Lucia's Masks
L
UCIA’S
M
ASKS
L
UCIA’S
M
ASKS
W
ENDY
M
AC
I
NTYRE
©Wendy MacIntyre, 2013
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit
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Thistledown Press Ltd.
118 - 20th Street West
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, S7M 0W6
www.thistledownpress.com
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
MacIntyre, Wendy, 1947-, author
Lucia’s masks / Wendy MacIntyre.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-927068-44-1 (pbk.).– ISBN 978-1-927068-54-0 (html).
ISBN 978-1-927068-78-6 (pdf)
I. Title.
PS8575.I68L92 2013 C813’.54 C2013-903935-X
C2013-903936-8
Cover photograph,
The Masked Players
, by Teresa Yeh Photography/Shutterstock
Cover and book design by Jackie Forrie
Printed and bound in Canada
“A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts” from THE PALM AT THE END OF THE MIND by Wallace Stevens, edited by Holly Stevens, copyright © 1967, 1969, 1971 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random House, Inc. for permission.
Thistledown Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Canada
Council for the Arts, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, and the Government of
Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing program.
For John Stairs
Contents
Chapter Five:
Lucia Finds a House
Chapter Six:
The Unveiling of Lola
Chapter Seven:
Which Circle of Hell?
Chapter Eight:
Bird Girl Spies a Rat
Chapter Ten:
Candace Sees a Bird Fall
Chapter Twelve:
Chandelier Heeds Snake's Counsel Again
Chapter Thirteen:
Harry Finds a Theatre Box
Chapter Fifteen:
Lucia Consoles a Sinner
Chapter Sixteen:
The Outpacer's Confession
Chapter Seventeen:
Bird Girl Sees Eros at Work
Chapter Eighteen:
Candace Is Vanquished
Chapter Nineteen:
Chandelier Sees Snake's Tongue
Chapter Twenty:
Harry Meditates on the Ice
Chapter Twenty-One:
Bird Girl and the Dance
M
Y DELIVERANCE CAME THE DAY THE
vandals smashed my potter’s wheel. I arrived home just before dawn, the acrid stench of bleach still in my nostrils. The door to my room was hanging askew from its hinges. My fingers trembled as I drew out my knife and entered the small, sky-lit space that had once been my sanctuary but was now violated and fouled.
I felt a sharp twist in my belly when I saw my wheel in pieces on the floor. It looked as if the interlopers had used a sledge hammer on it. I immediately knelt and groped under the bed, and cried out in relief to find the poet’s life mask still intact in its box where I return it each evening before leaving for work. I bowed my head and thanked the household spirits of my ancestors that the vandals had not discovered the box. Was it the Chemical Head Children who had broken in? Whoever the intruders were, they had also pissed and shat upon my bed, as if the destruction of my wheel was not outrage enough for them.
For years now, it is only my beloved potter’s wheel that has kept me here. It was simply too heavy an object to carry away with me if I decided at last to flee the City and escape through the forest to the north.
After my night’s labour, scouring urinals, toilet bowls, and sinks in the washrooms of bleak office towers, my reward was to return home to my moist clay and my wheel. In my box-like room with its cracked skylight I felt completely free and secure through the early hours of morning, communing with the clay. It is a quick and responsive medium, with a binding truth of its own. A potter’s hands and mind must be attentive — to the shaping powers of the imagination, and to the fluid form that thrives upon the wheel.
“What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth,” Keats said. As I worked, I kept his life mask by me. I would glance up from my work and draw strength and calm from the noble forehead, the closed and dreaming eyes, the high cheekbones and the wide, tender mouth. If I wished, I could reach out and touch the shape of his features and the set of his expression, just as the young John Keats looked on a particular afternoon nearly three hundred years ago.
Now all my dear sustaining refuge was gone. The vandals had defiled it.
For some minutes I sat on the floor beside the shattered wheel, stunned and grieving. The realization came to me then that this desecration was my deliverance. I could have no surer sign. I had gone on too long, beset with anxiety that I would become like so many others in the City, either rancorous and sadistic like the worst of the street thugs, or numbed and dead of mind like the sky-screen addicts. I was becoming more and more terrified that the evil I witnessed each day would ultimately turn me into stone; that I would no longer understand or care what goodness is. Sometimes when I looked at the faces of the most depraved among us, I saw the head of Medusa — the one painted by Caravaggio, where her mouth yawns blackly. It is that hole of a mouth that transfixes you first. Only then do you see that her hair is a nest of writhing snakes.
