Christ’s Entry Into Brussels Read online

  For the time being there wasn’t a single cry of panic. The Jehovah’s Witnesses zipped their lips and didn’t say a word about the countdown to the Last Days having begun. As if anyone would have listened anyway, seeing as the world ended every five years or so, according to their calculations. Defeatists and kiss-my-arsists everywhere indulged in childish excitement, the sceptics put the mockers under lock and key – it was a moving sight.

  All the more remarkable were the sour faces with which the Catholic authorities endured the debate. If anything, you would have expected the leading figures of this ancient institution to be delirious with joy about the arrival of their Shepherd. And they could definitely have used a religious revival: they celebrated their Sunday Masses for a few drooling bags of bones, the increasing vacancy of their places of worship was constantly obliging the National Trust to rezone a church here and a basilica there as a discotheque or fashion boutique. And that wasn’t even the deepest point of the pit they were in. The stench hanging over our bishoprics was billowing up from suppurating wounds that had finally been laid bare.

  It wasn’t as if the news of a priest having molested a child was such a total shock that the population couldn’t get over it. The wandering fingers of priests and brothers featured in too many popular jokes for the actual clergy to have ever been clear of suspicion, because that same populace, proverb mad, has lived for centuries in the wise belief that where there’s smoke there must be fire. Everyone was familiar with the twinkle that appears in the youth movement chaplain’s eye while inspecting his cub scouts at their washtubs. Every year the boarding schools produced a new generation of boys who had felt a priest’s clammy hand on their necks, who knew how a manly voice could tremble during the Hosanna if the singer’s eyes were fixed on a troop of boyish faces. On the day of the public announcement of his exam results, many a college student – and what could be more beautiful than a youth proudly venturing into adulthood with his tie twisted and crooked because it’s the first time he’s tied it himself – thought back on the Jesuit fingers in his mouth as the priest theatrically positioned a host on his tongue. And how that finger always left behind a taste of tobacco. That too would be on the graduates’ minds before they threw themselves into the drink and drowned the past; a close-knit teenage clique before they burst apart as lawyers and doctors, members of professions people named with less pride, and failures. Students who had once signed up as altar boys would soon walk through the large gates of the Catholic school for the last time, knowing that the image of the sperm stain on the chasuble would stick with them like a youthful sorrow. The sleeping cubicles had left a mark on their characters – it was there that the night supervisor had groped them in the crotch – but now they were receiving their diplomas and ready for the Great Forgetting.

  To a degree, the masses were able to forgive these members of religious orders their scarcely concealed horniness, given the inevitability of slow perversion for those living under the rule of celibacy. Yes, these priests and monks could even count on pity.

  But recently a bomb had dropped on the image of the Catholic Church. Yet another. One of the victims of a randy bishop had been smart enough to tape his conversations with the ecclesiastical authorities and these recordings left no room for doubt about how vigorously the Church had tried to manoeuvre the young man into a corner. He, the victim, was the one with a problem, because he – that’s right, the victim – was the one who was failing to resolve his problems in a pastoral fashion. Because this wasn’t something you needed to hang out in public, it wasn’t a matter to be considered by courts of law, incompetent as they were to judge cases that God was so much cleverer at resolving. It wasn’t the rapist who was failing as a Christian, but the raped, because he found it impossible to forgive his tormentors. He should be ashamed of himself.

  The Church cravenly embraced the role of injured party, even accusing the victim of wanting to profit from the situation by seeking damages. All over the country Masses were dedicated to the paedophile bishop, with prayers to support him through these undoubtedly difficult days. And to spare him the wrath of the mob, he was tucked away in a Trappist monastery, where the beer tasted quite a bit better than the liquids civil perpetrators of sexual offences get to drink in their overcrowded cells. No apologies. The clergy was entirely free of sin, always, and untouchable.

  Of course, we’d let ourselves be lulled into a state of drowsiness. This was the same institution that had used the search for the Holy Grail as a cheap excuse to indulge itself in excesses of pure racism. The same institution that derived great sadistic pleasure from the Inquisition, flagrantly raping young girls because virgins weren’t allowed to be burnt at the stake, rampaging through villages to rip open corsets and squeeze breasts in search of marks from the Devil’s tongue. The same institution that knew before others about the Holocaust, the deportation and gassing of an endless stream of people, mostly Jews, and kept quiet, because it was easier that way. That same institution – because after all these years it really was still the same, that was the only conclusion we could draw – now remained as silent as the grave about all the paedophilia scandals within the Church. The psychological mutilation of children was, and remained, subordinate to the reputation of the Holy Church, amen.

  And now Christ was coming to Brussels.

  The last time the Mother of God appeared in Brussels was in 1972, to complain to a poor, randomly chosen frump about all the abuses behind the façade of the Catholic Church.

  The clergy could put two and two together. They were pissing themselves with terror and there was hardly a dry habit in the house. This time it wasn’t the Mother coming their way, but the utmost authority in the whole universe. To call them to account – no other reason imaginable! And the bishops looked as pale as all those children when they were panting their cigary breath into their faces.

