The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl (17 page)

(‘I know of no better compliment to your style’, Voltaire whispered to Gibbon, ‘than the catchingness of its cadences.’)

As though to answer the challenge of God’s words, the humble Christian, who had all this time been praying merely mezza voce, increased his volume, so that his voice swelled round the little group like an organ through a cathedral. ‘Per quem majestatem tuam laudant angeli, adorant Dominationes,
tremunt Potestates….’

‘Splendid stuff,’ God appreciatively remarked.

‘Coeli, coelorumque Virtutes, ac beata Seraphim, socia
exsultatione
concelebrant….’

‘Yes,’ Gibbon said, in a noticeably abstracted manner, ‘prayers are indeed potent, though scarcely in the direction their reciters intend. They move, I find, not so much mountains as emotions and ideas.’

‘You hardly need me to remind you’, Voltaire said to
Gibbon
, ‘that it was at Rome, on the 15th of October 1764, as you sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to your mind.’

‘I should hate to seem to echo’, said God, ‘that philistine royal duke who remarked to you “Scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr Gibbon?” Permit me only to say I should feel as excited as he felt depressed were it to prove that the idea of a new book is now starting to your mind. And my excitement would turn into a veritable elation did the new book prove to be the one which I recently – I won’t say attempted to
commission
from you, but ventured to adumbrate to you.’

‘I scarcely…’, Gibbon began to reply, in manifest
confusion
. ‘Your thought is indeed a kind one. I confess that liturgy, like lullaby, promotes that combination of calm and stimulation which…. The clicking of rosary beads, it may be, recalls the clicking of my aunt’s knitting needles. It was my aunt, as I record in my
Memoirs
, who brought me up. Yet I scarcely dare trust my powers, in the matter of a conspectus so vast as the decline and fall of
Go
d
…. Her name was Mrs Catherine
Porten
. I confess I am somewhat perturbed, and can scarcely frame my sentences. I think I will, at least, take a brief walk on my own.’

He rose, bowed and wandered off, a little stumpily, into the daisies and asphodels of the Elysian Fields.

Swiftly drawing from a fold in his robe a Livre de Poche
paperback 
(‘Voltaire:
Romans.
Présenté par Roger Peyrefitte’), God said:

‘May I, before I resume my quest, just snatch the
opportunity
to ask you to sign this?’

‘Honoured,’ Voltaire replied, and prepared his pen.

‘If it isn’t impertinent’, God said, ‘would you mind signing it “F. M. Arouet”? I shall keep it next my copy of
Middle
march
signed “Mary Ann Evans”.’

‘Delighted to oblige,’ said Voltaire. ‘Did you get her to sign “Mary Ann Cross” as well?’

‘I did not,’ said God. ‘As a women’s liberationist I’m dead against all this imposing of married names. She was born Evans, she wrote masterpieces as George Eliot, and she had a lifelong liaison of love with George Henry Lewes. It wasn’t till she was virtually an old woman that she got married (to Mr Cross), and she died before the marriage had lasted a year. I know of no better illustration of the English preference for reactionary
socio-religious
institutions over people, love and literature than the fact that the name under which she appears in the
Dictionary
of
National
Biography
is Cross.’

‘No doubt’, Voltaire murmured sympathetically, ‘the name has painful associations for you.’

‘You certainly have’, God said, ‘taken up the psychoanalytic habit of thought. My own analysis of myself is complicated by the fact that I exist only as a projection of people’s somewhat two-edged emotions towards the image of father. Still, I’ve got far enough to concede you the point that it is my own
anomalous
situation, as a father orphaned by the vanishing of his authors into anonymity, that sharpens my interest in authors who make themselves anonymous by inventing a pseudonym and thus, in a sense, creating themselves. It has often amused me to reflect that Voltaire would not exist had not F. M. Arouet found it necessary to invent him.’

‘Am I right in thinking’, the idle-minded bystander asked,
looking
over Voltaire’s shoulder as he signed the book, ‘that “
Voltaire
” is an anagram of “Arouet l.j.”, in which the “l.j.” stands for “le jeune”?’

‘Yes,’ said Voltaire. ‘It was my bid for, simultaneously,
immortality
and perpetual youth.’

