The Unworthy

by Agustina Bazterrica

They’re fragile, some can’t tolerate the weight of the holy words they chant (words that ensure the bond with our God is not broken).

but the Superior Sister was gentle because a Full Aura can’t be disturbed while she’s orating.

I burned many pages, the forbidden pages that spoke of her, of she who is buried with the insurgents, the disobedient women: Helena.

Whenever the wanderer is a man, we hear shots fired. We never see old women or children to rescue.

When they told me, I clutched my fists so tightly I slit my palms. I would never have thought of that.

Sometimes I lie down on her bed and fall asleep thinking about what would have happened if she hadn’t found my writing.

I thought I could smell her scent mixed with that of the wet earth. I don’t remember if I put the chain with the gold cross around her neck before I kissed her eyes, before I removed the dirt from her mouth and closed it, before

I covered her.

The rashes are the filth of evil, the filth of collapse, the filth of failure.

This filth, nesting in the servants’ skin, in their cells,

Why would they bother sheltering mistrustful, skeptical, inconsiderate bitches who drag themselves through the earth, filthy and drooling like a pack of blasphemous, suspicious, wavering women?

Lourdes, who arrived without signs of contamination, with all her hair, with no blotches on her face. With her teeth intact.

I don’t want to be Chosen because I don’t want to be mutilated.

She spent the night licking the wall in the hallway that leads to our cells.

We don’t know, don’t understand, logically, how the miracle occurs, we just accept it. Without faith, there is no refuge.

I wonder if God is the hunger behind hunger, and if behind God lurks the hunger for another God.)

We were in our secret tree, inside the hollow, sitting on dry leaves, our arms around each other because we barely fit. In our secluded, hidden haven.

Some whisper she’s not a woman, they say she could break your neck with one hand, crack your back in a single movement, that she was taught to breed edible insects in the millenary tribes, that He is her brother.

I wanted to kill her, I felt this as an urgent necessity, but I sat down, and once again bowed my head.

I saw my mother dancing barefoot in the kitchen. I was looking up at her from the height of my ten years. I remember her polka-dot dress, threadbare but clean, her long, shiny hair, her laughter like tiny crystals clinking in unison, her hands touching the rays of light that came in through the window.

the words my mother urged me to love, even when I didn’t understand them;

I touched her dry hands, kissed her forehead, covered her with a dirty cloth, and left. I didn’t cry.

the girl who couldn’t cry, the teenager constantly on guard, the predatory woman who had lived in me, hidden away, came back to life.

I cried over the school I hadn’t gone to, the books I hadn’t read, the siblings I didn’t have, the father I’d never met, and over my mother, resplendent and rigid on the cold floor of a kitchen

I wanted to kiss him on the lips so his journey to the other side would be less lonely, but I heard a sound, something crunching under a human foot, and I ran.

fertilized by the holy flesh of these innocent men, that at night, hypnotic Gregorian chants can be heard, chants that could drive you out of your mind with their beauty and voracity,

I want to lick her, I want to take off her clothes,

I felt the abyss of her scent, her skin suffused with a blue paradise that I wanted to set myself free in, let myself go in, fall into forever.

Only that I felt uncomfortable when I looked at her, as though my body were suddenly foreign.

Lucía rose with an intense serenity, without smiling or boasting, as though she truly believed her sacrifice would change something.

I’d tried to go to her cell before the sacrifice, I’d wanted to calm her down, reassure her that I would treat her wounds, feed her, take care of her.

My mother would touch the images in the books and ask herself over and over how something so beautiful could disappear.

There were no enemies, she told Ulysses, only people trying to survive, people dying of thirst and hunger.

(Words with sharp edges)

Did I really want to be an emissary of the light? To live locked up? To be an intermediary between God and this contaminated world?

Are the miracles in this blessed space real? Or is it the water in the Creek of Madness that causes us to believe?

No one had ever kissed me; no one had ever run their tongue over my neck, my lips, that slowly.

I’d never experienced the pleasure of another’s skin; no one had left me breathless, panting, at their mercy, my will gone, having surrendered; I’d never closed my eyes to be vulnerable, open.

She hugged me and it felt like I was inside an ancestral temple, a cathedral of wood and sap.

I began to shred the paintings with my knife, deforming each painting, each child with large, tear-filled eyes, while I cried and screamed incoherent words, screamed my exhaustion, cried because I didn’t have a bit of bread, because no one was going to paint my reality and hang it on a wall.

I cried remembering my mother’s hugs and how badly I needed them.

so they don’t know that at night we become the sound of flowers no longer in existence, that without words, using only our touch, we seek the secret names that vibrate in each other’s skin.

The words wrap around us, caress us, they’re like the gentlest of rivers flowing over our bodies.

We cried for Circe, for the girl I was, and for my pain, which hasn’t faded, which still clings to me, remains deep inside me, and for all the years I could recall none of this, none of what they’d done to me, none of what I’d lived through before

a filthy smell of rancid flesh hanging from murderous teeth.

Circe curled up in fear. I put her under my shirt and protected her with my body.

my clothes tattered, stained with blood, hers and mine, two bodies broken, hers and mine.

but I would allow no one to touch her. No one could touch her.

If I close my eyes, I hear it, because she’s with me, though her body is in the earth, in that tree I imagine to be green and in bloom.

When she danced naked and free, her hands moved like a bird’s feathers in the wind, fluttering gently, not like deadly insects.