13, Rue Therese - Elena Mauli Shapiro [61]
I have copied some of
the best ones for you. I
think they belong to
you a little too. You can
play them if you want.
With love, Garance
Louise loves her gift. She loves this music. She loves the girl so much that she could cry and she loves Xavier and she loves Henri and she loves Camille and nothing makes any sense and her heart is exploded like so much shrapnel—she can feel gory pieces of emotion rising into her throat, constricting her breathing, taking her, irrepressibly. The first sob is wrenched from her with a great gush of hot tears.
[NB: This is a negative image of a document that does not exist.]
Louise is in the church again, the great hulking Gothic beast. This time she has to wait for her confession. While she does so, she crosses herself with holy water from the small marble basin at the entrance, white and filled with purity. She does so in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Today she forgets to put her wedding ring on her right hand; she neglects this gesture of carnival. She is merely herself, going so far as to forget the mere possibility of subterfuge.
She kneels in the humid dimness of the wooden booth and closes her eyes. Suddenly she wants to laugh—she is trembling—she says in a quavering voice, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been two weeks since my last confession.”
“I am listening, my child.”
“Yesterday I consummated a sexual union with a man to whom I am not married. It’s terrible, you see: I am married to a man, but not this one. He is married too. He has children. I wish I had children. He is the most handsome man I’ve ever seen, and he is witty and strange and I am quite sure that I love him. When he came into me, it was as if the whole world tore apart and gave me a glimpse of something beautiful and it terrified me more than anything but I don’t understand because I am quite sure I love my husband also but I am quite sure I want this man inside me again though the thought of his touch gives me vertigo. Father, the thought of his touch makes me feel like I am falling in the dark, forever. Father, I am not even sure that I have defiled anything. I am not even sure that I feel guilt. Is dizziness guilt? And then there is that confounded girl—Father, is it unnatural for a woman to love a woman as a man loves a woman? It does not feel unnatural, but it feels utterly incorrect, and sometimes I feel that God laughs, yes. God laughs at all of these heated absurdities He puts into our bodies. He laughs at us all, Father. I am quite certain He laughs at you, Father, unable to take a woman in order to glorify His name with the mortification of your body—He must think that is a clever joke, that is. Father, I am filled with fevers of the flesh and I am shivering with heat, Father, and I am quite certain that you are a bigger fool than even I am and surely, to think this is sacrilege. I don’t know. Is such a thing forgivable?”
The silence on the other side of the screen is complete. She cannot even hear the priest shifting around. She tries to listen for his breathing, some sign of life. Perhaps he has fainted dead away? It is possible that their wearing dresses gives priests fragile female constitutions, and their delicate ears cannot process such ignoble gushings of sin without draining all blood and cognizance out of their brains.
No, the man of God is here, and he is sentient. His gravelly disembodied voice speaks, finally: “Everything is forgivable, my child, if you have faith.”
When Louise hears this, something in her heart startles so fiercely that she gasps. She realizes that these are the same words the priest spoke at her last confession. To both these queries, he dispenses the same noncomfort! She could storm into his side of the booth and rip the white collar from his throat and fling it at his face, that ridiculous bastard.
The repeated words close a circle in Louise’s heart. Somehow, this