The getting of "wisdom"

Today I remembered a time when La Narcisse hit me with a book. 

An actual book. 

I can't have been older than maybe 14 or 15 at the time, because of where we lived. And there was this time when my mother was away for a while, maybe a week or more, and so were my siblings, and it was just La Narcisse and I at home. And for most of that time, she was nice as pie. She cooked me actually tasty dinners, and one afternoon we went out somewhere pleasant together, and she talked to me more than she ever had about her life before she knew us. She kept that up for a while but the effort of all that niceness must've taken its toll on her, because several days before my mother was due home again, she fell into a rage about something, I don't remember what the inciting incident was. (If I keep writing and breathing and staying with it, it might come up). Maybe I hadn't studied enough (because of all the tasty dinners and the outing and the pleasant chit-chat) or maybe it was a more generic failing, like not having done enough exercise, or not praying enough. Or maybe, beguiled by all her niceness I might have let down my guard and confided in her about some other utterly developmentally normal thought process or feeling state, which after some hours or maybe a day or two later needed prompt (and severe) rectification. 

You need to understand, dear Reader, that I loved her, and I believed that she in return loved me, but it was always Tough Love. This was the kind of love that, being bigger than the regular kind of love, does not hesitate to act with force and impunity. So it was that having waited anxiously for her return one afternoon after she'd been out, she erupted in a rage, and I came to know the sensation of a book hitting me, on the back of my shoulder, and my head, and the top of my chest. 

The body speaks. There is a bodily memory of this that I'm feeling while I write this, especially on my back, where it really stung. A heavier, blunter impact on my chest. The head, not so much, I think the pages flapped about a bit there. But I remember her sudden fury and knowing I was alone with her, and the instant realisation that the bubble of niceness had burst, that I was in for days of indescribable awfulness before my mother returned. So I remember that occasion more clearly, but there's this other awareness that it wasn't the only time I was hit with a book. There were other instances, in the days or weeks that followed, and I think it might have been my mother doing the hitting later. It was like hitting someone with a book had become an acceptable form of discipline, after La Narcisse did it and then justified her actions, and that justification was so unquestioningly accepted that it became part of the family lore. 

Because: she made it about wisdom. Like I hadn't learnt from all my errors and failures and wrongdoing and my most critical character flaw was that I lacked wisdom, so here's a book with wisdom in it, whack whack, this is the only way you're getting any wisdom, whack, is by me beating it into you.  

That's right, I remember now. (This isn't going to make a lot of sense, because it never made much sense, even back then). It was something to do with a task she had set me, following on from some religion homework some weeks earlier, and her general impression that I'd been getting lax with my schoolwork. (Which was laughable then as always, because I pulled straight A's and won every academic award there was to win, all the way through school). Anyway, I think I'd made the mistake of leaving my religion homework until last and skating through it quickly (which, to anyone else would be sensible time use) and maybe I didn't colour the pictures in or something ridiculous like that, and the upshot of that was that she set me extra homework to do, at home. And there was a written component, but then there was also a memorisation component. 

Her idea was that, to be a good Catholic, you needed to be able to recite the whole Catholic catechism. There was this small yellow book, with summaries of key points of Catholic doctrine. For most kids, they learnt bits of it throughout their time at school, usually in the lead up to their first Holy Communication or Confirmation. They recited it in class every day until they could spiel out the basics, like The Ten Commandments (Catholic version), or The Holy Catholic Sacraments, or The Mysteries of The Rosary in sing-song unison. But for me, as decreed by La Narcisse, that meant: don't stop until you've committed the whole thing to memory, even the parts that you never looked at in school. And say it exactly like it appears in the book, do not get any of the words wrong. And so I had, at some point previously, done this, or most of this, or enough of it anyway to be able to convince her that I had memorised it all and accurately, and certainly more of it than she knew. Anyway, that was months earlier, and I remember I'd had to take the book with me on holidays, and I swotted up on it in bed before bedtime, but my siblings did not or not to the same extent as me, and that was pretty much the beginning of what was a very bad time for them, while I managed to skate along under the radar, having proven my devout virtuousness and superior powers of memorisation, at least for a while. 

