They Long to Be by Catherine McNamara

The seers or veggenti of Medjugorje are united in describing the boundless love of the Virgin. They describe a woman wearing pastel blue garments, much like the open-armed statuettes on trestle tables along the streets. The language she speaks to her intimates is a local tongue. They tell us that the Virgin is chatty and warm, though on some days her suffering for humanity is immense. We have observed Mirjane, who is one of the six seers, weeping on the hillside, looking exhausted, the lines on her face filled with rivulets. Sometimes you can see Mirjane has been to the hairdresser. Her thick blonde hair has been cut and styled.

Some of the veggenti have bought homes in the United States. Some, like Mirjane, own hotels like this one, quickly built to house the wave of pilgrims who come through every season. These are bland hotels are run cheaply by young staff. Some say the veggenti are fraudulent and self-aggrandising, and their hearts are greedy tumours. It was said that a statue was found in Mirjane’s home, wearing a coat of fluorescent paint. The Roman Church remains watchful. Investigators have been sent and each time the Virgin’s ventriloquists repeat the same polished refrains.

When Danny and Cora enter the dining hall I know they are Croatian, or the statuesque father is. He’s not a Serb, he’s a man of the coast. She’s a mix, Anglo surely; the mother has gone. They’ve caught a cheap flight from somewhere in Western Europe, then the bus through the ravines. They’re living in one of those sprawling cities that foreigners polish, foreigners who have to explain their countries in terms of vicinity to Venice, or Greece. The blank land of the Balkans. The daughter belongs to another world, she’ll not stay long in this one. She looks like Isak Dinesen at the end of her siege with love. Or Karen Carpenter with that pointy chin and the claws of her arms, all anatomy and parched organs, the scales wavering downward, the consumed heart.

There are two empty seats next to me. The worst table companions are those who suddenly realise their quest for healing is terminal. They begin to smell death under their skin, they realise it sat in the same chair last week, climbed the same hill, lay on the same pillow. The reason I am here is for my own son Tommaso, who is yet unharmed. He and his German girlfriend and some friends are riding motorbikes down through Montenegro, with the idea of crossing Albania and Greece and camping in the Cyclades. In my mind a son moving through this nervy, sparkling scenery needs prayers. They’ll be on some nudist peninsula by now, scrambling down the rocks, horseplay in the water and somebody’s saucepan on windblown flames.

There’s a black blessed rosary at the bottom of his rucksack.

Danny speaks capable English, introducing his daughter Cora. A waitress wheels the evening trolley up and presents two steaming meals. It is part of the arrangement here. Cora scowls at her plate and produces a packet of seeds.

I read that Karen Carpenter was discovered facedown in her walk-in closet by her mother, concerned that she had not come down for coffee. Karen lay down naked, ready for eternal sleep. It was said that her malady – anorexia nervosa – was scarcely understood or even pronounced at the time, and yet was it not a sister of the ecstatic, bodiless delirium achieved by the medieval female saints?

I was first brought here by a friend, Giuditta, from Trieste, who has since died. I had heard much about the qualities of this place, with its name like a sweet that has been simmered for hours, covered in fine sugar, slipped into the mouth. Medjugorje. Giuditta was born on the same day as one of the six seers, Mirjane. Each summer of her long illness she travelled here to see the apparition that Mirjane experiences on the second of each month. We clambered up a hillside to a shimmering white cross. There was an inner circle of worshippers which we were unable to penetrate. When blonde-headed Mirjane gave a signal the audience sat frozen and the only motion of this world was the nodding of Mirjane’s crown, and then her face raised upward, imploring, as she murmured to the invisible Virgin in the sky. This was all we could observe of this glowing transaction.

Afterwards, Mirjane turned to the crowd of listeners who had phones and cameras raised. Her face was wet. Her eyes a divine blue. She shared the Virgin’s message through various translators and we wept because of our proximity to an azure limpidness so childishly described. I helped Giuditta to her feet. She had grown frail by then.

In Rwanda another blue-cloaked Virgin selected three village girls at a boarding school in the bush. This Virgin showed visions of the impending genocide to these girls, one of whom was later massacred with a machete. Why were these crying girls tortured in this way? Was this the same Mother of the Word? Or what of the Marian heroine from Guadeloupe with her pigeon breast and runny eye-liner? Is this the same Virgin of the Golden Heart who speaks to Mirjane?

Throughout the day the fierce child Cora eats seeds one by one, her knotted fingers deep in the packet. I notice she has lost a prominent tooth, perhaps a canine. Her teeth are crookedly jumbled together. Cora places one thigh on top of the other. These thighs are as thin as my forearms. I see her half-smile, and that her rolled eyes belong to a past of gamine health.

At meal times Danny has trouble looking across at her ancient face. He has had enough of this girl’s treacherous descent. I attempt to converse with Danny, who is a barista in a train station café. We titter about the grey coffee served in such hopeless pools. Then Danny is quiet. I study the rustling of his fingers, the cords in his neck. I know he has been told Cora risks organ failure. So many times he’s watched her tear the drip from her arm. Heard the puking and the run of shit in the bathroom. I know he fronts up to a hinterland train station before dawn. He sees the Africans hoist themselves from cardboard sheets on the ground, the platform workers change shift, the women from the park wash down in toilet basins. He serves them coffee. He is not generous or friendly. He’s not keen on backpackers, for they are thieves. I’d say he doesn’t like the Africans either, but there are one or two he’s developed a fondness for, because they are intrepid and have large, casual hands. He has never entered a church except to marry and to bear his father’s coffin.

In Medjugorje it is possible to see into the dark well of a person.