‘To make the anagram work’, the bystander said, ‘you have
to construe it in old script, whereby
u
is the same thing as
v,
and
i
a
s
j.
’

‘That was my bid for classic status,’ Voltaire said, passing the book, signed, back to God.

‘Thank you,’ God said. ‘Now I have only to secure the Black Girl’s signature, and my collection will be complete.’

‘Aren’t you’, the idle-minded bystander asked, turning to God, ‘going to complain that
your
name, in its English form, is an anagram of “dog” and that that shews what people really think of you?’

‘I like dogs, so it doesn’t trouble me,’ God said. ‘Besides, it’s appropriate to someone so often addressed in dog Latin. Neither do I object to the French habit of speaking of me as “le bon Dieu”, subversively though that suggests that there’s a
bad
one lurking somewhere. I shan’t even make anything of the fact that the Russians call me “Bog”. The only thing that does, I confess, cause me a twinge of pique is that the Italians call me “Iddio”. It’s very difficult not to take it for a phonetic, if misaccentuated, rendering of the French word “idiot”.’

‘To pronounce a word of one language in the accents of another often’, Voltaire said, ‘produces incongruities. An English person witnessing our transaction might suppose I had just placed my signature on a copy of the Epistle to the Romans.’

‘And incongruity could hardly go further than that,’ God said concludingly, as he stood up and slipped his signed
paperback
into his robe. ‘And now, if one of you could kindly tell me where to find the Black Girl….’

‘I haven’t’, Voltaire confessed, meanwhile linking his arm with God’s as they came to a hillocky patch in the Elysian Fields, ‘the smallest idea where this Black Girl of yours is to be found. But I’m happy to take a stroll with you and put you on your way.’

With his free hand Voltaire waved to Samuel Butler (
1835–1902
, not 1612–1680) who, in the course of a solitary walk in the opposite direction, came trudging past and accorded
Voltaire
a grumpy salute in return.

‘Such lucid prose’, Voltaire commented to God – and added,
as Butler passed beyond earshot: ‘but such an obscured
personality
.’

‘Yet such insight into the psychology of religion,’ said God. ‘Remarkable in a pre-Freudian.’

‘Quite so,’ Voltaire replied. ‘However, to resume the matter in hand: I’m not even sure that I know whom you mean by the Black Girl. Did you imply she’s a writer?’

‘I’m astounded you’ve never come across her,’ God said. ‘She’s—’

God broke off. Detaching his arm from Voltaire’s, he shouted ‘Excuse me a moment’ and began to run across the Fields.

With considerable curiosity and at the pace of a brisk walk, Voltaire followed.

He was quickly outdistanced. It was from many yards
behind
that he saw God’s feet become entangled in the hem of his robe and God go sprawling, his robe in disarray, on a hillock.

‘I am now’, Voltaire murmured to himself, ‘the equal of Moses. How unexpected.’

God hastily elbowed himself upright and set off again,
keeping
his hemline out of further trouble by gathering his skirt into a bunch in his hand, which made his gait lollopy but efficient.

Voltaire had to walk faster to keep him in clear view.
Reaching
the hillock where God had stumbled, he surmounted it and took advantage of its eminence to survey the distance.

There, Voltaire made out, a tall figure was retreating.

Voltaire hurried forward.

The figure (which, he could now see, was imposingly wrapped from neck to ankles in a patterned cloth of Gauguinesque
ferocity
) continued to retreat at an even, majestic pace, paying not the smallest attention to the fact that God was lolloping along after it calling:

‘Excuse me, Miss! Excuse me!’

At last, just as Voltaire was despairing of being able to keep the encounter in sight, the figure paused, turned round and waited for God to catch up.

Voltaire perceived that it was the figure of a handsome black woman, considerably taller than God.

Palpably panting as he reached her, God said:

‘Excuse me Miss, but are you the Black Girl?’

‘“Black Lady”’, she replied, ‘would come more
appropriately 
from lips that shamelessly accost me in the highway without benefit of introduction.’

