"I hope so. I hope it will work out well. I do not know your sister, you see, I do not know your family. But Domenico has made his choice."
"And Hortense has made hers."
"Yes, yes, I should think so. You know a man named Liveright?"
"Why yes, my New York publisher. I mean, we correspond. I've never met him."
"I belong to a club in Chicago, it is called the Mercury Club, for businessmen, you understand, Mercury is said to be the god of businessmen."
"Also of thieves."
He did not find that funny. "This publisher Liveright was the guest of a business friend of mine. At the Mercury Club. If I may say so, since he is your publisher, he did not seem to be a man of great morality. He is out to make money. He is as ready to make it out of scandal as out of piety or devotion or serious instruction. This he calls being a good businessman. Not good, I told him, prosperous perhaps but not good."
"He has a Calvinistic background. I don't think he'd see the difference."
"No? I talked about your work and he seemed surprised that I knew it. I said only that I had seen a book of yours without reading it. At least, I read the first page. I remembered the name Liveright because the first page seemed to be a discussion about--what one of the characters called the good life."
"That would be Before the Hemlock," I said. "No, wait, a different title in America. Dash Down Yon Cup, not a good title. The one about Socrates. I'm sorry you found it unreadable."
"No no no no, please. I find most novels unreadable. I am not perhaps what you would call a reading man. But I knew of your name, of course, because of Domenico and his falling in love, as my mother put it in her letter."
"You make it sound ungenuine. They're in love all right. But, forgive me, I wish you'd come to the point."
"Liveright kindly sent me a folder of articles about your work. There was one article about uncleanness and obscenity and I think the word was sensuality. I have the folder in a drawer in that desk there. Perhaps I should get it out." But he seemed tired, a very full day.
"That would be my first novel," I said. "Once Departed. I think the Americans called it Return No More. It's a nuisance, having these different titles."
"Liveright also said something about you having to leave England and not daring to go back. Because of some scandal or other. Is that true?"
"Look, Raffaele, if I may call you that, all this is my business. To deny what Liveright alleges would be an admission that it's your business as well. I see I must change my American publisher."
"It is the business of the family into which your sister marries. You become a kind of relative. Let me tell you. There was a British actress on Broadway. The name is in that folder. A widow apparently, her husband dead of influenza. She said that her husband had begun to live an irregular life some time before he died. There was a party at which Liveright was present. He was going to publish the play this lady was acting in. The lady became violent and abusive about the part she alleged that you played in her husband's estrangement from her. She spoke of your sexual irregularities. When I asked if you were a disciple of Oscar Wilde I meant it not only in the sense of literature. We call this thing a disease and sometimes the English disease. I spent two years at a school in England called Orpington School. It is in these schools that the disease often first appears."
"Homosexuality is the term," I said. "It is not a disease. The world's attitude to it is probably morbid, but it is a condition that exists widely and is often found allied to artistic ability. Sometimes great artistic genius. Your Michelangelo, for instance."
"Michelangelo caused no scandal."
"And, you might add, he had no sister to marry into the Campanati family."
"Whether we call it a disease or an attribute of the artistic temperament, it is still a sin."
"You mean the homosexual act or the homosexual condition?"
"One makes the other so I see no difference."
"In that case you've no right to talk about sin. Sins are the products of free will. Your brother Carlo made that very clear to us all in the sermon he gave at Sainte Devote in Monaco in the spring. I did not choose to be homosexual. Because the Church condemns it, illogically I would say, I find myself out of the Church. But all this is my business."
"I do not think so. I was seriously prepared to advise Domenico against this marriage, even last week when all was ready, but I saw that might be unjust. Moreover, Domenico is old enough to go his own way. I certainly could not forbid it. Still, the family must be protected, and I have become the head of the family. I have a duty to ask you not to bring scandal on the family."
I kept down my heat. "Also a duty to ask my father to watch his step in Battle, at the same time querying his right as a very recent widower to marry a young girl whose antecedents none of us know. You have a duty also to go to whatever theatre my brother Tom is performing in and persuade him to keep his act clean."
"Now you are talking stupidly. You are a writer and have the opportunity to incite publicly to scandal. There is also the matter of your private life. This has become public even as far away as New York."
I still stayed outwardly cold. "So what does the head of the Campanati family wish me to do? To seek some other career? To dissimulate my true nature? To drown myself in the Lago Maggiore?" Then the heat broke through. "I never in my life heard such sanctimonious impertinence. I'm a free man and I'll do what I damned well please. Within," so as not to appear totally anarchic and thus to some extent justify his view of me, "the limits imposed by my own nature and by the laws of society and literary ethics. The Campanati family," I added, sneering, "una famiglia catissima, religiosissima, purissima, santissima. With your brother Domenico shagging everything that offered and likely to do so again, despite the state of holy matrimony."
