Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Chapter Seven

Chapter Seven

Magdalena was waiting for Paul in the Rat in M.I.U.’s Student Union Building. She sat shivering in a gloomy corner, the light reflecting off the pure white of her over-sized sweater. She’d chosen the white one because Paulito loved the way she looked in white. “Estupidos!” she hissed. They had the air conditioning going full blast but the weather was wet and cold. She tossed her head, reached up with both hands to lift rhe long black hair from her shoulders and dropped it. An attractive guy at a nearby table gave her the once over. She turned away, face an icy mask.
No, senor. I am not for you! Paul is my man. She knew, without a doubt. Saw proof in the way his long, serious face opened, defenseless before her. Felt it in the way his body responded to hers. Knew by the way they communicated without speaking, energy flowing in their glances, between their eyes and hands. She was as precious as music to him. His need made her feel powerful.
Her man, the first to really appreciate all of her; from the cuddly purring sex kitten to the cold almost cruel clinician. She could guide and nurture him or turn him on as she chose. He was totally responsive to her, accepting her limits, not pushing beyond where she wanted to go. She could let her hair down with him and let the moods flow and carry them both away.
She knew he adored her 132 pound, 5'7" body because he'd kissed and licked just about every inch of it. His easy willingness was more than a comfort to Magdalena, it was a requirement. She needed the sense of physical and mental control she had with Paul. Because once, long ago, when she'd needed it most, it hadn't been there.
The men she knew then hadn't treated her as Paul did now. They weren’t fascinated by the combination of sensitivity, sexuality and intelligence. They'd only sensed the powerful female musk, and reacted to her warmth and friendliness as if they had been promiscuity.
And they'd been right. For in the beginning, when she was twelve, in Cali, Colombia, where she was born, it had been promiscuity. Not because she'd wanted it to be, but because it had to be.
She’d been as fascinated by her ripening body as were the men around her. They seemed to smell the difference in her. And of all the new sensations the blossoming sexuality brought, this power to command a man’s attention was the one she liked best.
But it bothered her, too, and she struggled against it. Afterall, she was a good girl and wanted to stay that way. Yet this powerful attraction, so very different from how things were supposed to be in Church and school, was strong, nearly irresistible.
Giving in to the surging sensations, letting them guide and nurture her, made men treat her differently. Senor de la Vega, her science teacher, and Senor Enrique at the Church Youth Group seemed more attentive and talkative. Even Joaquin, the family handyman who'd known her since she was a child, looked at her with new eyes.
After those first shocking blood-stained mornings a few months after her twelfth birthday, it felt like she was under a spell. Going about with a small vacant smile, attention turned inward, she felt as if the awakening sensations were singing to her. She touched herself constantly.
There were lucid moments when she felt peaceful, whole and normal; moments when her energy was balanced and she was able to think about school, her family and God. Those were the times that kept her sane and gave Magdalena and her family the strength for the other times.
But they were only moments. The sexual power was dominating more and more of her thoughts. . . her life. One Sunday morning in Church, seven months after her twelfth birthday, she ceased struggling against the burgeoning power, and just drifted away.
Intelligence drained from her vibrant heart-shaped face, the vacant smile re-appeared and her attention turned inward to the song her body was singing. Her nipples grew hard and she touched them. Her vagina grew moist and she touched it.
Magdalena's mother sensed the change. Elena Renaldo turned toward her daughter's empty smile, saw the hardness of Magdalena's nipples through the flimsy white dress and looked down to see her legs twitching and shifting. Reaching for the child’s hand, Elena lowered it from the child’s youthful breast and held it tightly, resting it between them on the wooden pew. Elena's own sexual awakening had been similarly powerful and she had immense compassion for her daughter.
Elena's husband Rafael shared his wife's wisdom. He glanced across Magdalena's two younger sisters, Beatriz and Anna, as his wife lowered Magdalena's hand.
Rafael Renaldo felt sad, not for himself or his family but for the changes that the sensitive intelligent Magdalena would endure. Thank goodness Beatriz, who was five and Anna who was three, were calm and unaware. Rafael felt in awe, struck by the unfathomable power of Life, by how it could not be denied, sweeping all before it. Magdalena was right to give in, to flow with it even as it flowed in her, boiling and spilling her blood.
Rafael Renaldo's reverie ended suddenly as Magdalena stood, shook off her mother's hand, squeezed across her two sisters, passed him and out into the aisle. He watched her walk rapidly out of the church, leaving the warm aroma of female musk lingering in the cool air. Rafael thought she'd gone to the bathroom.
