Earthly Powers

by Anthony Burgess

  CHAPTER 9

  The crackling of the letter in my left dressing-gown pocket was a crackling as of fire. But I was maintaining calm pretty well. The letter had, to cool the metaphor, ignited my cerebral engine, which was throbbing away nicely. I had everything worked out, I thought. When Ali rose at dawn, he found me seated at the kitchen table sipping Blue Mountain. He respected, as ever, my preference for total morning silence and merely nodded a buenos dias. Nor was he surprised to see me there so early: he knew my scant need of sleep. He nodded and nodded as I poured coffee into another cup, added ample sugar, filled a glass with orange juice from the refrigerator, and put the two eye-openers on a tray. Geoffrey's were the eyes that had to be opened. I left the kitchen, balancing the tray with an admirable (I admired) control of nerves, and mounted to the master bedroom.

  Geoffrey lay across the bed, his head over the edge like a man lapping from a pool. I put down the tray and shook him. He made foul noises and at last awoke, blinking down at the floor as if wondering what it was. Then he forced himself onto his back in a crucifixion posture, groaned, coughed, blinked rapidly, then almost sightlessly grasped the orange juice I proffered. He drained it blind, smacked, shuddered, belched, shivered, sighed deeply and handed back the emptied glass. I gave him his coffee. He was half awake now.

  He sipped, then muttered "Cat piss." He did not mean the coffee. "Mouth like a fucking all-in wrestler's jockstrap. Awfully kind, dear." I sustained my morning silence. "Any more there?" He blinked for the tray and, he hoped, coffeepot. I gave him a cigarette and lighted it with Ali's lighter. He coughed long and obscenely and then said, "Better. Much." Then he lay down again and smoked, rolling the dirty whites of his eyes at me. "To what do I owe the inestimable so to speak fucking honor?" I cleared my throat and spoke my first words of the day, saying: "Last night you asked me for ten thousand pounds."

  "Did I? Did I really? A nocturnal inspiration, as they say." And then, "Oh yes, my God, last night. Behaved badly, I seem to recall. It was that bloody Maltese raisin jam and vinegar." He recalled more. "Ah yes, indeed." He appraised me, who was sitting on the edge of the bed. "You seem fit, dear. Does you good, that sort of fuse-blow, so it would appear, yes. Must do it more often. What's that about ten thousand pounds?"

  "Geoffrey," I said. "Listen with very great care and do not say anything until I have finished. First, you shall have your ten thousand pounds."

  "Jesus Beelzebub, are you serious?"

  "I said no interruptions, didn't I? Attention now, please, close attention."

  "Hanging on to your lips, sir."

  "In the early hours I was in your office, which, I may say, was and still is in an unbelievable state of squalor and disorder. It was by sheer chance that I found this letter on the floor, a cigarette-end crushed into it by, I presume, your heel." I took out the dirty envelope and, from that, the letter. "This is from Everard Huntley in Rabat."

  "That shit."

  "Geoffrey, please. You have no conception of the effort I am expending on keeping calm. I will not read out the letter, which is to me but altogether concerns you. I will merely tell you what it says. It says that a certain Abdulbakar called on the British consulate in great and indeed tearful distress. He spoke of the death of his son, Mahmud."

  Geoffrey went terribly pale and whispered, "Oh bloody Jesus."

  "Yes, Geoffrey, the injuries you inflicted in what you termed play proved lethal. This letter, I must inform you, is already a month old, and I have no knowledge of what has happened since. However. Abdulbakar quickly modulated his distress to cries and angry shouts and demands that justice be done. He expected justice to be done by the consular representative of Her Britannic Majesty. First, though, he had gone searching for you in Tangier, finding at length our house, only just vacated by us and already in the possession of the expatriate painter Withers."

  "Oh Christ, get on with it."

  "That was while Mahmud, poor boy, was still alive and in hospital with an even chance of recovery after his operation."

  "What operation for God's sake? Oh Christ, yes--"

  "Abdulbakar had only a garbled version of your name. My name fits easily into Arabic, as you know. The teller of tales Tumi, so said Withers, had departed. Abdulbakar will have no difficulty in finding out where he is now, though Huntley kindly kept quiet about it. Huntley says that you, Geoffrey, are in grave danger."

