Carole Maso - Mother and Child - A Novel

One by one they were falling asleep.

She was falling into the smoke-filled Valley of Sleep. But for the baby, she might have succumbed. On her hands and knees she crawled over the sleepers in an effort to get closer to the window.

SHE WONDERED WHERE the Spiegelpalais had come from — why it had materialized, and why, in the end, it had gone away. One day it was just there, and she could not remember, after a time, having ever lived without it. It seemed always to have been in her presence. And just as it had appeared from nowhere, and out of nothing, so it had now disappeared, and she could no longer be sure that it had ever existed at all. All that remained was the longing for something: large, circular, luminous, very beautiful — but what? She wept, for soon she knew even the memory of the Spiegelpalais would vanish.

SEE THE INTENSE immobility of the mother. The mother had been put into a twilight state. She saw that the bat swooped around her head in shallow circles, but there was nothing she could do about it. The circumference of a circle in Romania is determined by the diameter of the arc made by those heat- and halo-seeking creatures. Saint Stanislav, patron saint of Poland, throws a discus or a Frisbee to them, lifts his hand as if in protection, and gives a benediction. The mother, in a twilight state, feels something like fear. She has no idea what part she is being asked to play. But it is a part, now hers, that she will not relinquish.

WITH SOME DREAD and some excitement, she stepped into the capsule. More than anything, she wanted to be a winged thing. She lowered her head and assumed the pose she had seen in the great science books of the Fathers. She tucked her head down to her chest. Slowly her eyes blackened and grew liquid. Her legs were pressed together, and her feet were crossed one over the other as is often depicted in the crucifixion.

She was wrapping herself in filaments, threads, gossamer, papery thin skins. Brown leaf-like strands were attaching themselves to her back. All was quiet. In a stillness, which seemed to signify a coming into being, and also the sloughing off of being, she was enclosing herself slowly in a firm case.

When the child came upon the mother, she was already wrapped in her mesh dress. Wrapped like a little mummy princess in papyrus and rags. Her gold-leafed head was elongated, her inky eyes had blackened, her appendages were immovable. She was gold-encrusted, sun-soaked, sessile, remote. Her pupa hung motionless and mute. Seeing her mother like this, the child, for the first time, begins to cry.

There is the mother like a mirage at the end of the Sphinx Road, and though the child walks toward her — the mother comes no closer. Now she was spinning more and more threads.

Moth pupae are usually dark in color and formed in underground cells, loose in the soil, their pupae contained in protective silk called a cocoon. Cocoons may be tough or soft, opaque or translucent, solid or webby, of various colors or of multiple layers. Insects that pupate in a cocoon must escape it.

PUPAE ARE IMMOBILE and have few defenses. Some species are capable of making sounds or vibrations to scare off potential predators, or sometimes just for communication. The child waited outside. She hoped her mother was the sort of species that made sounds.

She remembered now the mother singing, Tomorrow will be my dancing day, and it pained her to think of it. Her mother wrapped tightly in thousands of overlapping filaments.

NOT TO WORRY — if the world ends at this moment, the child said, God keeps track of where all the bodies are, the ones in the ocean, the ones scattered as ashes hither and thither, the ones entombed in silk and gold filaments, silent.

THE CHILD SITS quietly next to the little mother holding the shining pod in her hand. The mother seemed to be working very hard. The mother had assured her she would be back. The child smiled. She thought that she could see at last the place where her mother’s wings had finally begun to form.

Extreme darkness pours down on them, but they are not afraid anymore.

IN THE WOOD, a girl child is breathing like a beast. The mother is careful to stay very still. She recognizes the girl from a long time ago, but wonders how it is that this girl has not changed. She has remained exactly the same. The girl can hear her mother’s voice calling to her. She becomes a brindle color and light and gallops. It is the Grandmother from the North Pole who calls, but the Grandmother is young, and her yellow hair gleams. It was a mysterious life. Every night the girl thinks of the infinite forest that lay just beyond her door: immense, dense with totems and stars. She soothes herself by pulling the darkness and the cool around her like a cloak. The girl gets out of bed and goes to find her Bird Atlas, and her book of animal tracks. She cannot wait for morning to come.

AFTER THE MOTHER had her hair shorn for the war effort, the back of her neck could be seen for the first time since childhood, and it was only then that the child noticed that she had a stork bite at the nape, as infants often have, to mark the place they had been carried before they were dropped to earth. Mysteriously, the mother’s stork bite would appear and then fade, and after a while, it would disappear altogether only to come back at another time, bright red again. It was as if she were continually being born and carried and dropped to earth, over and over. Each time she landed, she was brand new and she possessed no hindsight and no foresight; she remembered and had learned nothing — but also, the world was always new, never seen before, and she never aged.

THERE IS A fire at the center of the earth. From the fire, a child’s voice, so pure, so true, makes itself heard. It is marked by the peculiar suffering of children. It is refined, perfected — innocence and experience held in such sublime balance, and possessing wisdom, ancient and new. She could hear the child from upstairs calling her name — stranger than music, more plangent than bells, sweet in a way we have forgotten entirely. A child is reciting numbers. A child is making up a song. A Happy Dance, a Fippy Song, a Fippy Dance.

SHE WAS ENCLOSED in a firm case. She remained in her pod stationary for ten days, and each day the pod would darken. About a day before the emergence of the creature, the chrysalis would become transparent.

THERE IS SOMETHING so luminous and clear passing through the child, and so momentous. She can hardly express the grandeur she feels. She thought of the pictures of the glass pyramid in front of the Louvre and how it matched the one she carried inside her now. If there is anything the child wants to see for real before she dies, it is that glass pyramid. She closes her eyes and she sees that shape in three dimensions travelling through space.

Right before the mother emerges again, the chrysalis becomes transparent. The child thought of Blanche Neige gleaming from her glass casket. She imagined her mother would at last be perfected and her soul purified, and at that moment their transparencies might speak. What is too sublime for you, seek not; into things beyond your strength, search not, the false prophet had said. The child’s body is transparent. Blanche Neige gleaming from her glass casket is at rest — everything is shining and bright.

SHE THOUGHT OF the Luna Moth, very late at night, spinning silk, wrapped in a walnut leaf, and the slow formation of pale green wings.

THERE IS A world not yet visible but there, before us. Welcoming, not hostile. And translucent. It is a matter now of attention — of perceiving the opening in the veil through which they might slip. The Virgin appears and welcomes her through, under a mantle of blue.

AT THE LAST moment, the mother had an odd visitation. It was not exactly a visitation; it was more an intimation, but it came back with such intensity that it threatened to change the course of all that now lay fixed securely before her.