The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín Read Free Book Online Page A

a decision. At one of the stops I saw a convoy coming in the distance which could have led me back and as I watched them approach I decided that I would not speak to them. I would complete the journey I had begun towards home.

    I thought that it would be quiet when I returned, and that I would remain undisturbed. As much as I could, I put out of my mind what I had seen and heard. I spent my days easily, I prayed in the morning as I had always done, I went out once a day to draw water and feed the animals and tend the garden and the trees, and went further every few days to make sure that I had whatever kindling and firewood were necessary. But I did not need much. When it was bright I sat alone in the shadowy spaces of the house. I did not respond to any callers. I did not respond even when three of the Elders from the Synagogue came and called my name several times, banging loudly on the door. And when it was dark I lay down on the bed and sometimes I slept. Gradually, despite my solitude, I came to realize that the house was marked and I was noticed and watched as I tended the goats or fed the chickens. When I went to get water, people at the well stepped aside as I approached, allowed me through with my water-carrier and remained silent until I had turned towards home. When I slipped into the Synagogue, women moved aside for me but were careful not to sit close to me. But a few women spoke to me, some news came to me. It was a strange period during which I tried not to think, or imagine, or dream, or even remember, when the thoughts that came arrived unbidden and were to do with time – time that turns a baby whois so defenceless into a small boy, with a boy’s fears, insecurities and petty cruelties, and then creates a young man, someone with his own words and thoughts and secret feelings.
    And then time created the man who sat beside me at the wedding feast of Cana, the man not heeding me, hearing no one, a man filled with power, a power that seemed to have no memory of years before, when he needed my breast for milk, my hand to help steady him as he learned to walk, or my voice to soothe him to sleep.
    And what was strange about the power he exuded was that it made me love him and seek to protect him even more than I did when he had no power. It was not that I saw through it or did not believe it. It was not that I saw him still as a child. No, I saw a power fixed and truly itself, formed. I saw something that seemed to have no history and to have come from nowhere, and I sought in my dreams and in my waking time to protect it and I felt an abiding love for it. For him, whatever he had become. I believe that I listened to very few people but I must have listened to someone in the street or at the well because I learned that his followers had gone out on a ship. They sailed out on a ship at the time when my son had disappeared into the mountains, at a time when he did not want to be with his followers, when he fled not with me, as I implored him to do, but remained alone because he too must have seen thesigns and the dangers. His followers, I was told, had taken an old boat on the sea and set out for some reason of their own towards Capernaum. It was dark and the sea began to rise by reason of a great sudden wind; it blew the vessel, which was too full, backwards and forwards and filled it with water as it was pulled each way, so that all of his followers felt they would drown. It was then, I was told, that he appeared to them in the moonlight and he was, or so my neighbours murmured that he was, actually walking on the water as though it were smooth dry land. And by his power he was calming the waves. He was doing what no one else could do. There must have been other stories, and perhaps this one I heard only in part, perhaps something else happened, or perhaps there was no wind, or he calmed the wind. I do not know. I put no thought into it.
    I know that one day as I stood at the well a woman came and said that he