The Battered Madonna
by Heather Houde
“And with that respectful scar she had learned to live, as one learns to live with a clawed hand, stroking it, taming its fierceness, smoothing down its sharp nails, growing accustomed to its violent blows, learning to enjoy its sexual scratch as the only possible expression of affection.”
― Pedro Lemebel, My Tender Matador
He accuses me at times of liking it and maybe he’s right, although liking it might imply a certain threshold of pleasure that I can’t say I’ve ever crossed. The part that I enjoy is the passing of something that I had been anticipating, because while in the midst of it, I am furthest away from the point in time in which it will happen again. It wasn’t the first time I had taken a good hard beating, and it wouldn’t be the last. It's not that he’s violent with me, exactly, it’s just that he gets so angry and I can’t help myself but to push his buttons without even ever really knowing it. This time I’d really gone and done it. He caught me talking to our neighbor, Joyce, for far too long. Joyce is, one might say, not the kind of woman that a man wants his wife talking to. Sure, she is married with children but she has a certain air about her. It has to do with her appearance, brusque and unruly, but truly that isn’t quite it. As I said, it is about her air. Joyce spends most of her days sitting on the bench outside of her house smoking cigarettes, one after another. She told me she was quitting months ago, that the doctor had insisted upon it, but she hasn’t been able to kick the habit. Her hair is cut ragged and short, like she does it herself or perhaps she goes to the barber shop around the corner to clean it up from time to time. Her face, wide, is never dirtied with makeup. Nor is the bluntness of her ears, neck, or wrists ever cluttered with jewelry. Her fashion choices value comfort over flattery - shorts, a baggy t-shirt, and flip flops. Even in the winter I find her out there like that, although less often and for less hours at a time. Her T-shirts, I might add, never seem carefully selected but rather those that one acquires by accident- a hand-me-down or a promotional gift like the one that advertises soft pretzels: i <3 and a graphic of a pretzel, is the one that she chooses most frequently. She doesn’t seem to particularly like pretzels, since I’ve never seen her eating one; it is more likely that the information her T- shirt conveys is not something that she spends much time pondering.
Seeing as Joyce spends most of the sunlight hours sitting outside of her house, which is attached to my house, it is nearly impossible for me to avoid her. Sometimes instead of sitting on the bench she sits in her minivan with the side door rolled open, which is also always parked in front of her, and therefore my, house. To be honest, I would hate to avoid her if I could because I rather like Joyce. She has one of those deep, wheezing belly laughs that sometimes transforms into a worrying cough. It reminds me of my childhood and the hours I spent in a smokey garage with burly men, who drank beer while making wisecracks at one another, holding their pot bellies in laughter right where their t-shirts pulled tight to reveal the shape of their bellybuttons. Joyce had this kind of air. Not to mention, I saw a hint of fear in her husband’s eye when he passed through the doorway, and I wondered if she might not have once given him a beating of his very own.
My husband caught us chatting outside one afternoon, and the rest unravelled in such a way that neither me, nor Joyce, nor my husband could have ever imagined. He gave it to me good: slugs, bashes, punches, and slogs. Later, in the bathroom I washed my wounds with alcohol, water, a warm washcloth. I sat bottomless on the bathroom sink, inspecting myself in the large mirror. I couldn’t help but notice that in the bruise on the side of my upper leg, just where my ass became my thigh, the blood had dispersed below the surface of my skin in such a way that it had started to form the shape of a human face. A woman's face, tilted with eyes cast downwards. I stared at her and leaned my head against my reflection. There we were, the two of us , joining to lament tonight’s pounding and wondering how on earth we were going to cover these up so the neighbors don’t start getting ideas about making any “concerned” phone calls, which anyone can tell you are the surest way to secure the next round.
“Hail Mary full of Grace, the Lord is with thee.
Blessed are thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus.
Holy Mary Mother of God,
pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, Amen.”
I muttered mockingly as I pulled off my tank top and started the shower. Sliding down my underwear, I turned to look at her once more. She didn’t find my joke as funny as I did, staying stoic as a statue with her hands pushed together in prayer. She was strikingly well synchronized with my little bald snatch, as they both gazed humbly upon the floor in tandem. I, being a grown woman, must do a lot of work to keep my lady parts smooth and creamy, like that of a preadolescent girl. I can understand it, though, why men so insist on a smooth girlish flower as the golden standard for cunty-allure. The bare outer lips paralleled by the soft cheek of the virgin herself, two lilies neither of whose beauty is mucked up by the roughness of a thorny beard.
