The Gargoyle (12 page)

The exact nature of Marianne Engel’s illness was still unclear but when she suggested that “those who suffer are the elect of God,” my best guess became schizophrenia.

Schizophrenics often have a particularly difficult time with religion, and some doctors suggest this relates to the age of onset: the condition most commonly develops between seventeen and twenty-five, a period when many people are first confronting their religious beliefs. Schizophrenics often have intense periods of heightened awareness—or outright delusions, such as auditory hallucinations—that can lead them to believe they’ve been specifically chosen by God. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that they often have trouble understanding that the symbolism of religion is metaphoric.

Christianity is based upon the idea that Jesus died for the sins of all mankind: to redeem us, Christ was tortured and nailed to a cross. A schizophrenic, attempting to understand the story, might reason thus: Jesus is the beloved Son of God, and Jesus endured incredible suffering, so those who endure the most pain are God’s most beloved.

There is a long tradition of devout believers who feel that suffering brings one closer to the Savior, but a human face is always better than a general theory. For this reason, allow me to present the life of one Heinrich Seuse, German religious mystic. Born in 1295, Seuse would become one of the most important religious figures of the time, known as the Minnesänger—the “singer of courtly love”—because of the poetic quality of his writings.

Seuse entered the Dominican house in Konstanz at age thirteen and, by his own account, was completely unexceptional for the first five years of his religious life. At eighteen, however, he experienced a sudden illumination—a feeling of heavenly delight so intense he was unsure whether his soul was separated from his body. He considered this event so important that it was with this that he begins his life story,
The Life of the Servant.

Some scholars claim that
The Life of the Servant
is the first autobiography in the German language, while others argue it’s not an autobiography at all. Much of the actual writing appears to have been done by Elsbeth Stagel, a young woman from the convent of Töss, who was the most favored of Seuse’s spiritual daughters. She apparently documented many of their conversations to use as the basis of the
Life
without Seuse’s knowledge, and when he discovered what she’d done, he burned part of the manuscript before a “message from God” instructed him to preserve what remained. No one knows how much of the
Life
was written by Stagel and how much by Seuse.

The
Life
is a fascinating narrative, and provides wonderful details of the visions Seuse received throughout his life: God showed him representations of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, and departed souls appeared to him to give updates on their afterlives. Good stuff, and terrifically dramatic! But the most striking writing in the
Life
is Seuse’s—or Stagel’s—descriptions of his self-inflicted tortures.

As an adherent of the belief that bodily comfort makes one spiritually weak, Seuse claimed he did not go into a heated room for twenty-five years and that he refrained from drinking water until his tongue cracked from the dryness, after which it took a full year to heal. He restricted his intake of food—eating once a day and never meat, fish, or eggs—and once had a vision in which his desire for an apple was stronger than his desire for Eternal Wisdom, so to punish himself he went two years without consuming any fruit. (One wonders whether he could not simply have recognized the moral of the story and continued to eat actual—as opposed to metaphorically forbidden—fruit.)

On his lower body, Seuse wore an undergarment that had one hundred and fifty sharpened brass nails pointed inwards, at his skin. On his upper body, he wore a hairshirt with an iron chain, and under that a wooden cross the size of a man’s outstretched hand and studded with thirty more brass nails. With this fastened between his shoulder blades, every movement—especially kneeling to pray—forced the nails to dig into his flesh, and later he would rub vinegar into his wounds. Seuse wore this spiked cross for eight years before God intervened in a vision, forbidding him to continue.

He wore these punishing garments even when he slept—upon an old door. When he lay down he shackled himself with rings of leather because if his hands were free, he could use them to swat away the rats that gnawed at him during the night. Sometimes he broke the restraints in his sleep, so he started wearing leather gloves covered in more sharpened brass tacks that would slice up his skin as effectively as if he’d run a cheese grater over it. Seuse kept these habits for sixteen years until another vision from God instructed him to throw these sleeping aids into a nearby river.

Rather than bring Seuse relief at being forbidden to keep punishing himself, these divine interventions bothered him greatly. When a nun asked how he was doing, Seuse replied that things were going quite badly because it had been a month since he’d known pain and he was afraid that God had forgotten him.

Such physical torments, Seuse realized, were only a beginning; they didn’t allow for a tangible sign of his great love for the Lord. To remedy this, he opened his robes one evening and used a sharpened stylus to carve the letters
IHS
into the flesh above his heart. (If that’s Greek to you, don’t worry:
IHS
is the abbreviated name of Christ in the Greek language.) Blood poured out of his ripped flesh but he claimed he barely felt the pain, such was his ecstasy. The scarified letters never vanished and he wore the wound in secret until the end of his life; it soothed him in times of struggle, he claimed, to know that the very name of Christ moved with each beat of his heart.