  "Bugger it, I wasn't the only one. You had a go at pocky little Mahmud yourself, prissy bastard that you are."

  "Abdulbakar's instinct is not to leave justice to the law, which he, reasonably considering his background, does not trust."

  "Bloody pimp. Pimping for his own kid, bastard."

  "He is much more likely, thinks Huntley, to effect, or try to effect, or have effected, a wild justice of his own. Of course, in desperation at not being able to afford a fare to Malta, where he will have no trouble, incidentally, in finding the house of Tumi, he may bring in the police. You cannot be charged with murder, perhaps not even with manslaughter, but there is a very nasty penalty attached in most countries to Grievous Bodily Harm Resulting in Death. Extraditable, surely. Have I made myself clear so far?"

  "Right, right, I've got to skip."

  "If I were you I should get washed, shaved, dressed and packed now. This is goodbye, Geoffrey. You're leaving the place you detest so much. A plane departs for London at midday. With luck you should get a seat on that plane. You must first go to Sliema to the travel agency on the High Street. I am making out a check for you, in Maltese pounds. I shall give you another check, on the National Westminster Bank, Stanhope Gate, to cover expenses in London prior to your leaving London and traveling to the United States. That check will also take care of a return ticket, tourist class of course, to Chicago via New York. I trust you are taking all this in."

  "Chicago? Chic--What the fucking hell am I to go to Chicago for? Return, you said. I'm to return here? To get fucking done in by Abdulfucking bakar?"

  "There's a job of work you have to do for me in the United States. I'll give you yet another check on the Chemical Bank, New York, for five thousand dollars. You may have to travel around, it all depends on what you discover in Chicago. As for return, I mean return to London. In London you will render your report, to me in person--Wignall asked me when I was coming home, I did not think I would be coming home so soon--and, if I find you have worked diligently, you will be given a final check. This will be for the ten thousand pounds you ah desiderated last night."

  Geoffrey was on his second cigarette and in control of the situation, lolling easy, even faintly grinning. "Such fucking decency and ah charity, such a colossal change of heart." As he would not be sleeping here again, he stubbed the cigarette out on the polished cedarwood of the bedside table.

  "I have plenty of money, Geoffrey. You know exactly how much is in the British account. I found the most recent bank statement mixed up with your pornographic magazines. Cognate, I suppose you would say, equally exciting or obscene reading. I have other accounts too, of which even you know nothing. I think, for all my wealth, that ten thousand pounds is sufficiently generous. But you have to do a little work for it. Not hard, but, to me, important."

  "What work, dear?"

  "I'll tell you over breakfast. It has something to do with the archbishop's visit of yesterday."

  "Oh fucking Christ. Very well, sir. I shall get up." And he got out of bed, naked, not hairy, running to fat (why running? Geoffrey never ran). The living had been too easy for him.

  CHAPTER 10

  It was the tooth that had begun to twinge at the Ovingtons' dinner party. It was now aching intolerably, and the gum above it was swollen and tender. The tooth itself was loose. An abscess, probably. Cognac quietened it, also some essence of cloves that Ali bought me from Grima or Borg the pharmacist, conveniently next door to my house. Toothache was, I supposed, a kind of luxury to a man of my age. My father had been a dental surgeon; he had lectured his children on the importance of healthy de
ntition as other men lectured theirs on the importance of getting on in the world and being discreet where they could not be moral. For all that, I had never taken special care of my teeth, yet here I was in my eighty-second year with twenty-six of them, discolored but sharp and sound, except for this rebellious premolar. I thought that even this might be saved, but I could not risk going to a strange dentist, the waiting room full of aromatic Maltese, in Birkirkara or Valletta. I needed my regular dentist, Dr. Pes, on the Piazza Bologna in Rome. Pes is a Sardinian name, less fitting for a dental surgeon perhaps than a podiatrist. A monied gentleman of my generation naturally kept faith with such tenders of his health, comfort and utilitarian needs as had proved their own faith in the metaphysics of skill and quality. Distance no object. Teeth in Rome, silk shirts in Kuala Lumpur, leather goods in Florence, tea in Mincing Lane. I had to go to Rome, unaccompanied.

