Free The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín Page A

gruff, determined, well fed, serious. Suddenly, I saw that among them was my cousin Marcus and that he had seen me. Before the others could stop me I ran towards him and I knew how foolish I must have seemed, how helpless and poor and shrill. I suppose I had my arms out and I suppose my face was wet with tears and I suppose I made no sense. I remember the looks of indifference or mild exasperation from some of the other men being mirrored in Marcus’s face and then changing into a dark brutality as he told me to get away from them. I know I did not use his name. Iknow I did not say that he was my cousin. And I saw fear in his face and then I saw how quickly it faded and changed into a determination that I should be removed from the orbit of these men whom no one else had dared approach. He nodded to someone and it was that man, who later played dice close to the hanging bodies, who became the one who watched me all the time, who seemed to know who I was and who, I believe, had instructions to hold me, capture me, once the death had taken place and the crowd had dispersed. Later, I realized that they all believed that we would wait until the end to take the body and bury it. It was one thing the Romans had learned about us; we would not leave a corpse to the elements. We would wait, no matter what the danger.

    My guardian, who comes now to this house, and the other one whom I like even less, they want my description of these hours to be simple, they want to know what words I heard, they want to know about my grief only if it comes as the word ‘grief’, or the word ‘sorrow’. Even though one of them witnessed what I witnessed, he does not want it registered as confusion, with strange memories of the sky darkening and brightening again, or of other voices shouting down the moans and criesand whimpers, and even the silence that came from the figure on the cross. And the smoke from fires that grew more acrid and stung all our eyes as no wind seemed to blow in any direction. They do not want to know how one of the other crosses keeled over regularly and had to be propped up, nor do they want to know about the man who came and fed rabbits to a savage and indignant bird in a cage too small for its wingspan.
    As many things happened in those hours as there are seconds. I moved from feeling that I could do something to realizing that I could not. I moved from being distracted by the coldest thoughts, thoughts that if this was not happening to me, since I was not the one being crucified to death, then it could not really be happening at all. Thoughts of him as a baby, as a part of my flesh, his heart having grown from my heart. And of running to the others to be held or ask questions. Or watching the men in case any of them made a sign that this should end more quickly. Or coming to understand that the reason Marcus had enticed me to the city and given me an address was so that I could be held when it was over, or indeed the day before.
    And then in the last hour, as the crowd thinned out, and some of the men made their way down the hill, there was no time for wondering, or realizing, or thinking. No time for looking around or finding waysto be distracted. In this last hour, the anguish of hanging in the sun with nails in your hands and feet seemed to grow more intense, came in fierce shrieks and then gasps. And all of us waited, all of us knew that the end was coming and all of us watched his face, his body, unsure if he knew we were there with him until close to the end when he seemed to open his eyes and tried to speak but none of us could catch his words, which came with too much effort for anyone to hear. They were ways of letting us know that he was alive, and, strangely, despite the pain he suffered, despite this vast public display of his defeat and the fact that I had all the time desperately wanted it to be over quickly, I did not want it to be over now.
    As it neared the end, our guardian, his follower, the one who