The first time I visited the Vatican, I saw a very tall, very frail old man in a wheelchair toss himself to the floor at the entrance to St. Peter’s and drag himself all the way to the altar on his elbows. He was wearing a fine pin-striped grey wool suit that must have been tailored for him years earlier, when he had been more muscular and more mobile. It was the most powerful act of religious devotion I’ve ever seen. Zosia, the Polish-American narrator of Karolina Waclawiak’s novel How to Get Into the Twin Palms, once visited the Black Madonna in Częstochowa, and can remember crawling around the icon in the church, the pebbles on the floor bruising her knees. Now Zosia lives in Los Angeles, collects unemployment, crashes motel swimming pools, plays with fire, and obsesses about getting into a nightclub near her home that’s populated by small-time Russian gangsters. Every so often she remembers the Black Madonna and the person she used to be.
The Black Madonna of Częstochowa isn’t black. She’s dark-skinned because the pigments used to paint her flesh were darkened, legend has it, during a church fire the painting miraculously survived. She has a profoundly sad, inward expression, and two disfiguring scars across her right cheek. The wounds give the portrait a tinge of violence and sadism, which might be one reason Zosia recalls it. It’s said that the scars were made by thieves during a robbery, and that they dropped the picture when it began to bleed. Twin Palms, in its setting and incantory tone, reminded me of Joan Didion’s California novels, which are narrated by women preternaturally sensitive, physically and psychologically, to their surroundings. The world rushes in and wounds them. Zosia wounds herself. She rubs her hands raw in the sand, nicks herself shaving, gets sunburn on the back of her neck, and then a rash on her arms. Everything that she experiences registers on her skin. Like the Black Madonna, she wears the scars heavily.
