A Dark Star
Original Fiction by Butch Ekstrom *
Original Fiction by Butch Ekstrom *
Going home, Without my sorrow
Going home, Sometime tomorrow
Going home, To where it’s better
Than before.
Going home, Without my burden
Going home, Behind the curtain
Going home, Without the costume,
That I wore.
-- Leonard Cohen
"Going Home"
Errors lie not in the art but in the artificers.
-- Isaac Newton
Winter, 1368: Raimondo Seeks Agnese
It was one of the strangest incidents that Raimondo, the revered Dominican friar, had ever encountered. So much to consider within his formidable mind. He leaned his heavy upper frame back in his chair, a clear signal of his reluctance to believe. He was passionately a mendicant. He loved Jesus, the Church, and beyond all the truth. Raimondo wanted to trust everyone, yes, all people, the simple, frayed and damaged children of his God. But he knew that he could not. At the request of Rome, and also the urging of the young gentle lady Caterina of Siena, the gifted Raimondo had long been an investigator and detective who looked into (and sometimes debunked) strange stories emanating from the medieval Church temporal. Regarding the creepy scene described to him that morning, the friar harbored doubts.
Could this aging peasant woman who was now on the way back to his cottage, who once was a poor young farm girl ensconced in this scenic, wine-producing village called Montepulciano, situated on the peak of a scenic limestone hillock in the province of Siena, be telling the truth? Her tale was eerie and was quite similar to other stark, bizarre graveside premonitions that had been recounted in and around Montepulciano to him by simple citizens alternately confused, frightened, angry, or zealous. Five decades had passed since the earthly demise of the revered Agnese du Segni, at 49 years, the holy Prioress who had long led the Dominican women in the nearby monastery of Gracciano. Raimondo knew that most of the fervent and pious memories that witnesses retained -- about events and happenstances that had mysterious, spiritual, and mythological dimensions -- had a way of changing as first-hand accounts, colored by additional experiences, eroded into imprecise human recollections as years go by. The human mind plays mean tricks. Stories, particularly ones with the golden glow of the miraculous woven into their fabrics, start within a sunburst and then tend to morph audaciously. Verifiable eyewitness accounts about pious but irrational occurrences, which are then succeeded by new generations of storytellers, fade to black and eventually expire.
The humble woman clothed in rough fabrics, from an Italian sharecropping family, inexplicably coming back toward him, a survivor of scandalous doings and dangerous decades in Montepulciano, claimed she had been present (as a child) for the irregular handling of the interment of the loner Prioress called Mother Agnese -- a woman who might on a future, blessed date be declared Saint Agnes of Montepulciano. That was if Raimondo and his most holy friend and spiritual confidante, Catherina Benincasa, who resided in Siena, had anything to say about the matter.
'Can I not trust this woman, will I not?,' Raimondo of Capua wondered before he trudged out into the evening cold. Momentarily his alert mind painted and populated colorful, old village scenes with great imagination.
Earlier that day, the aging peasant farm woman had intimated many things to Raimondo. She confessed she had grown weary through her years of the mysteries regarding Mother. Now the simple and righteous people of the Siena region must have the full truth.
She had begun with these words, 'There I was, not twenty paces from the deceased Prioress, wordlessly proud but profoundly terrified about what might come next. I stood with my padre, with my mama, and along with my little brother and my older sister. Our whole familia stood silently in grief, struck scrupulous, fearful, and dumb by God's great power that could at any moment be willed down from Heaven to strike us. But the line refused to inch forward ever so slowly. Mama had cautioned me, before we left our rooms, that we would mourn later on this dark afternoon and evening for the holy Mother Prioress, a great saint on earth who had worked many miracles for our people, who had loved us in our simplicity dearly, and who had been visited and nursed through her last bodily afflictions by the most holy angels from on high. We were about to inch forward to kneel and pray next to the Mother Prioress' dead body. I tell you great were the wails and other expressions of grief from the people near us and by the other faithful coming toward us from throughout the village. The most loud and heart-rending cries were issued by those who eventually passed in a single row right beside Mother's corpse. Some clutched her dead hands. Others fell to their knees in sorrow. I should now take out my prayer beads and pray for the Prioress' holy soul, my own mama said.'
Friar Raimondo prepared to write a few notes. So, you joined the long line then went toward the remains of Mother Agnese in her burial box, in the old piazza?, he asked.
'Yes, good friar. My father had large tears falling from the reservoirs behind his eyes. Mama cried too. Big streams slid down her bedraggled face. She fingered her prayer beads with fervor,' said Raimondo's visitor.
Then she added, 'I will not forget this because it disturbed me. There were tall, thick beeswax candles as big as my arm all around Mother's body, flames flickered in the winds and dark, devilish smoke trails went up and were twisted madly by the crossing air currents from the mountains. The trails of black smoke reached toward a big, bright star visible in the early night sky. A few of our companions in hushed voices called it the north star.
'Very well. What else do you remember seeing?' Raimondo said.
'Good friar, there were white flowers in large bunches placed on all sides of our poor Mother's body. A big, rough wooden cross had been hammered into the dirt floor of the piazza. The cross leaned and swayed as the breezes played with the smoke trails and blew without comment over the dead one. Townspeople rich and poor waited in the long line to see her, kiss her cheek, touch her hands, for just one last time. As I inched, with my family members, right next to the burial box, I held a tightly folded and scented patch of linen over my nose and mouth as I had been instructed to do. Mama had warned me not to breathe in too boldly or too close since there would be a powerful stench of death awaiting us. This warning frightened me. I was just a little girl. I had never seen at such a close point a dead person before.
