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Chaconne. Diana BlackwoodЧитать онлайн книгу.

Chaconne - Diana Blackwood


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      “Oh my, that’s a change from the commonplace horrors of the malodorous toilettes turques. But the fascist swine, the dictatorial soixante-huitards! I don’t blame you for not going back. I never could abide herd behaviour myself. When the Vietnam War demonstrations were on, I stayed in the library. I’d just discovered esoteric religion, you see, which was a whole lot nuttier and more fascinating than French literature …”

      All fine and dandy, she could hear Ruth say, when you know your flat feet will keep you out of the jungle.

      “You could try Paris VII,” he concluded. “They might have comparative literature and toilet doors.”

      Eleanor did not want to talk about comparative literature, but neither was she in any hurry to return to her cheerless room. She looked to the bookshelves for help. Of course it would be prurient to ask Roland if he had any religious beliefs himself, so she enquired about Sufism, which by happy chance turned out to be one of his favourites. The account he gave was encyclopaedic, spreading over the afternoon as she drowsed beneath it. Once or twice she thought she came close to achieving the obliteration of the self, but perhaps she had just nodded off.

      Roland had gone from gnosis and blessedness and the perfect man to saying something about the time being ripe for a new religion.

      “We could bring back human sacrifice,” said Eleanor, “starting with Margaret Thatcher.”

      “Tempting in her case, though not quite what I had in mind.”

      “A friend of mine says Thatcher has missile envy. But Roland, how could you compete with the Christians? They have all the best tunes.”

      “True. By the way, do you know about the music listening room at the Pompidou Centre?”

      Salvation in the here and now!

      That evening Eleanor went on her own to an orchestral concert at the Maison de Radio-France. The orchestra’s rendering of Mozart stood like a tourist bus between her and any glimpse of the transcendent. Having heard a radio talk about performance practice in the classical period, she concluded they were making dull work of the symphony because they were coming at it, out of arrogance or ignorance or both, from an anachronistic standpoint, smothering classical articulation with nineteenth-century legato phrasing and twentieth-century vibrato. At any rate she was unmoved, but since she had nowhere better to go, and the orchestra might have more success with Berlioz, she stayed in her seat and let her mind wander where it would. It revisited Roland and his well-thumbed religions before taking off along overgrown paths of its own.

      Since adolescence Eleanor had given little thought to religious belief. Faith was simply out of the question: she had come along too late in history for such binding comforts, and modernity had cosmologies of its own. But neither did she share Julien’s contempt for religious expression – masturbatory, he called it – or even her mother’s milder disdain. For the duration of the St Matthew Passion she was a believer – almost – but that glorious submission ended with the dissolution of the final chord. When she was younger she had chafed at the irony of it: you could worship Bach’s sacred music but be denied the Resurrection by the workings of your own mind, the same mind that caused you to love the music in the first place. What mattered to her these days, however, was that the St Matthew existed at all in this unholy world, and that you didn’t need a Christian faith to receive it. Bach was there for anyone who would truly listen. If the thousands of religions that had come and gone upon the earth were just an inventive human response to a troublesome itch – with creation myths and hierarchical struggles and ethical precepts thrown in for good measure – then surely it was better to satisfy that itch with Bach. For no one, so far as she knew, had used the great man’s sublime powers to oppress or persecute anybody, although a bad performance could annoy the hell out of you.

      Faith belonged to childhood, at least in her experience. Most people she knew seemed to have outgrown it, although in some it took on other forms, as if there were a vacant space that needed to be filled, or neural pathways to be kept open and humming. Lapsed Catholics embraced Marxism; Protestants with a fondness for the material found comfortable accommodation in Tibetan Buddhism. Not long ago she had been asked twice at a party if she was an old soul. Lately some people appeared to have effected a nifty substitution: the Universe for the One. The textless, lowbrow Universe offered hints – a coincidence was never just a coincidence – but demanded nothing in return. As a higher power it lacked moral authority, and Eleanor was suspicious of its adherents. Such people were not above asking the Universe to cough up for a trip to Nepal when they would have thought twice about pestering the Lord.

      She had not quite forgotten the pantheism of her own childhood. Moonrise over the ocean, the roar of the surf that on still nights she could hear from her bedroom, a magnifying drop of water on a nasturtium leaf: God was in anything that took her fancy, though not, of course, in bull ants or maggots or mosquitoes. Her grief when a muddy creek near the house was forced into concrete drains and buried under fill involved more than just the loss of somewhere to catch tadpoles. It was God against the bland suburban spread, and she was on the side of God, as in this instance was Mavis – for once both righteous and godly, though she didn’t know it. At around that time, when Eleanor was eight or nine, she confided to her grandmother that she had been asking God to send her father back. The grandmother was plaiting Eleanor’s hair, and she did not answer straight away. She undid the bottom half of a plait, the one that had been yanked so viciously the day before by the red-haired girl up the road, and replaited it more securely. Then the woman spoke in a voice that shocked the child. It was the same gilded tone that grownups used when they talked about Father Christmas.

      “God is taking care of him. Sometimes we just have to bear certain things, even though we may not understand why things are the way they are.”

      God didn’t bring her son back from the war. She doesn’t believe God helps people, even good people like her. Maybe she doesn’t believe in God at all.

      Some thoughts cannot be unthought, and so Eleanor stopped her hopeful prayers. In some ways nothing changed. She still came top of the class, as before. (Sometimes she had asked God for that, although it wasn’t strictly speaking necessary.) The redhead pulled her hair at every opportunity. Eleanor continued to say grace with her grandmother because she knew – she was reminded often enough by Mavis – that all over the world there were children who didn’t have enough food to fill their stomachs. It was only polite to give thanks for what she had, even if no one was listening and it didn’t help those unfortunate children. But she entertained no more expectations of the Almighty, and gradually His presence faded from the world around her. The ocean became just the ocean, though she loved it as before, and the breath of God was no longer in the wind.

      Some of the neighbours who wanted to be rid of the tadpole creek – the redhead’s family, for instance – as well as some of those who wanted to keep it, attended church of one hue or another. (How could some churchgoers be so out of touch with God?) But church or no church, creek or no creek, neighbours mattered, according to her grandmother. They mattered because one day you might need their help, or they yours, in which case you wouldn’t give a hoot about their religion or their politics. Her grandmother was at pains to say such things, though in the abstract she was a bit funny about Catholics, whose loyalties, she believed, were to Rome. Someone had convinced her that they had secret plans to take over the public service, scattering their haitches like pebbles as signals to those coming after them. Mavis doubted the public service story – not that she would want them running the hospitals, mind, because they’d put a foetus’s life ahead of a mother’s when a choice had to be made. She had a low opinion of religion in general – name one that wasn’t dreamed up by men! – and gripes against the pope in particular. The Roman Catholic Church, thanks to the men in the Vatican, caused more suffering in the world than it alleviated. The Church should mind its own business, allow divorce and contraception, and not keep women enslaved and in poverty by tricking them into having too many children. But what got her goat more than anything was that the Catholic vote was keeping the real Labor Party out of office. It was the rock choppers’ fault that the country had to endure Menzies the Magisterial, because their breakaway party gave his mob their preferences. The Drongo


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