Roman Charity

 

The young woman’s sumptuous crimson dress is unbuttoned. Her exposed breasts, painted in gleaming, creamy flesh tones, invite caress: they are the focal point of the painting, magnetising our gaze. Even if we manage to look away, how can we ever unsee the grey-bearded man, his mouth greedily attached to one breast, his eyes fixed on the rosy nipple of the other?
 
Roman Charity is an image of voluptuary horror. Twisting her face away from what is being done to her, the young woman gazes desperately beyond the frame, her body tensing. There is no bliss here, no reciprocity, no pleasure, no air. Is she signalling for help, or just desperate that nobody witness her entrapment? But there are witnesses of course. I am one, you are another. There have been innumerable others since 1625 when Peter Paul Rubens painted this scene with all the sinuous carnality for which he is renowned.
 
This suckling man, naked except for the black cloth draped across his groin, is marked as virile. There is an erect nipple on display on his bare chest. His sinewy arms are strong. He could still wield a sword, except that his hands, twisted behind him, are manacled, chained to the wall. It is only when one follows the gleaming links through the shadows that one sees the metal grille, behind which men leer at this abject spectacle. They are helmeted – soldiers or guards.
 
This is a public prison not a domestic one. And though the man is shackled, it is the woman, swathed in her ocean of red silk, who is unable to escape. Even as she averts her eyes from the sight of this awful, shameful, inescapable suckling, she rests one hand on the old man’s shoulder. Here tenderness, pity, perversity, fear and love compete. Hers are invisible bonds.
 
This scene of disorientating and regressive perversity, of a woman trapped – her body in service to nurture without limit – feels shockingly familiar. I feel it in the young woman’s body language, a silent scream of ‘Get me out of here!’ What would she say to me, I wonder, if she could use a language other than the language of the body and its fluids?
 
What women say and don’t say was in the forefront of my mind when I first saw this strange painting in 2016. At the time, I was drafting a manifesto for women writers for the free-speech organisation PEN International, so I had the following questions in mind: why is women’s creative legacy so easily lost to the canon? Why is the authority of women – our self-authorship – so difficult to establish, then pass on to our future daughters? Why do we hear silence when we know there are words? How are women disappeared? This disturbing painting embodied a psychic truth about the intimate politics of patriarchal relations between men and women that I needed to metabolise.
 
I could not see this sinuous Baroque painting as a classical allegory, the way a wealthy Florentine or Flemish bishop or merchant or nobleman would, the better to evade the censors. All I saw was a stricken young woman with an old man battened like a tick onto her body. I could not look at her without thinking of the countless women who have been feasted on and silenced by men, for whom women’s bodies feed and sustain their sense of power, authority and invincibility.
 
I have learned enough from Sigmund Freud and Michel Foucault to know that history can clarify things, which is why I went in search of the origins of Roman Charity, but I could find very little. The only full-length monograph on the subject is Jutta Gisela Sperling’s book Roman Charity: Queer Lactations in Early Modern Visual Culture (2016). Her investigations were prompted by a similar response to mine – a confusing repulsion-attraction that made it impossible for her, as for me, to look away from this perverse image. Sperling, a cultural historian of the early modern period, gives a marvellously fecund and subversive account of the image, replete with its unstable and shifting meanings – its queering of social and sexual relations. She looks at how these often eroticised and disturbing images of lactation conjure other (often repressed) relations of power, desire and matrilineal connection that disrupted and troubled the patriarchal system of kinship being established in the early modern period. I am indebted to Sperling’s wide scope and detailed analysis of Roman Charity as it relates, in particular, to the legal and social world that produced these images. But I’m also interested in looking at them from my own second-wave feminist vantage point in the present. Roman Charity reveals something fundamental about the troubled gender relations of the present. I have not wanted to lose the feeling of shock and recognition I felt on first encountering these paintings: the elision of the distance between sexuality and food.
 
The first record of Caritas Romana is a written account of a daughter breastfeeding her impoverished and imprisoned mother. Valerius Maximus, a 1st-century Roman historian, tells us that:
 
   “A plebeian woman of low position who had just given birth to a child, had permission to visit her mother, who had been shut up in prison as a punishment, and was always searched in advance by the doorkeeper to prevent her carrying in any food. She was detected giving her mother sustenance from her own breasts. In consequence of this marvel, the daughter’s pious affection was rewarded by the mother’s release, and both were awarded maintenance for life.”
 