'Mother Agnese of course laid in repose waiting to be borne by the grieving mourners, friends, and admirers loved by her to her crypt. Years later it was rumored that the barren hole that she was supposed tgo occupy for eternity had been lying open, unwatched, unguarded. inside the back room of the village's battered old chapel for days,' the Italian woman added.
'I was just a devilish little child, I have told you. There was much that I did not understand. But I understood one thing. Rumors swept through the lined up villagers standing immediately before us. They scared my brother, my sister, and me. They whispered mercilessly that the holy Mother Prioress' deep, gray-pocketed eyes remained wide open in death and that the holy woman's body looked and smelled odd. Certain mourners were overcome. If my mama had not held me firmly in place, I believe I would have run away. I shuddered all over.'
The friar wrote more. What happened then?, he wondered.
Agnese Visited by an Angel
'Like all the others before us had done, once we got very close to Mother's remains, my padre removed his hat, my mama clutched her fraying shawl tightly to her bosom. I slowly pulled the scented square covering they had given me off my nose and away from my face,' she continued.
'I sniffed around. At first there were no unpleasant odors that accosted me. The winter breezes felt cool on my chin and lips. Tension had made my body feel rigid. But quietly it relented. I had been told by mama to wait for a smell to come that was more awful than death. I had no previous experience with things such as this. I cautiously . . . sniffed . . . but nothing was there. So I took in a deep breath, expecting the worst. Nothing out of the ordinary did I detect. Then being just a little child and greatly curious, I petulantly gripped the sagging wooden boards on which Mother's burial box was perched unevenly. With my arms up, with my fingers clinging to the gray boards, I hung there like a kitten pulling herself up toward a promising nest of baby birds.'
'I confess, good Friar, as I was suspended, I urgently sensed some malevolent presence in the box with the body! I could not touch it, or see or smell it. But I feared it was about to leap out onto me! I was terrified. My sister poked my back hard and told me to hurry, pull up, hurry, it was her turn -- yet stubborn, confused, and petrified I refused to climb or drop.'
My gentle, old padre gripped my waist. He whispered by my ear, 'There is nothing here to fear, my little dear. Mother Agnese has gone to be with the benevolent Creator.'
'Yes, go on,' Raimondo prodded her gently.
'So, despite my confusion, my terror, I inhaled deeply. My heart pounded. I sought to go higher, pulling myself up by my tiny hands, arms, and legs with my padre's assistance. Still this took great effort. For a fleeting moment, I beheld a vision. It was the aged, breathless Prioress with the thin face in her black burial garb, a rosary with bright blood red beads and a wooden cross twined around her bony and discoloring fingers, and her hands crossed piously at her wrists. But horridly she had no eyes for me to behold. No, in fact, she had no face at all. Just a deep black oval pit yawned where her features had rested. I feared the whole village, with me, would be sucked down into it.'
'Yes,' Raimondo murmured.
'So boldly I stuck my face down into the burial box,' the woman went on. 'A terrible dizziness overwhelmed me. Crazy thoughts came into my mind. I feared that the great pestilence that had slaughtered so many of our innocent countrymen before my birth would afflict my soul. Then I heard a loud hiss and looked skyward. I envisioned that great star from the north sky had begun to spin wildly and turn black as polished onyx. The heavenly body hurtled like a fireball toward our windblown piazza with indescribable speed. It whooshed down toward our heads then flew by. Black particles, like onyx dust, settled down over everythting. Then the unsteady wooden framework on which I had been dangling made a snapping noise. I was loud and sudden. A painful cracking. The entire burial apparatus shifted sharply below my padre and me. Then it collapsed indecorously to the dusty floor of the village center.
'That sounds like it was awful for you. Were you injured?' the friar sympathized.
'I was young and my body was supple. I bounced. I did not suffer. My papa fell on me though. He lost some teeth and harmed a wrist when he hit the piazza face first. But, now good friar, listen to this. All those present were stunned. The decaying remains of the dead Prioress fell out of her nesting place. The awful slap of her corpse striking the piazza floor echoed throughout the surrounding buildings. People leaned back in horror. Many screamed in fear. I began to weep for committing this abomination, this grievous sin. My brother laughed at me. Uniformed guards sprang forward to prevent more disaster. The good friar from the village and the powerful Bishop who was in attendance began to bark orders. They called for order.'
The woman seemed to beseech Raimondo for sympathy. 'You see, sir, I was just a simple little girl from a secluded farm. Indeed I was impulsive like that.'
Tears trickled down each side of the peasant woman's weathered face. Echoes of guilt and shame clouded her voice. She wiped tears from her face with a clean rag that Raimondo had handed to her.