With my wheel smashed, there was nothing to hold me back. I could discover for myself if there really was a place a thousand and more miles to the north where the EYE’s surveillance did not reach, and where it was possible to practise a decent human kindness and serve one’s craft or art freely.
I was seven years old when the EYE staged its coup. It happened on the cusp of night’s stillest hour, a rupture that divided their time from everything we had known before. I was hurled from my bed and watched in panic the jagged light that pierced the curtains in time with the vast booming outside. My childish mind pictured a phalanx of one-eyed giants advancing, the entrails of their prey still hot and steaming in their mouths. The drums they beat in that ceaseless booming were made of the skins of all the lovely animals of the world. Soon these ogres would tear open our building and strip me of my skin and my sister and my parents of theirs. The giants would not care that we were still alive while they flayed us.
I saw the walls of my bedroom tremble in that ghastly light. Something was pummelling the soft tissue inside my head and chest. I had the urge to pee and vomit all at once, like a baby. That was how the EYE first imprinted fear in our bodies. They set a taper to our nerves to teach us what an unexcelled governance tool terror is. When the taper flared red-hot in our arms and legs, in our bellies and brains, we saw by its lurid light the crack the EYE had opened in all that once seemed solid and secure. We saw the mailed fist, without a face behind it, and how that fist could seize you by the neck and snap it and then toss your head to the dogs or worse.
It has taken me years to be able to articulate what happened that night when they burned their fear-brand deep into my core. These thoughts I keep within the confines of my skull. Concealment is self-preservation because the EYE’s surveillance cameras are everywhere, and most of them cunningly hidden. Were I even to let the words “EYE equals terror” play upon my lips, they would spy me out. I would likely have my eyes and organs removed while I was still alive and semi-conscious and they were in optimum condition for sale. The remnants would be ground for fertilizer. The EYE is above all a “functional regime,” as they never tire of telling us.
Do I exaggerate the regime’s dedication to the “economic imperative?” Certainly, one hears rumours of such punishments, probably spread by the regime’s own propaganda department. The EYE likes to keep our fear fresh.
I learned that first night a simple, decent way to make my terror smaller. In a splinter of silence between the explosions, I heard my sister wail. She was crouching on her bed and her tiny fingers plucked at her hair. Her rosebud lips had disappeared. In that part of her face there was only a little pink and white cavity from which issued the dreadful sound that roused me from myself. I ran to comfort her and gathered her in my arms as best I could to take her to our parents’ bedroom. Thus my own fear dwindled by some small degree. Mama and Papa flew in at that instant, still pulling on their dressing gowns. They looked so unlike themselves, with their white faces and wild eyes, that for an instant I was afraid of this strange man and woman who snatched us up bodily. We fled down the two flights to the building’s basement, Papa carrying me and Mama clutching Sophia to her breast. Under us the wooden stairs buckled. Papa gripped me in his arms so hard that it hurt. I focused on his familiar heat and the smell of his sweat and tried not to whimper.
In the cellar I recognized other families from our building. They sat holding hands, with their backs braced against the grey concrete wall. Papa guided us into a corner behind the big antique machine with its tubular tentacles that reached into snug holes in the wall. He had told me this machine was an “archaism” that belonged to a time when the world had a season called winter. I sat between my parents, clutching Papa’s hand in my right and Mama’s in my left. Mama had tucked Sophia’s head inside the folds of her dressing gown so that my sister’s eyes and ears were covered. I could see she was sucking her thumb. I strove to be brave. I wanted to ask for reassurance that it would soon be over; that everything would be all right. But it was impossible for anyone to hear me in any case.
When the silence fell upon us at last, I felt like someone had slapped my ears and made them tingle. Then came a great rush of relief and almost a joy, but undercut by wariness. I thought that if I had a mirror, I would see my ears had taken on the sharp triangular shape of a cat’s when it is put on high alert. It was as well I stayed wary, because a siren lacerated the quiet. Sophia wailed. Then silence again. We sat waiting and on edge. Every face I could see looked wearied and strained. Among the adults were those who plugged their ears with their fingers.