It was a delight to have care – that form of embodied love, almost always performed by women, almost always made invisible – presented as a rebel daughter’s radical act. But there’s an undercurrent in the story of prurient patriarchal unease. The guards, Valerius Maximus tells us, at first wondered aloud if they had witnessed a titillating act that went ‘against nature’. Only after lengthy discussion do they decide that what they’d seen was not an act of incestuous lesbianism, but a demonstration of a dutiful Roman daughter obeying the first law of nature: to love her parents. Pliny the Elder records that a temple dedicated to the goddess of Piety was built in these two women’s honour where the prison once stood. It was at this site that freelance Roman wetnurses went to sell their milk services – a reminder that milk was both an extrafamilial commodity and a fluid that created different kinds of lines of connection to blood. No classical depictions of this law-defying act of daughter-mother nurture have been found – and there are vanishingly few in the Common Era. There are, however, many images on coins and frescoes that show a daughter feeding her father.

 
With a narrative speed that is striking, the mother-daughter couple is pushed aside, and Maximus swiftly moves on to tell a different, patriarchal version of this tale of filial devotion, in which the couple are named Pero, the dutiful daughter, and Cimon, the suckling father incarcerated for an unspecified crime and condemned to death by starvation. This was the story that was to become dominant in terms of visual representation: the father usurped the mother’s place. But this is not a like-for-like parental substitution. The relationship between a mother and her children, part of the law of nature, was not codified in Roman inheritance law, which meant that a mother could not leave anything to her daughter. A woman’s children were not hers. Meanwhile, a father’s relation with his children was codified in civil law: they could inherit from him. They were also, in effect, his property. The paterfamilias had all rights, including the right of life and death, over the members of his household. For the daughter, this defines the meaning of her giving and her father’s receiving.
 
Where the daughter could feed her mother as an act of freedom or rebellion, feeding her father is imbued with the relation of fealty.
 
I had a flash of body-memory when I read Sperling’s claim that Maximus’s twin anecdotes ‘participate in [a] visual and religious universe in which the depiction of breastfeeding stresses ritual or symbolic, not biological, maternity.’ It reminded me that the domesticated art of breastfeeding was once a promiscuous business. Milk leaks outside of and dissolves the closed lineages of blood-relations. I have fed three of my own children, but I have also fed another woman’s desperately hungry son. My friend went out and left her baby in my care. The tiny boy began to wail. So, to soothe him, I lifted up my top, stepping into one of the most ancient roles – that of wetnurse. He latched on, drinking what I had until then thought of as my birth-daughter’s milk. It surprised me at the time how natural – that complicated word for things we think of as being outside of culture – to allow a hungry but unrelated creature to feed from my body. I have thought of him as a kind of son ever since.
 
It is tempting to speculate that the original mother-daughter vision of Caritas Romana gives us a glimpse of a kinship system defined by milk lines rather than the blood lines of agnatic, or paternal, kinship. This tale that harks back to older goddess-centred cults and religions reminds me that Caritas Romana is not the only Roman tale of a life saved by the milk of its not-mother, the best-known being that of Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome: twin sons of the god Mars and the mortal Rhea Silvia, who were suckled by a she-wolf. There are also lactation tales that imbue the recipient with divine powers, demonstrating ancient beliefs in the magical power of breastmilk. One is writ so large that it has given the most spectacular feature of the night sky its name: the Milky Way. Tintoretto’s The Origin of the Milky Way (c1575) shows the infant Heracles being surreptitiously latched on to the goddess Hera while she sleeps. Heracles, the son of a mortal woman, apparently sucked so hard he woke the goddess who dashed him from her breast. Hera’s divine milk, which afforded him the immortality of the gods, then sprayed across the heavens and formed the Milky Way.

 
The abundance of milk is present in images of phantasmagorical plenitude and eroticism. Suckling nymphs and multibreasted mermaids and goddesses abound, portraying an extravagant delight in this extralinguistic world of flesh and bodily satisfaction. Images like Giulio Romano’s fantastically tailed mer-mother and her mer-babies give the slip to the realities of sexual reproduction and the constraints of family and of species.

 
 
The pagan breasts of powerful goddesses, their magic and their healing power, were assimilated into Christian beliefs and imagery, and so the veneration of lactating goddesses lived on in Catholicism. The scene of filial piety described in the original version of Roman Charity became linked to the Christian virtue of charity, which was customarily represented as a breastfeeding woman. The Madonna nursing the infant Jesus, the ur-image of maternal-divine care, became central to representations of the Roman Catholic Church. There was even a tradition of adult breastfeeding as a cure, evidence of the ancient beliefs in the magical power of breastmilk. Pope Innocent VIII was prescribed a young woman whom he suckled in the time before his death in 1492.
 

Renderings of the Madonna Lactans, or Nursing Madonna, in which one of Mary’s breasts is exposed, her milk standing in for the spiritual succour of the Church, became ubiquitous during the medieval period. Perhaps one of the most beautiful images of the pure, healing breasts of the mother of God, the intercessionary mother, is Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna Litta (1490-91), in which he combines an exquisitely natural depiction of an ordinary mother feeding her infant with an evocation of the divine.