I awoke at my usual hour, the crack of dawn, to prepare breakfast for my husband before he went off to a long day of work. Once he’s gone I sometimes return to bed, but with the broken lamps and drops of blood now dried on the floor, I had a lot of tidying up to do. I had invited my friend Julia over for lunch and I would have nothing but a spick and span house to host her in, the smell of bleach as my witness. I set out to work—washing , scrubbing, and ironing—all while humming myself an upbeat tune. Julia arrived right on time, as always. No sooner than the doorbell rang did I hear a little whisper in my ear “you missed a spot” and sure enough, turning my head I saw a smear of blood right under the dining room table. What a faux-pas that would have been. What's more, I would be left to explain it; no one likes a lady to air out her dirty laundry at lunch.
Stepping through the door, Julia pulled a bottle of wine out of her bag, “My neighbor gave it to me, let’s have a glass with lunch.” It was much too early for wine but I had already finished my daily chores and it would be hours before my husband got home from work. “Why not?” I said, mischievously. I so rarely spent time with friends, being so busy with the house and all; I hated to be a bore. At the very least, the wine was white, a color less scandalous to consume in the early afternoon. We each poured ourselves a glass and started to run down the town’s gossip from top to bottom. Although we were alone, Julia whispered and deepened her tone for the darkest of secrets. Maybe it was to keep the neighbors from listening. Maybe it was to reinforce the gravity of the information’s confidential nature, being entrusted to me solely because of our feminine bond. I wasn’t sure and it didn’t much matter. “You didn’t hear it from me, but...” and after a short guffaw, we silenced our snickers into the palms of our hands.
“I want to show you something,” I whispered, in the lowest and quietest tone I could muster. “Cross your heart you won’t tell a soul.” Julia genuflected and pantomimed holding a needle in her hand and sticking it into her eye, the sacred pact. She sat back in her chair and sloshed her glass of wine in such a way that made me notice that she was quite drunk. And then, I noticed, so was I.
I slid up my skirt, passing my calf, knee, and then thigh until I displayed the place where my own personal virgin resided. Looking up from the crumbs that had fallen on her chest and lap, Julia focused her eyes, which had by now gone a bit astray. “Stand up, stand up!” She commanded. She crawled onto the floor to get eye level with the Virgin. After inspecting me for a few moments, she took out her flip phone and snapped a picture from below. She looked up and I saw in each of her eyes two little reflections of my head, centered perfectly in front of the ceiling sconce. I saw the backlight halo that she was seeing. Her eyes widened and, to my surprise, became wet with tears. “Julia, what—” and she fell to my feet, rocking in prayer. “Hail Mary, mother of god, the lord is with thee…” Stunned, I stepped away from her, and from the sconce light. She dutifully came forward, assuming again her position at my feet. We continued this way for some time, me moving, and her crawling after me. I tried to use zig-zag patterns or to strategically use furniture as blockades but she just kept finding her way back to my feet. I, drunk and a bit frightened by Julia’s sudden shift in mood, said to her sternly, “Julia, it's time for you to go home.” She stood up, her hair now tousled with strands sticking out in every direction. The dark black pools of mascara gathering under her eyes had begun to drip down her cheeks, like a harlequin clown.
“Pull yourself together!” I said, thinking a slap might be in order.
Her eyes filled up again, “I know, mother, I have been led so far astray.”
“I just mean you’re…”
I moved close to her, pulling a rag out of my pocket and licking it before wiping under her eyes in an attempt to bring to her appearance a shred of decency. She inhaled deep and long, and in the same breath, nearly suffocating, “the blessed mother has wiped me clean with her veil!” I was becoming irritated at her slap happy theatrics. I handed her bag to her and pushed her out the door and into the street. It was a shame to let her go out in public in such a state, but I was sure she would recover once she had some fresh air.
