but sounds wrong in English. In French, "la lenteur" has (at least for me...which is another problem altogether touching on the degenerative nature of language) the connotation of a certain sensuous slow-time. I recently re-read this book on a cross country flight to Las Vegas. The fact that high-speed air travel offered me the rare, distraction-free occasion to mull over the ideas he touches on in that book is not without its irony.

In the book, Kundera sets up a contrast between eighteenth and late twentieth century aesthetics as regards sensory experience, speed, memory and audience. His premise is that speed is the form of ecstasy with which the technology revolution has gifted man. He contrasts a runner who feels entirely present in his body, conscious of his breathing and the sensation of his feet pounding against the pavement, with the sensory experience of a man who delegates the faculty of speed to a machine...(poorly no doubt translated by me) "as such his body is no longer part of the equation, he gives himself over to a speed that is incorporal, immaterial, pure speed, speed for its own sake, ecstasy speed." Kundera feels that there is a secret bond between slowness and memory, and speed and the ability to forget. The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of the memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity with which one can forget. The term "ecstasy speed" to the contrary (he later associates it with some "apparatchik of eroticism"), what Kundera is really celebrating is the lost quality of slowness. He weaves in two parallel stories to contrast the presumed sensibility of the eighteenth and late twentieth century.

The twentieth century story involves a young man who is a hanger on in an intellectual group in Paris that prides themselves on their libertine outlook. They are libertine to the degree that their pleasures are cerebral rather than sensual and to the degree that the conquest of pleasure is not about pleasure itself, but about conquest and victory. Not surprisingly they admire the Marquis de Sade, and a certain Sadeian aesthetic pervades in their intellectual disgust for the outside world and retreat into an artificial world and the economy of human interaction, as demonstrated by the ways in which the members of the group undermine each other. Their privilege is that of a certain degree of intellectual cognizance and their scorn is reserved for individuals who are inept or lack self-awareness. de Sade's work is mainly concerned with the privilege of power and the pure hatred of the strong for the weak (Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman). Although dramatized in pornography, the de Sadeian focus is political satire, with characters who play for life and death stakes. His characters tend to be representations of abstract ideas. Meanwhile, the focus is more individual in Kundera's "La Lenteur" and the victim is personal vanity. Despite the fact that the generalized pettiness and self-preoccupation of the Kundera characters prevents them from being individually sympathetic, the quality of his prose and characterization makes the tragedy of their condition rather poignant.

The members of Kundera's clique have developed a theory of "dancers"--generally media and political figures who uphold certain causes "or rather their vanity upholds those causes" not because they believe or disbelieve in the causes, but because those causes offer them opportunities to take center stage and showcase themselves in photographic media moments--kissing AID's victims on the mouth or swatting flies away from the body of a child during the Somalian famine. Similar in spirit to de Sade's imagined world where one person's pleasure can only come at the expense of another's pain, Kundera's dancers must displace each other to occupy the center stage. Their objective is to transform their lives into works of art, which will move and impress onlookers. That audience takes the form of the mass of anonymous, invisible spectators at the other end of the television screen. In this objective, the Kundera dancers find themselves in a brutal (and hilarious in a bitter-sweet manner, because the stakes are so low) competition with each other.

Central to Kundera's story is the idea of the resonating shell where no action or communication is private and everything is amplified for the viewing pleasure of a broader audience. In the eighteenth century part of Kundera's story, that audience constitutes a limited group of people from the same privileged social class, who also share similarities in their outlook upon life. In this group, everyone knows each other. In the twentieth century part of the novel, the audience is an invisible, mass audience. The privileged audience of the eighteenth century, as embodied in Choderlos de Laclos's "Dangerous Liaisons," is concerned with cleverness and refined sensibilities; Kundera's mass audience of the twentieth century is concerned with tableaux of moral "beauty" and superiority, however the sub-plot and parallel story has similar paramaters to the eighteenth century story because the protagonist is simply vying for the attention of his own intellectual clique.

