The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl Page 24

  One of them acutely missed the presence of sacred cows in the streets: both because she was fond, though without passion, of cows and because the rule that no one must disturb them served to slow down the more headlong drivens, a service she thought Rome could do with.

  Seeing the white objects descend, Father O’Flummery was put in mind of manna and, for an instant, conceived that God was manifesting himself in token of forgiveness.

  Then he mentally chastised himself for his want of humility in supposing that God would single him out.

  As though the devil were after him, he fled through the baking piazza, up the steps and into the church. There he flung himself to his knees before the throne of St Peter and bewailed his pride, his heretical inclinations, his sensuality and his flippancy. Purged, he then settled down to a long, serious prayer for the unity (under the control of the true faith) of his native island.

  The environmentalist (who was wearing, flapping open, an old and dirty green mackintosh which she dared not throw away because it was not biodegradable) noticed, as she trudged through drifts that accumulated on the ground inside the colonnade, that what she had taken for oleander petals were in fact advertising handouts. She kicked at them in disgust. She was not interested in what they said – which in any case looked to her as though it was in shorthand, which she could not decipher.

  As she trudged she wondered whether oriental civilisation had accidentally hit on the solution to this modern problem before the problem arose. She pondered the chances of getting the U.N. to enact a ruling that all handwritten and printed matter must be on rice paper and that the reader, having read, must eat it.

  When a copy at last drifted into his hand, Hector Erasmus looked at the side which first presented itself and found it blank. He turned the paper over. The reverse side was blank too.

  For a gulped second he feared his luck had left him. Intelligence again rescued him. He recognised that the message meant ‘Use your imagination.’

  Smiling, he marched out of the piazza, determined to call himself the Black Prince from now on.

  Gathering her charges into a group about her, and conducting them from the centre as though they had been a choir, the little elderly nun put them through their practice. Misdistributing the accent, and slurring what should have been an explosive double consonant, ‘Iddio’, they declaimed in unison, ‘Iddio’.

  The environmentalist pushed past them, but they paid no attention, happy in their sense of learning Italian at last, though they had no idea what the word meant.

  ‘Iddio’, they said louder.

  The sound ran round the colonnade and swelled out into the piazza.

  ‘Iddio. Iddio. Iddio.’

  Unobserved, though dipping quite low over the obelisk, a goose flew across the piazza.

  1 ‘So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations; and from David until the carrying away into Babylon are fourteen generations; and from the carrying away into Babylon until Christ are fourteen generations’ (Matthew, I, 17). Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason, II) contrasts the 28 generations in which Matthew gets from David to Christ with the 43 it takes Luke, III, 23–31.

  2 Matthew, I, 16.

  3 Matthew, I, 18.

  4 Alexander III. The piazza was begun in 1656.

  5 as it does not seem to have been to scholars of the subject.

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  © The Estate of Brigid Brophy, 1973

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  ISBN 978–0–571–30461–5