Exhausted by the whole scene and with still a few hours to kill I went to my room for a nap. As if the afternoon’s debacle wasn’t enough, when I drifted off to sleep I found myself in what I was sure was a grotto, although I had never been in one. Predictably, in front of me was a woman wrapped in a cloak. The cloak was embroidered with pearls, and in my opinion, tasteless in its excess. I rolled my eyes, as baby lambs crawled around my calves, rubbing their cockeyed faces on me and knocking me off balance. I was hoping for a nap, not a continuation of today’s absurd scene and I told her so, this cloaked and weepy virgin. I climbed down out of the grotto to see if I could find a place to get some peace and quiet.
I was awakened by a muffled voice on a megaphone passing by my window. Thank god I had drawn the blinds before my nap. I spread one apart from another with two fingers to have a look. A flatbed truck rolled by slowly, filled with a mountain of roses. And who was sitting on top of the mound? None other than the disheveled Julia. In front of it, our local priest, dressed in his fanciest get-up usually reserved only for Easter Sunday. Over a crackling megaphone he repeated one Our Father, three Hail Mary’s, one Glory Be in a loop. The living rosary. Behind the truck, the church’s usual suspects: Betsy, Abigail, Rose, Beth and the rest of their pathetic posse making a show of their suffering as they walked through the streets on their knees. The worst of them was Hannah. She trailed behind sticking long stemmed roses in the neighbor’s yards along the way. “For god’s sake,” I scoffed, wondering how roses are even grown on long stems like that when I have only ever seen them wild and tangled in a bush. Snapping shut the blinds, I hoped this would all pass before my husband got home from work.
Opening my phone, 56 unread messages. And then I discovered it. Julia had worked at the speed of light to cobble together the tackiest video I had ever seen. I can just imagine her now, sitting in a dim room lit only by the light of her giant PC. Its tower groaning as it tries to run two, three, even four programs simultaneously. The video is three minutes and fifty three seconds in length. It opens with a finger dragging slowly through the sand of a beach: M, A, R, it slows as it rounds the curved tail of the Y. A quick cut to a placid lake just as the sun sets over the mountains, leaving the sky an impossible reddish purple. The head of a doll of the Virgin appears, cropped with soft airbrushed edges. Stars twinkling around her head and doves shoot out towards the viewer without so much as the flap of a wing. Then starts in the Hail Mary set to an acoustic guitar with the lyrics scrolling across the bottom. Now there is a statue of Mary holding baby Jesus cropped over a cliff overlooking the sea, the dreamy effect of a light reflecting on a lense. And then, the image that I most feared-- a pixelated still frame of my face, at that most dreadful angle, with a clip art veil placed atop my head. The video zooms in and pans slowly down, revealing my bruise surrounded by the twinkling of stars. The words flash across the screen:
THE VIRGIN HAS APPEARED IN THE FORM OF A BRUISE.
BRING TO HER YOUR TIRED, YOUR POOR, YOUR HUDDLED MASSES YEARNING TO BREATHE FREE
IN THE NAME OF OUR MOTHER WE PRAY
(My address scrolls by the bottom)
The video returned to the incessant flower petals, rolling tears, butterflies, the glowing blue rubies of a necklace, closing as it started with waves washing over the sand of a nondescript beach. It has gone viral via Whatsapp, being sent from mother, to aunt, to cousin, and so on.
I needed a break, all of this was getting a bit out of hand. I went to the kitchen window and dug in the cabinet for where I kept my cigarettes hidden for precisely these stressful moments. I pulled them out, crossing my arm around my waist and peered again out the window.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.” Around the corner I see it, the most ridiculous image I could have ever imagined. Kevin, who is my accountant by the way, rounded the corner and fell to his knees, face planting into the dirt. Each of his wrists were tied with rope, holding in place two two-by-fours that were nailed together in the middle and resting on his back. He had taken it upon himself to cut up what appeared to be an old bed sheet and wrap it around him like an adult diaper. His hair, normally tied back in a professional ponytail had been let loose to hang in front of his eyes. Jesus falls the first time. He, with a feigned frailty, pushed himself up. Not having had enough time to prepare for this role, he is overweight. The pudgy parts around his waistline do not, by any means, convey the image of the starved and suffering Christ. Behind him is the whole godforsaken town. In front, women and, even worse, children, wiping their crocodile tears with hankies. Having attended Catholic school I knew which station was next, Jesus meets his mother.