In both worlds, where the attention of the larger audience is sought, disclosure is the weapon of choice. The central conflict faced by the eighteenth and twentieth century protagonist is whether to communicate a certain experience or keep it for themselves. In both episodes, the case could be made that the protagonist was, to a certain degree, ridiculous. Each story involves a one-time encounter with a mystery woman. The difference is that the eighteenth century protagonist actually engages the woman and enjoys the experience, whereas the twentieth century protagonist disconnects from the entire experience completely because at the very moment it takes place, the sole importance of the encounter lies in its becoming a story to be retold, for the purpose of impressing his friends. The young eighteenth chevalier determines that there is no explanation for what he experienced and that the public perception of his dignity would be ambiguous were it to be disclosed. He decides to keep the narrative to himself. We last see him leaving the chateau of the mystery woman in a long, slow carriage ride back to Paris, where he is engaged in the agreable passtime of sensual recollection. By contrast, the twentieth century protagonist has nothing agreeable to recollect. His self-preoccupation and omnipresent inability to live or remember his experiences outside the context of their perception by a larger audience produces an overwhelming feeling of humiliation. He gets on a motorcycle and speeds back to Paris, trying to forget the actual circumstances of the event as soon as possible.

April Come She Will

April in Atlanta is, perhaps, the most beautiful month. It would take an aesthete of depression or an allergy sufferer (Out out vile dust!) to find it the cruellest month here. Although I did recently attend a funeral featuring the Anglican Liturgy for the Burial of the Dead. As they interred the ashes in the church garden, I had to restrain my young daughter who wanted to catch a caterpillar. Such intrusion of life and the chrysalid reference did cheer me. The azaleas and dogwoods are in bloom, the weather is still temperate, the mosquitoes, fortified since my childhood with the introduction of Daybiters, are not yet out.

I do not get to think about April, T.S. Eliot, or daybiters for long. "Mommy, Mommy come quick. One of the boys is launching himself from the armrest of the chair into the playpen." If I were a good American mother, that is the kind willing to see nascent brilliance in every random action of her progeny, it would occur to me that this might show some future promise of an astronautical career. At the moment, all I can think is that that if he plays his cards right he could be the next Johnny Knoxville . Maybe the Classics got parenting right; all I need now is to find is a sympathetic she-wolf to help me raise those twin boys.

Could I be the only parent demented enough to blast out the Rolling Stones "Mother's Little Helper" to get through the five o'clock witching hour of the children's dinner? Or, "No, we are not listening to Wee Sing Fun and Games "Who stole the cookies from the cookie jar" again; it's time for some Tina Turner, babies. My children are good sports, they really are. My four year old daughter now asks for Tina Turner. I figure if you don't take the pep pills, you're at least entitled to some really loud music to get through the anti-aircraft siren-strength screams, background whines and the twins' food launch missile strikes without going into a catatonic trance. This job doesn't offer combat pay.

