The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl Read online

  ‘But—’ God began.

  ‘But, you are going to object,’ Voltaire took up, ‘The Iliad is almost wholly about soldiers at war, a subject of which Nausicaa could have no personal experience whatsoever. That is precisely why it is a subject that would engage her imagination.’

  ‘But how would she get the detail right?’ God demanded. ‘The Iliad is so exact about armour and strategy and chariots and—’

  ‘She had two resources,’ Voltaire said, ‘either of which would be entirely adequate. She could invent: or she could ask a soldier. What do you suppose imagination and the power of speech are for? Anyway, I daresay that many crucial problems of Homeric archaeology would be solved if the scholars would only admit that Homer, whether male or female, was freely inventive. But then I daresay that they, like Butler, can’t admit it because they’re not freely inventive themselves. In fact, when he re-invented The Odyssey as an autobiographical work, Butler was pursuing his own vocation as an autobiographical novelist. His Nausicaa as author is a self-portrait of Samuel Butler as author.’

  ‘I suppose’, God said, ‘you might say that I was misled in his footsteps by something not dissimilar in my own case. After all, many people conceive the Bible to be a sort of autobiographical novel by the Holy Ghost.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Voltaire. ‘Indeed, one might even say that the interpretation you set on—’

  But he stopped and decided instead merely to stand quizzically confronting God in the sunlight (which made him blink).

  ‘Well?’ God demanded.

  ‘You will take it more to heart’, Voltaire said, ‘if I let you find out for yourself – an old maxim of teachers and psycho analysts.’

  ‘Is it about the Black Girl?’ God asked. ‘Is she in this garden?’

  Since Voltaire gave him no more answer than a blink which he probably intended for a blank stare, God looked about, making a careful examination of the water garden.

  Several statues were to be seen, some of them actually in (up to their ankles) the pools and a few positively spouting water.

  None of them, God decided, could be even a fanciful or idealised representation of the Black Girl.

  The water garden itself was pretty and must, God considered, remembering his discourse on technology, delight Voltaire. It evidently made ingenious use of hydraulic principles to re-cycle a fixed quantity of water. On a circuit God could not trace, the water was discharged down cataracts, gathered gurgling into caverns, reissued through brazen mouths and jetted in plumes towards the sky.

  Its movement made a constant small sound of lapping and kept the surface of the pools puckered like a cloth with a pulled thread.

  In some of the basins, coloured spotlights beneath the surface illuminated reeds or minerals, with an effect consummately vulgar and irrefragably winning.

  Some of the less turbulent pools contained water lilies – which also, God thought, must give pleasure to Voltaire, since, although they were entirely natural, they looked entirely as though they were made of plastic.

  Only one person, God and Voltaire apart, was in view. A tallish, bony-hipped figure wearing narrow trousers and something resembling a norfolk jacket (in which. God considered, he must surely be too hot) stood, with his back to God and Voltaire, looking towards one of the most elaborate of the jets, which was illuminated by indigo lights.

  ‘Well, that’s not the Black Girl,’ God said, turning away.

  ‘Isn’t it?’ asked Voltaire in a neutral voice.

  ‘Well, if you have doubts,’ said God, ‘let’s make sure.’

  Accompanied by Voltaire, he approached the figure – which, as it stood, long-legged, on the rim of the basin, resembled an ornamental flamingo.

  From closer to, it could be seen that the shoulders and back of the figure were visited every now and then, by a small but violent spasm.

  ‘I’d better have a word first,’ said Voltaire; and, stepping in advance of God, he placed himself accostingly by the figure’s side.

  ‘Excuse me, my friend, but have you got the hiccoughs?’

  ‘I have not,’ the figure replied, without turning round. ‘My digestion is perfect – which I attribute to vegetarianism and eating sweets.’27

  To God’s disappointment, the voice was masculine. Its intonation was Irish; and, with a pedantry28 that suggested a person highly but not university-educated,29 each consonant was articu lated separately and explosively.30

  ‘Then why’, Voltaire asked, ‘are you quaking?’