 
For a time, a parity of fluids – the Virgin’s milk and the blood of Christ – were entwined in religious imagery, in worship, and as a means of accessing the divine. The erotic masochism – the pierced, tortured, leaking Christ, whose blood nourishes his followers, as Madonna’s milk nourishes those she suckles – was a staple of medieval and Renaissance Christian imagery. In Quirizio da Murano’s painting The Redeemer and the Nun (1475), the Christ figure offers his wound/breast to a nun, his fingers in a V shape around his nipple in the classical pose of a woman breastfeeding.

 
 
The beautiful Madonna Lactans – one ripe breast fully exposed – was a popular subject, but the holy and the erotic made for uneasy bedfellows, especially with the increased realism of these paintings. In the Virgin and Child with Angels (c1452), Jean Fouquet is said to have painted Agnès Sorel, mistress of Charles VII of France, as the Madonna. This disguised portrait marks the blurring of, if not a transition from, the symbolic holy breast to the erotic breast of a powerful man’s lover.

 
A century later, as the Reformation gathered pace, the German brothers Barthel and Sebald Beham produced several lascivious renditions of Roman Charity, one of them openly pornographic. The Behams repudiated the hypocrisy of representing titillating subject matter through veiled classical subjects. In one image, while Cimon is clothed, with hands shackled behind his back, a breastfeeding Pero stands seemingly naked, her pubis shaved and everything on show through a piece of cloth so transparent as to satirise the very conventions that enabled this display of thinly disguised classical figures. Here, Pero is as upright and erect as any dominatrix, while she pushes her pointy nipple into the eagerly submissive Cimon’s mouth. The sexual is palpable in the Behams’ images – and the truth of illicit desire, and of incest, is undeniable. The brothers Beham paid for their honesty by being jailed for atheism.

 
The trouble between the ecclesiastical authorities and the provocative Beham brothers presaged the religious conflict that exploded with the reforming zeal of the Protestant Reformation. This prompted the Catholic Counter-Reformation – and Baroque art, dating from the early 1600s, was part of the pushback against Protestantism. A populist and sensational form of ecclesiastical art, it was intended to appeal directly to the senses. The aim was to attract congregants, lured away by the reforming fervour of the newly formed Protestant churches, back into the Catholic fold. The Baroque style is defined by vivid images – dense, loaded, crowded, full of movement, and Caritas Romana – the Latin title fig-leafing the creepy made-you-look voluptuousness of this image – became a very popular subject during this period.

 
Perhaps the greatest Baroque painter was Caravaggio, and he was commissioned to do an altar piece, The Seven Works of Mercy (c1607), for a church in Naples, in which he included a depiction of Roman Charity. Caravaggio’s famed use of chiaroscuro, or contrasting light and dark, gives an intense sense of drama to his paintings, but in his version, unlike that of Rubens or most other painters at the time, Pero stands in the street and feeds her father through the bars of his prison while crowds swirl around her. This makes Pero’s law-breaking gift of sustenance both defiant and subversive, transforming a private act of charity, suffused with eroticism and shame in most depictions, into a civic act of solidarity.

 
The increasingly naturalistic depictions of bodies in classical subjects give the Baroque paintings of Roman Charity a pronounced sexual frisson, dissolving the increasingly faint lines that separated the sensual from the sacred. In Gaspar de Crayer’s rendition, the expression on Pero’s face as she performs the abject act of suckling her seated father is complex. Shame and entrapment, duty and love, as she approximates that intentional stillness that mothers learn to adopt in order to facilitate the milk flow. His expression is one of satiated bliss. For me there is a reckoning with this image, churning up my own discomfit with my father’s increasing dependence as he ages, and throwing into sharp relief the impossibility of both giving succour and of eliding that giving, so that the illusion of masculinity’s omnipotence can be maintained.

 
The Dutch painter Hendrick ter Brugghen has Pero kneeling before her father. She is in the position of supplicant and of the sexually dominant woman, which the Beham brothers parodied. In this painting, the daughter’s indentured care-labour, filial duty and the erotic are entwined. The composition of the painting draws one’s gaze to this illuminated young beauty’s bare shoulders, her rich brocade sleeves tumbled to her elbows. Only then does the viewer’s eye travel to her feasted-upon breast. The suckling old man is swaddled in velvety crimson. As is typical of the Baroque, the illuminated couple is set against a dramatically dark background, so it takes a while to discern the shadowy figure of a man staring at this furtive scene. The two guards of the original account have become a single voyeur who watches the pair as the viewer – we – watch them from the other side of the canvas.
 