Ironically, it's the girl who sends me to the emergency room on an evening when my husband is out of town. She puts a gash in her forehead while jumping on the brick steps on the back terrace. The nice thing about living in a big city is that (barring traffic) you can be at a specialized children's hospital in about twenty minutes. The bad thing about living in a big city is that at the same point in time there will be about twenty other kids ahead of yours in the emergency room of that same hospital. At Children's Healthcare they give you a vibrating thingy to let you know when it's your child's turn to be seen. They have the same thing in trendy no-reservation policy restaurants. Unless your child is having a seizure or a hemophiliac bleeding episode, you can definitely be seated quicker in the trendiest restaurant in town than you'll be seen at Children's Healthcare. Nobody is particularly impressed with the bloody washrag my daughter is holding to her forehead. The friendly college-age girl, probably a junior version of what is now known as a "patient advocate," circulates. Several coloring books and plastic mini-toys later, the question of what she can do to help definitely seems rhetorical since she can't help most of us with what we want, which is to have our child seen by a doctor in less than ninety minutes. It's nine thirty in the evening by the time the doctor takes a look at my daughter. She's doing fine (she'd been fed and bathed before her jumping episode at 6:30 in the evening); however, the fact that I haven't had dinner, the permafatigue and the fact that my husband isn't there is taking its toll on me. I remember the mother of a child in my daughter's ballet class last year proudly telling us how they made the hospital call a plastic surgeon and waited six hours for him to come and sew up her daugher's cut forehead and that it was so worth the effort and the wait because "you know, it's your little girl and you'd hate for her to go through life with some unsightly scar." The doctor is talking about glueing and deflecting my best efforts to protest and make noises to the effect that I have keloid scars, I'm afraid she scars badly too, her cuts don't seem to heal that well. The doctor looks at one of her scars and is not impressed. I'm alone, tired and hungry. It's going to take being a real bitch and waiting several more hours to get a plastic surgeon in, and, frankly, I don't know a thing about facial scarring. I'm caught between two disquieting images--my daughter at fourteen being self-conscious over this scar or the fact that maybe I'm being completely neurotic. After all, when I was a child nobody would have thought twice about having some emergency room hack stitch up their child...that is if they even bothered to go to the hospital at all, as opposed to slapping on a bandaid at home. My daughter gets glued. She does far better than her mother who is nauseous and barely escapes fainting.

What is wrong with American women of my generation that so many of us are so traumatized about whether we are good mothers? We read too many books on parenting and child development. I think we are rather isolated, compared to earlier generations of women who may not have worked, but did enjoy stronger networks of fellow mothers who could share stories and experiences that child-rearing into perspective. Comparatively, women are waiting until later in life to have children. Some may have given up a promising career to stay home with children. Those mothers often seem to have higher expecations than earlier generations, as though the child's achievements must justify the mother's sacrifice.

I do not think I shall have this problem, not being aware that anyone ever awaited a mutual fund shareholder annual report with breathless anticipation, or if they did, the reasons for that had little to do with the writing. As for my current job in charge of PR in a "nepotistic little family"/nobody in their right mind, outside of family, would have joined us when we started out company, opinions are divided. Some say we have the worst PR in the entire Java industry. Conversely, those who somewhat begrudingly see in our efforts a ruthless talent for self-promotion attribute this to no less than a pact with the Devil, so I can't claim much credit there. No, I'm feeling quite at peace with my own temporal nature and existential irrelevance today. In no way qualifying as a Mother Superior...I know exactly how she does it, it's all about lowering your standards and choosing your priorities, darling...I think I shall submit myself for membership in a less exclusive and far more entertaining club.

The Decadent Mothers' Club--For every woman who didn't give up coffee while pregnant, forgot when it was her turn to handle snack week at preschool, talked about setting up a cocktail playdate with the parents of her childrens' friends, who "supports" her child's education by offering the school live auction high-bid on box seats for the Prince Musicology concert at Phillips Arena, who struggles with the thought that she has about ten more years to start acting like a grown-up, and then decides to take Liz Phair's advice, who when asked if her son might not be a bit freaked out by having her as a mother when he's fifteen said "Well I figure that by the time he's fifteen he'll be pretty freaked out, anyway. I'm just helping him put this into a concrete context."

Through a Glass Darkly--Part II

Through a Glass Darkly, Part I

Translation of CORRESPONDENCES, Charles Baudelaire

Nature is a temple where living pillars
Let sometimes emerge confused words;
Man crosses it through forests of symbols
Which watch him with intimate eyes.

Like those deep echoes that meet from afar
In a dark and profound harmony,
As vast as night and clarity,
So perfumes, colours, tones answer each other.

