Rigadoon Read Free Page A

too . . . they've got a right! suppose they get sore at me . . . ten years! . . . twenty years! . . . Hell, that's bad! I'd better go! Get my ass down to the gate and chase that jerk away! loud and quick! . . . I don't see a thing . . . oh yes, now I see . . . a shape in the darkness . . . in the gray . . .
    "Get the hell out of here! thug! quick! swine!" and I bark with the dogs! "bow-wow!" . . . and I growl! . . . "grrr!" ready to bite! . . . all four of us together . . . quite a racket! " grrr! " I bet they can hear us all the way to Auteuil! . . . Merry Christmas! via the Seine, the echo! what a celebration! but does it drive that boor away? Not at all! He shouts at me, he fastens onto the bell . . .
    "Monsieur Céline, I've got to see you!"
    "Monsieur, impossible at night! Go away! Never come back! I'll tell the dogs to tear you limb from limb!"
    The bastard insists!
    "I've written you twenty times! I've mentioned you in a hundred articles! dear author, you've never answered! I've called you everything, Céline! Scoundrel! . . . pornographer! . . . double agent . . . triple . . . bought and paid for! You've never answered!"
    "I never read anything, brother of darkness, never! I'm not tempted! Bow-wow! Grrr! "
    "Well, you're going to listen to me now! I'll outhowl your dogs! I beg forgiveness! Oh, forgive me! You do forgive me? Mercy! Mercy! Christmas!"
    He kneels down . . . splash! right in the sludge . . . "grrr! grrr!" what worries me is the scandal! People aren't deaf . . . not even at night . . .
    "I, the Reverend Father Talloire of the Order of the Most-Holy Empire! beg your forgiveness! Just for that I've come . . . I've deeply offended you! on Christmas, Céline!"
    He beats his breast, I can hear the neighbors . . . they're shouting, protesting! I don't look.
    "To the lions, you holy asshole! Bow-wow , grrr! "
    That doesn't faze him! No! he defies me . . . he gets up off his knees . . . he talks back!
    "To the lions yourself! . . . you damn pervert! . . . that's where you belong!"
    He takes the path, I wish he'd fall and crack his skull! shooting his mouth off like that in the rain, that blackshirt has given me my death! I know it! not that I'm soft, but I know what it does to me . . . I never go out at night, I know the risks . . . One more word about Christmas! . . . him or anybody else! That magus! with his cassock under his cassock! let him go back where he came from . . . like he'd never been here . . .

 

    I lie down, Lili goes back up to her room on the second floor . . . I'm giving you these intimate details to help you . . . I hope . . . understand what follows . . . I'm thinking about that priest, the nerve I . . . I sent him packing, sure, he deserved it, a hundred times! a thousand times! if he'd been a rabbi, an Anabaptist, a Protestant pastor, a Greek Orthodox, I'd have done the same, all soldiers of the Christ child, same difference absolutely! they can't fool me with their little squabbles, their arguments, they all come straight from the Bible, in complete agreement that we're nothing but a lot of whites, meat for mongrelization, all set to be turned black and yellow, then slaves, then soldier boys, then stiffs . . . I'm not telling you anything new . . . the Bible . . . the world's most widely read book . . . more obscene, more racist, more sadistic than twenty centuries of lion's dens, Byzantiums, and Petiots° ! . . . racism, massacres, genocides, butcheries of the vanquished that make our worst atrocities look pink and blue, like thrillers for kindergartens . . . next to the Bible everything . . . Racine, Sophocles, or what have you . . . is candy bars . . . a little more vanilla, a little less, that's all . . . I wouldn't be in harness any more . . . believe me . . . if I wasn't bugged by debts, I'd be taking it easy . . . I'm old enough to retire . . . and so I will . . . all I want. . . is short walks, very short, with canes and smoked glasses . . . so nobody'll notice me . . . enough we