Chapter 36:: Daddy, you bastard, I’m through

Mexico, autumn 1874.

Celestina Savonarola. It felt like the most beautiful and most unique name she had ever worn, almost unreal, and that made her clutch on to it as if it was precious. Like the body; in her mind, she was always aware of its contours, the way every body part was crafted, the way they moved. The warm brown colour of the skin, the tightness of the cheeks, the supple firmness of the breasts, each curl of hair, crisp and black. She was aware of them all the time, all of them, the flesh, the pleasures of it. It had taken her a lot of time and attention to imagine this body, and the energy that was drained out to bring it into existence could have sucked the life out of her. She knew, and she had taken the risk, knowing. She had survived. And this life, this existence, was more fascinating than anything she had experienced before.

Why would she want to leave all this for another existence that held no attraction for her?

The world was filling up with magic. She wouldn’t have needed her father to inform her about the fact, but he had done, nevertheless, and expressly. Beings of imagination, beings of belief. Beings from other, distant places, never heard of or encountered before. And bastard children like her – beings not belonging to any one realm or another – were fast coming into the forefront, he had especially emphasized. But Celestina remembered her father mentioning once long ago, no two bastards were alike, and she knew he had been wise. The fact that they did not resemble anyone else did not mean they resembled each other. They were each of them alone in their uniqueness, without precedent, doomed to etch out their own unique destinies.

Her father had perhaps intended the words to inspire her into actively entering the plans he had for her, but Celestina was no child. The world is filling up with magic, he had said, very soon the moment will come when you can make up for your deficiencies in blood with what you will achieve. You can erase the differences between you and my other children, you will be accepted as one of them. Stay prepared. And while he delivered the impressive speech, Celestina had laughed inside her head. Who are you kidding trickster, I have your blood in me, remember? I know some of those dirty tricks. As for the other part of her blood, well… was it ever possible, for any achievement, to erase the differences of blood? How could she expect do be accepted as one of the Aesir, as an equal, with one half of herself irrecoverably mortal? Had he managed to be accepted as an equal himself, the grinning half-bald old man sitting across the table from her at the dusty old pub called Gloria, managing the physical appearance of a haggard coalmine worker to perfection, his eyes twinkling red under the dim yellow light? Was that not why he walked the earth, like a vagabond, instead of joining his peers in their full glory, instead, hanging on to the life of the only offspring he believed he could talk into his stories?

Bastard children. They belonged to nowhere. No family, no clan, no kin. She did not belong to him, she was not what he was. No more than she had belonged to her poor mortal mother, dead long ago. No destiny, Celestina mentally added to the list of negatives. Nobody wrote destinies for bastard children, freaks of nature and chance and accidental existences where none should have been. Nothing compelled her to take part in this war that her father kept insisting would begin in less than two centuries – and two centuries was no long time for the his ilk – nothing compelled her to seek the glory and the justice he spoke of and what he called her rightful position.

Celestina could not care less for glory, justice or rightful position. She could do with forgetting them forever, as if they never existed for her, as if they would never resurface in her life just when she was about to let the unpleasant awareness of them drown from the back of her mind. Her father could never understand it, she knew. It puzzled and frustrated him, her tremendous passion for the mortal flesh and existence. He had been putting on mortal flesh himself for centuries, but she knew he had never quite understood the existence, not beyond the utterly inconsequential transience of it. Not the essence. For him it had been like an act, a grand go-as-you-like carnival where you put on the clothes of someone and walked and talked like them, but you never really became them. She knew it was the essential difference between their beings. It was inevitable. She would never be able to become what he was, just as truly as he would never fully comprehend what composed and inspired her. She thought, with a little surprised ruefulness, it was perhaps unfortunate to him that there was no guidebook.

Bastard children. Accidents of existence, each a unique entity. Nobody ever wrote guidebooks on them. Each of them was only their own, answerable only to themselves, predictable to none.

--

When she spoke, she did not tell him of these reflections. It was against her wishes to join the conflicts of his people, and besides, she had put her life in peril to create the life she was currently leaving. That should be reason enough for her to turn down his grand plans.

“What are your grand plans then?” he sneered. “Marry that lover you have, settle into a calm, impassive life of blissful matrimony? Build a home of your own? Have babies?”

“Mind if I do?”

“And then? Eventually? Mama Cellie dies a natural death at the ripe old age of sixty-seven? ‘Celestina Garcia, died 1928, beloved wife of Adan Garcia, mother of Brandon, Marco and Juanita, Rest in Peace’?”

She glowered at him.

“You know that will never happen, Celestina. You will spend so much time and effort constructing, what? yet another illusion! Why keep trying to create permanence with twigs, wisps of smoke, bits of nothing? Mortal lives? How long will you keep pretending that you belong to them? Do they ever truly accept you? Do they not complete their own course and spit you out like an unexhausted residue, left to find and cling to another existence and repeat the foolish cycle? Isn’t that what you’ve been doing for centuries?” He was evidently enjoying the malice. The grin on his face had spread so wide it struck her as particularly obscene.
“You cannot create belonging. You know that in your heart of hearts. You don’t belong here, or the place you were before, or at any of the places before that. There’s nowhere you belong. No home is destined for you.”