The sunny warmth and noise of the street were a sharp contrast to the cool, dim quiet of the church. Magdalena felt like an escaped prisoner. At last! An outer reality to match the inner one. A pulsing rhythm to match her own!
Hesitating a moment for her eyes adjust to the light, she walked purposefully away from the Church, to the Calle de las Putas, the street of whores. Her friends had whispered about it. Once, a few months ago, they’d all passed by. That was before her awakening. She'd been a tourist then, now she was going to be a native.
Oozing musk and big for her age, Magdalena quickly attracted a man. He was her father's age. As he put an arm gently around her shoulders, she purred, tilting her head up to look into his eyes. Energy leapt between them and she had him. In spite of the difference in their ages and status, she had him. Yes, she would give herself. Yes, he would pay and could have what he wanted. But what he wanted was her -- Magdalena Renaldo.
Magdalena stayed on the Calle del Putas for five days. On the third day she began feeling sorry for her mother. She wondered how her father and sisters were. She missed her own bed and old peaceful life. She'd been with ten men. The feeling of exhilaration and control was dissipating. On the fourth day, a huge, mean, ugly pimp named Luigi roughed her up and had anal sex with her. Luigi sold her, in her torn and soiled white dress like spoiled meat, to three more men early on the morning of her fifth day. Then, at eleven o'clock, her father found her.
Rafael hugged his daughter, cried with her, walked with her and listened as she talked. They telephoned Elena. Magdalena cried to her mother and talked to her sisters.
Five months later, Rafael's company, Shell Oil, offered him a promotion to hemispheric corporate headquarters in Coral Gables, Florida. The next month, the family moved from their neighborhood of informal, red-tile-roofed homes nestled in the rolling hills of Cali, Colombia, to a new neighborhood of red-tiled-roofed homes set in the scrupulously maintained grid of Coral Gables.

Half an hour before he was to leave for his debut as Dream Group facilitator, as Magda left her home to meet him at the Rathskaller, the threatening weather finally turned wet, cold and blustery. Watching the rain drops splatter against the sliding glass door to the balcony, Paul considered his own potential to splatter.
Was the fierce weather a sign? It matched his state of mind perfectly. He was foggy about his dreams and chills ran through him when he thought about what might go wrong.
Maybe it’s too nasty to go. Maybe no body’ll show up.
His breath clouded the glass.
This was heavy coat weather.
Something more than personal fear was gnawing. Something about the weather. . . . It was a sign! Josh had told him just before he'd left.
"The textbooks say that the Aztecs believed every element: sun/fire, earth, wind and water, was a physical manifestation of a god or goddess. They also believed that these manifestations, powerful though they were, were pretty much meaningless by themselves. That is, they were not attempts by the gods to communicate with human beings. As you know, Paul, such communication always came through dreams.
"To the Aztecs, extreme elemental force, storms and such, were precursors of an important dream, either a waking dream or a sleeping dream. Storms were the gods' way of preparing human beings to receive important messages."
They were in the darkly paneled, shelf-lined study in Josh’s old 1920's home. The place was a quaint remnant of a bygone sub-tropical architectural age. Paul still wasn’t comfortable with its strange energy and creaking wooden floors. The rough beamed cathedral ceiling in the living room and arched doorways and windows reminded him of a scene from Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera. There was even a stained glass window high up in the entry alcove wall.
"I think there's more to it than that," Josh continued, "that's one of the things I want to find out this trip."
"More to what, Josh?"
"More to the generally accepted idea that the elements were merely precursors of the gods. I think the gods became the elements, changed their form and became the wind and the fire. In fact. . . ."
Josh lowered his voice to a whisper and leaned forward, drawing Paul closer to him.
"I believe the gods could be both in form and not in form. That they were really some kind of omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient energy. I think the ancient, so called 'primitive,' Aztecs knew they were dealing with pure energy and only called them 'gods' so they could manipulate that energy more efficiently."
Josh rose, walked around his massive desk and over to the nearest shelf. He picked up the greenish white human skull from its place and beckoned Paul to him. Paul rose and went to his professor.
"Hold this."
Josh slid the skull into his hands.
Paul had noticed the skull the first time he'd entered the professor's study nearly three years ago. It had seemed to glow. He'd been repelled then and didn't want to touch it now. But he didn't have a choice.
As the skull slid into his hands, he felt a tingling. His eyes went wide, breath rushed from him and he nearly dropped it,
"You feel it?" Josh asked.
