Page 11 - In a different register - Sample

evangelical Protestantism when I was quite young. He was a mild sort, my father. Perhaps the passion behind his conversion was what attracted my mother to him. While baptised Catholic I escaped the ‘give me a child until it is seven’ rule.According to French legend, after the crucifixion of Jesus, Mary Jacobé, the sister of Mary, Jesus' mother - a person supposedly invented by the Roman Church to explain biblical mentions of other children born of the "Virgin" Mary - was supposedly with Mary Salome and Mary Magdalene when they set sail from Alexandria, Egypt, with their uncle Joseph of Arimathea. Another story is that they were expelled from Jerusalem around the year forty and cast away in a boat without sail, oars or supplies, drifted across the Mediterranean until it arrived off the coast of what is now France, at a sort of fortress named Oppidum-Râ. The place became known as Notre-Dame-de-Ratis (Râ becoming Ratis, or boat – ‘Our Lady of the boat’). In another story the refugees included Lazarus, his two sisters and Sara. The name was later changed to Notre-Dame-de-la-Mer, and then to Les Saintes-Maries-de- la-Mer in 1838. If the stories seem confusing, said Mary, they are. There’s an exquisite painting by Giotto of the miraculous arrival of Lazarus and his sisters in Marseilles.Giotto di Bondone c 1320 - The Miraculous Arrival of Lazarus and His Sisters in MarseillesWhat stories fire our imagination now, Albert? Mary told me she remembered the wonder of Sputnik as a teenager. Personally I thought seeing our blue planet from outer space must have trumped everything in the imagination of us all. I wonder what Giotto would have made of Sputnik, she mused.The group from the Holy Land supposedly built a small oratory to the Virgin. Then while Mary Magdalene went to Ste-Baume and Martha went to Tarascon, Marie Salome, Marie Jacobe and Sara remained in the Camargue, and were later buried in the oratory. The tomb of these three saints became places of pilgrimage, especially for gypsies and have been for the past nineteen centuries. Another of my loves, Albert. Gypsies. No wonder the pull to the Camargue was so strong. I had known about the horses but not sure I knew Gypsies were associated with the Camargue. Their free form, abandon, ‘up-yours’ to conventional society, passion .......... Oh, they’re my tribe alright. I am forever mesmerised by Bizet’s Carmen and identify with her utterly although my interpretation of the psychological drama, spiritual import even, has changed over the years. She is a free woman, her own woman, one in herself. The archetypal resonances have taken over from merely a story of wild and passionate romantic love. Did you ever see Elina Garança as Carmen and Roberto Alagna as Don José, Albert? I’m sure it would heat even your cold blood! She was right, Opera was not for me.