So, there had been this test of memorisation and virtue-proving that I had passed months earlier, but in one hurriedly dashed-out piece of religion homework, which I didn't commit to memory like she expected, I had catastrophically failed at good Catholic-ness. And I don't remember exactly, but the homework was about some very-not-critical aspect of Catholicism, like parables or proverbs or something you can look up any time you like in the Bible, without committing them word-for-word to memory. But she would often pull one of these Bible stories out, based on whatever she'd read that day, to illustrate the point she was making, to reinforce her claim to spiritual authority, moral arbitration and, of course, to enforce rules and punishments. Not that she ever committed any of it to memory the same way she expected me to, she just had a few key Bible quotes that she could trot out reliably every time and the rest was a lot of paraphrasing and interpretation. 

Anyway, she was always banging on about "wisdom" which is a concept that comes up repeatedly throughout the Bible, especially in parables and proverbs. And I think it might have been around the time of Pentecost, which is when the Holy Spirit came down in tongues of fire and imparted the Gifts of the Spirit, of which wisdom is at the top of the (Catholic version) list. And so there was some kind of thematic collision between the homework I hadn't taken enough time over, and the memorisation task she had set for me (even though I'd finished the written part), and parables and proverbs and the Holy Spirit, and at some point her mood turned and she started to interrogate me about all of this, and she suddenly asked me to regurgitate some of the stuff I'd previously memorised. And my mind went blank - as it often did, during these interrogations. Partly because they were often so illogical that it was difficult to follow the thread of her thought in order to even begin to refute or challenge it. But partly because it was always so terrifying. You had to think fast, because no matter what you said, she would pounce on it and turn it into something wrong, something you needed to be punished for. So the stress was enormous. She could keep up these interrogations for anywhere between 15 minutes and several hours, alternating between ranty diatribes, anecdotes, idealised accounts of her past and her own, better-than-us family, intensive and repeated bouts of questioning, requests to instantly furbish evidence to back up whatever you said (and you had better run to bring it), bizarre hypothetical scenarios which she associated with whatever the topic was, lengthy verbal contemplation of options for punishment and/or new harsher rules, and always, at some point, a complete excoriation of your character, your morality, your motives, your entire identity. And so, months after I'd completed the memorisation, I failed to be able to recall or re-verbalise some of that catechism I'd learned, and some of whatever additional material I'd been told to remember, and that made me worse than someone who hadn't done it. It made me someone who hadn't done it and then had lied, for months and months, about having done it, and who had made a mockery of La Narcisse with my laziness and my deception. And she couldn't possibly continue as my godmother, if I was going to be so morally corrupt. Amoral is what she called me, as if that was the very worst thing I could be, and she threatened to withdraw me from my school, and send me instead to the nearest public school (which wasn't very near at all), because I clearly placed no value on the Catholic education she was giving me. And so I spent several days (at least) believing I would be pulled out of school (where I was doing well) and that I was somehow going to have to get myself to and from the new school every day because she made it clear she would have no further involvement in my education, and certainly not to drive me there. 

And I don't remember exactly how it all played out, except that this drama continued over a few days, during which she alternated between angry outbursts, and being increasingly cold and distant to me, and at some point she hit me with a book, to put "wisdom" into me, because that was the only thing that was going to save me. 

And it goes a long way to describe the effect of the sustained abuse when I say that, as devastated as I was, I was also utterly contrite. And so by the time my mother arrived home, I had absorbed the blame for not doing the entirety of what was, in reality, an entirely unreasonable and arbitrary task, and I was busy making amends by diligently pumping out an astonishing quantity of self-generated religion homework, similar to what La Narcisse had imposed upon me. And since La Narcisse made a big thing about how terribly hurt and upset she still was, I was required to explain to my (now hysterically angry) mother what exactly had transpired while she was away. And so I had to stand there and talk about it, including the part where La Narcisse hit me with the book, and I had to tell it like La Narcisse wanted it told, and I had better do a fucking good job of it, because what was at stake was my entire education. And so calmly as I could I told my mother about how I needed "wisdom", and how La Narcisse used a book to knock it into me, as if that was a perfectly reasonable action that met an identified spiritual need. 

