The nun opens the door and sticks her head in. She’s wearing one of those terrible grins meant to terrorize children. It seems she wants to let Daphne know that she has tired the Death Mask enough already. He sends the sister away with a look that says, I’m exhausted but I’m still the boss. The nuisance seems not to notice the gravity of her infraction. As soon as the door shuts he begins to stare at Daphne as if he’s seeing her for the first time. Once again. He seems to want to speak, but he says nothing. As if no words were suitable, or he was unable to choose from among the many presenting themselves. Or maybe simply because he’s too far gone.
Your mother was an exceptional woman, he finally murmurs, his voice as feeble as a fine cord about to snap. A very pure woman, he says, his consonants furring. Until just a few days before, his diction had been conspicuously clean, but Daphne can’t know that. Hearing him mention her mother, she feels as if an abyss has opened up under her chair; in this upsetting, surreal meeting so like a nightmare, she had completely forgotten that this priest once knew her mother, of whom she herself has but the faintest memories. A very fine person, he murmurs again, rooting around in her eyes with that gaze out of Death’s pocket. Before she knows it, Daphne has begun to cry. The way she does, silently, without moving a muscle.
You ought to be very proud of her, says the priest, signaling to her, although she doesn’t understand at first, to take the crucifix parked on the night table in her hand. Excellent, he murmurs when she understands and obeys, squeezing the end of the cross between thumb and index finger. He looks as if he wants to add some crucial further information, but instead his weary eyes fill with a transparent liquid, a small tide rising from below. After a while tears begin to overflow onto his lined, greenish skin, and fall on the white of the sheet. He’s weeping too. Staring at the wall at the foot of his bed and weeping. Wheezing louder now, like a bellows about to break.
Daphne looks at him and weeps, he weeps and looks at the wall. Their weeping is rather similar actually, although her tears are larger and descend more quickly, a faucet dripping. His are smaller and spaced out widely, as if like him they are exhausted. She’s not thinking about leaving anymore, she’s not thinking about anything. She’s feeling very strange, there in the fading light, crucifix in hand, but she also feels this is necessary, it’s something like an initiation rite. Were her merciless mental clarity in charge here, she’d leap to her feet and run away, but some overpowering force has nailed her legs to that metal chair.
Now the door opens again and a young man in a white coat appears. The priest makes a tiny—but violent—gesture, outraged that they dare to keep on disturbing him. The doctor lowers his head and disappears. I learned a great deal from your mother, he mutters, picking up where he left off with some difficulty and fixing her once again in his gaze. His voice is even more feeble now, barely rising above the soughing of the river outside. The talks I had with her were a great gift to me, I have rarely met such profundity in matters of the spirit: he looks at her as if for confirmation. For a moment his ecumenical empathy is such that his hand edges toward hers; all his energy is concentrated in that tiny operation. But he lacks the strength to raise his forearm the necessary few millimeters, or even to slide it over the sheet. Daphne therefore reaches out and takes his hand, which is icy cold. She holds it in her own, warming it, the crucifix on her knees. For a long time. It’s almost dark, and the river has become a gleaming course of lead.
Now the door opens once more and this time the young doctor is accompanied by an elderly man who walks in with an authoritarian stride. He turns on the lamp on the night table. They don’t ask permission, they just take up positions on either side of the bed. There’s also a nun with them, different from the first, taller and more in tune with the times. The older doctor has a concertina of wrinkles on his neck; the priest is staring at him, seemingly getting ready to order them to leave. Instead he merely closes his eyes, you can see that the faint light is blinding him. He’s immobile, clearly too exhausted even to lift his eyelids. The young doctor checks the IV line, takes his pulse, adjusts the sheet.
The sister who’s plausibly a web-surfer is staring at Daphne as if she were a serial assassin. The accordion-necked doctor also studies her with something like bigoted rancor. It’s clear they’d like her to beat it right away (beat what, no one knows, but the expression is imperishable). She doesn’t know what to do; she’s feeling a bit woozy. Now she gets up, leaves the room and heads down the corridor, still holding the crucifix. A crucifix she hasn’t stolen; it was given to her by a dying bishop. Yes, bishop: that was how she’d heard him referred to. Descending the few steps at the entrance, she turns again toward the river, spellbinding for an instant in its violet hour. And at that very moment she understands that the not quite dead man is the same confessor who sexually abused her for a whole winter when she was nine, and then again the following year. Or better, she realizes that a warning bell inside her head had sounded smartly the very instant she first saw him, but something prevented her from hearing it. She starts to cry again. This time she’s riven by hacking sobs, like a woman with a bad cough.
GOD AGAIN
A god shall not and must not speak. The languages of (wo)man seem to be purposely designed to formulate deception of all kinds, stoke up the pipe dreamers, lead people out on limbs and down garden paths. To stir up (wo)man’s highest accomplishment, in other words, his/her intrinsic raison d’être: evil. Other animals don’t get into trouble because they don’t speak and never have done, that’s the sole reason.[43] Divine language is silence; words are superfluous to express harmony and love, or even anger of the just variety. It’s enough to look one another in the face, or merely stare straight ahead; everyone will know who’s in agreement or that there’s a certain problem.
Very soon I’m going to stop writing, go back to being God again, and that’ll be that. No thinking, no distractions, no more letting my gaze be captured by one particular thing. As I’ve always done. A god’s job is to show up, that is, be present, not so much agitate for one thing or another. It makes sense, really; a god that both is and is not would be a catastrophe, whether brazenly absent or merely part-time. Atheism and agnosticism would spread like wildfire, overtaking religions. These are the true cancers of the present day, and everything must be done to fight them. It must never be forgotten that once these false religions are installed, you need earthquakes, famine, terrible bloodshed, or hideous dictatorial regimes to drive them out. That’s the sort of shock therapy I’d frankly prefer to avoid.
I have no need of humans; actually, I need to avoid them. They’re merely an unlucky accident, a not very edifying sideshow. That irresponsible supposed son of mine created great confusion on that account, he let it be thought that humans are mighty important when in fact they don’t count for anything and could disappear from circulation in the wink of an eye. In some ways I’d prefer not even to hear them mentioned; they can do whatever they want, I couldn’t care less. I am God.
COTTAGE IN THE BRIARS
When she wakes up, Daphne needs some time to work out what bed she’s lying in. Then, her main processor slowly kicking into action, she realizes this is the room hosting the nineteenth-century laundry machine and the paleolithic honey extractor. And then she recalls why she’s here, and her external memory lights up, switched on by that cold shower of recollection. Leaving the seminary, she had waited for a train for who knows how long, mesmerized, staring at the river. In that hallucinatory frame of mind, she imagined the river to be her father. Back in the city, she had wandered around the center, lost to the world. In the end she found herself at the station and took the last coach for the town of the rich people’s villas. From there, driven by the force of inertia, she had walked to her stepfather’s place in the rain. And now she has no idea how she’s going to cope with this day that’s beginning. She feels like the corpse of some drowned creature, washed up on the beach by the waves.
43
If they did speak, they’d immediately begin to screw around, get fired up, make war. Sparrows versus chaffinches, fleas versus lice, dark gray hippos versus pale gray hippos, and so on.