'Good Friar, you must listen to me,' she whispered. 'I confronted a great mystery that day in the palazzo. I am not ashamed to tell you this. As I pulled myself over the rim on Mother's burial box, there was no odor of the dead for me to behold, nothing ugly nor unpleasant. Not at all. What I breathed in was a scent that mimicked a cloying sweetness and fresh flowers. But these garden fragrances were much stronger than any smell to be found in a wealthy Montepulciano citizen's carefully cultivated, Spring garden. I fought bravely the demon that had revealed to me the black pit in Mother's face, the center of the stony but collapsing face of a saint in death. I pushed the troublesome demon away. You see, I did not wish to see or to know anything untoward about the Prioress. But in truth, the aged Mother Agnes within the pall of death looked tormented and pallid, deeply grooved throughout her face, like she had suffered extreme pain and expired in a restless state. Mother did not appear to have suffered a disfiguring disease like smallpox. Except her eyes, once I got a sincere look at them, betrayed deep trouble welling up from her soul -- her dry her eyes were encircled with blackened skin, dry socketed, still thrown wide open, and staring intensely at me and the world. Soon I beheld that a liquid, like a marginally thickened and graying water, with that intense and cloying odor that made me so dizzy, was trickling from underneath each of Mother's hands, which were palms down, and from the flats of her feet, as if it were draining out of small piercings in her wrinkled skin below her fingers and her turned out ankle bones. Pieces of traditional Dominican clothing on Mother's corpse made it impossible to tell any more. The sweet wetness that trickled from her body I simply could not resist. It suffused the immediate area around the corpse like a dense cloud of perfume.'
'In time you believed someone had devised a ruse?' Raimondo asked.
'At that time, I believed it was a miracle from Him. As I have told you, I was an impulsive little girl, a curious thing. I reached over despite my mama's warnings and touched the liquid though I knew my parents would disapprove. The mystery of that day then grew much deeper. When I reached across sister poked me in the back again. She cried no! My little brother whispered, Uh-oh. The graying substance warmed my fingers to the bone and stroked my soul like some sweet story told during a hearty meal before a family's roaring winter fire. My world began to spin quickly. I feared that I was about to fall dizzied into a black pit, tormented by hallucinations, and be lost forever. My father held me when I cried out in fear. Even to a young child like me the hypnotic gray liquid testified to stark violation of nature's ways. But I then dipped my right hand into the mysterious substance smeared over the Mother Prioress' hand as she lay mutely by the burial box. I made a sign of the cross on myself, like I had seen everyone around me at this funeral, even my family, do. My right hand grew warm again. My mind began to spin anew and, friar, my hands remained sweetly fragrant with that seductively sweet odor for days and days.'
The legendary Raimundo, an investigator, a detective for the Church, had heard similar things regarding Prioress Agnese du Segni's death watch and burial. He had stopped taking notes. He felt pity and compassion for this simple farmer's wife.
'Let's go over this just one more time,' he said gently, intrigued by the story. 'You now believe that foul play perhaps was at work? A soporific and perhaps other magical substances were used to keep her dead body fresh, as fully uncorrupted as possible? A cloying but man-made scent was employed, you suspect, to convince mourners that the Prioress had been taken sweetly into the arms of the Lord and his Mother? Again, how did you say the blessed corpse, our Mother's, had its hands arranged?'
'Her palms were down. The fingers of her two hands were perfectly straight and crossed over each wrist in the center of her lap. Prayer beads that shone bright red, like the color of fresh blood, were wound around all her fingers,' the woman replied.
'The trails of sweet elixir came from where?
She said, 'It came from underneath her hands and from under her ankle bones. People said it was a miracle when they beheld this! But there was no blood mingled in. Mother Agnese already bore the holy wounds in her precious palms. What are those called, sir?'
'Holy stigmata. So is there anything else?'
The woman looked about his quarters. She added, 'There appeared to be some flecks of something dark red, like rust, in the sweet potion. These made me feel very sad.' She seemed to be on the verge of disclosing something else. But her lips did not move and she lightly shook her head no.
Raimondo de Capua stood. For this day, his inquiry was complete. He politely thanked the kind peasant woman from Montepulciano. She left his quarters. Then she went through his front yard without turning back to wave and walked away. He kept his eyes on her. She was heading toward the steep road down to the Val di Chiana. On the road the woman had pulled her hooded cloak tight to fend off the cold breezes that still blew, as a constant, across the hilly landscape.
It would be very dark in one hour or two. In the twilight by the window, the friar pondered this version of Blessed Agnese's pre-burial scene from years ago. It was one of the most graphic that Raimondo had ever come across. He had heard several accounts. But the recollections were very old now. Many imaginative details in this version, he thought to himself.
Briefly, the friar also recalled a few things he had learned about the Prioress while he grew up in Capua. Based on all the facts he had discovered, the investigator harbored many concerns regarding the pastiche of detail, myth, and speculation that had surfaced about Agnese's full life and dramatic, but righed, burial since she expired five decades ago. Raimondo believed the mind played tricks as one aged -- as memories became frayed, details became eroded, and firm facts, just like like the iron-willed rule of the mighty Ozymandias, were cracked and crushed to pieces, and left to decay in the dust.
