Rituals (9 page)

They walked back in silence. By the first houses of the village she asked him if he would go home a little after her. Leaning against a wall, he watched her as she slowly, rockingly, walked away from him, not looking back once. When he arrived home, he did not see her anywhere.

*       *

Dinner was a greater catastrophe than lunch. The uncle who had hitherto existed only in name had become flesh and was sitting at the head of the table, wrapped in massive drunkenness. Taads looked with disdain at the army of crystal wine glasses by his plate, and Inni's aunt was in such a state of agitation that Inni feared she would not last the evening. The fourth man at the table was addressed as Reverend Uncle by the uncle. He was wearing a purple sash, purple buttons on his cassock, and a purple skull cap. "Monsignor Terruwe is private chamberlain to the Pope," his aunt had told him, but he had had no idea how to imagine such a person. The man had a long, exceedingly white face with mud-coloured eyes. He was a professor at the theological academy in Rome. During grace before the meal, which he said in a slow and rasping voice, Inni saw him looking at Taads, who had not crossed himself, as if he were setting eyes on a rare reptile for the first time.

The hors d'oeuvre consisted of calf's tongue in a green sauce. His aunt tinkled a little bell. His heart pounded. The girl entered. Her gait had something of a dance, and he noticed that the priest followed her all around the room with his eyes. When she bent forward to pour out the wine, they both saw the high start of her breasts. Their eyes met, and the priest cast his down. Inni hoped she would look at him, that the mockery of those green eyes would briefly flutter over him in confirmation of what had happened that afternoon — that he and no one else had caressed those now concealed breasts at which the mud-coloured eyes were looking so covetously. But nothing happened. She filled his glass last, that same small, strong hand holding the bottle of Meursault in its grip. The wine poured golden yellow into the glass.

"To our newly found nephew," said the uncle.

They raised their glasses to him and drank, a strange group of solid shadows that had suddenly somehow become connected with him.

"You have left the Mother Church, Mr Taads?" asked the chamberlain.

Arnold Taads stared at him and said at last: "Let us try to avoid an argument. What I have to say on the subject would sound most discourteous to your ears."

"My ears are but human ears. It is God's ears you might offend."

Taads said nothing. Inni tried to imagine it. God's ears. Who knows, God might be nothing but ear, a gigantic marble ear floating through space. But God did not exist. The Pope did, that was sure, and this strangely birdlike man was his private chamberlain. But what was that? If he was so private, no one would know about him. Maybe he was the lord of the private chamber. A secret room in the Vatican where the white, equally birdlike figure of Pius XII resided and to which this man had access, white heron and hooded crow. What would they talk about? Secretive whisperings in Italian, but what about? Perhaps he was the Pope's father confessor. Could a pope sin? He remembered his own sessions in endless sequences in sour-smelling confessionals, the whispered exchanges, the foul male smell in which there floated words like unchastity, repentance, and forgiveness, and his own voice in the repulsive intimacy of the wooden seat. "Alone or with others . . . Sixth Commandment. .. penitence."

"But forgive me my curiosity, Mr Taads."

Inni saw the ski champion's single eye narrowing.

"I forgive you everything," he said, "but even if I had believed in God, I would have left your church. An institution that is based on suffering and death can never bode any good."

"You mean the sacrificial death of the Son of God?"

"The communists are busy surrounding us," said the uncle. "When they come, our number will be up first."

Arnold Taads reflected. "Monsignor," he said, leaving a pause after
Mon,
so that the full force of the title remained briefly suspended around the priest, like a halo. "God does not exist and therefore he has no son. All religions provide the wrong answer to the same question: Why are we on this earth?"

"We are on this earth in order to serve God and thereby to attain heaven," said the uncle as if someone had pressed a button. The big breasts reappeared and poured small glasses of Sercial to accompany the consomme.

