Free Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson Page B

childbearing, or on the three festival nights when a troop of male and female prostitutes were hired from a neighbouring town and asked to satisfy the longings of the city dwellers. Naturally, even after such brief encounters, there were those who vanished in the night. The monk and the whore, now fabulously old but still absolutely in control, declared all such vanishings illegal and sequestered the person's property.
    I questioned them about their strictness, likening them to the Puritans holding sway in my own country. They had not heard of Puritanism, but found the idea of bandaging up the male member so as to leave it immovable very appealing. The religious side, they said, was unimportant; the urgency was to prevent another plague of love sweeping the city and causing its hardworking people to give up their jobs and families and take to flinging roses through the windows and composing ballads.
    'A few months of that sort of thing/ said the monk, 'and the people are ruined.'
    Then he told me how it had been the last time the plague had struck. It had started quietly enough, a few guitars in the moonlight, a few love-notes sent under cover of darkness. Then the mayor had fallen for a shop-girl and draped his chain of office over a public toilet. Then every single monk in the monastery was caught masturbating in front of a statue of Hildegard of Bingen. They ignored the call to prayer at five a.m. Indeed they ignored it for so long that the old man hired to ring the bell died of heart failure. He was still pulling at eight o'clock, and so were the monks.
    Worse, ordinary men and women, with no eccentricity in their natures, began to eye one another and die for love. Every day new graves were dug in the hillside. The grave-digger himself was so struck by the woman he was burying that he wrenched the lid from her coffin and got in. After hours of pleading his family lost patience and threw the soil in themselves. After that the dead were thrown into the river, and then of course everyone who was left died of contamination. Except the monk, who was on a fast and drinking only holy water from the monastery cellar, and the whore, who drank no water at all.
    'The people who live here now,' he said, 'are completely happy and disease-free. You should settle here yourself. It would do you good.'
    I decided to look round the place and began by going to a stall to buy some bread. The young woman behind the stall was unsmiling, though I smiled a good deal. Eventually she said, 'What you're doing is illegal. You should stop it.'
    'What's illegal?'
    Tailing in love with me.'
    Tm not falling in love with you.'
    'Why are you smiling then?'
    Before I could answer she pulled out a book and looked under 'S' in the index. She read out loud: 'Smiling is one of the earliest signs of love. If someone smiles at you, be sure they have another intention.'
    Tm very sorry,' I said, my teeth in a straight line.
    After that I went to buy a mouth-organ, and I was very careful not to smile at all.
    'Have you a little guitar or a mandolin?' I asked.
    I might as well have asked for the bones of the Holy Mother to be dug up, so wrathful and insulted did the shop-keeper appear. I explained I was a stranger, and he softened a little and told me that guitars and mandolins were forbidden, as were violins. He had a nice tuba, if I was interested. Politely, I declined the tuba and waited for some enlightenment. He directed me to the city museum.
    The museum was a gloomy edifice. No one seemed to be looking after it; there were no guides and no other visitors. It was a Museum of Love. As I walked into the main chamber I was greeted by a statue of Samson, blind and defeated, chained between two pillars in the fleshy palace of the Philistines. Sitting at his heel, laughing gleefully, was Delilah. She was holding his hair.
    Very soon I found the outlawed guitars and mandolins. They were hung high on the wall, and underneath was a fierce inscription describing them as: