​​​​

Salerno, Civitas Ippocritas
The year of our Lord 1182

 

 

 

 

First, I want to share what the spirit told me: All love is good love.

 

These words were spoken to me by a spirit who calls himself Matteo. They might strike your ear with a pleasant sound, but like me, you might realize that they are not true. There are many types of love, and many, in fact most of them, can wreak havoc in the body, deteriorate health, and even maim and kill.

 

“Surely not all love is good,” I told Matteo that day, yet he insisted he was right in that gentle way spirits have.

 

“All love is good love.”

                                                            *

I do not make a habit of arguing with spirits. Until meeting Matteo, I did not even believe they spoke to humans, and I was of the opinion that people who claimed to do so were only motivated by baser interests. Although I have witnessed the majesty of the spirit who says that he is Matteo, and although I have bowed before his towering form, and watched tremulously as light flickered from his shoulders like flint hitting a thousand points of stone, I still wondered at the veracity of his being.

​

God forgive me if I am wrong, but in truth, when he is not there, I credit my own wild imaginings.

 

Yet there are evenings where I am struck by wonder, by the sheer lucidity of his form, which appears in my mind with flickering gestures and a certain stickiness, and I know that I can’t shake it loose. He speaks to me then, as if he were in the room. I am never scared, but I am often struck with nerves and I freeze, listening. If he speaks more than a few words—if, in other words, it seems that he wants a conversation—I fall to my knees, as one should.

 

Yet even then, kneeling before him, and bathed in the radiance of his light, I was not quite awe-struck enough, because I couldn’t help but wonder who he truly was.

 

I am not a good Christian, perhaps because I grew up in an abbey, where the willful suffering repulsed me. Despite being literate, I did not read scripture. My only interest was in the Song of Songs, and only then because it was a love story. I didn’t believe the saints who argued that it was an allegory for Jesus and the Church, or for God and the soul. I read it for carnal pleasure. I was, in short, very likely to be visited by a messenger of God who had come to punish me for turning away from the church.

 

On the evening in question, when we discussed his words about love, I asked him to clarify why he would so brazenly lump together the divine love of Christ with the foul excretions of, say, a prostitute with crabs.

 

To my surprise, he knelt before me, looking suddenly very human. He opened his hands and told me that God’s love was in everything. It was in humans, in Nature, in everything I could see or smell or touch. It was even in the lowliest crab.

 

This was, I must admit, so far above human notions of love as to ring with a certain godly authenticity, and that, combined with the fact that he didn’t admonish me for my question, made me think that he was perhaps divine.

 

“Eva,” he said, “you are loved in every moment.”

 

“Thank you,” I said quickly, feeling embarrassed. “I’m sure you realize I only ask these things because…if humans are truly to understand love, we must be made clear on the details.”

 

He smiled and I felt a wave of amusement and interest billow over me. By then, my knees were hurting, so I slid to the floor. 

 

“And I can’t help but wonder if,” I went on, “pardon me and I mean no offence, but you, being holy, may be so…saturated in divine love as to have forgotten the distinctions of its lesser forms?”

He took my hands in his own, which delivered a fresh shock, for I felt their very essence graze my skin. His hands were intensely real, much more than the rest of him, and from them I felt a glorious, golden radiance warming my fingertips and flowing up my arms, into my chest, where it seemed to bloom.

 

“I am aware of the distinctions,” he said.

 

I was silenced, uncertain how to explain the physician’s view of the matter. I’d only been in training for a year, but already it was clear that love was at the center of a huge variety of ailments. On the physician’s scala naturae of love, lovesickness was the god of this creation, its model of perfection and its rarest element. Beneath that were the seraphim of murder and adultery, also somewhat rare, then the human preoccupation with courtly romance, bizarrely adulterous and cruel, and all the attendant delusions of impulse, infatuation, and lust, (into this category I also placed the great number of women who were trying to be made virgin again) and finally the baser, animal properties of spousal violence, deadly pregnancies, venereal disease, and the shame of having the entire city know who was cheating on you.

 

He seemed to understand my reservations, because he went on. “The material form,” he said, “in one way or another, all serves the purpose of increasing love.”

 

Quite a few disputes rose inside me at this, and I was about to voice them when the door creaked behind me and Trota came in, her face puffy, hair tousled with sleep. I stood quickly. I had been sitting beside the stove.

 

“I heard voices,” she said, glancing around the room.

 

“I was praying,” I said. “I’m sorry to have woken you.”

 

“I wasn’t yet sleeping,” she said. I believed this, because nothing could wake her when she truly slept.

 

She looked at the floor where I had been sitting, no doubt wondering why I prayed on my rump, perhaps even wondering why my prayer sounded like conversation. Had there been anywhere for a person to hide, she would have investigated the space.

 

“All right,” she said, looking irritated and fragile and curious all at once. “Good night, then.”

 

“Good night, magistra.”

 

She shut the door, and I heard her footsteps on the wooden floors as she made her way back to bed.

 

I sat on my bed cushions, more shaken than I’d expected, and resolved to be more careful. I didn’t want Trota thinking I belonged in a convent when it was so plainly obvious that I belonged here.

 

Laying down to sleep, I found myself blushing. How foolish to think that a Host of Heaven would appear in my bedroom to tell me that all love was good. I hoped he wasn’t expecting me to go trotting around the countryside preaching these words and begging for bread. I was a physician in training, and nothing was going to stop me from that, not even a call from God.

 

Yet I couldn’t get the image of Matteo from my head.

 

God forgive me.