I Am the Brother of XX by Fleur Jaeggy

Author:Fleur Jaeggy
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780811225991
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2017-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

The Visitor

On a day without a date Angela da Foligno appeared in the halls of the Archeological Museum in Naples. She walks slowly, lost in thought. The face the color of sand. The brow stern. They had heard about her fasts, but her appearance showed no signs of wasting. They had also heard that she had dark hair and eyes. The eyes were a washed-out blue, hostile. The hair concealed by a linen gauze, gathered and as though sewn together. She smiled sweetly. It is not clear to whom. But from one window insects flew. At the hem of her habit, gray and lined with austerity, dabs of red velvet — two graceful tattered pumps. Perhaps she wore them when she was visited by the abbesses. Or by divine darkness. They swung in the void, when she hung in midair and couldn’t breathe. In perfect dereliction. She is scented. Like a small plant of orange flowers.

She was born in 1248. A landowner and loaded with possessions. She marries at the age of twenty. Feels solace at the death of her husband and children. As she tore her clothes off, she pledged herself to chastity before the crucifix. She chose the way of mendicancy. Deprived of earthly loves, of goods, and of her very self, she embarked on her mystical contest with God, “Unknown Love,” and nothingness. A humble and frightened monk transcribes her words, her theological investigations, the visions. On Holy Saturday, she, the faithful Christian, tells him, led to it by an excess of the mind, that she had been in the sepulchre with Christ. She said that she had kissed the torso of Christ. She saw him stretched out, his eyes closed. Then she had kissed his mouth. Christ drew her to him. She spoke of a certain taste of the host that spread in her mouth. And when it descends into her body it gives her a greatly pleasant sensation. She trembles violently. Years later the bigot Agnes Blannbekin, on the 1st of January, again and again turns in her mouth, tender as egg-skin and very sweet, Christ’s foreskin.

It happened that on that day without a date the shell was the first to become aware of the presence of Angela. It oscillated gently on the ocean floor of slanting waves. And Venus, from her elegant white post, slipped to shore. The fresco is tinged with the void. The curious gaze of the goddess visits the museum’s other guests. Before her, in the corridor, and deferent, the marble statues move aside to let her go by. They all seem alive, she thinks. Where’s the difference? Has she herself ever existed? The ascetic and the goddess touch lightly. Angela doesn’t seem entirely alive either, though she has an appearance of her own. The goddess saw herself repeated, reflected in many museums. She cannot tell herself from the copies. She had been to London, to Berlin, to Paris. She knows how to travel. She knows how it feels to be wrapped, packed, transported and battered.

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