Читать книгу The Devil's Paintbrush - André Brochu - Страница 9

Father Lanthier is driving slowly toward the presbytery, his beautiful panama glued to his sinner’s head. For a moment, he wonders whether he should instantly go and seek absolution from one of his colleagues, but he pictures himself in clothes defiled with the sweat of lust and longs only for icy water with which to scour away his vile sin. O Lord! How could he? At his age, with his experience, how could he have fallen for that witch’s game? Yes, she’s a witch, with the black cauldron of her sex, her great laughing lips with crooked teeth! He sees himself between the vampire’s legs. Forgive me, Lord, forgive me for offending You! He prays, but the words carry the smell of flesh and hair; the abominably soft sensation of a woman’s belly brushing against his — a belly that bathes daily in the river’s silty water — tugs at his groin. O God, such softness! Never with Marthe, his housekeeper, has he known such complete delight. Marthe is simply a matter of hygiene, a monthly affair that has no further meaning and with which both God and the confessional are well acquainted. But Lucie! This is woman in all her horror! Woman as whore, as cunt. The hideous word returns to his lips ceaselessly, tainting them forever. Cunt!

He enters the presbytery like a hurricane and heads for his apartments, but Marthe, who had been on the lookout for him, intercepts him.

“Father, there’s a man waiting for you. He’s been here for almost an hour for a birth certificate.”

“The office opens at one-thirty. You know that.”

“Yes, but he’s really in a hurry. He came all the way from Montreal.”

“All right, I’ll take care of it.”

There’s no time for solitary contemplation of his sin. His impure hands have touched the beautiful, sweet abomination; his hands, still glazed by pleasure, will perform the office of the priest, or rather the bureaucrat in charge of an administrative department that registers births and deaths, marriages and baptisms, all the acts that humans use to certify their presence on earth or their departure to the hereafter.

“You are ... ?

“Vincent Lemire. Forgive me for coming at the wrong time, but I need a birth certificate urgently.”

The man is in his thirties and fairly well dressed. He speaks correctly and with a certain ease. Could be in accounting, or insurance ... As he fills out the certificate, Father Lanthier looks him over discreetly and wonders if he, too, is burdened with hidden sin, if his body bears the traces of shameful acts, if woman has enveloped him with her subtle contagion. Has he bathed in purifying water since the last time — probably last night — that he plunged his member into the soft abyss? More likely, the beaded secretions have dried on him. Beneath his brown suit, his air of decency, is he not one of the carnal’s many minions, just like he is? A brother in slavery!

Father Lanthier signs with a slightly trembling hand and returns the document. He watches the hand reach toward him, wanting to take it and cover it in kisses, just to smell, breathe in the possibly guilty warmth, sniff the other’s sin and at least find consolation in not being the only sinner. “The truth is, I’m going crazy,” he says to himself, wanting to cry as the man takes out his money and hands him a large bill. He tries to give him some change, but the man stops him with a gesture — with that ambiguous, perhaps guilty hand.

“For the poor, Father. And many thanks for sparing me a two-hour wait.”

He watches him leave, a fairly good-looking man, really, young; it is easy to picture him with a woman’s breasts pressed against him, naked, all ... God! God save me from my life!

Ten minutes later, although it is just before lunch and an odd time of day for it, Father Lanthier, armed with a horsehair bath glove, plunges himself into a tub full of cold water. He’d like to rip off his skin with it, but an image floats before him, no matter how hard he scrubs, an image with long, soft, undulating hair, over-large brown eyes, a sensuous mouth with large yellowy teeth, a demented laugh that pours over him like spittle, like a philtre, a sacrament, a heavenly blasphemy. And large breasts, moving, too white below the shoulders’ bronze skin, breasts that descend like caresses, rain, smiling moons that have reinvented roundness, the fullness of his plunge, of sweetness.

Once again, he is overcome, he is hard to the breaking point in the icy water, which, far from appeasing him, exacerbates his tumescence to the point of pain. It is the devil, inside him, arousing him, possessing him, and damning him here and now in this tomb of icy metal. Stretched out on his back, legs apart, he imagines above him a vulva, red and black, descending toward him like the Pentecost, descending slowly toward his desire and misery, an enormous flower that will bury him in its smiling folds, envelop him in death. “Oh, God!” he whispers, and everything within him that responds to God’s name fights the pounding of blood in his body, hoc est enim ..., the hiccups of the gorged beast, flesh desecrated, seed profaned.