  ‘Gazing as I am’, the figure said, ‘at the beauties of Nature—’

  ‘Nature!’ Voltaire interrupted, with all the explosiveness of one of the figure’s own consonants. ‘You can’t tell Nature from landscape gardening. Still: I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Along with other members of the public, I’ve taken a look at the manner in which you chose to furnish your home, and it is an abiding monument to your total visual insensibility. Indeed, after your death your housekeeper disclosed that you were partly colour-blind.31 A lesser man might have overcome that disability. You couldn’t admit to having a disability. On the contrary: during the earlier part of your career, you positively had the nerve to set up as a critic of painting.’32

  ‘In one respect’, the figure replied without perturbation, ‘I knew a great deal more about painting than its other critics did, because I knew a great deal more about novels, operas and symphonies and was therefore never tempted to suppose that painting was the only art. (You will have noticed that when an English-speaking person refers to “an artist” he automatically means a painter, thereby making it clear that he does not consider literature and music to be arts.) Besides: at the time when the job of art critic (as it was prejudicially called) was offered to me, I had not yet married an heiress and was consequently in need of the money. However, since you have found me out at last, I will confess. I was not looking at the view. I was listening to the music of the waters. (You will not deny me musical sensibility.) The sounds of this water garden resemble the waves on Killiney strand33 and the breakers on Howth Head, and therefore put me in mind of the period of my childhood34 when my family lived high on Dalkey35 Hill.’

  ‘That scarcely explains’, Voltaire said, ‘why you’re quaking.’

  ‘I am laughing,’ the figure said, sounding surprised that that had not been obvious. ‘I am laughing over my native land – where, for decades, people have been blown to perdition in a dispute about the top right-hand corner of the island. The upkeep of this corner is enormously expensive. Indeed, it reminds me of my wife’s estate in Ireland, which cost her £600 a year until I induced her to sell it.36 It would not be surprising if the two sides in the dispute were trying each to thrust the expense on the other. But no. Each is claiming the privilege of paying. The English have been persuaded that it is their duty to pay because a majority in the top right-hand corner expects it of them. The Irish know that, if they won that corner, it would beggar them. But they have been persuaded to claim it nevertheless, because the national feeling of the island as a whole expects it of them. Their claim is pressed in the name of Irish unity. In fact, the island is and always has been united in all effective respects, including a common currency, for the simple reason that the terrain is so rural and the inhabitants so unruly that no one has ever been able to seal the frontier. That, however, is not good enough for your Irish unitarian. What he means by Irish unity is that the island should be united in being altogether cut off from the society alike of the English and of his fellow Celts the Welsh and the Scots. The grand design of Irish unitarians is, of course, patriotic. They want their island to make its mark in the world. This they propose to achieve by giving up the English language, in which the literary works of Irishmen of genius have been disseminated throughout the world, and confining their speech and writing to a language that is understood by nobody except themselves, and by most of those imperfectly. (The Irish language is in even more scandalous need than the English of a phonetic alphabet.) Since he
has the utmost difficulty in understanding what they say, your united Irishman feels no unity whatever with the other united Irishmen living around him. However, he feels entirely at one with Ireland’s dead, who died in order to bring this state of affairs about. In consequence, the Irish are a nation of widows, a fact which accounts for their melancholy. Widowhood is, of course, the literal condition of many of the women, their husbands having seized the first opportunity presented to them to die for Ireland. But widowhood is also the psychological condition of the entire populace. Every Irish citizen is born bereaved: of Ireland’s heroes. The natural ambition of every Irish youth and maiden is to join Ireland’s heroes as quickly as that can be arranged. As a result, Ireland is a nation of widows whose national pastime is suttee. In order to provoke someone to despatch him to a hero’s tomb, your Irishman frequently has to commit acts of aggression. Yet it never occurs to him that he is a bully or a gangster. It is an essential characteristic of the Irishman that he invariably believes himself to be the victim. As he shoots down or blows up his opponents, it never crosses his mind that he is being callous. He knows, since he lives on an island that outdoes Sicily in devotion to the vendetta, that vengeance will certainly follow. This leaves him free to think of those he kills not as persons but merely as the instruments of his own martyrdom. Any wickedness he commits by killing them will, he believes, be cancelled by the courage with which he faces his own death. In short, there is not a more ridiculous spectacle on earth than the courage, perseverance and unselfishness an Irishman will devote to cutting off both his own and everyone else’s nose to spite his face.’