  Both the pain and the prospect of traveling for the cure of its cause had come at the right time. I was lonely without Geoffrey, and not even his behavior at the airport, a final and spectacular performance as it were, could altogether quell my bitter affection. Ali and I took him there in plenty of time for his plane, and this perhaps was a mistake. First he quarreled with the police who wanted to stamp his passport with an exit chop, shouting that he refused to have anything further of his defiled by the fucking Maltese, and what would they do if he wouldn't have it, shove him in bloody jail? He got away with an undefiled passport but, in the bar, he treated me and all around us to a loud recapitulation, based loosely on the visas and entry permits in his passport, of the more scandalous elements of our life together. "New York, dear, and that pissy-arsed publisher of yours who tried to stop me going to the fistfuck party, dangerous he said, lethal, stupid sod. Toronto, that was where we had little whatsit at the same time, remember, lovely kind of henna color, half-Indian half-French, not an ounce of bloody Anglo-Saxon blood, remember." He got drunk very rapidly on undiluted Pernod. "The man on the Washington Post who once had it off with a ghost. At the point of orgasm the pale ectoplasm shrieked 'Coming I'm coming--almost.'" We soon had the bar to ourselves.

  "That's your plane there, Geoffrey."

  "Got to unload the bugger first, haven't they? Too right they have. Time for another ah ah imbibition."

  "Have you got everything?"

  "Too right, sport." He slapped and slapped the old Gucci case I had given him as a parting present. "All in here positively aching to be encashed. And all the Pope Buggerlugs twaddle."

  Geoffrey was the last to board the plane. He attempted to give the airport staff a voluble account, highly rhetorical and very loud, of my virtues, summing the vices up in: "Sentimentality and bloody prissiness as well as fucking ingrained hypocrisy, product of a bad bloody period. Apologies, ladies, for that bloody period. No, I don't fucking apologize. Malta is bloody lucky to have great international writer on its sanctimonious soil. And to Malta this." The lip fart he let off was monstrous; at the same time he pronged two devil's horn fingers at the roof. "Up all of yours and the very best of British arseholing luck. Look after Toomey, you bastards." At last he could be seen weaving across the tarmac, while the engine turned over and the ground menials waited to wheel away the steps. He tried to do a kind of staircase dance but was at length persuaded to get aboard. I did not envy either the stewardess or his fellow passengers.

  And then the toothache. As I was here I might as well book my passage to Rome. I would have to wait till the day after tomorrow, I was told. Two parties of Maltese going off for a papal blessing. I collected my ticket and paid by check. When I got back to the car Ali and I looked at each other. I had no doubt of Ali's cordial detestation of Geoffrey, but Ali had never indicated, in word, gesture, sigh or eyelift, his dislike or resentment. But now Ali nodded at me, his eyes fully on mine, took in a quart of air and then released it swiftly. "Home," I said, or rather "A casa." There was nothing in that to bring tears to my eyes. Halfway home the bad tooth sang a forte measure of rage. It was a prompt surrogate for Geoffrey. One o'clock, June 24, 1971. My eighty-second year lay all before me.

  CHAPTER 11

  "The point is, Father," I said, "that I shall never have any hope of making a good act of contrition. Not until the urge fails, or libido, as some call it. And why, for that matter, should I have to be contrite about the way God made me?"

  Father Frobisher, S.J., gave me another glass of Amontillado. That was kind of him, because sherry was short, everything was short and growing shorter. We sat in an ugly dark parlor on Farm Street. My chair was a penitentially hard Windsor, but his was big and deep as a bed, old and with creaking springs, covered in dirty chintz. It was just before that green and muggy Christmas of 1916, when full graveyards were promised. Just one month before, the battle of the Somme had ended, with British losses estimated at nearly half a million. A green Christmas represented a kind of civilian expiation.

  Father Frobisher said, "Who was it who sent you to me?"

  "A man called Hueffer, Ford rather--he changed his name because of the war. An editor, poet, novelist." Father Frobisher frowned, couldn't seem to recall the man.