The little farm girl, when prodded by her older sibling, had plunged her inquisitive face and nose into Agnese du Segni's burial box of fine chesnut (castanea sativa) during a windy April dusk in 1317. Letting her linen protective down, she cautiously sniffed the air that had wafted in and around the lovely Italian hillsides all day, then over and through the villagers, into and out of the dens of local animals, and finally over the lifeless bones and drying skin of the black-clad sister. The child began to tremble in a panic and imagine terrible things. She gulped cloying perfumed air, and a spray of flowers seemed to bloom around her. She peered into the dead woman's graying eye sockets. Dizziness overcame her. She slumped over. This movement rocked the makeshift wood structure, made of oak and supple chesnut, on which she had leaned. Several of the Cardinal's minions sprang forth nervously to steady the corpse in the box. What had she said?, Raimondo wondered anew. 'On my second breath close to Mother's body, the odor filled my senses, like an intoxicating elixir brewed on the margins of Hell itself.' Then the child was forced down to her knees by some invisible pressure on her bony shoulders, perhaps under her parent's hands. She felt engulfed in some other-worldly cloud. Her head bowed low under the pressure until she almost tasted the earth. The little one shuddered again. She prayed 'Lord God, in the Heavenly hosts, oh Mother of Mercies, sweet Angels above, show me pity, save me from the falling star and save me from this troubled spirit.'
But was it, in truth, just her trusted and teary father or her insistent mother, or her misbehaving sister, who were imploring her, by pushing her toward the earth, to kneel down to pray for Mother's soul?
That happened five decades ago. Raimondo was now a passionate, grown man and a Dominican himself, a prayerful and attentive mendicant, an upright and loyal son and supporter of Mother Church during these troubled, crusading times. The humble friar was born in the town of Capua. He was revered by Tuscan citizens. Unexpectedly, he had become the spiritual confidante and merciful confessor to blessed Caterina Benincasa from Siena. Caterina was a deeply mystical, but a spiritually troubled young woman. She too was a Dominican sister. Caterina spoke hauntingly to her friar-confessor of a deeply intimate, the world would say forbidden, physical relationship, including sexual contacts, with the Savior of all humankind in her personal cell. She confessed to feeling pricked and bloodied often by jagged scruples and religious fears. And (unknown to Caterina and Raimondo) she was destined to be honored, in time, as the holy patroness of Italy, a saintly and incorruptible mystic enshrined on pedestals across the Christian universe, her preserved head carried tafter her death to Rome to be venerated by throngs of the faithful.
Raimondo was laboring to produce an authentic biography of Mother Agnese, the storied Dominican Prioress whom the local girl from Siena, Caterina, had loved completely as her spiritual mother and wise mentor. The friar had pledged to Caterina that he would complete Agnese's life story. Raimundo now secretly held doubts that he could do so honestly. His worries about Mother's secrets were kept him on edge b day and had ruined his ability to sleep through the night. His mind wandered when others spoke. In fact Raimondo feared that Agnese, who had laid in repose in that chesnut box in the piazza, outside the storied hillside monastery in Montepulciano, was not the revered Sister and Mother Agnese in deed. The perfumed and dark-eyed corpus in the creepily frangranced box was that of Agnese's victimized and timid sibling, Noldo, lying under decades of cleverly painted-on but tortured disguise.
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Caterina's Sarcophagus |
During recent weeks, Raimondo had worried that he would never be brave enough to inform Caterina, and the world, as a certain fact that Mother Agnese had actually not expired virtuously during April 1317.
Agnese was dead long before that. Raimondo was not a physicist, like Albertus Magnus, nor was he an alchemist. He was a man of simple faith who was smart, skilled as a listener, and insightful about the dark intricacies of human affairs. An intuitive thinker, and a product of the burgeoning Renaissance, the friar had privately surmised during his sojourn in Montepulciano that the real Agnese had expired during her fourteenth year, during 1281, probably down in a windblown forest grove or nearby on the damp and marshy banks of a local lake. He had learned that Agnese, a twin, had been a beauteous and budding red-haired flower, and a dedicated daydreamer. She loved her roan horse more than any family member or friend, even her emotionally-troubled twin brother, Arnoldo. Yet dark forces stalked her. On a fateful day, some awful power had stifled Agnese until she expired. The girl's remains were never located. The statuesque roan mare, called Castanea, was spied running unabated later, at least once, but outside the village walls.
Raimondo speculated also that Agnese's demise must have happened just days before a rainy-cold and windswept dawn during which a small group of Dominican postulants, in fresh black and white habits, were whisked to the town of Porceno to outfit a new monastic community. The lovely Agnese du Segni looked to be among them. But, of course, she was not. Someone was impersonating her. Years later then it was not the real Agnese, who was rumored by religious zealots to have been privately and mystically visited by gentle angels and even the Infant Christ in her convent quarters, whose corpse, aged 49 years, was lying in repose within that audaciously scented burial box -- heavily laced with a hypnotic drug that made passers-by feel disoriented by the Spirit's presence -- on that star-struck Montepulciano piazza. That was how, at dusk on a strange evening, a naive and curious little farm girl, made dizzy by the odor from the box, next to her siblings, indeed her entire sharecropping familia, roughly jostled and nearly crashed down the makeshift wooden bier, while tall, thick candles burned brightly and dark smoke trails wound around madly in the mountain winds, smudged the looming oaken cross nearby, and stretched up toward a blinking north star. That was a crucial moment in this mystery, Raimondo thought. A timorous farm girl almost spilled all of the chestnuts about the ruse then and there.
While he conducted his long research project in Montepulciano, Raimondo longed to see Caterina again. She was intriguing. So full of God-given and youthful life. Barely in the 21st year of her earthly sojourn, Raimondo pictured her in the bustling city of Rome. Caterina had lately confessed to the friar that she had for a time endured a series of nighttime visits received in her personal prayer chamber from holy angels and then Blessed Dominic himself, who of course, as Raimondo knew, had been long been dead and buried. Like the lovely Caterina, Dominic habitually fingered his well-worn prayer beads in the candle-glow of nightfall. He sought her private company whenever he could in the interior comfort of the Dominican house for women. But the anxious detective, Raimondo de Capua, persevered with his assigned task away from Rome. He did not leave to visit Caterina. He interviewed, studied, asked probing questions, tarried on some days, and wrote tirelessly about Agnese -- and he laid awake night after night. The beautiful Caterina was forever on his mind.