There are perfumes fresh as children's flesh,
Soft as oboes, green as meadows,
And others, corrupted, rich, triumphant,

Possessing the diffusion of infinite things,

Like amber, musk, incense and aromatic resin,
Chanting the ecstasies of spirit and senses.

The Chalice of Blood

Mademoiselle de Sombreuil was a painting by Puvis de Chavannes, a reference in Balzac's Vicar of Tours, a poem by Victor Hugo and a riddle of my childhood.

I first came across her among the paintings in my grandparents' house: an oil depicting a fair girl with long blond hair and blue eyes, her countenance a mixture of fear and resolve. She stands solitary and sacrificial against the backdrop of the guillotine, arm extended to reach for a goblet lifted up by the angry, ruddy figures in the Revolutionary mob.

Years later in Paris, seeking any possible distraction from my thesis research in the Bibliotheque Nationale (National Library), I took the opportunity to look further into her story. What light would dusty historical tomes shed on a family oral tradition where magic realism featured so prominently? The only online narrative I could find of Mademoiselle de Sombreuil's actions during the Revolution, Charlotte Yonge's The Second of September 1792, tells a story similar to the accounts in the Bibliotheque Nationale. The main difference lies in the tone that strives less for historical objectivity than a dramatization of events in the service of a moral lesson. One can just imagine the Ms. Yonge as a maiden aunt with scholarly leanings. In its moral objective and tone, The Second of September recalls the illustrated Lives of the Saints that children were encouraged to read during my brief sojourn in Catholic school. The hope that these stories would inspire us to lead saintly lives did not take into account the perspective of a ten year old girl. In the saintly life, it seemed one had a choice between youth, beauty and an early death in the throes of the most creative forms of torture known to man, or maturity and long life...lived out in a nunnery. Needless to say, neither was appealing.

Charlotte Yonge's account

"About twenty-two ladies were together, and were called to leave the prison, but the two who went first were at once butchered, and the sentry called out to the others, "It is a snare, go back, do not show yourselves." They retreated; but Marie de Sombreuil had made her way to her father, and when he was called down into the court, she came with him. She hung round him, beseeching the murderers to have pity on his grey hairs, and declaring that they must strike him only through her. One of the ruffians, touched by her resolution, called out that they should be allowed to pass if the girl would drink to the health of the nation. The whole court was swimming with blood, and the glass he held out to her was full of something red. Marie would not shudder. She drank, and with the applause of the assassins ringing in her ears, she passed with her father over the threshold of the fatal gates, into such freedom and safety as Paris could then afford. Never again could she see a glass of red wine without a shudder, and it was generally believed that it was actually a glass of blood that she had swallowed, though she always averred that this was an exaggeration, and that it had been only her impression before tasting it that so horrible a draught was offered to her....

M. Cazotte was imprisoned again on the 12th of September, and all his daughter's efforts failed to save him. She was taken from him, and he died on the guillotine, exclaiming, "I die as I have lived, faithful to my God and to my King." And the same winter, M. de Sombreuil was also imprisoned again. When he entered the prison with his daughter, all the inmates rose to do her honour. In the ensuing June, after a mock trial, her father and brother were put to death, and she remained for many years alone with only the memory of her past days."

As a child, I interpreted this story as a moral test. Given the opportunity, would I sacrifice my own life to save another? Looking at the painting of Mademoiselle de Sombreuil, I feared that I had been measured and found lacking.

Worse yet, the gesture was useless. Mademoiselle de Sombreuil later lost her father and brother anyway. What did it mean to face death to remain faithful to one's God and one's King? While the gratitude of God is not for this world, it would appear that the gratitude of kings leaves much to be desired. In one of the accounts of Mlle. de Sombreuil's life in the Bibliotheque Nationale, it told of Mademoiselle, now Madame in later years, petitioning the Restoration king for some pension with which to educate and raise her son. While the exact details of her later life and reduced circumstances escape me, the suggestion of a less heroic and penurious middle and old age lend perspective to the second painting of Mlle. de Sombreuil

Who is that old woman?