Seuse died in 1366 after a long life which, one can only surmise, must have seemed even longer than it actually was.

I find it interesting that Seuse had his “illumination” at age eighteen, just when schizophrenia most commonly manifests. If you were a schizophrenic, you could do worse than religious life in fourteenth-century Germany. In the Age of Mysticism, your visions would not be feared but revered. If you beat yourself senseless, you were not self-destructive but emulating Christ. If you heard voices, you had direct communication with God.

But for all this, there is one event in the life of Heinrich Seuse that I find particularly interesting, although it is something I have never been able to verify in my library research.

Marianne Engel insisted that, once upon a time, she met him.

When I woke again, Marianne Engel was gone, but she had left behind a gift on the nightstand, a small stone gargoyle.

I turned the little fiend over in my hands. About six inches high, the gargoyle looked like a semi-human dumpling, cooked the color of a melancholic rain cloud. His potbelly drooped on crossed legs, his elbows were propped on his knees, and his chin rested upon three-fingered hands. His back sprouted short thick wings, presumably for show rather than flight. A blocky head was perched on his slumped shoulders like a boulder waiting to be pushed from the top of a cliff. He had enormous eyes that loomed underneath a Neanderthal brow, and a mouthful of uneven teeth. The gargoyle seemed to be trying hard to scowl, but he couldn’t quite pull it off. His expression was sweet and sad and somehow all too human, like that of a forlorn man who has spent his entire life dragging himself from one tiny accident to another until the cumulative effect has crushed him under the weight of words he can no longer speak.

My physical condition improved markedly in the days after the surgery. The garbage scow that is my stomach learned to float again, although it could no longer carry as full a load as it once did. My right leg, with its mangled knee and blasted hip, was also beginning to mend, and the doctors promised that they would soon remove the mechanical spider cast. Each day, I seemed to lie in the skeleton bed a little less awkwardly.

Nan poked me and wrote little messages to herself on my chart. She always remained professional, but I found myself calling her Nan more often than Dr. Edwards. I don’t know if she disliked this familiarity but she never asked me to stop. I suppose this emboldened me and in a moment of curiosity I asked her whether she was married. She hesitated and thought about answering, but in the end decided against it.

The seat beside the skeleton bed remained empty, save for the visits from the nurses and Nan. One Marianneless day became two Marianneless days, two became three, five Marianneless days, until they formed a Marianneless week. I wanted to ask her about the little gargoyle, why she had given it to me, what it meant.

I was reading a lot, mostly lawyer mysteries that I didn’t actually enjoy. I needed something to replace them, so I requested of Nan that she loan me some textbooks on abnormal psychology. “You must have something on schizophrenia, manic depression, bipolar disorder, anything like that?”

“It’s not my area of expertise,” she replied. “Besides, you should be reading about burns.”

Nan had already brought a number of books on burn recovery that sat untouched on my bedside table. I was not reading them simply
because
they were what I should be reading. We made a deal: for every psychology book she brought, I’d read one of the burn books. Nan considered this a victory and insisted that I read one of her books first.

After I had, Gregor arrived at my room, his corduroy thighs rubbing together, with a psychology text in his hands. He handed it over and said that Dr. Edwards had asked him to deliver it, from the private collection in his office.

“The place isn’t driving you nuts, is it?” The way he chuckled to himself, I wondered if he’d been thinking that up all the way from the psychiatric ward. When I asked him whether psychiatrists were really supposed to refer to patients as nuts, he dabbed a bead of sweat from his brow with a tartan handkerchief, and didn’t answer. Instead, he asked why I was so interested in schizophrenia and manic depression.

“None of your business,” I said.

Gregor opened his mouth as if to say something more, but instead he just smiled and tapped my little gargoyle once on the head. “I like this,” he said, before padding his way out of my room in his tasseled loafers.

The following day, a very small Asian woman, who upon first glance looked more like a doll than a real person, entered my room.

Please don’t jump to the conclusion that I’m attempting to further the stereotype that all Asian women resemble china dolls. That’s not the kind of doll I have in mind. This woman had a broad face, a flat nose, and a most amazing smile. (I’ve always hated people who can smile widely without looking stupid.) Her cheeks were like ripe apples, which, when taken with the striped shirt and denim overalls under her gown, created an overall effect of an Oriental Raggedy Ann.

“Hi! My name is Sayuri Mizumoto. I’m pleased to meet you.” She thrust her hand into mine for a hearty shake. And while I might not write that every time she spoke, she did so with a large grin, please take it as a given from this point forward.