Sunshine happens upon the world in halves, and none know whether days precede or follow twilight. Each eve in Bordeaux, nocturnal pitch pours down alleyways, varnishing the city with the venereal film peculiar to sinfulness. Sticky seepage trickles out into boulevards where lamps light the filth for all to see; Everyone sees the muck and simply steps over it. Schoolboys play hopscotch and policemen walk beats.
Cardinal Mourlot walks his ingrained diurnal walk down these alleyways after every evening mass. Uneven cobblestones make his steps falter, and he exerts himself to maintain his balance and poise, grunting low among the fornicators; Their sordid chorus bellows from quarter-hourly hotel rooms. Groping for the palpable comfort spirituality lacks, the cardinal fidgets with his rosary beads. Safely tethered to his trusty anchor, he whiffs deeply the curious musts: the smell of his congregates conjugating; and he hears the solicitations of sirens: sweet Virginia de Clugny-Twat selling herself by the pound like ham hocks.
After one of her brief arrests for prostitution, Virginia confessed to Mourlot how God speaks to her. His recollection went so:
God confided in Virginia that a great flood would wash over Man, not unlike the Great Flood. It was Man's dabbling in penicillin and pasteurization that would wage such carnage. So Man would survive, which was satisfactory, but God's most esteemed creature would perish. God had bestowed upon Virginia the honor to serve as a sanctuary for His select reserve: the animalcules by His ridiculous naming. Everything else on the planet was, as He put it, 'superfluous in number and complexity.' God's cargo had migrated to Noah; God asked Virginia to obtain the cargo herself, for traveling distances was difficult for His bitty animalcules.
She swore on God's ordination to infect herself with all of His favored children. Last month she had inducted consumption, the clap, and a zoo of stomach flora. She was collecting French disease when Mourlot finds her.
The two holy folks judge each other in so many ways. A few:
He approaches her, and she knows he never used his body: the cardinal's black robe is utterly negated by the darkness, so Mourlot appears disembodied, as nothing but the pale grimace of a scarlet-capped cherub.
He approaches her, and he knows she has fallen from grace: the lips that fouled the cardinal's ring, the lips that slobbered over the Eucharist, the lips that lied in confessional, decorated with resplendent ruby sores.
He approaches her, and she knows he is but a man underneath that costume: sweat wets his temples, his pupils keen as predators' do, the smoothness of his cardinal robe is betrayed by a bulge.
He approaches her, and he knows she is clean under her grime: the little girl he baptised as Virginia, frocked with a patina of unwarranted abuse, her innocence salvageable by his abundant piety.
'I can rescue you from this farce you live,' both say in awkward simultaneity.
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