Rituals by Cees Nooteboom Read Free Book Online Page A

the vaulted, dark shade of the wood. The host soon diverged from the path that had caused his former mistress such trouble and turned into a small side track. But with Taads, there was no question of stumbling or falling. Inni had difficulty in keeping up with the bushranger's jacket in front of him. The dog, on the other hand, seemed to know exactly where the walk led. His presence had become invisible and could only be deduced from the quick riffle of dead leaves somewhere ahead. "Sartre," said the grey wavy hair, the smallish skull, the chamois jacket, the corduroy trousers, and the Russia-leather boots in front of him, "Sartre says we should draw the ultimate conclusion from the fact that God does not exist. Do you believe in God?"
    "No," Inni called out. After all, the man had said that on their impending visit to his aunt he did not want to go to church.
    "Since when don't you?" asked the pine trees and the bramble bushes.
    He knew exactly when it had been, but whether he would say so he did not know. It had had something to do with wine and blood, real wine and real blood, and you just try to explain that.
     
    The best thing would, of course, be to say that the little faith he had ever possessed had simply poured out of him like oil out of a defective engine. Up to the age of twelve his upbringing had hardly been Catholic, after all. The humiliating seed of which others have to bear the excessive growth had been sown too late for it to take root properly. He had been christened, but his parents could not marry in church because his father was divorced. A later marriage of his mother to a devout Catholic had brought him face to face with this religion, but only its theatrical, external aspects had fascinated him. The singing, the incense, and the colours had appealed to him so much that he would not have minded entering the monastery even without believing.
    Another thing that attracted him about the Catholic faith was that others did believe in it. At boarding school he had served as altar boy every morning at six o'clock for the half-demented Father Romualdus, who was too old to teach and was only allowed to do a bit of surveillance. To the belching old man at the altar it really was true that when he whispered Hic est enim Calix Sanguinis mei, the small measure of red wine changed into blood, became blood, mysterium fidei — the blood, at that, of someone who had been dead for almost two thousand years and which the old, brocade-clad man in front of him, who had to hold on to the edge of the altar, would presently drink "in remembrance of Me". It was blood of which Inni would help remove the last traces by pouring a cruet of water into the gold chalice raised to him by trembling, speckled old hands and in which a few drops of divine blood, human blood, had remained behind. Inni had found this unspeakably mysterious, but that was no reason to believe in it. If the man with whom he busied himself on those dark cold mornings and who moved this way and that in front of the little slaughter table like a gold-stitched toad believed in it, then it was true, even if only in that half-softened brain which at times tended to muddle up the Latin phrases in ways so unacceptable that Inni, in his sharp boy's voice, had to lead the speaker back to theologically more correct sequences.
    But it was not only that. It was also the notion of sacrifice, of offering. There they were, totally unobserved in their strange twosomeness of sixteen and well over eighty, busy with mysterious, antique rituals that gave Inni a feeling of sinking far back into time. He felt that he was no longer imprisoned in this wretched neo-Gothic squalor but that he had arrived in the landscapes of ancient Greece, the world of Homer, whose secrets they unravelled every day in class, or at the sacrificial offering of live animals by the Jews to the God with the terrible voice who resided above the scorching deserts. This was the God of Vengeance, the God of the