Snake preview - Excerpt

Cross Currents, Spring, 2002 by Catherine Madsen

An excerpt from the new novel A Portable Egypt. Santa, a dressmaker and a visionary, has a habit of working late in her shop and invoking otherworldly visitors for help in understanding her preoccupations. This time, as her friend Miranda (Mim) goes away for the weekend with her new lover Bob Morgenzahl (referred to once in this chapter by his Hebrew name, Aryeh ben Mordecai), she muses on the risks of their love, and turns to the supernatural figure most likely to help.

The novel will appear soon from XLibris (www.xlibris.com).

That I should hear if we should kiss

A contrapuntal serpent hiss.

--W. B. Yeats

Fig leaves. The first clothing, filched along with the fruit (the rabbis said) from the twigs of the forbidden tree. Sarita was working on satin in green and dark gold. The dyes were subtle, coppery, spreading into each other in cloudy fields with blurred uncertain boundaries. The garments would be simple: kimonos, evening wraps, bias-cut dresses, so that the eye could follow the colors without distraction. Some she would use for the linings of capes and coats; imagine a staid suit-jacket whose inner unseen face recalled lost Eden. Women sitting in law offices and boardrooms all day, caressed in secret by those colors.

There was no way to impart to the garments the tomcat smell of fig tree--and no doubt that was just as well--but she gave the cloth a faint veining of dark red as the next best thing. The sexuality of trees and of people overlapped in some curious ways, nearly always through smell: the fishy scent of maybloom, which made it preeminently the tree of fertility in old England; the frowst of chestnut, which had always made her think of ripe corn till a friend said it was like semen (and she disgraced herself by saying so to an aunt who hated the smell); the redolence of plane-tree leaves, like a woman's heat grown cool upon one's fingers. But sight too -- the sinewy upthrust of old beech trees, the intimate entanglements of birch and hemlock roots, the grooved folds of ash bark, the blatant tropical plants. Could smell be translated into sight? How strictly her work was determined by the narrowing of the senses: of the five she could use only two, sight and touch, with occasionally a faint rustle for the ears.

Sarita's profane humor did not extend to making the cloth into aprons; the wrong kind of person would buy them, the guffawing hopped-up tourist who would just as soon buy a shirt that said I GOT SCROD AT WAYNE'S WHARF. But when she found she had a long coil of satin left over from a circular lining, she did back it with muslin and roll it up, and stuff it with mung beans, and give it a high crested head and a forked tongue of wire wrapped with dark red embroidery floss. Too late she remembered the Gothic representations of the snake with a woman's torso and long golden hair; from such a snake she might have got straight answers. But as she worked--as usual, after hours, long after Mim and Bob had left the shop on their expedition -- she was gratified to observe the quiet hiss that twisted its way across the room to her. Saurus, sussurus, sibilance: a chance to question.

"Eve was working too, wasn't she?" she said, not looking up. "She was presumably a gardener. Was she learning the uses of herbs?"

The hiss broke, as with laughter. "A curious thought! What labour should she do, mother of all, before her motherhood?"

"Adam named the beasts; perhaps she named the plants. They were put in the garden to keep it."

"A little pruning, twining wayward vines, gathering myrrh-drops. Nothing to confound her. Love was her work. Once differentiate -- rib pried from rib -- the Adam longed to join, and all Eve's garden blossomed toward that end. Their task, as trees' to flower, was to embrace, by high command assigned: nor turn'd, I ween, Adam from his fair spouse, nor Eve the rites mysterious of connubial love refus'd--but there I quote. My noblest chronicler, having suppli'd such words to tell the tale, surpass'd all other tellers. Since that time -- my debt to him being great -- I speak blank verse. But what would you, Eve's daughter, know of me?"

"What I asked. It can't be that Milton was right, that Eve was a vapid beauty hanging on Adam's every pompous word." Oops, pentameter was hard to resist; she had better be careful. In this interview it was necessary to keep one's wits. "After all, the mind seeks its own labor, as the body does; there's intellectual fruition too. Wasn't she in search of that?"

"She was when she accepted fruit of me. But there is doubt -- some readers have discern'd--whether her fruit could fall before she did. Opinions vary, but (you will observe) the pair did not conceive their firstborn son till after they left Eden.

"Oh, you mean--" She tore herself out of its rhythm. "You mean the stasis of paradise. Where everything is perfect, nothing is necessary: no art, no invention, no skills. And no need to reproduce, because there's no death."

The serpent's eyes -- opal buttons -- glowed with an inward pleasure. Apparently it found Santa an apt pupil. "But on that point some differ. Death, 'tis said, might have been chosen freely--time and means--had man not disobey'd (though mortal still). Just so conception -- had not your mother Eve so pliant prov'd to my fork'd reasoning -- might have been chosen, subject to the will; and then had fruitfulness not been disgrace, nor accident made parents of the young, nor Adam's children, wild, o'ergrown the world."