The American Lady(35)

“Wherever have I ended up?” she muttered when she saw Pandora coming back toward her. She pointed in surprise at the glasses the dancer was carrying. “Where did you conjure those from?”

Pandora smiled. “Let’s not waste our breath talking about this dive. You’ll see soon enough that the venue is all part of Sherlain’s art. And as you can see, it’s not quite so uncivilized as all that.”

Marie sipped her wine while Pandora told her more about the poet. If Marie still believed that Pandora was eccentric, she was soon corrected. Compared to Sherlain, Pandora was as mild as a lamb!

Sherlain had left her husband and their seven-year-old son when she was twenty-four years old, and broken off ties with her whole extended Irish family. She raged against the Irish church, accusing it of stifling the life of its flock and of being the enemy of pleasure and a pack of hypocrites. It hadn’t taken long for Sherlain’s family to denounce her in turn; her father had forbidden anyone, mother, cousin, or uncle, to speak to Sherlain ever again. Even her son was not allowed to talk to her. They were forbidden to so much as mention her name. It was as though she had never existed.

“That’s all a bit much, isn’t it?” Marie asked, frowning. “How does your friend manage on her own?”

“She gets by,” Pandora answered with a shrug, then continued.

Once she had left respectable society, it didn’t take long for Sherlain to run into money trouble. She lived in a damp basement flat without a single window. Some weeks the poet was so weak with hunger that she couldn’t even get out of bed. Friends brought her food, though she was loath to accept it.

“But why does she do all this? She could write poems even with a husband and child,” Marie said in dismay.

Pandora just shook her head.

Sherlain believed that she was a kind of Celtic goddess. When she turned her back on the Irish church, she had taken up the old Celtic rites of her country. Heathen rites, Pandora explained.

“Of course it’s just a way of breaking society’s rules,” she said in a matter-of-fact voice. “But Sherlain finds her salvation in words. Sometimes she’ll stay up all night long writing, and by morning, she has a single poem. Just one.”

Marie raised her eyebrows. “I don’t want to say anything unkind about your friend . . . but do you really think I can learn anything from her that will help with the dry spell I’m going through?”

“You’ll have to decide that for yourself,” Pandora answered cheerfully.

There was a stir among the crowd at the front.

“It looks as though things are about to get started. Come on, let’s go up to the front!”

Privately Marie had already packed Sherlain away in a box and pasted on a label with the word “Madwoman.” But then a thought came to her: a lot of what Pandora said about her friend was very much like what Alois Sawatzky had told her about the German poet Else Lasker-Schüler. She lived in dire poverty too, had broken with conventional society, and lived her life according to some “cosmic laws” or whatnot. There must be something special about these madwomen after all . . .

Suddenly a drum pounded, breaking her train of thought.

Four young men, all cloaked in white robes, set out dozens of candles in a circle and lit them. All at once a tension filled the air, as though a thunderstorm were brewing. A shiver ran down Marie’s spine.

The poet came into the hall, dressed in a billowing silk robe. Her rusty red hair glowed as though on fire and hung loosely down her back with not a clasp or hairpin anywhere. The drum pounded again, and the four young men bowed deeply.

Marie swallowed hard. She had been determined not to let this crazy poet impress her, but no sooner had Sherlain knelt down inside the circle of candles than Marie was utterly transported.

What a woman! What an aura she had! All of a sudden Marie found herself thinking, She’s a goddess.

Sherlain lit a cigarette. Instead of inhaling, however, she spluttered in disgust and coughed it back out. Then she began to recite from a scrap of paper, without a word of greeting or introduction, between drags at the cigarette. At first she was quiet, so quiet that many at the back of the crowd couldn’t hear her at all. Her voice grew louder, though, after the first few words.



. . . seven summers, seven sins,

hell above me, sweet haven below

my memory lost in glorious mercy

my shell empowered with lust . . .



Another shiver ran down Marie’s back, an unsettling prickling feeling, as she listened to the poetry with her eyes closed. The sounds of American English were still strange to her but she heard the joy in the bright vowels, i and e, and the sadness in the dark u’s and o’s. Sherlain’s voice changed from one moment to the next, sometimes soft, sometimes hard. She was a musician, coaxing her voice like an instrument, making sounds it had never been intended to create.