Raimondo prepared to turn back from the twilight-streaked window. He pulled out his loop of prayer beads. But something, a very slight movement, caught the friar's eye. It was a person walking this time up the sloping road from the Val di Chiana. The woman struggled to trudge forward in the steady chill breezes. Her black over-cloak with the full hood was pulled up tight to her breast and around her head to battle the effects of the cold. She must have forgotten to say something to me, Raimondo thought at first. Yet the idea of her returning to his private quarters at this hour made him testy. The woman waved toward him urgently. Was she beckoning him to come out to join her?
The surprised friar pushed his front door open. He felt reluctant to do so. Yet Raimondo left so instantly that he forgot to put on his warm winter wrap. He prepared to be befuddled by what he would hear. In seconds he was freezing outside. And, as destiny would have it, the aging peasant woman's disclosure delayed significantly Raimondo's return to Rome and his beloved Caterina. His re-entry to the eternal city would not occur for almost two thoughtful and discovery-packed years in Montepulciano and beyond.
>>>>>>>>
Fall, 1281: Agnese Dreams of an Etruscan Love
Agnese, a fetching young lady, sat proudly astride her beautiful roan horse. They trotted toward the Porta al Prato at the end of town near the steep hillside ledge, a descending limestone formation that took horse and rider on a twisting old road to the Val di Chiana. They rode past the beginnings of thick stone walls that were freshly quarried and would in time grow high enough to envelope the entire Renaissance community of Montepulciano.
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Montepulciano and the Val di Chiana |
The year was 1281. Agnese was a beautiful young woman of fourteen years, but a very lonely one too. The season of autumn had arrived. She spurred the roan forward, aiming for the copse of trees nearby. They would pace slowly now to the placid little lake. Agnese would day dream amidst the pretty trees about her life as the loving and faithful Queen to King Porsena and his Etruscan army, the strong and fierce warriors that had bravely marched through the blooming Val di Chiana to the outer edges of Rome, then laid seige to conquer the legendary Romans almost 1700 years ago. Surely that was a noble and romantic age!, Agnese believed. She pulled Cassi to a standstill. She gazed for long minutes up and down the old valley road. Queen Agnese of the Etruscan region, clothed in rich purple and gold garments, wearing a proper crown, perched regally atop her snorting, spirited warhorse. The Queen imagined her powerful ruler, Porsena the King, leading his sure-footed legions toward the ruthless Roman region. In time, the bold and striking Porsena would return via the limestone roadway to once again join her, a beloved and faithful consort and (at last) a legendary conqueror.
Agnese broke off this daydream. Feelings of loneliness and abandon immersed her again. Her parents were preoccupied with their emotionally ill son, Arnoldo, her twin brother, who was so devastated by his gender. The Segni parents insisted that Agnese would travel to Proceno in a matter of days with the odd newcomers, the young Dominican women, so as to stay indefinitely in the new monastery. This, they trusted, would make them more apt to aid the struggling Noldo, who was increasingly prone to outbursts of anger, dressing and walking about like Agnese herself, running away for days, and (dare she admit this complicated secret he had confided?) a drive to subsist as a true female. Remarkably, her had shown her his hairless chest and arms, and the small conical breasts, that were somehow blossoming on his upper torso.
If only I had been born in those noble days of Porsena. This would all fade away, she sighed. Let us go, my sweet Cass.
Horse and rider slow-gaited toward the thicket of chesnuts. Agnese's gleaming red hair and slim shoulders under her riding cape bounced lightly in the sun. The body of the roan, then the body of the teenaged rider, pierced the curtain of green and gray forest swaying in the breezes. Each step that Cassi took pressed them deeper into that verdant density. Then, with a swish of the roan's tail and another sure-footed step, they were all swallowed into the copse, invisible to all outside of it. Agnese du Segni felt a sudden rush of expectation. Her hands became shaky. Once inside the shaded grove, she sensed something menacing that laid in wait for her. Was that a slight movement from behind that tree?, she wondered with a start. Then, before many minutes had elapsed, Agnese was transported to the unknown forever, a bright star gone dark -- never to be seen or heard again.
* * * *
Less than one hour passed. A masked figure in a black riding cloak with a generous black hood rode the roan at full speed out of the forest grove. Quickly, they turned toward a forgotten old trail. A curtain of light auburn hair was splayed across the rider's forehead. The trail way took the horse and its frantic companion toward a field of vines that led around to the backside of hilly Montepulciano. It would prove to be a hard and steep lunge for the horse and rider to go up the ancient trail, until they crested at the mostly unwatched southern side of the classical piazza. The goal was to sneak unseen into a cramped and dimly lit chamber, the crypt area, of the shadowed capella of the Resurrection. There awaited a selfish and greedy little man, a prince of the holy Church, from Orvieto. Arnoldo knew his name of course: Cardinal Casanova Bentivenga. His eminence had relentlessly curried the favor of the sickly Pope Nicholas while still a bishop. Soon he had been appointed the Dean of the College of Cardinals and, as some said in confidence, the ruthless Queen of the Conclave. The new Cardinal had once fallen just a solitary vote short in a bitter political tussle to become the Supreme Pontiff in Roma. It was now likewise a fact that Cardinal Bentivenga, the black prince with the blood-red hat and a madman's evil stare, had just coldly blackmailed the weak Noldo, his eminence's most tender physical prey, into committing a heinous crime against his innocent Agnese, the twin sister who had to disappear utterly, and the whole wealthy Segni clan. As usual, the scheming Cardinal Bentivenga had a devious plan in mind-- and that secret plan would unexpectedly bear varietal fruits for fifty years, like the pertinacious vineyards left behind in Montepulciano soil by Romans.