“Neither with you and your sort,” she quietly said.

“My sort is the nearest to family you have got,” he retorted, adding viciously, “or perhaps you could go and try to mingle with your mother’s people?”

“I’ll consider that.”

“What? You don’t…”

“I cannot see why not. I was born and brought up among them. They are more family to me than your sort will ever be.”

“But that was centuries ago, my child!”

The address alarmed Celestina. His attempts at insult had failed to provoke her, now she did not want him to resort the persuasive strain. She was getting late. She did not wish to be noticed absent at the nunnery once more, followed by the tiresome reprimanding from the Mother Superior.

“Father, please,” she said, patiently pronouncing the words, “I want this to be very clear. I do not want to participate in your war. I want to have nothing to do with it. I do not crave power, glory, justice, divine status or anything you have to offer. I do not want relatives I have never known. I want them to leave me alone, and especially you. I want you to stop returning to my life and keep interfering with it. I want you to forget my existence, and allow me to forget yours.”

“But… but you’re my… my offspring! My blood!”

“Please, father. Why not save yourself the ignominy of being reminded by a child that you have mixed your blood in enough wombs to raise an army of children by now? You are a god, you should preserve your dignity.” She watched with savage pleasure as the old man deflated under her stare and silently suppressed the pity rising involuntarily in her mind. He did not deserve it, she reminded herself, he was only playing a role. “Besides, that’s all you ever wanted, wasn’t it? A loyal army to assist you when you rose in war, weapons ready at hand? You have never had any fatherly affection for me.”

“I… I…”

“Please. Look at me. There are centuries of excuses stored in my memory. I am only one child of so many. I don’t want to go to war. I will never, never voluntarily assist you in any of your efforts. I’m not remotely fond of you. Leave me alone. Forget me.”

“Celestina, you…”

“Leave me alone,” she said again, and stood up, decidedly. “I never want to see or hear from you again.”

She walked out of the pub, ignoring the surprised looks drawn from the other tables by her austere nun’s habit. The old man, now alone at his table, sat with his sad, lined mouth and half-finished mug of beer and watched her go, till she disappeared at the bend of the street. There was no twinkle in his eyes any more. If there were tears, she never looked back to see them.

Although as she crossed the threshold of the pub, she had whispered under her breath, “Goodbye Lie-smith, Shape-Shifter, Monster-Father, Walker across Skies. I return your debt of blood, and I hope you fare well.”

--

The Monasterio de Santa Catalina was a strict, silent, desolate place, but the desolation did not bother Celestina Savonarola. She looked at the severe life of a nun as yet another interesting experience in her eventful existence, and the monotony of it allowed her ample opportunity to reflect on and adjust to her present identity. The nunnery had been convenient for many purposes. The nuns were not very curious about the past lives of young women willing to join the service of Christ, so she had got away with a highly unconvincing story about being a Moorish slave girl from Spain, shipwrecked on a journey to Mexico and separated from her masters and fellow passengers. The nunnery also provided social protection, dignity and independence not otherwise accessible to a young unmarried woman without money or acquaintance. And as far as Celestina was concerned, it had allowed her to choose her own lover at leisure.

Never before had she imagined she would love a man like Adan Garcia, but she was not omniscient, and the unpredictability of mortal life was one of its features she enjoyed the most. There was much she did not know about him, his past for one, or even his true identity. She was not troubled by the ignorance. After all, what was it to her? She might have bothered if there was truly a hope of permanence with him, even the kind of ephemeral permanence that mortals strive for. But her father had been correct, she could never become entirely mortal, never have a mortal lifespan complete with its closure. No home was destined for her, she had to keep wandering forever. When she herself did not belong anywhere at all, what difference could have been made by where he belonged, or who with?

Celestina had learnt to live with impermanence. Nobody wrote destinies for bastard children. Ignorance about a lover’s identity was only a grain of dust in the great desert of uncertainty laid out before them.

Trudging up the uphill path to the nunnery thoughtfully as sunset streaked the sky in shades of red, Celestina tried to imagine what Henry might say if he met her in this incarnation. Of course, this time there were very narrow chances of running into him. Celestina liked Henry White. It would be too much to call him a friend, but he had been a speck of permanence in her long transitory life, if only by virtue of recurrence, not very unlike her father. No, Henry White was much more pleasant company than her father. He never tried to trick her or impose his will upon her, and there were stories they would both share that they could tell no other. Celestina did not even know who Henry White was. Perhaps he was another bastard child, perhaps another vagrant deity from a dead pantheon, perhaps something else entirely. He had always been Henry White, pretending to be his own son generation after generation. Personally, Celestina found the sort of existence boring. She liked variety. But perhaps the rigid existence had imparted a sort of stability to Henry White. She always knew where to find him; he might not always be home, but he had a permanent home he would always return to. And once in three or four decades, they would always meet up, go for a drink and have a good time in general.

Only maybe not this time around.

Celestina felt a chill and found herself thinking how miserable it would be to return to the bleak nunnery for the night. She wanted to hug Adan and fall asleep in his arms, after crying silent tears for very, very long.