  ‘You must be thoroughly hard-hearted’, God exclaimed, nudged into speech by sheer indignation, ‘to laugh at such a tragedy.’

  ‘Then you dont understand’, the Irish figure said, turning round at the access of a fresh voice, ‘how much passion laughter requires.’

  Now that he saw his face, God concluded that the Irishman had in fact been laughing till he cried. Large tears were still rolling down his cheeks into the white beard which stuck out from his chin at something of the angle of a vizor.

  ‘I’m sorry to have disturbed you, Sir,’ God said, discomfited. Then, turning to Voltaire and seeking to take out his discomfiture on him, he complained: ‘I told you this couldn’t be the Black Girl. It’s just an elderly pink gentleman with white hair and a white beard – very much like myself, in fact.’

  After delivering his complaint, God turned to lead Voltaire away. But then he suddenly stopped and swung back towards the Irishman, to whom he said:

  ‘But I recognise your face. I think you must be Bernard Shaw.’

  ‘And you,’ Shaw said, amiably holding out his hand, ‘with the resemblance you remarked on to myself, must be the Ancient of Days in person. Ive always wanted to make your acquaintance.’

  A pretty little knot of greetings followed. When they were satisfactorily accomplished, Shaw enquired:

  ‘And how can I be of service to you, gentlemen? Did you just want to see the celebrated Buffoon37 G.B.S., one of the most successful of my fictions?’38

  ‘No,’ said Voltaire. ‘If it was celebrity I was after, I could find enough in my own company. And God, now that I think of it, must be the celebrity of all time. No, the truth is: God wanted to meet the Black Girl.’

  ‘To meet her?’

  ‘I mistook her Adventures for an autobiographical story’, God said in a shamed voice, ‘of which I wrongly supposed her to be the author herself. I thought, since in the book she’s so anxious to meet me, that if she did meet me she might undertake a sequel and tell people what I’m truly like.’

  ‘I must be a sad disappointment to you’, Shaw said understandingly, ‘for theres little resemblance. The Black Girl is by no means one of my Self Sketches. I am a bit colour-blind, but I can distinguish black from pink. To tell you the truth, the Black Girl is not sketched from the life at all, but from literature. I couldnt give her a name, because I had already used the name Candida elsewhere. But she is simply a black and female version of Voltaire’s hero Candide.’

  ‘O,’ God said.

  So disappointed was his tone that Voltaire explained to Shaw:

  ‘Flattering though your avowal is to me, it leaves us no further advanced towards God’s rehabilitation. We had ventured to hope you might have some tips to give us. After all, one of the most notable rehabilitations in history was officially accorded to Saint Joan, and there you are even more of an expert than I. (I am, by the way, greatly in your debt for your sound, round and, if I may say so without seeming snide, surprisingly unprudish defence39 of my own poem on that subject.) As a matter of fact, I have brought together a few people who are willing to bend their talents towards promoting a more just appreciation of God, and I am wondering if you…’

  ‘A celestial Fabian Society?’ enquired Shaw. ‘I shall join it. One moment.’

  From the pocket of his norfolk jacket Shaw quickly took out a set of pan-pipes, on which he sounded Papageno’s call:

  ‘I am now ready‚’ Shaw said, briskly putting the pipes back. ‘Where is the meeting?’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ‘One item in my plan’, Voltaire said, ‘is not at all clear in my own mind.’