A rap at the door. You’ve got to be kidding me.
“Kevin, I am not opening this door.”
They knock again. I hear him weeping, so pathetically I can’t stand it. I wait, my back on one side and Kevin leaning his crucifix on the other.
“If I open this door you are going to fall and you have three more stations before it is time for you to fall for a second time.”
He sniffled and I heard the cross’s weight be removed. Taking a breath, I opened the door to the whole lot of them. Some on their knees with their eyes rolled back towards the sky, others knelt down with their foreheads on my doorstep. I took a long, deep drag of my cigarette and dropped it to the ground. As I twisted my foot overtop, the crowd opened and burped up a little girl, her hands moving aimlessly in front of her reaching out for stability, her eyes never focusing. “My baby can’t see!” her mother cried out, hugging me from the knees and pulling her daughter by the hand, guiding her towards me. They both smooshed their faces into either of my thighs. In an attempt at balance I reached out for the door frame. Just then, I looked down and installed next to my stoop was an ancient looking woman, bony and bird-like with a blanket strewn over her shoulders. Sitting in the dirt, she laid a cloth down and upon it were lilies for sale, $3/ stem.
Managing to step, stumbling out of the grovelling grip of the mother and daughter, I backed up towards my front door. As I opened it I glanced back over my shoulder, this time over the crowd. Across the street, Joyce was sitting in her minivan in her pajamas, smoking and watching. We locked eyes and she held in the smoke for a moment, then let it ease out her mouth and snake right back up into her nose. Feeling hands start to grab at my calves, I pushed myself through the opening to find refuge against the door, chest heaving. It would only be a matter of days before the bruise began to disperse and change shape and all of this would necessarily pass and things would return to normal. Normal, I thought, as visions of hours upon hours upon days in that dimmed house, cleaning, smoking, cleaning, waiting, scrolled like a shitty slideshow through my mind.
The doorknob rattled, 6PM, surely my husband. After some struggle, the door opened a crack and one of his legs stepped through the threshold, followed by his hips, torso, shoulders and many hands clawing at his clothes, pulling him back. He slapped at them, so as not to close them in the door and break tens of fingers in the process, they retracted, and he closed the door leaving one smashed long stem rose as the only casualty.
“What the fuck is going on?” He roared, a clawmark of red on his neck.
“I didn’t…,” he lifted up my dress to see her. He did, closed his eyes and turned away.
On the way to the kitchen table, he grabbed his Maker’s Mark which he saves for special occasions. Usually this means moments when he is particularly disgruntled. He started to throw shots back, one after another, staring blankly into the middle of the table. In this way, my grievances go compounding until the pressure is so great that the slam of a cabinet can arouse them all at once like hounds. There is a sweet spot in his inebriation, past laughter, past rage, before sleep, where he gets sweet with me. I watched, pensive, hoping he finds his way there because I was in need of a little tenderness. He passed it, straight to sleep.
Starting that night, I stayed indoors. I waited for my bruise to change shape. The crowd, too, changed shape. Each day it became bigger and less recognizable, people had begun to travel from farther and wider to visit the “battered madonna.” After four days, I woke up to find a letter in the mail; it was blank but had a waxed seal. Squinting, I read in small ornate letters, following the contours of the rounded shape: “Miracle Commission.” I held the top of the letter in my hand, and let the bottom fall between my wrists. The letter, quite matter-of-factly explained that my miracle, the bringing of sight to a blind child, had been pushed through the first phase of examination, and had been determined VERIFIED. Enclosed was a copy of the child’s vision test, 20/20, and a series of witness testimonies of not only the incident, but of my overall character.
From my cousin, Victoria:
“She has always been so humble. She kept to herself as a child. She was particularly in tune with animals. Once, while out for a walk in the woods, I witnessed her picking up an injured bird and bringing it in the house to heal it. In another instance, she claimed to have seen a wolf drinking from the stream behind her house in the brook. We called animal control, but there was no trace of the wolf to be found. I hadn’t realized it at the time but I now have come to believe that this was an early vision.”
My 9th grade teacher:
“While all of the other girls in her grade were becoming interested in the boys in class, she never brought her modesty into question- keeping her skirt pulled down over her knees and her ankles covered...”