To my ten year old self, the idea of my own aging seemed distant and unreal, thus I experienced great difficulty in reconciling the earlier and later portraits of Mademoiselle de Sombreuil. While I was not particularly interested in the imagery of self-sacrifice, I did appreciate that certain standards of beauty had been respected in young Mademoiselle's portrait. The same could not have been said of "Mademoiselle" de Sombreuil, the twilight years. The earlier portrait memorializes one moment that came to define her life for others, frozen in time, romanticized, a small paintstroke in the larger tableau of Nineteenth century French literary and artistic fascination with the Revolution and the phase known as La Terreur...a tendency to seek solace for impersonal and senseless acts of violence in individual acts of faith, courage and devotion. The latter portrait presents the older woman, independent of any dramatic context, montage or romanticization...a pinched expression on her face, wrinkles, wart on her chin, dark hair that sits unnaturally on her head (did I read that she lost her hair, was it a wig?). The face in the portrait of young Mademoiselle Sombreuil reflects the instantly recognizable archetype of the girl martyr. In the later portrait, the old woman's facial expression represents no archetype, no solace, no resolution.

From The Vicar of Tours, Honore de Balzac

"In the "citta dolente" of spinsterhood we often meet, especially in France, with women whose lives are a sacrifice nobly and daily offered to noble sentiments. Some remain proudly faithful to a heart which death tore from them; martyrs of love, they learn the secrets of womanhood only though their souls. Others obey some family pride (which in our days, and to our shame, decreases steadily); these devote themselves to the welfare of a brother, or to orphan nephews; they are mothers while remaining virgins. Such old maids attain to the highest heroism of their sex by consecrating all feminine feelings to the help of sorrow. They idealize womanhood by renouncing the rewards of woman's destiny, accepting its pains. They live surrounded by the splendour of their devotion, and men respectfully bow the head before their faded features. Mademoiselle de Sombreuil was neither wife nor maid; she was and ever will be a living poem."

Translated stanza from The Death of Mademoiselle de Sombreuil, Victor Hugo

Her life was a pure mystery
Of innoncence and saintly remorse;
This soul that passed along the earth

In between the living and the dead.
Often, alas, the unfortunate one,
As though, from her destiny
Death broke the bond,
Felt with vain terrors
The icy passage in her pale veins

A blood that was not her own!

The Rose

My parents' rose garden was a true labor of love in the American South. The bushes would initially flourish in the early temperate months of spring. However, when the air took on the moist shimmer that gives way to the crashing violence of afternoon thundershowers, which punctuate the heat of summer, the roses began to look a little beleagured. They required constant watering (on the roots only in the early morning), fertilizing and spraying, lest they be consumed by aphids, parch and dry or fall victim to an outbreak of black spot. They had whimsical names: Mr. Lincoln frequented Queen Elizabeth in a court composed of Peace, Double Delight and Voodoo, staid reds and pinks gave way to a veritable Mardi Gras of color--flouncy whites, swirls of hot pink on white, canary yellow blending to deep orange.

As they tried out different varieties, they learned that modern, hybrid tea roses, bred for hardiness and a longer blooming season, display a sort of uniform and regular beauty that, alas, leaves much to be desired in the perfume category. To get a rose that smelled like a rose often meant going back to the older varieties, notably antique tea roses. In researching those varietals, I discovered that "Mademoiselle de Sombreuil," in addition to being a vampire of virtue, was also a rosa rugosa.

From The Lady of the House of Love, Angela Carter

"When he returned from the mess that evening, the heavy fragrance of Count Nosferatu's rose drifted down the stone corridor of the barracks to greet him, and his spartan quarters brimmed with the reeling odour of a glowing velvet, monstrous flower whose petals had regained all their former bloom and elaticity, their corrupt, brilliant, baleful splendor.

The next day, his regiment embarked for France."