So that's how my mother came to know I needed to be hit with a book, and presumably that's why I have some memory of later instances of being clobbered with it when she was in the room. My recollection is that La Narcisse often directed my mother to carry out physical punishments on us, as if that would protect her from prosecution in the event that we ever told anyone about it. There was a time when the book I was hit with collected me on the side of my face. I'm not sure if this was that same time that La Narcisse first did it, or another time, or which of those women it was. But on this occasion, the spine or the corner of the book must've caught on the tender skin around my eye, because I ended up with a small cut and some bruising near my eye. Not enough to look like a black eye, and the bruise was in a different spot to the cut, so I passed it off as two separate injuries. I had one story for the cut, and a different story for the bruise, and I made sure they were juuuuuust close enough to real episodes of clumsiness I'd had that I was able to recount them convincingly. 

Anyway that's what happened. La Narcisse hit me with a book, for reasons of moral and spiritual improvement, and for a while afterwards, that became the preferred form of physical violence at home. To the point where it was a particular book that was used, and there came to be a kind of family in-joke about it being The Book of Wisdom. Which reads like a pretty fucked-up kind of humorous family story. Except the bit that's not in the funny story is the bit where, by that age, I already knew that to beat someone up really badly, you use a telephone book. You apply the telephone book flat to the person's body, preferably their torso, and then you beat the living shit out of them with whatever you have handy. The idea is that the surface area of the telephone book spreads the force evenly over the skin so that it doesn't leave marks, and the bulk of the book transmits the force of the blows effectively into the internal organs, for maximum damage, but on the inside, where it can't be seen. And the reason I knew this at that age was because La Narcisse used to tell me. At first, informationally, like here's something you didn't know about this terrible thing that's done by bad men in faraway places. But eventually, she talked about it like it was a threat. She talked about it at times like when she'd already hit you or punished you and her rage hadn't yet peaked and subsided. She would threaten to beat you with a telephone book "... until your insides are mash" (her words). And then, at other times when she was calmer, she would mention it again, she would bring it up like she had been joking when she said it, and weren't you silly you believed it, hee hee. And The Book of Wisdom stayed there in full view on the side table, so you had to walk past it every time you entered her part of the house, every time you were summonsed to go in there an account for yourself, your actions, what you did, ate, said, thought, felt, or prayed, and then every time you went out again. And it stayed there, on display, the whole time, right up until we moved away from that place. 

And one day, a couple of years later, I was sitting in class (because she hadn't pulled me out of school, it was just a threat), and the topic of torture came up. Maybe there was a reference in something we were reading to the use of things like telephone books and rubber batons to inflict damage in less visible ways. And so there was some discussion in the classroom about that. And I sat there, hot and uncomfortable, really conflicted about whether I should say something. Because I knew that sometimes a book does leave marks. Sometimes the spine or the corner of the cover can graze your skin, sometimes it digs in and leaves a bruise. And I'm not sure but I think it was nearly lunchtime and the class had lost its focus so there was some light-hearted discussion of times when a sibling had thrown a book and clocked someone on the forehead and it left a dent or when some books fell off a shelf during an earth tremor onto someone's foot and bruised it. But I remember the discomfort, I remember how my face felt red hot and my mouth was dry and I felt my heart thumping in my neck, and how the cold-greasy slick of stress-sweat stayed with me for hours after the class had finished. Because the whole time I was thinking: a book can hurt you. It can cut your skin and leave bruises on your face and require you to make up stories that aren't true but are juuuuuust close enough to things that really happened so you can say them without people realising you lied, you who are always so guilelessly honest even when your honesty costs you more than your silence. 

And so, remembering all of that now, I find myself wondering what happened to that book. Did they bring it with them to the new house? Did they put it out to charity, or give it to someone with similarly religious inclinations? Or did they hang onto it, and bring it out even after I left home, to remind me that I was still within their abusive reach when they wanted me to be? Did they ever really think about how they used that book, or the story it might one day tell? Did they plaster conveniently over the memory of their actions with a revisionist retelling in which we were never harmed, only ever loved? Did they forget to burn it to destroy any traces of epithelial cells, blood, fingerprints, the DNA that wasn't detectible using the technology of the time, the minute biological witnesses that are now infinitely easier to collect and process and to reveal, even decades later, what I could not speak about when it occurred? Or will the contents of that book, finally, knock some "wisdom" into La Narcisse herself, when it confronts her with the evidence of crimes she committed and can no longer deny?