‘I’m afraid’, God replied, still panting and considerably taken aback as well, ‘I’ve got out of the habit of needing an
introduction
. Please excuse me. If I may introduce myself—’

‘I have no wish’, the Black Lady interrupted him, ‘to know
who
you are, given that I know full well
what
you are, that being all too obvious from the fact that in your brazen and licentious impatience you are already hitching up your skirts.’

‘No, really,’ God began to protest, quickly dropping his handful of skirt, ‘I do assure you—’

‘Don’t’, the Black Lady said commandingly, ‘compound your offence of brazenness with the offence of hypocrisy.’

‘Truly’, God pleaded, ‘you are under a misapprehension. I really didn’t mean to offend you. Please forgive me.’

‘Since our good lord and saviour enjoins us to do so, I
forgive
you,’ the Black Lady replied, raising her hand pontifically above God’s head, ‘even though you accosted me under the misnomer “Miss” – me that was joined to my good man in holy matrimony in the face of the congregation at Hallelujah Hall and have now two fine boys to shew for it, and neither one of them in trouble with the police or on drugs or with Afro
hairstyles
or homosexual, thanks to the two switches, the one called “strait” and the other “narrow”, which I keep hanging on the inside of the larder door so that, whenever my two fine growing boys venture therein with a view to satisfying the appetites of the flesh, they are reminded of the tribulations which, it is
promised
, shall visit the flesh of all who step out of the path which our merciful lord has appointed.’

‘I see’, God said, ‘that I’ve made a most unfortunate
mistake
. I can only beg your pardon. From the distance I mistook you—’

‘—for a bedizened strumpet’, the Black Lady completed, ‘though my footsteps were in fact dutifully bending towards Hallelujah Hall, where, but for your shameless interruption, I should even now be, crying “Hallelujah” and imploring our merciful lord to put down Mighty Whitey from his seat and exalt us humble and uncorrupted Blacks to total domination over him.’

‘I assure you’, God said, ‘what I mistook you for was a
writer.’

‘Your excuses are not only lies but implausible. How can a Lady be a writer?’

‘One or two have managed it.’

‘Pornographers,’ the Black Lady cried, ‘every last one of them, perverters of the underlying values of our civilisation,
laying
it open to subversion by communism, tempting men to the lusts of the flesh and ladies to step beyond the boundaries of the submissive and subservient rôle our good lord has appointed for our sex.’

And after a last glare down at God, the Black Lady turned and marched majestically away, leaving God standing alone in a small depression beside one of the hillocks.

Voltaire waited a moment before he approached God, put a hand on his shoulder and said:

‘Don’t be cast down.’

‘I know it’s silly of me,’ God replied without raising his head. ‘But she did seem upsettingly illiberal.’

‘And quite grossly religious,’ Voltaire agreed. ‘However, your dejection is irrational.’

‘No doubt,’ God replied, without moving or shewing interest.

‘If, Voltaire said, ‘centuries of slavery, oppression and
injustice
produced open, generous, enquiring and tolerant spirits, you would have to consider that there is something to be said for slavery, oppression and injustice.’

God continued a moment in head-sunk thought and then raised a relieved face. ‘I think you must be right’, he said. ‘What a clever man you are. You quite give me courage to resume my quest. And I hope you’ll consent to resume our stroll?’

‘Certainly,’ Voltaire replied. ‘But I can’t help suspecting that you’ve set out on your quest in a state of misapprehension.’

‘O, of course,’ God was quick to agree. ‘
That
wasn’t the Black Girl at all. From the moment she opened her mouth I knew I’d made a dreadful mistake.’

‘Even so—’, Voltaire began to say, but God was already
continuing:

‘Pray lean on my arm. I noticed on my way here that this is treacherous terrain and, knowing the delicacy of your health, I should hate you to stumble.’

‘It’s true’, Voltaire said, availing himself with a sigh of God’s offer, ‘that I was, throughout my long life, a sorry invalid. I escaped ideological martyrdom, but mine was one protracted martyrdom to minor ailments.’

‘Let’s make a détour’, God suggested, ‘to avoid these
dangerous
hillocks – though “détour” is perhaps the wrong word, since I don’t know what direction I
ought
to be taking. I suppose’, he added abruptly, ‘I made a fool of myself over the
Pseudo-Black-Girl
.’