The Truth About Lou. Angela Von der Lippe
of our own. He was steeped in his translation and I left to the drudgery of my catechistic study.
Heaven came crashing to earth. Io was no longer a moon or mythical creation. Io was me and I felt the sting of my mother’s instructions, his daughters’ intrusion and his wife’s complaints that seemed to trumpet my every arrival to their household. All of a sudden I was that cow now aimlessly grazing in his pasture.
I plucked up my courage. Complaining to Gillot, I protested the choice of texts. I could not connect the Psalms’ plaintive plea for surrender to the damning threat of Revelation to triumph over all the unworthy infidels—of which I thought myself possibly one. There was violence in salvation. There were no stories to these books. Where on earth were the people?
There were only symbols and ominous numbers—seven seals, twelve candlesticks, five stars, dragons, lambs, harlots and brides—and all of these things stood for something whose meaning was known only to the prophet. And a plague on him or her, who added to this prophecy, embellished that text. She would be visited by pestilence for the rest of time right here, the prophet said, writhing in an everlasting world of death, mourning, weeping and pain (fair warning). I knew better than to tempt fate (heresy, defying the known, was bad enough, but defying prophecy, the unquestionable unknown, now that was pushing God’s limit). I knew which lot I would end up with.
Gillot didn’t know what to make of my distress. But he urged me to return to the safe territory of the older stories. “These last books are part of received wisdom, Lou, a prophecy yet to be revealed. They seek the beyond, a resurrection and reunion with a lost brother. They were grieving. Go back to the older stories and write what they tell you. There you can express your fantasies through the hurt of earthly people battling to know an earthly savior. You see, my child, they were seeking a man. Theirs was a clearly human story.”
I took his advice. I discovered that through writing I could begin to create my own prophecies and in no small measure save myself, create my own word, in short, chart my own way. Little did I know the gift Gillot had given me that day by directing me to seek solace in the old stories and counsel from a savior within. So I set about looking for something remotely familiar, for a sign in the scripture of old that would beckon, would guide me, and not surprisingly perhaps, I found my way to my namesake.
The Truth about Salome
The truth is she loved to dance. She was only a girl growing into her own body when she learned that the flowing lines of her nubile form sculpting curves of a simple rhythm could send men into a frenzy. A girl with hoops in her ears and spangles on her wrists who saw herself as she whirled and whirled seized by an unending ring of blazing mirrors—their rapt eyes. She was everywhere when she danced, she was all theirs in the room of their body but as she peered through the gauze of her veils, seven veils no less, and felt the caress of eyes from afar, the undulating spasm of her hip, the kiss of air upon her belly, a moist dew forming between her lips, she let her silken scarves drop one by one, and feeling herself disappearing, disappearing ever so slowly, she stopped, becoming nothing before the fiery gaze, the claws, the fangs of the nameless one who would devour her.
The truth is she danced not for them but for the favor of her mother—a woman for whom there was no natural favor—no thing taken for which she did not extract revenge and no thing given for which she did not exact a price. Her mother had used her daughter, as parents are wont to do. So in this way Salome became the thing given to Herod to satisfy her mother’s revenge, her stepfather’s lust, in exchange for the head of the one man who had seen through her mother’s treachery—the one holy man who could have saved her. Saved her from her own aching need, from that silent cry for her mother’s embrace, from the insatiable grasp of anonymous men and from becoming the unwitting instrument of her own destruction. Alas, it was not meant to be.
And whirling through the centuries, through a veritable cult of Judiths and Lucretias who cultivated the baser instincts, killed for good or bad, collected heads nonetheless, a holy man here, a tyrant there—Salome would whirl and whirl enduring centuries of luscious desire and highhanded derision, til it ended with another Salome who knew her mother’s manipulation all too well, who loved that one holy man and who thankfully never learned to dance. She wanted only to be lifted in his divine gaze, and delivering to him the sword the others had used to decapitate so many, so indiscriminately, she gave him the strength he needed to consummate this, their holy union. And breaking the spell and anointing her his own in Christ, this Salome was reborn as “Lou.”
I wanted him to smile at least and he did through tears. His ageless cool northern command suddenly gave way to the fluid uncertainty of the moment. He seemed to be caressing the beads of a broken chain in his palm. He said in a soft considered tone, as if having worked his way to a conclusion: “But the difference, dear Lou, the difference with this Salomé is the man who finds himself blessed to be reflected in those soulful eyes of hers.”
I always knew I loved him but now I was sure that love was returned. Gillot had responded not to phantom palpitations of the heart but to the inscribed voice of my own words and I felt emboldened and protected by that.
Holding my face in both quivering hands, he drew me toward him in a long protracted kiss and as I sank onto his lap on the cot his hands began to travel up and down my vertebrae, as if playing a stringed instrument. My skirt. My breasts. And falling into him, I felt his loins stiffen.
It was a wild grasping of bodies as we seemed to swim into each other, clutching for some hold, some release. And feeling the full weight of his body on my chest smothering me, into me, I pulled free and sank to his knees and began to weep. I did not want to see his face. That would be too close to my shame.
I remember looking up to the distracted gaze of Cranach’s Luther and then lighting on a crucifix on the wall, on that ray of light, the clot of blood from his pierced side, the last droplets of a life that no longer flowed in him. And at that moment what came to mind was that among the witnesses of that long ago event with Mary and Magdalena was a Salomé too.
Gillot sat hovering over me and kissing my head said over and over again: “Dear Lou, dear Lou, no, no please don’t. Please don’t, it’s not you. I have been struggling with this for so long. I must talk to Katya [his wife], to your mother. There must be some future for us.”
As much as I wanted to believe, I could not. My mentor was a man, nothing more. And his savior had died—an icon on the wall. As changed as he became for me from that moment on, still I knew I would come back, but never the same. The lie, that promised now no future, but only an end, was back for only us to know, but never to be spoken of again.
EXCEPT of course until we would speak our final leave-taking. Two months later in a ceremony in Sandpoort, Holland, his birthplace, in the presence of my mother, Gillot presided over my confirmation. We had prepared a program deliberately in Dutch, a language my mother did not understand, but which we secretly devised as our lifelong nuptials. Drawing from Isaiah (the angry prophet who had descried my youthful heresy—not my choice), Gillot summoned me to Christ with the words: “Fear not. For I have chosen you. I have called you by name. You are mine.” And facing him feeling only the hold of impending death and not rebirth at all I responded: “You have blessed me. For I do not have you.” First love when lost is the lie that tells the truth—the one that haunts you forever, like a phantom limb always there but not, and so it was with me.
As the train made its chugging labored way across the Dutch flatlands through their glorious quilt of blooming flowers, I thought of Sandpoort, its vaulted cathedral at its center now empty, its neat cobblestone streets with everywhere squinting windows, mirrors allowing the eye within, lost in the glare, to observe the comings and goings on the street below. Did anyone recognize that day the grasping of hands between celebrant and confirmand on the steps before the closed cathedral doors as the rueful farewell of lovers? And if they did, would they not expunge the thought at once in a clean righteous sweep of what life should be? Not ours.
I left him there in the security of his earliest childhood memories, his birthplace, and set out under