"Yes," he gasped, "my God, yes! What is it?"
"That's very likely the skull of one of the most powerful ancient priestesses of the great Goddess Coatlicue. She lived four hundred years ago. I acquired her skull on my last trip to Mexico City. She was one of the most dedicated, carefully trained human beings to ever walk the planet. She was an adept using the Goddess' energy. So much so that even now, some of it remains active.”
Josh took the skull from Paul's shaking hands.
“They killed thousands of people in the name of their gods, Paul."
Josh’s voice was a quaking whisper. Returning the thing it to its place, he put an arm around Paul's shoulder and walked with him back to the big desk and the pool of light in the center of the room.
"The history books record as an irrefutable matter of fact," Josh said as they sat down, "that 10,000 people were sacrificed in a single ceremony shortly before Cortez landed. Imagine the energy released! Perhaps that priestess," he gestured to the shelf behind him, "officiated at those ceremonies. . . . And that power still lives, not just as a weak vibration in her skull, but as a potent force in our lives, today.
"Things are coming to a head for us. I feel it. Those thousands of lives were not sacrificed in vain. We are very near to finding and understanding Coatlicue's power. But I fear what such an understanding may bring. . . . As much as I want it, Lord help me, I fear it."
Now, as Paul bundled himself up to leave the apartment, his own anxiety was heightened by the memory of Dr. Wilbeth's fear. The ancient alchemists’ injunction -- "what is, isn't; and what isn't; is" - - echoed in his mind.
The almost forgotten feel of putting on the heavy coat coupled with the sights and sounds of the severe weather, momentarily disoriented him, opening him to another memory. This one of a similar storm in Dundeen, Pennsylvania, on the day of his tenth birthday.
It had fallen on a Sunday that year and because he was an altar boy, a very serious and devoted altar boy, the family scheduled his party for after the last Mass. Paul had felt a strong connection with God and wanted to worship by singing in the choir. But dad had told him that was for sissies and talked him out of it.
Father Watteau, began that Sunday morning with the reverential calm Paul found so comforting. He liked being around the priest and wanted to be like Father Watteau when he grew up. But as the elements outside the frail old church grew stronger, the old priest had grown uncharacteristically distracted and agitated.
After the Mass, as Paul, Fred Keeshan, the other altar boy, and Father Watteau changed, the wind whistled through the robing room, shaking its small windows. Their breath hung in small, frigid vapor clouds around them. The heat was turned off just before the last Mass. It didn't reach that far back in the church even when it was on. They were freezing. As they hurried to get into warmer clothes, their movements were hasty and spastic.
Suddenly, Father Watteau stopped in mid motion and stood still, the surplice hanging in his hand. His eyes glazed over and his lips turned up in a slack-jawed mindless grin. "She is coming!"
"What did you say, Father?" Paul asked.
"The Goddess!" the old priest answered. "The storm is Her chariot. I am Her Steed."
He rocked as he said that. He seemed to be tightening the muscles in his thighs and buttocks.
Fred Keeshan jabbed Paul in the ribs.
"The old fart's having an orgasm! D'you believe that?!?"
Fred was two years older than Paul and Paul didn't like his irreverence and constant sexual innuendo. Besides, this was Father Watteau, a venerable old man in his sixties and it was broad daylight in a church robing room. People like that didn't do those kinds of things in such places. But what was it then? Father Watteau was obviously in the grip of some powerful energy. The priest had never done anything like that before.
"Serve Her! Serve the Goddess. She is coming!"
Then Father Watteau awoke, a slightly embarrassed expression on his craggy face.
"What happened boys?"
"Are you O.K., Father?" Paul asked.
"Why, yes. Yes I am. But I seem to have had a dream. I don't remember it too well. What did I say, Paul?"
Paul was feeling too mixed-up to repeat the strangely erotic words.
Fred Keeshan answered, a leer on his face.
"You said, 'The goddess is coming. Serve the goddess. Sounds like something from a dirty book to me, Father."
Paul's voice was desperate, pleading with the priest to say Fred was wrong.
"What does it mean, Father?"
Father Watteau seemed embarrassed.
"I'm not sure, Paul. I'm not sure I know and I'm not sure I could explain it even if I did know."
The old priest's voice trailed off.
"It's not what Fred said, Father!" Paul demanded. "Say it’s not that!"
"No, Paul, it's not that. But people like Fred always mistake it for that."
Before the priest could say anymore, Fred guffawed. Then they heard the car horn calling them out to the parking lot for their ride home.

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