Free While the Gods Were Sleeping by Erwin Mortier Page B

of the melting pot.
     
    These were the years under the sign of the Magna Mater, because the time called adolescence remains the most female season in a human life. Our qualities haven’t yet caked solidly around us, and always, I am certain, a core in us remains white-hot and boiling. Its impulses influence the fluctuations of the magnetic field that I call our being, or our soul, or whatever—since words are only words, congealed screams.
    In my schooldays, at the venerable institute of the Cistercian Sisters of the Holy Word, my sympathy, although I should rather say fascination, invariably focused on the largely invisible nuns in their godly termites’ mound, which was divided by a high wall from the classrooms and covered playground. The young ladies who gave us instruction, young bourgeoises for whom marriage heralded the end of their career, seemed to me much more sterile than those black Fates, who in self-elected virginity glided over the immaculately polished tiles of their corridors with the rustle of canvas around their calves—the wing beats of the Holy Ghost, whom they worshipped in their chapel at dead of night, until in the first light of morning they prostrated themselves before the altar like scorched moths.
     
    My mother thought it important to send me to a religious school. The belief in a supreme being was for her at best a form of edifying poetry, very useful in bringing up children, while for me the true God was the God behind the tabernacles, the totally silent scream between the lines of the Living Word, which made galaxies collide and drove chicks from their egg.
    “Stop talking nonsense, child,” she would snap at me if she were here with us. “There’s nothing on high.”
    She regularly took little offerings to the nuns; sums of money, food, in May flowers from our garden, for the statue of the Virgin. Then she would converse for a while out of politeness with the sister in charge of guests in the parlour of the convent, sitting on one of the chairs that exuded the smell of furniture wax and were reflected a hundredfold by the copper of the flowerpot-holder and the old kitchen utensils on display. She treated the nuns with the respectful incomprehension she also reserved for doctors, whose knowledge she appreciated, but without the will to share in it. She seemed to find the finesses of the sacred as unappetizing as a view of the opened wall of an abdomen with an inflamed appendix throbbing in it.
     
    If I look at the nuns through her eyes, at the portion of the cloister that I could see from my desk in the class, and the ghosts that shuffled past the pointed-arch windows every day at the same times, on their way to the chapel, I don’t see a convent but a machine, a generator whose imponderable mechanism converted hymns, litanies and acclamations into a psychic gravity designed to keep morals and habits in their place.
    I have always disliked the fearfulness attaching to every rite, although I know: a ritual without useless exactitude precisely loses its purpose. Behind this lurked the fear of the Egyptians, whose priests begged the sun god all night long to rise again from the kingdom of the dead, or the frightened cunning of the Incas and their attempts to anchor the heavenly disc to the sun stone, like a sheep on a chain, or like a child tries to prevent his mother leaving him by clinging to her skirts.
    I don’t know exactly how old I was when I suddenly began to suspect that the rituals were meant to keep in check a huge fear of the Word itself, God’s Own Name, which there in that chapel had to coincide reassuringly with itself. The circular days of perpetual adoration, the perpetuum mobile of songs and invocations, yes, even the style of the holy in itself, suddenly seemed to be incantations meant to avoid the godhead disintegrating, or, as the sun will one day do, exploding and unleashing a storm of meanings gone adrift.
    Wouldn’t that be a spectacle? And how would it feel to