  News has to entertain. And once again it had done an excellent job of just that.

  That night I caught myself starting to make the sign of the cross. I mean, the reflex still seemed to be there. An old, ancient habit from my childhood, when my grandparents drew crosses on my forehead with their thumbs when I was going up to bed, something that always made me feel safe. I’d stopped praying long ago. I had simply lost my faith. My horror of death had grown and in exchange I had become proud of the independence of my thought. But now I suddenly felt my right hand rising towards my forehead, a habit I thought I’d shrugged off long ago. I only needed to lose control for a moment and I’d start mumbling, Oh Lord, ev’ning has now fallen, begging for His blessing, peace and forgiveness. I would have discovered just how well I had memorised all those prayers and to what degree their mantras could still soothe me. But I managed to pull my hand back just in time and grabbed my wife instead. And that, too, was a form of prayer.

  Third Station

  The next day, when I went for a walk to pick up the paper – more of a stroll really – I was struck by the sight of an elderly woman who had set up camp alongside the Place des Palais. At that stage there were still more than three weeks left to count down until the arrival of the Most High, but this lady wasn’t letting the grass grow under her feet and had already assumed position in a beach chair, armed with an ice box, a small shopping trolley filled with tinned food, and a fairly large portrait of the Lord that seemed to me in danger of succumbing to the first downpour. On a cardboard sign, she’d written ‘Lord I am not worthy to have You come to me, yet You have come. Thank You’, with a few endearing spelling and grammatical errors that I, out of piety, have chosen not to reproduce here. And so she sat there, determined not to budge an inch from her chair. Against a backdrop of travel-mad Japanese tourists who gravitated to this neighbourhood, toothless pensioners shuffling to the ducks in the nearby park with bags of saved-up crusts, young lovers who were still satisfied with just a bench and each other, joggers, numerous dog owners who had to leave their gardenless homes several times a day to meet their pets’ requirements, cramm
ed sightseeing buses with day-trippers who kept their cameras aimed hopefully at the royal balcony, exhaust fumes … To me, the scene seemed more surrealistic than the Magrittes that charmed the dreamers in the art gallery around the corner.

  This lady had apparently jumped straight to the conclusion that Christ would be including the royal palace in His visit. And why not? A fellow king, after all. Her presence forced us, and with us the city council, to think about a likely route. For myself, I would have sent the Son of God off on the path of the discontented, the north-south axis over the Boulevards Jacqmain, Anspach and Lemonnier: streets that have often been the conduit for a caco phony of megaphones, horns, rattles and curses. Where the crew of the Iceland trawlers came to scream their dissatisfaction at the new fishing quotas, where Pyrenean sheep shearers begged for a humane price for their wool, where farmers sprayed their liquid manure and emptied their milk churns and the employees of the steelworks roared for a more equitable Europe; here, where people had hoped to march racism right out of the world, where they had believed in the effectiveness of slogans and chanted ‘no nukes, no war’ in a single voice, where the unions had come from every corner of the old continent to display their abhorrence for the power of money, where effigies had been lit and rotten eggs hurled … that was the path, in my mind at least, that Christ should follow in this city. The route of the unhappy masses, the eternal etceteras, the enslaved, the poverty-stricken. But heading to the royal palace was another option too, of course. It just depended on how you wanted to see it.

  The old woman’s foresight did not go unnoticed. Her move got her onto the local TV station’s midday news, and that set the ball rolling. By evening the Place des Palais most resembled a campground, and well-equipped families who weren’t planning on missing a single second of the historic event were still flooding into the neighbourhood, despite the official bodies’ refusal to confirm that this area had indeed been included on the route.

  Seeing this little old lady, one of God’s groupies, I inadvertently thought of my own mother. I say inadvertently because, all in all, I think very little about my mother and far less than I might be expected to. But it occurred to me that perhaps she too might like to be present at this unlikely event. If I wasn’t mistaken, she had, during a sprightlier phase of her life, witnessed John Paul II kissing the tarmac of the small airport of, I think, Wevelgem. Even if that might have been mainly due to her then employer’s devout decision to mark the papal visit by granting paid leave to every baptised employee.

  In the meantime, an unaided afternoon in the centre of Brussels had become too difficult for her, given her respectable age, her fear of the metro and her anxiety about bombings and various other things. With me along she might have been braver, and that left me only one option: I had to ask her.

  She lived on the Avenue Charles Quint, close to the clunky Koekelberg Basilica, three floors up in the kind of grey apartment you find in large numbers in most cities. The owner refused to rent to coloured tenants – out of principle, because they bred like rats and, when it came down to it, his flats weren’t equipped for big raucous families. This meant that the profitability of this slum lord’s poorly maintained dumps depended on newly infatuated couples with bottom-of-the-ladder wages and old-age pensioners with no other means of support and a compromised sense of smell, which didn’t encourage him to do anything about the stench rising from the rubbish chute either.

