3
Here is the most important incident of her new life. In the winter of 1678-1679 another marriage project developed. Everybody, even Anastasie, wanted Catherine Tekakwitha to have her cunt opened. Here in this Christian village, or there among the heathens, it was all the same. Every community was, by its nature, ultimately secular. But she had sailed her cunt away and it did not matter who came to claim it, a Mohawk brave or a Christian hunter. There was a nice young fellow they had in mind. Not only that, but the relative who had rescued her and who provided for her sustenance hadn’t thought for a moment that misty morning that he was assuming a lifetime economic obligation.
– I won’t eat anything.
– It’s not the food, dear. It’s just unnatural.
She ran in tears to le P. Cholenec. He was a wise man who lived in the world, lived in the world, lived in the world.
– Well, my child, they have a point.
– Arrrrggghhhh!
– Think about the future. The future starves.
– I don’t care what happens to my body.
But you care about her body, don’t you, my old friend and disciple?
4
Th ere was great fervor in the mission. Nobody liked his skin too much. Their pre-baptismal sins hung about their necks like the heavy tooth necklaces they had thrown away, and they sought to erase those old shadows with rigorous penitence. “Ils en faisaient une rigoureuse pénitence,” says le P. Cholenec. Here are some of the things they did. Think of the village as a mandala or a Brueghel game painting or a numbered diagram. Look down at the mission and see the bodies distributed here and there, look down from a hovering helicopter at the distribution of painful bodies in the snow. Surely this is a diagram to be memorized on the cushion of your thumb. I haven’t got time to make this description gory. Just read it through the prism of your personal blisters, and of those blisters choose the one you got by mistake. They liked to draw blood from their bodies, they liked to pull some of their blood outside. Some wore iron harnesses with spikes on the inside. Some wore iron harnesses to which they attached a load of wood which they dragged everywhere they went. Here is a naked woman rolling in the 40-below snow. Here is another woman buried up to her neck in a drift beside the frozen river, reciting her Rosary in this strange position, and let us remember that the Indian translation of this angelic salutation takes twice as long to say as the French one. Here is a naked man chopping a hole in the ice, and then he lowers himself in up to his waist, and then he recites “plusieurs dizaines de chapelet.” He pulls out his body like an ice mermaid, the erection perpetuated as it formed. Here is a woman who took her three-year-old daughter into the hole, because she wanted to expiate the child’s sins in advance. They waited for the winter, these converts, and they stretched their bodies before it, and it passed over them like a huge iron comb. Catherine Tekakwitha got an iron harness and she stumbled through her duties. Like St. Thérèse she could say, “Ou souffrir, ou mourir.” Catherine Tekakwitha came to Anastasie and asked:
– What do you think is the most horrible painful thing?
– My daughter, I don’t know anything worse than fire.
– Me neither.
This is a documented conversation. It took place on a Canadian winter across the solid river from Montréal in 1678. Catherine waited until everyone was asleep. She went down to the cross beside the river and built a fire. Then she spent several slow hours caressing her pathetic legs with hot coals, just as the Iroquois did to their slaves. She had seen it done and she always wanted to know what it felt like. Thus she branded herself a slave to Jesus. I refuse to make this interesting, old friend, it wouldn’t be good for you, and all my training might be for nothing. This is not an entertainment. This is play. Besides, you know what pain looks like, that kind of pain, you’ve been inside newsreel Belsen.
5
Kneeling at the root of the wood cross Catherine Tekakwitha prayed and fasted. She did not pray that her soul should be favored in heaven. She did not fast so that her marriage would never nourish history. She did not cut her stomach with stones so that the mission would prosper. She did not know why she prayed and fasted. These mortifications she performed in a poverty of spirit. Never believe that the stigmata do not hurt. Never make a decision when you have to pee. Never stay in the room when your mother has her fortune told. Never think that the Prime Minister envies you. You see, darling, I have to trap you on an altar before I can tell you anything, otherwise my instruction is just a headline, just a fashion.
6
She wandered through the leafy woods on the south bank of the Saint Lawrence River. She saw the deer start from the thicket, listening even in the arc of his leap. She saw the rabbit disappear into his burrow. She heard the squirrel rattling in his hoard of acorns. She watched a pigeon building a nest in a pine