Noldo felt frantic and sweat-stained. He burst through the chamber door. He pushed back the black hood. His long auburn hair was damp and stringy. His hands and forearms were concealed inside his large cloak. There was one candle with a small flame lighting the crypt area.
Bentivenga turned his panther-black eyes toward the teenaged boy who wished to be a girl. His eminence asked, 'She is . . . ?'
'Yes. Gone . . . forever. And so am I. As you have planned. The corpus will never be discovered. The assassin you dispatched into the woods to help me completed his ruthless work quite easily. At first, he hit her so hard that two of my lovely sister's teeth popped out. There was so much blood. I recovered one of them. ' Arnoldo withdrew his hand and arm from the cloak and displayed the bloody tooth in his palm. He began to cry when he saw it. It was his last piece of her. He gripped it more tightly.
'Ah, get rid of that, young fool! It ties you directly to your supposed and hasty disappearance.' The evil stare was fixed on the young man. 'Yet I see that you have brought the delicate horse, as I instructed. Good. I will ride her to my villa tonight, then plan to meet you once more in Proceno's gardens soon enough. I have taken an enormous risk to come here for you. You must journey in several days to the convent, we have discussed, with the new postulants. No argument will I hear! Do as I command. No one in the troupe will know you. These Dominican students are newly-arrived in Tuscany.You must go without objection and in proper spirits. Understood? Put on a proper show. Do not let down your disguise. Agnese then will have begun to find her proper calling in the monastic life, as will you, my boy. You will be my charge, happy. You will be costumed perfectly according to our plan, you hear?' Bentivenga said.
Arnoldo nodded at the irony. For you.
The Dean of the Sacred College stood. The time for the fulfillment of his carnal urges had come. He slowly removed the scarlet galero from his head. His string of polished prayer beads, worn like a decorative belt, clacked loudly on the wood floor. He began fiddling with the equally scarlet fascia wound around his expanding waist, the striking hue symbolizing the very blood he must be willing to shed in defending the holy faith. 'Now turn around. Lean, my little pet. Lean against that,' Bentivenga commanded. The Cardinal reached out for the black cape that covered Noldo's back. The red prince began breathing harder.
Arnoldo obeyed hastily. He steadied himself with both hands against the propped-up oaken door. He shut his eyes tight. He clenched his hands firmly. Casanova Bentivenga brushed up against him. His unholy hands searched for Noldo's budding chest. The boy instantly felt nauseated. Furiously, he vomited the meager remains of his midday meal into the crypt. Noldo strangely thought about the wooden door in his shaking hands, as he caught his breath. These oak boards would someday be lowered over a fresh corpse entombed in the capella's mud floor. Noldo imagined. The Cardinal roughly pulled the auburn hair on the back of Noldo's head. Noldo jumped, startled. His right hand's grasp on the door gave way. The jagged, bloody tooth of his twin sister slipped from his fingers and plunged down into the rectangular pit.
As this tragic scene unfolded, Arnoldo, the victim, the victimizer, and the grief-stricken, and the impious and sinful Cardinal Dean could not foresee another scene that would also play out in this blessed room in years hence. For herein the ludricrously-fragrant physical remains of the expired Dominican Prioress -- which were, in truth, the reeking bodily remains that belonged to Arnoldo the brother, not his erstwhile sibling --would be united forever with a ghastly little relic. It was now lying down in the burial hole, a jagged and bloody tooth, donated unwillingly by the dear, departed Agnese: a red-stained incisor that had just been smashed violently from her tender and truthful mouth by a bastard's fist in the semi-darkness of the swaying grove, near the marshy grounds adjacent to Lake Montepulciano.
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April, 1370: Raimondo the Incorruptible Finds Agnese
Three things cannot long be hidden
-- the sun, the moon, and the truth.
-- The Buddha
| Raymond of Capua |
The Dominican legenda from Capua, Fray Raimondo, had longed for many months to be reunited, far from the hilly terrain of Montepulciano, with Caterina Benincasa of Siena -- the Christian mystic, the philosopher, a gifted writer, a diplomatic peacemaker, and his spiritually vulnerable friend. His sojourn in the Montepulciano region and beyond had been productive but extended. The time for the desired reunion had finally arrived.
The two Dominican friends sat together on a secluded bench in a beautiful flower garden near the saintly woman's abode and beside the entrance to the legendary cemetery of the Santa Maria sopra Minerva Church. They wore the traditional black and white garb of their religious order and occasionally held hands. Catherine had begun to cry once Friar Raimondo reported all that he had learned, a certain and bitter set of truths, during his extended sojourn in Montepulciano and beyond. He had been afraid that that might happen. In fact, Raimondo felt like crying about the real Agnese 's blighted fate too.