They went on like that for pages on end.
STATUS: Pre-Beatified
I stuffed the letter in the cupboard alongside my cigarettes. The last thing I need is to go down as a saint, Lord knows anytime a woman tries to be too good she is a half step away from the edge of the social cliff. No, it is only in death that a woman can be so holy—it is better never to claim your innocence so no one tries to claw you down from your pedestal. I averted my gaze to my shelf filled with glass trinkets, tiny angels, a pink porcelain shoe, a baby mid-crawl, a collection I started with no notion of the time it would take to maintain. Each one needs to be wiped individually to keep the dust away, and with these days of distraction they are long overdue. Closing my eyes I pulled up my skirt to give her a look, and sure enough, she had vanished just as she appeared. She had become nothing but a few blotches, not black or blue now but yellow and green. I tilted my head back in relief and leaned against the kitchen cabinet, the lights dimmed so the crowds would think that I had not yet stirred to waking. Still in my bathrobe and slippers I ran to the door. I’d show them and they’d take their inflictions to some other door. Swinging it open the stack of gifts fell in on me: chocolate bars, fruit, teddy bears, crumpled up dollar bills. As I bent down to lift the bottom of my robe, I felt something slam against my cheek, and everything went black.
Upon waking I could see her through blurred vision, the bird-boned woman from before, now inside my house arranging her items on her blanket. At the door, my husband was accepting offerings and whispering to the visitors, mostly women, who brought him what they could in order to take a shot at me, and a shot at curing whatever it was that ailed them. “Yes, yes, she’s so brave,” they quietly agreed with bowed heads and clasped their hands around worn beads, letting little crucifixes dangle.
The chain fastened to my ankle yanked against the radiator as I gathered myself on all fours. Cloudied, I saw a line of women holding their chests, waiting with bated breath. They covered their mouths with gloved hands and leaned into each other in whispers. I looked down to find my knees black and blued, surely where I fell to them after the knockout blow. It was a stretch, but I supposed I could make out that they claimed to be seeing. Cocking my head to the left with a good imagination, a distorted face, missing a mouth. By this point we were all in deep and there was no more room for doubt. The arrangement was that you could either bring your own object of significance: a crutch, a brick of your crumbling home, a balding woman’s brush, or you could opt to purchase what the bird-boned woman had collected: Small stones/ $3, large stones/ $5, frozen steaks $10, special wooden paddles with “The Battered Madonna” engraved on the back $12. For sale was, of course, more than just blunt objects but also rosaries, keychains, and clothes with a screen printed image of the virgin as a doll wearing an oversized crown.
Up walked the first in line. The woman was no stranger to me, but a neighbor. Presumably her geographic advantage had helped her to obtain the first spot in line. She lifted an urn, of god-only-knows whose ashes, up in the air above her head. She held it there for a moment of hesitation while the slack muscle of her flabby arms swayed, and brought it down --slowing herself just before knocking me on the head with a force that did not do justice to the climax of the moment. We all, including me, felt awkward at the sight of this feeble attempt at a blow, and shifted in our places. Having been raised to be so deeply averse to the discomfort of others, I felt the desire offer her some encouragement, to cheer her on. Come on, Ruth, you can do it. Emboldened by her shame, she lifted it again this time smashing it down upon my head, stealing from me any bit of consciousness that I had mustered. Falling to my knees I looked up, dazed in such a way that I could find beauty in the loose ash dancing in the sunlight. Through muffled ears I could hear some commotion. My husband was holding the woman by the wrists and scolding her. “How dare you hit my wife that way, not the head, not the face.” And so, some ground rules were born and he was so kind as to paint them on pieces of cardboard and hang them on the wall. Despondent, I sat as they came in one by one, bracing myself for the next blow, and the next. It went on this way until, they said, they had heard all they could from the Virgin. After the crowds left, the bishops came to visit. They talked and drank with my husband until they came to an agreement. They could each take one piece of my body back to their churches for a hefty fee. This, of course, was premature since I was not yet a full saint and wasn’t dead yet. They agreed that it was for the greater good, just think of all the people my body would cure if preserved and placed in a glass case. Hands were shaken, slaps on the back. And one by one they took their piece, carrying pieces of me off in small white cloths, for those too sick to make the journey to my small town.