In both these paintings, as with the Rubens, the daughter’s breast, nurturing and erotic, distracts us from patriarchy’s blind spot: male need, dependence, vulnerability. There is the explicit danger that Pero might be caught breaking the law by feeding Cimon, but to save her father she must break an unwritten law. This taboo is not the prohibition against incest. It is the prohibition of an elemental truth of patriarchy: that for this familial, social and cultural system of power and dominance to function, there has to be a denial of the dependence of men on the care given to them by women – that dependence, as the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott wrote, is the origin of men’s fear of women.
 
What, I wondered, did women painters, contemporaries of these men who had little truck with female autonomy and even less with female creativity, make of Caritas Romana? To find answers, I turned to the contemporary of these men, Artemisia Gentileschi. Taught to paint by her father, she had a successful and lucrative career that afforded her considerable independence. But this stellar career was scaffolded on great personal courage. Aged 17, Gentileschi was raped by the painter Agostini Tassi, a friend of her father. Tassi was charged and Gentileschi’s testimony ensured that he was convicted, at a cost of being tortured in court to verify the truth of her account.

 
Gentileschi made female rage and power a theme in her richly coloured, intense renderings of classical subjects. Her work is fascinating because of the autobiographical elements that represent classical myths from a violated woman’s point of view. Her painting Judith Slaying Holofernes (c1612-13) allegedly depicts Gentileschi killing Tassi, her rapist. She understood only too well the power of the male gaze to strip a female subject of more than her clothes. In her painting Susanna and the Elders (c1610), Gentileschi chillingly depicts the bathing Susanna’s experience of the predatory male gaze and the collusion between two men, so like the leering guards in Rubens and ter Brugghen’s Caritas Romana, spying on a woman in a deeply private, intimate moment.

 
Gentileschi’s Roman Charity is different. Pero, large, protective and clad in the regal blue of the Madonna, calmly scans the darkness surrounding them, while her chained old father, naked from the waist up, feeds. The artist has banished the voyeur-guards, so brilliantly rendered in Susanna and the Elders, from the scene. Instead, there is urgency and defiance in this woman giving a life-saving and subversive gift to her father, and Pero is not ashamed. Like Gentileschi’s Judith, Pero is in charge of what she is doing. Like Judith, she holds the power of life and death over a man – but, in this scene, she gives life, not death. To save him, Pero gives of her own body, but for him to live he must regress to the position of infant. Emasculation is the price of his salvation. Gentileschi’s Cimon is aware of his vulnerability, his indebtedness and his dependence. It is this knowledge, perhaps, that makes Gentileschi’s rendition so moving. She reclaims the heroic aspect of caring for another. Her painting allows us to glimpse a counternarrative to the reductive functionalism that collapses a woman’s entire identity into her feeding role, inducting us into a system of kinship based on reciprocity, rather than extractive servitude. Her painting seems to demonstrate, not so much what the daughter’s debt might be to her father – something that she must avert her eyes from – but, rather, what the father’s debt might be to his daughter.
 
With the changing ideologies of the Church, the state, the family and its sustenance, not to mention the new restraint of neoclassicism, Caritas Romana receded from view, as did wetnursing. In the second half of the 18th century, ancient patterns of wetnursing – nonmaternal breastfeeding and the open-ended forms of kinship made possible by connection via the flow of milk – came under sustained ideological attack. Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued vociferously against wetnursing, writing in Émile (1762) that the first duty of a mother is to feed her own infants. Milk production was being privatised and brought within the domestic confines of the bourgeois patriarchal household.
 
As breastfeeding became increasingly hidden from view, so renditions of Roman Charity were rarer. Tantalisingly, the Swiss history painter Angelica Kauffmann – a founding member of the Royal Academy in London – painted one in 1794 but, apart from an anodyne sketch from around 1765, which has echoes of Caravaggio, it has been lost.
 
Then I chanced on Barbara Krafft’s Count Franz de Paula Graf von Hartigand his wife Eleanore as Caritas Romana (1797) – a painting I can view only through the lenses of psychoanalysis and pornography.

 
Krafft distils and surfaces the claustrophobic horrors of the patriarchal bourgeois family that shackles a woman, body, mind and soul. All pretence at the mythic or the allegorical has been dropped, except in the title. This version of Caritas Romana reveals the truth of bourgeois marital arrangements – that the daughter/wife is there to feed and succour her father/husband. The ageing count with his claw-like hands protruding from the sleeves of his striped dressing gown, a tea tray on the table beside him, is propped up like an invalid on plump green cushions, his face turned to us.
 
The voyeuristic guards are gone. We, the viewers of this ghastly scene, have taken their place and are gawping at the female prison that is the domestic sphere. This uncanny tableau exposes what is usually hidden behind the walls of a home where, in the patriarchal family romance, the daughter and her equivalents service the insatiable, hidden needs of the father. The perversity – a skin-crawling creepiness – exudes from the visual inversion of patriarchal hierarchies of sex/gender and power/dominance. The young daughter/wife, whose full breasts are exposed presumably on her husband/father’s instruction, looks out at us, as does he. He is smug, replete – has he just fed off her? But she looks sick as she stares at us with an expression of defeat, shame and humiliation that is almost unbearable. All of Eleanore’s – all of a woman’s – milk, personhood and dignity have been appropriated.
 