Upon returning to Caterina's side in this sweet garden, Raimondo felt immediately disturbed by his female friend's apparent condition. Had she truly deteriorated so much mentally and physically? Her moods seemed alternately ecstatic then forlorn. Her thinking seemed unstable. She looked pale and frail from eating too little in her cramped personal quarters and laboring much too hard most of the time, both day and night. At one point Sister Catherine spoke at great length about visits to her private cell at night by the Lord Jesus. Quietly, in mystic flights of fancy, she related to the friar that she had accepted the Savior as her one, true spouse. Caterina even maintained that the couple had physically consummated their spiritual union once again just days before. She showed her confessor a ring that she now wore on her left hand, a gift to her from heaven, she said. (Later, Caterina swore that it was the preserved and gilded, post-circumcision foreskin of the baby Jesus from Nazareth miraculously crafted for her in heaven into a finger ring.) The alarming disclosures that came from Caterina's mouth disturbed her confessor and male companion to the core.
Caterina had read Raimondo's complete written testimony about the secret, horrible fates of Agnese and Arnoldo du Segni. It had summoned bitter tears to her sad eyes. The sound of her crying bruised Raimondo's heart. The key to solving the squalid mystery had come into focus for the dedicated friar like a twinkling star comes into view suddenly as evening in the north sky grows black. Raimundo's inquisitive but suspicious eye had been riveted by the sight of the humble peasant woman returning so soon up the road from the Val di Chiana to him, her dark cloak and hood clutched tightly around her to fend off the bitter winds. Suddenly, she seemed to beckon the friar to hurry out to her.
This must not be happening, not now. Perhaps, Raimondo thought, I am the one who is seeing things. He imagined the dizzying smell emanating from Mother's burial bier. The friar rubbed his eyes. Yet, there she was, standing expectantly in the cold. Signalling urgently to him. He passed through his front door without his overcoat intending to hear her out.
Good friar, I have very little time left. I am in a great rush. And the night is growing harsh with cold. I must return home to my family very soon. I have come back because I have remembered something from long ago that might prove important to you. About a day when my madre was just a little child, like I was on that strange evening in the piazza for Mother Agnese's burial. She related to me once I reached womanhood to remember a certain thing if ever, she repeated firmly the word ever, someone in responsibility ever questioned me about either Agnese, her cherished horse, or the dead Prioress. On an evening shortly after Arnoldo du Segni had disappeared, my mama's father -- my grandfather, he was -- was taking the family wagon full of grapes slowly from our farmland up the road that stretches from the Val di Chiana toward our hilltop town. He planned to drop off the harvest at the old winemaker's shop. My mother rode with him that evening as a special treat for her, as did her brother, my favorite uncle. In light , holy friar, of what you have said to me today, what happened next takes my breath away still. My mother told me about it. As the family wagon wheels ground slowly toward the town, a charging horse, a tall and shapely roan, came bounding over a hillock toward the road. It was approaching dusk at the time, so making things out with one's eyes was becoming difficult. Yet my grandfather instantly recognized the fine roan. It was Castanea -- the beautiful mount that was proudly cherished by Agnese du Segni. The mighty steed ran past our family wagon undaunted, then continued downslope toward a large expanse of oak and chesnut trees. When Castanea reached the edge of the copse she pulled up and stamped the ground. For minutes the horse walked back and forth near the tree line. It was, my mama told me, as if the young, innocent Agnese had charged her roan to go searching for someone -- or something. My grandfather mumbled and shook his head as he beheld this. Then, seconds later, over a nearby crest, a large male figure with a flowing black riding cloak, topped by a generous black hood, galloped after the runaway roan. The black rider approached the du Segni horse on the margin of the the forest grove. My grandfather sensed that the young Agnese would never allow her wonderful friend Castanea to run free and without a guide. The horse should have been with Agnese or already put down in her stable for the night. But she was certainly not bedded down. How could that be? My grandfather knew that he should not pose questions about what he had seen. Curiosity could lead to great trouble, family anguish perhaps. With the stealthy appearance of the black rider, the old man feared that powerful people were somehow involved in something unsavory. He commanded my mother and her brother, my beloved uncle, to never speak about what they had witnessed from the wagon that evening. But later my mama told me all about the incident. At the time, I could not puzzle out the mystery on my own. I did not grasp what she was trying to tell me in a cloaked way.
Raimondo nodded sagely. Then he shivered from the cold. He grasped the message from the long-dead parent immediately. It had survived, barely, locked away for decades, in the memory of the simple peasant woman.
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The friar thought about key sections of the imposing text that he had placed in Caterina's hands. He had pondered them in solitude on dozens of recent occasions.
Raimondo told her, 'So my dear Caterina, a great clamor arose throughout the insular village of Montepulciano once the young esquire, Arnoldo, could not be located for days. Rumors and unofficial reports in the village indicated that his parents were immersed in anguish. Castanea the roan was very restless throughout those hours, neighed wildly and kicked the big wooden door to her stall, thus creating a great commotion. Villagers throughout Montepulciano said that the du Segni familia wondered if a plot had been hatched against them by a rival clan. They worried that their remaining children were targeted for harm. Agnese's parents were satisfied that Arnoldo's twin had been ensconced safely and quickly behind secure convent walls at Proceno. They concentrated with associates and employees on following, perhaps recovering, the troubled Noldo. But as weeks passed, it was widely speculated that Noldo's troubled emotional state had led him to willfully disappear. Many townspeople intimated that he had consorted secretly with unsavory characters and that caused the frail and flighty boy, Noldo, to suffer an untimely demise.'