  He and God, with Shaw now stationed between them, were walking back, up the oleander avenue, towards where they had left Gibbon and the psychoanalyst.

  ‘I thought you put it beautifully clearly,’ God said.

  ‘Of course he did,’ said Shaw. ‘Voltaire is one of those from whom I learned that effectiveness of assertion is the Alpha and Omega of style.’40

  ‘I can see’, Voltaire pursued, after he had acknowledged the compliment from Shaw, ‘that we may succeed in improving God’s reputation down here (or up here – it makes no difference and depends merely on whether you adopt the classical or the Christian imagery). But what about the world of the living? Not being spiritualists, we do not entertain the illusion that the dead have power to intervene in the affairs of the quick. In relation, therefore, to what most people would call the real world, our neo-Fabian-Society seems doomed to impotence, because all its members are already dead.’

  ‘God isnt,’ said Shaw. ‘The great advantage of never having been alive is that you cant become dead.’

  ‘No one will ever have to attend my funeral,’ God said with pleasure. ‘But beyond that I don’t quite see where the advantage.

  God lost the end of his speech in giving a slight squeal and twisting suddenly round to see what was behind him.

  There, it proved, a large grey sheep was nuzzling, through his robe, at the back of God’s knees.

  ‘You frightened the life out of me,’ God said in a very mildly reproachful tone to the sheep; and he placed his hand on his chest to still his alarmed heart.

  ‘Look,’ cried Voltaire, pointing further down the avenue.

  Two brown cows and one the colour of vanilla fudge were slowly advancing.

  Behind them, quicker of foot but slower of progress, came a flock of hens, with a few partridges, geese and turkeys to be distinguished sporadically among them.

  ‘You were speaking’, Shaw said in a conversational and explanatory tone, ‘of funerals. Well this, in a sense, is mine. I prophesied41 that my hearse would be followed by oxen, swine, sheep, hens and so forth, all honouring the man who perished rather than eat his fellow creatures. Of course they didnt turn out for my funeral, any more than I perished of my vegetarianism, which in fact gave me an exceptionally long and healthy lease of life. But they follow me through paradise. Though I must admit’, he added, taking his pipes from his pocket, ‘that I have not yet managed to induce in them the smallest sense of punctuality.’

  He sounded Papageno’s call again.

  The cows looked up, but did not improve their pace.

  Several of the birds jumped into the air. But when the fluttering was over, the flock had advanced not at all.

  ‘We may as well walk on,’ Shaw said. ‘They will come when it s
uits them.’

  As the party moved forward again, the sheep placed himself next to God and from time to time pressed his woolly side against God’s thigh.

  ‘He seems to have adopted you,’ Shaw observed.

  ‘He evidently aspires to be the lamb of God,’ said Voltaire. ‘I confess I have seen nothing to match this in the whole of my afterlife.’

  ‘As a matter of fact’, Shaw rejoined, ‘it is rare for people to see animal ghosts at all.’

  ‘True,’ Voltaire replied. ‘I wonder why.’

  ‘I suppose’, God said, ‘theology impresses them with the notion that animals have no souls – and hence no ghosts.’

  ‘Theology’, Shaw said, ‘doesnt impress people deeply enough to touch the folk imagination – or people would have to give up seeing fairies. There is no spot on earth more impressed by theology than my native island. Yet nowhere will you find a higher proportion of the population claiming to have conversed with the fairies. No, what prevents people from, on the whole, seeing animal ghosts is not theology but bad conscience. If they do see an animal ghost, it will be a dog or a cat, not an animal they are in the habit of eating. They will even permit their dogs to see ghosts. A dog may see a ghostly rabbit or rat because, being unable to choose otherwise, it cant be held guilty of its diet.’

  Perhaps in belated response to the piping, a big pink sow galloped out from the oleanders and placed herself in Shaw’s path, where she stood looking intelligently up at him through her short-sighted but scrutinising slit eyes.