Here, Krafft has depicted a kind of neoclassical revenge porn in which the nakedness of the woman is put on display at the behest of the man who owns her. This Pero has the blank-eyed stare of a woman who, because she cannot escape, has absented herself. A hostage-housewife, she looks straight to camera, unable even to plead her part. Her ageing husband/father smiles out at us, utterly shameless, while her whole body is freighted with shame. And shame is what has kept so many women silent down the years. It is enforced silence that maintains the patriarchal status quo.
 
This unsettling painting is layered with future history, but it is also a record of its time. Perhaps Krafft had read Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), published five years before this painting was completed. Surely, Krafft had heard of The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen (1791) by Olympe de Gouges. ‘Women have the right to mount the scaffold,’ declared Gouges. ‘They should likewise have the right to mount the rostrum.’ Krafft would likewise have known that Gouges was sent to the guillotine in 1793, in part because of her insistence on a woman’s right to public speech. Something that Eleanore, wife of Count Franz de Paula Graf von Hartig, did not have.
 
My historical quest for traceries of Roman Charity achieved its mercenary apotheosis in the late 18th century, when the gendered domestic extraction of female care shifts to the colonial canvas to represent the extraction of resources from colonised subjects. Nowhere is this more evident than in Jean-Michel Moreau’s version of Roman Charity from 1777. Depicted with a colonised subject performing the filial act, Moreau’s image demonstrates the versatility and political resonance of the ancient allegory. A Spanish priest, Bartolomé de las Casas, is cast in the role of the languishing Cimon, who becomes a bedridden invalid, rather than a starved convict. An unnamed woman (whom Sperling in her book calls an ‘Amerindian princess’) is placed at the centre of the composition, near-naked – suggesting that she will play the role of Pero and suckle this sickly man. The painting underwrites the colonial entitlement to the bodies of others, while shifting Caritas Romana’s gendered domestic extraction of female care and labour to the extraction of resources from the colonised world.

 
This is an image of how gendered extraction without limit and the violence of colonial subjugation are merged and made domestic, intimate, natural. This impossible relation must be kept hidden in the most private spheres – a sphere that, under patriarchal arrangements of the home and the body, is outside of regulation.
 
And then Roman Charity as a subject of painting disappeared. It took more than 200 years before it burst back, waking like some kind of malignant Sleeping Beauty, onto the visual landscape that is the movie Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). In this eco-apocalyptic world, ruled over by brutal tyrants, Earth has become a man-made desert. Almost all women have been subjugated. There is virtually no water, and nothing grows, so the only food is breastmilk. Because the warlords depend on breastmilk, the women are captive, forced into pregnancy and then, after they give birth, they are hooked up to machines that milk them as dairy cows are milked.
 

The rebellion against this patriarchal terror is led by a warrior woman, Imperator Furiosa (played by Charlize Theron). Her fight for survival becomes a war between the sexes when she protects a group of escaped women who have miraculously saved the seeds of once-abundant plants. This is the food that will save humanity and liberate women from reproductive enslavement, if only Furiosa can succeed and vanquish Roman Charity forever, freeing Pero from her parasitic father. Once again, Caritas Romana pops up as shorthand for ongoing gendered inequality. We should keep a close watch for its reappearance in the cultural landscape if we want to rethink the politics of filial duty, care and the use-value of women’s bodies.

Milk, Pity and Power. Since antiquity, artists have depicted a perverse scene of a daughter breastfeeding her aged father. What does it mean? By Margie Orford. Aeon, March 17, 2023.

The last time you saw your mother alive, she helped you heal from your C-section. It wasn’t what you planned, with your careful study of the benefits of natural childbirth, your doula, your pelvic carriage the midwife called beautiful. Your own mother’s births had been natural, her milk abundant. She always said that being a mother was the one thing she did right, even if she didn’t always do it well. At first, you’d asked her not to come after the baby was born. You didn’t want the interference or the fights. Now you think about how lucky it was that you needed her then. Now you can remember how she jumped out of the car and held your son before she hugged you. How immediate and consuming her love could be. How unfailing and stupid and true. She forgave you every time you let her down, but you can’t forgive yourself. Then you might forget how, when the tide of hormones changed in your body, your mother held you down with blankets until the shaking stopped. When your son spit up bloody milk, she rubbed lanolin on the scabs on your breasts. She swaddled your son and sang to him while you cried.