The earnest friar paused to take a breath. This will be painful to her, he knew.
'Dearest Caterina, I know deep in my heart that you idolized the saintly Mother Agnese. Many others did so as well. She did much good throughout her many faithful years of service to God's people. She lived a holy existence. She bestowed concern and mercy on all who came to her. Her corporal and spiritual works are legendary. But hear me, please, Caterina, my most dear friend. There are numerous documents throughout all regions of Italy that elucidate stories of persons who have sought, ardently and . . . secretly, to morph, to change over, to become disguised, in all apparent ways into figures of the opposite sex. My investigations indicate, though, that never before has there been a proven tale of a young male who switched places with his redolent and guiltless twin, by arranging or helping with her death, then adopting a most remarkable female disguise to beguile the world. Not until this day. How the benighted scion, Arnoldo, must have missed his parents and his twin, Agnese, during his lengthy seclusion in Proceno and thereafter.'
Raimondo detected a look of alarm and then great displeasure in the gentle Caterina's eyes.
'My study has led me to conclude that Arnoldo was probably blackmailed by his vile abuser, the Cardinal, Bentivenga, until the old villain, and his bastard, the black henchman, were assassinated by poison in Orvieto. Cardinal and son were brought to their Maker by a different male sexual victim one would assume. The lives of Noldo's parents hung in the balance for a time as well, I am sure. Noldo was surely threatened that both he and they would die terrible deaths if he ever confessed his criminal victimhood at the crimson hands of the Church. The death of his twin would afford him a way out of his predicament. So, capitulation and hopelessness led him to adopt the feminine identity, the Dominican sisters' traditional garb, a change for which oddly he had hungered in his mysterious and suffering soul. By all accounts Arnoldo was a thin and beautiful boy enthralled for a time by the sinful churchman and his immoral, bastard son. But once he began to deeply experience this nightmare, replete with his unforgiven guilt, he, she, was converted by the Almighty to a life of merciful works, selfless charity, and fervent prayer. But in fact it was a life built upon a long ruse, once his Roman tormentor's physical assaults had abated.'
Raimondo looked down thoughtfully. 'Good sister, perhaps the gentle young lady, Agnese, never really sensed the atrocious plot at hand -- never grasped the great danger that was creeping into her family's life. Yet perhaps, sadly, on some level, she actually did but she remained powerless to reverse that tainted fortune.'
That was truth. Having disclosed it to the pious Caterina, the earnest Raimundo immediately sensed that the course of his labor on the biography of the Prioress would soon be altered significantly. The friar was an intuitive, a gifted researcher, and a practiced essayist. Yet, above all, Raimundo the Dominican was a prayerful mendicant who served without fatigue as an upright and loyal son of Mother Church. It seemed clear that the tale of the du Segni twins, and the ugly avarice and murderous frailties that it revealed, had the power to mislead, confuse, and hurt the simple people at all levels of God's holy sheepfold in Italy and beyond.
Caterina blotted with a woven cloth some tears flowing from her eyes. At last, she whispered hotly: 'Dear sir, the Prioress was my trusted teacher, my treasured heartbeat, my north star shining brightly in the night. Would I have not sensed that something was terribly amiss?
'Mother Agnese performed great deeds. She bestowed solace and mercy to all who came to her. Foy many years! This is the truth. Mother was even graced by a visit from the Infant Lord in her private cell. You know the faithful will be deeply pained -- no, they will be deeply pained and scandalized -- to learn of this sordid account," she said. "You must re-write it, good friar. Relate the truth'
Raimundo eased his upper frame back heavily. He did not appreciate Caterina's surly tone. He was reluctant to concur with his beloved. More warm tears ran down her cheeks. He squeezed her hand.
'The Holy Church will suffer a horrific scandal. You must make changes. Avoid the evil that will befall the Church, good Raimundo,' she added.
He was stunned that the youthful but stalwart Caterina Benincasa would plead with him.
But that there would be scandal widespread was not to be argued. The church was full of simple believers. So, the humble friar, a loyal son and servant of the Holy Mother Church, the lady Caterina's sensitive confessor and brilliant confidante, already knew what he would do.
Raimondo would begin his writing endeavor afresh. Caterina would be appeased. His judicious labor would commence at dawn as the stars faded in the gray sky and as rays of light from the sun began to rise.
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Caterina Marries the Lord Jesus in Her Cell |
The song soundtrack for A Dark Star --
"Going Home" by Leonard Cohen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQlLWnbco_I
* Author's Note --
Long before Newton, LaPlace, and Cavendish, astronomers and early physicists speculated on the existence of "dark stars" -- stars that actually are invisible. Explained by complicated Newtonian mechanics, light that is emitted at the surface of a dark star is trapped and held within the star’s gravity -- thus rendering it completely dark. Hence the name "dark star."
Unlike another phenomenon in the universe called the black hole, in the case of a dark star the 'object' behind the horizon is assumed to be stable against collapse. It is reliably there, with mass and stability, but it is unrecognizable (you just cannot see it) due to the implosion of light.
People have asked what is the meaning? of the story about your Dark Star." This note should provide a little insight with regard to that question.
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