Wednesday, February the 9th, 2005

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Total Eclipse

One day, after a huge breakfast, Ignapfando had a total eclipse of the heart, just like that songstress whose name escapes me. He did not look as if it was happening. Indeed to the untrained eye Ignapfando looked as if he was asleep, rather than in the throes of convulsive emotional turmoil accompanied by strident rock music. Adding to the disjuncture was the fact that Ignapfando resembled Clement Attlee, down to the finicky moustache and an inadvisable line in hats. Nevertheless, when he went to his priest for confession the following Sunday, there could be no doubt about the upheavals of his passion.

“Bless me father for I have sinned,” he pleaded as he knelt facing the grille behind which the priest sat clutching his rosary beads and wishing he was Montgomery Clift in I Confess. “I have had a total eclipse of the heart.”

“Let me stop you there, my child,” murmured the priest, “I have heard enough. Say three Our Fathers, four Hail Marys, and one An Evil Cradling by Brian Keenan. Now get you gone.”

Ignapfando left the confessional. Soon afterwards, so did the priest, his own heart not so much in total eclipse as heavy with the weight of the fat black sins he had had to listen to all morning. Terrible, terrible sins, of impiety and vainglory and greed, of abandonment and lust, of twiddly Moog synthesiser solos, rapine, pillage and wrack. He imagined each sin as a lump of lead, and he stuffed them all into a sack. It was a burlap sack, tied up with a knot, and he hoisted it onto his back. His back was broad, and his shoulders were strong, and he carried the sack through all the day long, the sack of sins as black as his heart, and at nightfall he tossed it onto a cart. He reined up his horse in the milky moon's glow, and off he rode with the sack on the cart. Ignapfando tossed and turned in his attic of sin with his total eclipse of the heart.

Dawn came. Ignapfando awoke refreshed, all sin washed away, a man who now was pure. Far, far away on the road to the lime kilns, the priest with his horse and cart and sack full of sin had stopped to drink water from a stream. It was a pretty rill. As if in a dream, the songstress appeared, standing in the long grass, dressed in no longer fashionable glam finery. There was a sudden din. Was it the music of the spheres as conceived in the Mind of Brian May? The priest clapped his hands over his ears, his horse reared up in terror, and the burlap sack exploded, its incandescence vapourising the sun, the blast almost as loud as the songstress and her band, belting out her anthem.

This much have I seen. This much have I heard.