Rituals by Cees Nooteboom Page B

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