 §

 In ancient Rome, those in need could visit the Columna Lactaria in the market. There, wet nurses would feed your baby for a fee. You could also hire a wet nurse to live with you and take care of all your child’s feedings. In the first century AD, Sonarus recommended a wet nurse’s breasts be unwrinkled, soft, of medium size. The nipples couldn’t be too big or too small, neither too compact nor too porous, but soft and smooth. The Goldilocks ideal of breasts, the Pythagorean ideal. The wet nurse herself was required to be self-controlled, sympathetic, tidy. And Greek. Her traits would be transferred to the baby upon nursing. In the milk, that calm. In the milk, that moral cleanliness.

 §

 You wonder what you’ve already given your son—fear, awe, worry, exhaustion, a few ounces of your own blood. You’ve often been a disappointment as a daughter and hope you won’t fall short as a mother, too. At least you were not the first to harm him. The surgeon cut a millimeter too deep and split his flesh. Thank God it wasn’t his face, your mother says as you kiss the sliced and tender foot. He was breech, unwilling to roll down headfirst, stubborn as your own need. You were cut by the same scalpel he was, though your wound is deeper. The gauze keeps reddening. The clear glue holding the edges of you together barely seems like enough to keep you from coming apart. Maybe that is what you’ve given him—shared scar, shared history, same healing. Your mother prays for you, but you don’t know which Christ is coming for you—the one that’s a lamb, or the lion.

 §

 Scholars have translated the Greek word for lion to mean five different things in the Bible. You don’t understand how language could fail this abundantly. A single ferocious mammal could come to mean everything. Your mother doesn’t understand how you can stop going to church and still win Bible trivia every year at Christmas, as though attendance and curiosity were mutually exclusive. You remind her that you’ve been saved more times that you can count. It had become a source of rapture for you and embarrassment for her, that call to the altar and your reliable surrender. It just felt so good to know God wanted you each week without fail. And so you explain to your mother that you only did what God wanted of you, and when God went quiet, you went in search of him in quieter ways. You began to dissect words to discover their histories. You found the red words of Jesus. You found the lion. You began to find a lion in every book.

 Your mother thinks God wouldn’t let himself be misinterpreted. He says what he means. In one out of five cases, she is right. One lion is, naturally, a giant cat named by Adam. Dear hunter who was surely a tame vegetarian until God found Abel’s bones rotting in the midden. Ruler of the pride. King of the beasts. The Lord who will lap the blood from your hip, that bone curve of sex and cradle.

 §

 In the story of the founding of Rome, the twin heroes Romulus and Remus are abandoned by their mother and nursed by a wolf. This may not shock you. Children have often been given goat’s milk or cow’s milk for nourishment, and interspecies nursing can go both ways. For several centuries, women nursed puppies to ease engorged breasts and to drink the colostrum. That first milk you’d been taught to call nutritional gold was once suspected of being tainted. When Mary Wollstonecraft lay dying of puerperal fever, her doctor ordered puppies to nurse from her breasts, believing it could help her uterus contract and expel the infected placenta that was poisoning her.

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 Your friend calls it vampiric, the hunger with which your son attaches to you, but you enjoy it. When you were wheeled into the recovery room after you’d been stitched shut, you saw your husband, shirtless, your newborn gumming him from collarbone to shoulder. He crossed your husband’s empty chest, dressing him with spit and instinct. When he was laid on your chest, your body knew. His mouth seizing your nipple was a familiar sensation, even though you’d never nursed before. It was a need you understood, a need you could meet—at least at first.

 On the third day, when your son tries and tries and fails to latch, the lactation consultant comes in and shows you different holds and techniques. When these all fail, she attaches a double pump that tugs your nipples with regular compressed air cycles that simulate a child’s suck and gulp. This is how you learned one side was dry. Your son was frustrated and hungry because you kept trying to offer him the half of yourself that had nothing to give.

 The lactation consultant consoles you. This happens, she says. It can still come in. They did, after all, have a milk bank at the hospital if it came to that. She is patient, untroubled, wise in the knowledge of the body and how it can nourish. And you know it was the mythical figure Philosophia-Sapientia, the personification of wisdom, who suckled philosophers. The breast was the site of such wisdom, such virtue. Even the Virgin Mary’s milk was equated with Christ blood. A picture from the Day of Judgment in the Hereford Mappa Mundi shows the Virgin displaying her breasts and making her plea for humanity. Christ intercedes before God by showing his wounds. Maybe blood and milk are both miraculous. Pilgrims flocked to Walsingham and Chartres to venerate the Virgin’s milk, allegedly contained in phials there as relics. Medieval mystics would meditate on the image of milk as a metaphor for the nourishment of the Christian soul, like a pearl foundering in cream. In the twelfth century, Bernard of Clairvaux had a vision of drinking from the Virgin’s breast. His offering was devotion. Her milk, the reward.