  He said, "I've had one or two shall I say literary personages sent to me with precisely your problem. It's always such people who have the problem. Actors, too, though not musicians. You're a writer?"

  "A novelist, reviewer, that sort of thing."

  "Well, the situation is the same for writers as for dustmen, if dustmen ever have this problem, which I doubt. Heavy exercise and beer, Mr. Toomey, are remarkable solvents of of of." He was a heavy man and could have carried dustbins himself with ease. His scalp was nearly nude but his eyebrows thrust out stiff filaments in all directions. His clerical black was filthy. "Holy Writ," he said, "is perfectly clear about the way God made us. Male and female created He them. The sexual urge was designed for the peopling of heaven with human souls. Aberrations are the work of men, not God. God gives us free will. We use it or we abuse it. You, from what you tell me, have been abusing it."

  "You're wrong, Father. With respect. I did not will myself into being the way I am. From puberty on I was driven away from what the world and the Church would call the sexual norm."

  "Have you prayed?"

  "Of course I've prayed. Prayed to be attracted to what I find distasteful. Prayed even sometimes to be led into the carnal sins of the norm."

  "You must never pray to be led into temptation, Mr. Toomey." He pulled out a cheap snuffbox and offered it to me. I did not know whether it represented an alternative to sex or a type of sensual temptation. I shook my head. He fed a great pinch of what looked like white dust, though it smelt of peppermint, into each of his hairy nostrils. Then he carked and spluttered and pleasurably shivered. He drew a handkerchief of surprising snowiness from his sleeve and trumpeted into it. Then he said, with the smugness of one who has overcome the flesh, "I think you make too much of sexuality. It is a fault of your generation. Of the artists and poets of your generation. You have read the poems of Rupert Brooke? Distressingly--physical."

  "Heterosexually so. He's paid for all that, Father." He had too, at Skyros the previous year. "Perhaps," I said, "we make too much of sexuality, as you put it, because there's so much death going on. Oh, I know what you'll say--that my sort of sexuality is sterile. But there's only the one fundamental urge. Alma Venus, and so on."

  "Why," he said, as impertinently as any strange woman on a bus, "are you not in the army?"

  "You mean that an army chaplain would know more of my problem? Or that an untimely death might solve it? The fact is," I said, "that the medical officers don't care much for my heart. The rhythm is irregular. Doubtless, if we have any more Somme disasters, it will be heard to beat healthful enough music. But may I return to the problem? What does the Church say?"

  "First," Father Frobisher said very briskly, his hands folded in his lap and his thumbs rolling round each other, "all fornication is sinful outside the married state. You are therefore in ah the same position as any any
any."

  "Yes, but a normally sexed person can at least marry rather than burn. I cannot marry. Marriage would be a mockery and a sin. Yes, a sin."

  "I will indulge your ah ah metaphor. But there is no knowing what the love and yes help of a good woman might achieve. You must pray for God's grace. You have no right to assume that your present present present represents a permanent and unchangeable state. God's mercy works strangely. You know nothing of what the future holds. You are still very young."

  "Twenty-six, father."

  "You are still very young. But old enough, may I say, to be beyond the expectation, I say the expectation--"

  I finished it for him impatiently. "The expectation of loopholes, the hope of clauses of exemption and distinguished precedents, and all the rest of it." Just behind Father Frobisher and seeming, in his post-snuff tranquility, to be riding on the apex of his scalp, was a dim reproduction of Michelangelo's Last Judgment--a Christ with wrestler's shoulders condemning everybody, impervious to his blessed mother's pleas, the painter himself standing in the foreground of the blessed, though as Saint Bartholomew grasping his own flayed-off hide. "Where," I asked, "is Michelangelo? In hell? He had dealings with men and wrote passionate sonnets about homosexual love. God made him what he was, a homosexual and an artist. He's one of the glories of the Church. Am I not right in supposing that the Church used to take the sins of the flesh less seriously, in a humane spirit of humorous resignation? There was a bishop, I've forgotten his name, who spoke of a man and a girl in a garden of a May morning, and if God would not forgive it he would. Meaning, I think, that God would forgive it. If God cares at all, which I doubt."