  My mother’s canary was at its most cheerful in the morning between seven and nine, when the commuters on the road downstairs lost their patience and treated the neighbourhood to a concerto of car horns. It gave the creature something to do, lustily answering all those urban noises. Until the evening rush hour came to relieve its imprisonment again, the bird, Flutter by name, had to entertain itself with the listless swing of the pendulum and four or five weather reports. But from where she read her gossip mags, my mother did have a view of the only cow the city of Brussels had left, a bonus that any real-estate agent worth his salt would advertise in bold letters. Every year when the butchering season was leaving cowsheds all over the country that little bit quieter, people started worrying about the arrival of a developer. Because it was clear that every blade of grass was a barrier to the economy. What was the benefit of letting a cow snort up diesel fumes day in, day out? Her milk could only be a source of lead poisoning! The national interest would be much better served by building an office block! But still, for the time being, the cow was holding firm against all kinds of expansionism – according to rumours, because of the burgeoning strength of the environmentalist lobby – and both the field and the occasional mooing of its grazer granted my mother and others an illusion of nature. When preparing thoroughly urbanised children for their First Holy Communion and searching for a few concrete Bible references, catechists would conveniently ignore the negligible differences between an ox and a cow, and take their students to the small field on the Avenue Charles Quint: standing there before them was a descendant of the privileged beast that was present at the birth of the baby Jesus in Bethlehem; the steam from the nose of this pierced creature had, in the miraculous year zero, drifted over the manger, briefly leaving a pleasant warmth behind. Atheistic parents stressed other points in their educational attempts and could be seen on weekends standing at the barbed wire around this patch of lawn giving a detailed explanation of the miracle known as a cow. Eyes wide, the littlies stared at the animal’s dangling bagpipes, struggling to believe that this could be the source of tubs of yoghurt.

  Anyway, that was where my mother lived, and she – judging by the volume she invariably set her TV at – had lost most of her hearing.

  The lift was working – miracles upon miracles that week.

  It occurred to me that I had never before invited my mother on any kind of excursion at all. Other people take their parents out now and then, to a pancake restaurant here, a market or theatre production there. Some of them even take them on holiday with them. Not me. The only outings I went on with my mother were to the Erasmus Hospital, where they occasionally recalculated the use-by date of her artificial hip. From her perspective, the worst thing about visiting the doctor was the taxi ride, as there was a ten-to-one chance of the driver being North African. To celebrate surviving the ride and being given a clean bill of health, she would buy us a treat at the hospital cafeteria. A carré confiture: braided pastry filled with apricot jam. What you could call a family tradition.

  I wasn’t altogether sure that my suggestion of going to cheer the Good Shepherd would meet with her approval. Perhaps she wouldn’t appreciate being lumped together with the flag-and-banner-waving simpletons along the route. And as far as the depth or otherwise of her faith went, I didn’t have a clue. True, she had kept the Bible she’d clasped angelically to please the portrait photographer on the day of her First Holy Communion, but I’d never seen her read a single word of it. A crucifix hung above the kitchen door, a decoration that gives the owner the pleasure of dusting it once a week but is otherwise completely ignored. Two palms were wedged in behind the back of the semi-naked deity, almost like feathers in the arse of a burlesque dancer, and the leaves looked so dried and bleached that it could only mean that it had been decades since my mother had last attended Mass on Palm Sunday. She ignored religious obligations like Ash Wednesday and her insatiable hunger for chocolates was a hurdle to any interest she might have had in Lent. She had sent me to a Catholic school, but only because she assumed they would give me a better education, a belief she shared with many others of her generation. The cold church benches put a chill in my mother’s waterworks during weddings and funerals only, the latter significantly more frequent than the former. If Christian groups appeared on her doorstep begging for donations to set up a school in Port-au-Prince or sink a well in a parched part of Africa, she slammed the door in their faces. So no, I couldn’t be sure that her heart was imbued with Christ’s teachings. What’s more, she was a sinner in the clerical sense of the word: an unmarried mo
ther who had refused to confess the name of the father, even to the child.

  ‘Look who’s shown up, my prodigal son! Would you like something to drink?’

  There are actually only two beverages I really like: beer and coffee. It was too early for beer, I thought. And since stinginess had tightened its already firm grip on her, my mother had taken to reusing her coffee filters several times. Once she started doing that, I knew she had grown old. Her taste buds were completely shot – fortunately for her. The sight of her going crazy with the pepper grinder over a bowl of soup left no room for doubt. But I wouldn’t derive any pleasure from the vague recollection of coffee provided by her watery infusions of infusions.

  ‘I’m fine, thanks.’

  ‘Hasn’t Claudia come with you?’

  ‘Veronique!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Veronique! It’s been almost fifteen years since I was with Claudia. It’s Veronique, Mum, can’t you remember that?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter anyway. You’ve come by yourself, that says enough.’

  While speaking to me, she kept her face turned to the TV. I joined her in watching a cook pretentiously arrange three leaves of crinkly lettuce on a plate, undoubtedly in the hope that this would make the lettuce taste a little less like lettuce.

  ‘Do you want something to drink?’

  ‘You just asked me that, Mum!’

  ‘Did I? What did you say?’

  ‘That I was fine, thanks.’

  The cook disappeared from the TV screen, replaced by a vet.