Coming to, alone, I lay with one cheek on the hardwood, and stared at the wall wondering how in the world I would get these stubborn blood splatters to come clean. Drifting in and out of sleep, I imagined, wistfully, the many pilgrimages that would be made to the places where my parts were buried, the mourning that would happen there, welled-up eyes of the desperate visitors. Suddenly, I could feel myself stretched across the spanse of the earth and the cold of the gilded reliquary that would hold me: a finger, a lash, a tooth, a severed ear. Maybe they would be plated with gold or placed upon an ornate pillow. I thought of each cheek that would rub upon them in a quest for healing. I was multiplying. Through the crooked shade, I could see the light of a brand new dawn beam through, forming a warm spot on my wooden floor just a few inches away. I urged myself forward, reaching limbless towards the light.
Before my eyes, a foot with an ADIDAS sandal manifested. “Jesus Christ,” a voice muttered as two hands on my shoulders shook me from my ethereal fantasy. They flipped me over onto my back. Squinting, I saw Joyce’s haggard face as she squatted over me. “Jesus Christ,” she repeated, rolling me up into a swaddle. She picked me up with her hand supporting the back of my head like a newborn. The door clicked as she closed it quietly behind her. “I’m getting you out of here.” The warm sun felt good on my scalp, now revealed in bald clumps. She rolled open her rear van door, the sound roared as it slid back. After placing me down she rearranged me a few times, deciding it was best to lay me down and wrap the seatbelt across my middle. With no arms to balance, any bump would have knocked me over had I been sitting upright. She closed the door and got in the driver’s seat.
“What the fuck did they do to you?” She glanced at me through a furrowed brow in the rearview, shifting us into drive. I opened my mouth to speak but my tongue flailed aimlessly, knocking against my teeth as dry as dust. Her eyes widened in the mirror as she watched me attempt to make sound. “Fuck,” she said, shaking a cigarette out of its pack. Placing it in the side of her mouth she spoke without lighting it, letting it bounce up and down between her lips. “They really fucked you up.” She shook her head and lit it. Her elbow hung out of the driver’s side window, and through the crack between the seat and the door I could see the flab of her arm moving in the wind. A faded tattoo of a heart with a knife stuck into it read “FELIX.” Merging onto the highway, a shiny shamrock charm swung back and forth from the mirror. It was early enough that the sun was rising over where the road met the sky. Joyce started to flick through the stations. Static, talk radio, static, and then the sound of a soft piano. Next, chimes and the voice of an angel. “It's been a long, dark night.” Dolly Parton always did know just the right things to say. Joyce’s head started to bob, I never knew she liked her too. The beat dropped, a heavy drum and forceful strum. “I can see the light of a clear blue morning / I can see the light of a brand new day/ I can see the light of a clear blue morning/ and everything’s gonna be alright, it's gonna be okay,” Dolly belted. Joyce put on her blinker to slide into the fast lane, beating the rhythm into the steering wheel. “Hoo hoo hoo” I tried to sing, forming part of the choir. “I’ve been like a captured eagle, you know an eagle was born to fly, now that I have won my freedom, like an eagle I’m eager to fly.” I closed my eyes and let myself imagine resting my head on Dolly’s lap, her long nails running through my thin hair. “Hang in there” Joyce said, pushing 80mph. Step on it Joyce, I thought, as she drove me to god-knows-where.
Heather is a Philadelphia based multimedia artist, writer, puppeteer and translator. She was certified in taxidermy at the Superior Institute for Taxidermy and Conservation in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her creative education has been primarily self taught, through many books, many hours in her studio, and by way of osmosis via the Philly movement/ DIY/ performance community. Her first book of short stories titled Thin Skinned will be published in Summer 2021 with Antípoda, a Puerto Rico / Philadelphia based editorial. She is currently working on a comic book of poetry, slated to be published in 2022. By day, she teaches English as a Second Language to adults in Philadelphia at the Free Library of Philadelphia where she is lucky to share her love of reading, writing, and language everyday. The photograph of her shown here was taken by CJ Harker. To get in touch with her she can be reached by e-mail Heather.M.Houde@gmail.com or to follow her work find her on instagram @crowxxjane.