And then it happens. It arrives as promised. That weight in your chest descends. Your own milk is the reward of biology and a patient lactation consultant. There was no pilgrimage, meditation, or vision, but you thank God anyway. You’ve always had a talent for offering God that which he has no use for.

 §

 The Roman goddess of filial piety, Pietas, conducted her sacrifices by fire and altar. Unlike other virtues, putting parents and country before self was not a gift from the gods, but an inborn desire. Or at least it should be. Children who failed to honor their parents needed to perform diaculum, expiatory rites, for the infraction. Usually the expiation involved an animal sacrifice upon an altar. Blood has always been such an easy symbol of atonement, as if it were your own you were shedding.

 You always struggled with apologies, even when you knew you were wrong. Like every time you valued honesty over kindness. But your mother was the one who taught you this—to confess to crimes no one had discovered yet, to admit your own thoughts as if the cruelties of imagination needed to confess themselves to an audience. You secretly felt that the person to win an argument should be the stronger one. And in the contest between you and your mother, that person would always be you. You hated her need for words, for those two words in particular. In fact, some days you hated her need in general. You’d rather make it up to her by slitting a pig’s neck and letting it bleed out on a stone.

 §

 Your mother has always loved Job. His patient suffering. His enduring faithfulness. You’ve always detested his compliance, the easy way he accepted another set of children to replace the ones God allowed to die. But you have to admire how he argues. Some scholars say Job proves his faithfulness because he wins the argument with his friends about God by simply being more poetic. His metaphors are better than theirs. The lion in God is the snake in God is the whirlwind swayed by an image. No one could deny God’s power in the face of Job’s suffering and how he rendered that suffering into language.

 In this way you realize you and your mother do have something in common. You admire Job, too. Not his faith, but the quality of his verse, his deft allegories. It’s about time you realized God cares about rhetoric. Your own sentence depends on it.

 §

 You didn’t argue with your mother but accepted right away that she wanted to dress your three-day-old infant in little costumes for pictures. Tiny elf. Sweet pea. Topped with a bow like an early gift. You congratulated yourself on this accommodation of her desires, her perennial insistence on showing her love through images. How she framed your son in photos. How she re-wrapped all your presents under the tree. You love beauty too, so for once, you were grateful. You were finally kind.

 Though you noticed your mother had a hard time breathing as she helped you clean your sutures, you won’t really start to worry until the second time she’s in the emergency room. You have been too focused on sleeping, nursing, sleeping, eating, nursing, trying to unhook your snarled hair from the brush. You take your son on walk after walk as the ground thaws and you think about your mother. Why she’s vomiting. Why she’s weak. Why blood tests show nothing.

 §

 Like so many miraculous things, breast milk was thought to be a curative. Queen Isabella’s pharmacist stocked human milk as a restorative for when the queen was ill. Pope Innocent VII prescribed himself breast milk for his various ailments. Even you dabbed milk on the corners of your son’s eyes when they started to seal shut, thinking: Maybe it will work. And it did.

 §

 The Columna Lactaria in Rome was also a place babies could be abandoned. It was presumed that a wet nurse would see the forsaken child and take pity upon it. A friend tells you that when her daughter was three months old, she tried to sell her baby on the internet. Before your son was born, you would not have understood this. But now between your sleepless worry about how many ounces he is drinking and how you can get more than three hours of sleep and how your mother told your uncle that she didn’t think she was going to make it—and it took a minute before you understood what she meant by make it, and your hands shook, and your son would not stop crying—and you knew that you, too, would have to abandon one love or another. And your son was still so new. Your history together only contained kicks and then cries. Surely there was someone else out there who was better prepared, or stronger, or had a mother with a strong heart the next town over.

 God tried to show you what to do, but you are no Ruth. You would not stay by your mother’s side no matter what. You would not go where she would go. Her people were not your people. Her God was not your God. There was no way on God’s green earth you’d pick up discarded threshings like it was charity, no way you’d lay yourself at Boaz’s feet. You had a life to live. You embraced your freedom like a son.

 It’s about time you learned that the quality of mercy is as weak as the tendons in your knees. Even the dark comes when you name it. So does the lion when you call it king. Gift-burdened, he rides with two wise friends under a rare star to drink the milk leaking on your shirt.

 §

 Your husband jerks back and looks down at your body with surprise. Mmm, he says. What? you ask, and he says, Milk. You look down at the watery white pearl that buds on your left nipple before rolling off. You both thought you were done with this. Dry. He thought your breasts belonged to him again, but then this wet reminder of your son in the next room. Your body a geography of nourishment, pleasure, and comfort shared between father and son. What does it taste like? you want to know. I don’t know, he says, and then more quietly: Sweet.