"I understand you are a professor of theology," Taads continued, "and so this is a very childish conversation. You are filled up to your dog collar with dogma and scholasticism. You know all the arguments to prove the existence of God, and all the counter arguments. You have constructed an entire system on the gruesome symbol of the cross. Your religion still feeds on that one sado-masochistic seance that may never really have taken place. It was the militaristic organization of the Roman Empire that gave this strange cult, with its peculiar mixture of pagan idolatry and good intentions, a chance to develop. The Western thirst for expansion and colonialism enabled it to spread, and the Church that you call a mother has more often been a murderer, usually a tyrant, and always a bully."

"And you have a better answer?"

"I have no answer."

"What is your view of the mystics?"

"Mysticism has nothing to do with any particular religion.

Mystics are almost always regarded with suspicion by the official churches. It is a rare opportunity for man to lose himself. If there ever comes a time when there are no longer any religions, there will still be mystics. Mysticism is a faculty of the soul, not of a system. Or did you think that nothingness is not a mystical concept?"

"So you believe in nothingness."

Taads groaned. "You can't believe in nothingness. You can't attach a system to the nonexistence of everything."

"The nonexistence of everything." The chamberlain savoured this brief phrase on his tongue. Suddenly he raised his hand. "This hand is real, wouldn't you think?"

"To look at it, yes."

"So it is not nonexistent. And if this plate is the world — let us assume for a moment that it is — then that is not nonexistent either."

"One day," said Taads, "you and I, your hand and this plate and this bottle of Haut Brion and all the rest of the world will no longer exist. Then even our deaths will not exist and everybody else's death will not exist and therefore at the same time all memory will be nonexistent. Then we shall never have existed. That is what I mean."

"And you can live with that?"

"That wasn't the question." For the first time that day Inni saw Taads smile. Some of the greyness drifted away from his face. "I can live perfectly with that. Not always, but usually. Stones, plants, stars — everything lives with that. I am, ah, a colleague of everything that exists. So are you for that matter."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I am, we all are, colleagues of the universe. If you take the line that the human measure means nothing and that nothing is in fact smaller or bigger than anything else, then all of us, people and things, share the same fate. We have had a beginning and we shall have an end, and between the two we exist, the universe as well as a geranium. The universe will exist a little bit longer than you, but this small difference does not make you differ essentially from each other."

"And death?"

"I have not the faintest idea what that is. Have you?"

At this point the dinner party took a strange turn. Inni's aunt burst into tears. Whether it was because of what Taads had just said was not clear, but the consequences were not long in coming. In the silence, punctuated by violent sobs, Arnold Taads's commanding voice boomed forth.

"Therese, don't make such an exhibition of yourself."

At this, the sobbing changed into a kind of wailing in which, with some difficulty, the words "never loved me" could be distinguished. As if he were not really there but was suspended from the ceiling, infinitely high up and far away, Inni saw Petra entering the room, taking his aunt in her arms, and leading her away like a half-witted child. At the same time the uncle rose. His huge bulk stumbled towards Taads. Blood turned the patrician neck below the white hair to dark red. Monsignor Terruwe had also risen from his seat and was travelling along a course between Taads and the uncle. The blow intended for Taads landed flat in his white, ecclesiastical face, but its premature arrival caused the uncle to lose his balance. He briefly continued on his way in a crazy zigzag, hit the cupboard full of
famille rose,
and as the fragments of glass and porcelain were sent flying, slowly slumped to the ground.

"Well done," said Taads. With the help of the monsignor, who had withstood the familial blow amazingly well, they lifted the uncle from the carpet and settled him in an armchair.

It had become empty around the table, at which the three of them resumed their seats. In silence, but with her clown's face glinting with ill-concealed mirth, Petra cleared away the leg of mutton and returned a moment later with a gigantic platter of cheeses and a dark gleaming decanter.

"Mr Taads," said the priest, "there may be a few things on this mortal earth on which we have the same opinion, but on this at least we can agree: my nephew serves an exemplary glass of port."

They raised their glasses to each other and drank. Inni felt the deep, dark taste pervade his mouth, seductive and mysterious.