This time I have not seen Reginald, a Texan who was healed here. It happened in this building near the elevator. One of the veggenti, named Jakov, was also waiting. Jakov placed his hands upon Reginald’s shoulders in his wheelchair, holding them there for the time it took for the lift to reach the ground floor. Later Reginald explained he felt a satanic plume of energy thrust from his being, similar to the G-force he’d felt in an Air Force jet. Immediately he felt enlivened and that afternoon was able to walk. Back in Texas, his doctors found that the tumours riddling his organs had shrunken to negligible dimensions, and from then on Reginald organised a parish group that returned each year. On one of those visits Reginald – or his wife Bev – was the first to notice a rosy cloud descending upon the white cross on the hillside, visible from the garden of the hotel. How odd it had been, mid-summer, to see this cloud descend over the town, which in no way bears the sanctity of Jerusalem or the holy French villages in the south. When this cloud thinned there arose the shape of a woman with raised arms. I witnessed this with agonising froideur. Many cried out or folded to the ground.

Someone has brought along a baseball cap which I recognise as Reginald’s. It hangs from the fence that encloses an elongated bronze Jesus, on one of the main roads. I imagine Bev or someone from the parish group has placed it there.

This morning Danny is feeling unwell and has stayed in bed. Cora says it’s a stomach upset, he’s had a string of these. She steers her body across to the buffet table and returns with an empty white plate. I see her face is shocked. A wasted woman has just been wheeled in by her haggard mother and the two anorexics have noticed each other. This girl is worse off than Cora, which Cora has seen. I watch the mother uselessly collect food. I imagine her upstairs in the evening, how she settles the dying girl then locks herself in the bathroom to stare at her own face.

Cora tolerates me now. I ask her if she would like to accompany me for a walk this morning, perhaps up towards the Blue Cross on Apparition Hill. Cora shakes her head.

‘Take off your glasses,’ she says to me.

I prefer to wear sunglasses most of the time now. It is not a question of vision. I remove my black, boxy glasses for Cora. My eyes are placed widely apart and one, in the past, was lazy. I have been told I look unearthly. For years now, I have dyed my hair a white blonde.

I dislike the touch of the eyes. We stare at each other. I feel embroiled with her. Cora is telling me she wishes for no relief. She has escaped from this existence already. I recall television interviews with Karen Carpenter in her frilled high-necked dresses, and how her team prevented her from wearing the low-slung gowns she wished to wear onstage.

Cora says she’s changed her mind, she’ll come for a walk.

I wait for Cora in the vestibule, watching pilgrims emerge from the lift and trundling out into the brightness. I only have a few days left and I don’t wish to see the other veggenti – Vicka, Jakov, Ivanka – and their compatriots. It was Mirjane and Ivanka who were first stopped by a luminous woman on a trail leading back to Podbrdo when they were fifteen and sixteen. They described this woman as ‘beyond beauty’. The girls returned to the same place with their friends, all impoverished offspring of the communist regime, who were blessed with a further vision of the gentle woman, this time holding the Holy Child. I think most of us who visit have a favourite. Mirjane is a good-looking woman who divides the crowds as the walks. She has aged well. Jakov is the youngest and wears a neck choker. I have seen photographs of the chosen children as they grew older, always guarded by priests. They kneel in line, faces transfixed. They are experiencing the first visions which will define their lives. It is said that when Mirjane went to university, the Virgin told her that her daily apparitions would cease. Mirjane, broken-hearted, went to Sarajevo and completed her degree. The Virgin’s visits resumed on a monthly basis when she returned here.

All of the veggenti have married and produced plain human children. None of the veggenti have yet died. If I don’t die myself, I’m curious to see how this will impact the visitations.

Cora finds me in the garden and says she has to smoke a cigarette. I find this ghastly. The young cadaverous woman inhaling and exhaling grey streams.

We begin our walk to the bronze Jesus enclosed within the iron fence, where Reginald’s cap is still hanging. There are a few people waiting. On the Saviour’s thigh is an open gold wound that releases tears of oily salt water. A woman stands on a step with a cloth, ready to wipe these droplets when they appear. We join the group but I see that the strain upon Cora’s depleted spine makes her shift her pelvis from side to side. The span between her hips is not much more than the length of a kitchen knife.

There is a collective ahh when the metal produces the first moist beads from the crucified Saviour’s empty muscle. The woman stretches up to wipe them with her cloth. She wipes each time the liquid wells, until a man urges her down and takes her place. There is no patriarchy here on Mary’s turf. Mostly it is the women wheeling men they will bathe and dress and bury, or pushing along their faulty children with their tubes. These women are full of grim health. Cora watches the line forming beyond Christ’s metal leg, the sunburnt faces raising cameras and phones. She steps back into the shade and settles against a wall. So feisty at the hotel, she is a stick figure out here in the heat. Cora sees through to my surveying eyes and I watch her summoning her strength, displaying it to me. She pulls back her little shoulders and two nipples appear on her T-shirt.

I ask her if she wants to continue and she nods. We walk on. In between the reliquary stalls there are cafes and I suggest we pause for a moment. It will soon become hotter. Cora selects a bottle of water from the fridge. I drink my coffee. The shop girl is used to listless pilgrims sitting at tables, returnees to the temporal world after the celestial traffic on the hill. She finds nothing to stare at. Cora’s hands lie on the table, the walk has fired up her circulation and they are flushed with blood.

………………..

Catherine McNamara grew up in Sydney and ran away to Paris to write, and ended up in Ghana co-running a bar. She is the author of Love Stories for Hectic People (Best Short Story Collection, Saboteur Awards 2021) and The Cartography of Others. Catherine lives in Italy.

Twitter: @catinitaly