“Father,” Death said, “I am peace incarnate.”
“Do tell,” Satan said.
“Bloviating Virgil wanted souls to be tormented for one thousand years before they suffered enough, were purified enough, to be permitted to drink from Lethe and find peace. Your ancient Roman poet considered a thousand years’ sad exclusion from the doors of bliss quite acceptable, if not outright glorious. Now, he was a reed-and-papyrus kind of guy, grandiloquent and verbose, whereas I am modern, one hundred and forty characters and quadruple microprocessors, that’s me. I offer peace on demand, instant gratification. Step into the future, leave memories behind, welcome to the land of latest. Want a sip? Go ahead, please. Democratic and ecumenical I am. New and improved, I am Lethe brownies. Eat me.”
“If one can’t kill the savage or castrate him,” Barbara said, “what is to be done? How does one convert a Muslim?” While she spoke ambrosial fragrance filled the room, sweetness of the Lebanese mountains, jasmine and lavender, pine and a hint of cedar, scents that belied her irritation. “Mary, Mary, quite contrary, Mary, Mary, Mary, how does your garden grow when your chastity belt stops any kind of flow?”
The seat of all saints looked most like a throne with Barbara in it. Her back remained regally straight, her demeanor rigid, a modest crown upon her head. The peerless academic with fishwife tongue held a miniature tower in her lap, no more than a foot in length, yet impeccably detailed, down to the three tiny windows of the top room, the Trinity.
“Those fucking nuns kept trying to shove Mary down those poor boys’ throats,” Barbara said, “and those were the Christian lads. Our Jacob arrived a Muslim, allegedly; he needed a megadosage, a supersized Mary with fries. Why cut off a boy’s balls when you can freeze them right off with an icy virgin?”
The smell of orange blossom and lemon trees wafted from her; one could practically lick the sour sumac in the delicious air. Satan did not need to goad Barbara, who commenced her sumptuous diatribe as soon as she appeared—no tea required, no apple, just venom.
“And it wasn’t Jewish Mary from Bethlehem that these nuns worshipped. Theirs had nothing to do with ours. Once the West appropriated our religion they turned our poor mother into a frigid altarpiece, no trace of humanity allowed. Their Bethlehem sounded more like Stockholm. Mary became their arctic suppository. They came to our lands with their corrupt religion, the nuns, the missionaries, and the popemobile. Worshipping Catherine or Margaret was uncivilized. The mountain saints? Heretical! You’re no Christians, the nuns told our boys, bend over so we can shove our higher catechism up your ass.”
Perfume of sweet gardenias and tuberoses fanned out from her pure form like gentle breaths. Her halo shone brighter than the brightest star. Her hair was a dark black, her cheeks a sparkling strawberry red.
“Sleep on, blessed brown people,” Satan said. “O, yet happiest if ye seek no happier state, and know to know no more than what we tell ye.”
“Belief should develop organically, and it did in our mountains, but all these new religions, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, all of them were forced upon us from far away. Generations of boys and girls were raised broken and unwhole.”
“Why do you think the nuns did their worst damage through Mary?” Satan asked. “I’m not sure I follow that.”
“Original sin,” Barbara said. “Ave Maria and all that, Ave derived from Eva, inverted because Mary restored what Eve lost. To the nuns, to those disciples of a sanctimonious god, Mary was the antithesis of sin, the boys its embodiment. The Mother of God was supposed to wash clean all the brown races. You know, the French mother superior walked around with a rolled-up map of the Levant in her pocket that she continuously stroked while speaking to the boys, it comforted her, provided her with solace, it pleased her to caress the world she was about to release from darkness. I loathed that soulless bitch. On my feast day, Lebanese children wore masks and went door-to-door in the villages asking for coins or sweets, a ritual that had gone on for hundreds of years. Within one generation, these stupid Europeans erased it. Only the old people remember now—old people and our poet. He remembers now.”
“Barbara is still raging,” Death said. “All her fire has gone into her temper. That indignant virago has been angry since she lost her head.”
“Can you blame her?” Satan said.
“Of course I can.”
“Effulgence in my glory, son beloved. You have always been so unforgiving.”
“I am naught if not forgiving, Father,” Death said. “Barbara is the one who isn’t. Should she have held a grudge when her father decapitated her? Of course. Should she still grasp it tight to her bosom more than a thousand years later? Of course not, but she’s a Semite through and through, Levantine to the core. They lip-synch the same tired songs every day. The same mitered man who removed her from the liturgical calendar had made Mary the mother of the Church. Should she still be hating him some fifty years later? Please.”
“Which one was he?”
“Paul VI, John XXI, Rocky IV, who cares? They’re all the same to me. I forgive them all. Even that French mother superior. She gulped her Lethean cup with the relish of those who desperately cling to their assumed innocence.”