"To think," said Terruwe, "that Chamberlain had not even gone to Munich when the grapes of this wine were still hanging in the vineyard in the full heat of the sun."

No one spoke. The priest had closed his eyes and was listening to inaudible voices. When he spoke next, it was in a different voice, as if he were no longer addressing Taads and Inni, but a multitude hidden somewhere behind the grass-coloured silk wall hanging.

"Saint Cyprianus teaches me, not you — and this was as early as the second century — that outside the Church there is no salvation. Just as in the days of the Flood there was only one ark in which man could be saved from the death of the body, so there is in the New Covenant only one saving ark, the Catholic Church. And Our Lord himself has said that anyone who refuses to listen to the Church must be regarded as a heathen or a publican. Our Church is holy, for she has a holy founder, a holy doctrine, holy sacraments, and at all times, holy members."

He cut off a piece of Brie and lifted it on the knife to his mouth. For a moment, Inni saw the creamy, white-yellow substance moving back and forth on his eloquent tongue. Taads, having refilled his glass, raised it against the lamplight with obvious satisfaction and said, in a milder tone than Inni had yet heard him use: "Monsignor, first of all I am grateful to you for receiving that blow on my behalf. You were my other cheek before mine came into question. You have a strong skull and your intellectual capacities have clearly not been impaired, because your thought processes still run along exactly the same doctrinaire track as they always have. But what you don't understand is that I am standing beside the track. I have seen your train going past at least a thousand times. In your perception, which to me would seem blurred by cataract, I am the proverbial erring innocent."

"Not innocent," said the chamberlain. "Not innocent. Only those who cannot know the truth are innocent."

"If I err I do so in good faith," said Taads cheerfully. "If faith in God comes through grace, it has not been granted to me."

"God allows the sin of unbelief because he wants us to choose him freely. You can know there is a God through the visible world, through the voice of your conscience, and through divine revelation, and then you may by all means remain a colleague of all that exists — ha-ha-ha — but it is the Church that teaches you what God has revealed, and of that Church you are a member."

"Was."

The priest laughed, but as he was taking a sip of port at the same moment, it turned out badly. He choked and the port squirted out of his mouth and settled in the damask. He coughed the words out.

"Was! Was! But we shall never let you go! You have been baptized, you have been counted, you belong to us. When we say that there are so many millions or billions of Catholics in the world, you are one of them. Baptism is a mark for all eternity. You are a member of the body of Christ. Talking about being colleagues! You can never undo that, no matter what you say!"

"What I find so amazing," said Taads, "is that if someone were to take the trouble to cleave us in two, I mean, to cut each of us vertically in half and then lay the two parts of each on their sides, there would be little visible difference between us."

"A rather painful means of argumentation."

"I said suppose. You have supposed all sorts of things in your life. After all, you get up to some funny casuistical tricks, don't you. Suppose then that our divided brain pans were to be placed on a beautiful tray — this one here, this eighteenth-century silver one, is perhaps a bit too good for us. Wouldn't you think it was strange, then, that your grey matter was convinced that one of the three persons residing in your aggregate God was his son, born from a woman who remained a virgin forever but who was nevertheless impregnated by one of the other persons who had 'come upon her' as the Church puts it. And that as a consequence you would two thousand years later walk about in that curious attire of yours, not inelegant but, still, with that funny purple bib, and that your grey matter would send out messages to my grey matter that would be lying so daintily beside yours on the chased silver — just let's go on supposing for a little while longer. And that from this it would have to follow that I am not allowed to think what I think because once upon a time and without my consent — let us be clear — a colleague of yours poured some water on my fontanelle while uttering certain magic formulae, just as in any cannibal club in the jungle."

"Mysterium fidei," said Monsignor Terruwe.

"Mystery my foot," said Taads, rising from the table. "I am going to take my unbaptized dog for a walk."

*       *

The uncle snored. Inni felt himself slowly getting drunk. The priest twirled the crystal port glass between his long, white fingers and sighed.