 §

 Romans could also go to the Columna Lactaria to hire a woman for erotic nursing. Those who felt undeniable lactophilia could resume the relationship they began with breasts when they were minutes old. In this, the breast could be a source of nourishment, of pleasure, of power. Nearby, in the temple of Pietas, was a painting of an old motif—Roman Charity. The woman in the painting is a daughter, just like you used to be. Remembered for her actions, she is nameless now. But her mother gave her one, even if history has forgotten it, two syllables plucked from the air. Pretty, that’s what all mothers hope for. A pretty name they’ll never want to say in anger.

§

 If the lion is Christ, then he is also the lamb, or you are the lamb, or you are the woman in the painting baring the whites of her eyes to heaven while she feeds her father. This rare, obscene mercy. This way only a daughter can save. In the background are Roman guards who will discover her act and pardon her starved father, awed he was honored like that.

 §

 Before your sister phones and you hear code blue, code blue repeating on the hospital intercom, you were examining the Book of Luke, that doctor among fishermen. You’d been arguing with a friend about Christ’s last words, but you were both right. The gospels couldn’t keep their stories straight. Luke and John in their late remembered testimonies said Jesus cried: It is finished. Or, Father, into your hands I commend my spirit. Darling son. Dear trust. It was Matthew and Mark who wrote that it ended with Eloi, Eloi, lama sabacthani. They say the sky went dark because God could not watch his only son die, and his son wanted to know My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? But Mary watched, as perhaps only a mother can. And when the Roman soldiers took Christ down, she held him. She cleaned his body. She prepared it for burial.

 In the last letter your mother wrote you, she said: Will write more soon. You ask your sister what your mother’s last words were, and your sister says the last time she saw your mother alive she just kept shaking her head. I think she was too weak to talk. Stop worrying about whether or not your last words were kind. That’s not where you failed.

 §

 Your sister says it was good you sent your Mother’s Day present early. You’d shopped weeks before, laid fabrics across your wrists to test their softness, judged the rose patterns against one another. You’d sent them express to make sure they arrived in plenty of time, thinking your mom might like some new pajamas in the hospital, a way to feel pretty in the starched and stiff bed. Your sister gave them to your mother the day before, and your mother said she couldn’t wait to wear them. You decide to bury her in them.

 §

 Though your mother left a list of objects that should belong to you, all you want are a few photos and her old pajamas. Even though the smell of her fades, you wear her red pajamas every night, refusing to sew a new button where she’d clipped a safety pin, the thin, cold metal resting against your breastbone at night. Your sister said the hospital gowns were what your mom hated most in her last days. She complained about them to a nurse who told her to get over it. No one cared. They saw naked bodies every day. That did not console your mother. She didn’t see why illness and privacy could not coincide.

 Your mother was shy about her body. In Brazil she grew up thinking she was half man, half woman because puberty was so slow to arrive. She said other girls would tease her, and she would run into the jungle after school almost every day and pray that God would finish making her a woman. Even after he did, he made her modest, too. She would refuse to change in front of you, and your easy way with your body shocked her. You liked that. Shocking her. Both because you liked making people uncomfortable and because you thought she could learn from you, you who knew what it was to be brave.

 But one day she said she wanted to surprise you. One bright Florida afternoon, she showed you her breasts in the bathroom mirror. It stunned you. You didn’t believe you had inherited this particular beauty or this particular courage. The most beautiful part of your body is the scar you’ll never show your son, red grimace whitening between your hip bones like a scythe, and he the reaping. Pain’s cruel reminder: alive, alive, you’re alive. He doesn’t know you cry when he naps, cry as you push the stroller, cry when you think about the mercy that should’ve been yours. Even now, you’d give anything, like the woman in the painting holding her father’s mouth to her breast.

 §

 Your mother used to talk about her death when you were a child, describing how to remember her, down to the last floral detail, as if she already knew the absence she was preparing. Sometimes in her last few years she would seek it, that kind of pain that could knock her out, gift her with numbness. You could hear her on the other end of the phone, not her voice, but her body’s thump thump thump against the wall as if she had the courage or will to beat herself hard enough for that blissful black fog to find her. Thump, she tries. Thump—the whole force of her body launched at the wall—thump—as if one quick pain could help her escape the rest of it. Thump. You called for help from six states away while your sister put herself between your mother’s body and the wall, and you knew your mother’s walls were green, her bed was probably unmade, that she put on makeup before she cried. When the police arrived, she would be embarrassed. Not at the extremity of sadness or the dents in the wall, but the messiness of her house, the unbeautiful way her mascara leaked down her undammed cheeks.

§

 By now you know God’s not much of a talker. When your mother died you had milk to give and no way to reach her, but that’s not why you’re guilty. Her death hurt you. Her suffering never did. If the lion is also the devil, unbutton your shirt and feed him.

Roman Charity. By Traci Brimhall. Image Journal, issue 90.

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