"I do not know that word. And I do not think I will have you speaking in this manner."
"My sister, I may add, wished to make a man of your brother. She recognized a talent that had to be encouraged. Oh yes, she loves him as well, whatever love means. He's prepared to work for a living, or so he says, instead of writing music as a cheese-subsidised hobby, and you twitch your naso raffinatissimo at the prospect of his discoursing harmless twaddle on a brokendown piano. Your holy brother Carlo, a waddling banner for the deadly sin of gluttony--at least he's realistic and charitable and has no time for the first deadly sin. The pride," I said, "of a putrefier of lactic solids. A pride that stinks like the commodity itself."
He drank his whisky in one irritable gulp and stood up. "Perhaps this was not the best time for talk. It has been a long day. Perhaps I have not spoken to you with the right--discretion."
"The theme is clear." I also got up but did not finish my whisky. "Clear as a bell. I'll sleep in Milan tonight."
"No no no no no. Your room is prepared. I will show you where it is. Perhaps we both need a good night's sleep. You are more upset than I expected. I don't think, however, that you understand my position. Surrounded by corruption, by immorality. Chicago is a most vicious city and it will grow worse. I am sensitive to these things, they become... a physical oppression. If you are angry, I apologise for making you so."
"I suppose I'll have to walk back to Milan. Perhaps I can pick up some filthy little Milanese boy on the way. Ready to hire out his edo for a couple of centesimi."
"There is no need to be disgusting."
"Oh yes there is. Pharisee. I thank thee God that thou hast made me pure. I never did much care for your putrid specialty. I'm getting out of here."
And so I did, walking to the town under the honeyed moon and finding a garage with a Daimler that had probably been left behind by the defeated Austrians, the bonnet dented and what looked like bulletholes in the rear offside door, the driver an Old Bill type who blamed the British for dragging Italy into the war and thus implementing her present distress. Still, he took me to my hotel, shaking with rage and contempt as I was, and charged me exorbitantly. The Milan Metro did not at that t
ime exist.
I did not, the following day, make my proposed trip to Lago Maggiore. It was necessary for me to take a taxi from the hotel to the Stazione Garibaldi, there to catch a train for Arona on the western shore of the lake. But there were militant workers on the streets with portraits of Lenin and slogans about liberty. A knot of five had knocked down a carabiniere and were kicking his bloody body to death. When my taxi approached this same knot it seemed to them that I must be a bloodsucking Milanese industralist who had to be dragged out and given to brisk revolutionary justice. Some window smashers joined them, jeering but with their claws out. Good Northern Italian faces, terribly distorted by politics. My driver was not on their side. He rushed at them, bumping sickeningly over the carabiniere's body, and they howled and stumbled and fell and rose and chased us. I felt approaching a cardiac spasm of the kind I had last known in Battle on the High Street in the rain, walking to confront the news of my mother's dying immediately on my knocking at the door. The attack missed its trajectory, seeming, in my temporary delirium, to crack at the window behind me. But what hit the window was a lump of lead piping. The driver rushed me and my bag circuitously without my telling him to the main railway station. He knew I was a foreigner; let me get back to foreign parts and not witness any more of Italy's shame. There were troops, armed, in the station yard.
"Hypnotised, that's what they are," he said, when I paid him. "But what can you expect? Drunk with what's happened in Russia. Bolshevism as the answer to the whole damned mess-up. Gutless politicians and gutless police. But they won't win, they can't. The patriots of the Trentino won't let them, and I'm one, by the mother of Jesus Christ. You heard of the Sansepolcrista? No, you're a foreigner. They'll remember the Piazza San Sepolcro, I can tell you, and what's been decided there. Last March, it was."
March 10, to be exact. In a room lent by a Milanese Jew overlooking that square of the Holy Sepulchre. Borrowing the black shirts of D'Annunzio's arditi and calling themselves the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento. They would stop red thugs killing policemen in the streets.
CHAPTER 29
Robert panted, "It will do you no harm, you will like it, you will see." And he gently undid the boy's shirt and drew it over his crisply curled head, casting it to the floor, where it lay limp as the boy's own body. "Ralph, Ralph," murmured Robert as he caressed the young warm flesh, running a hand ever and again over the thin but muscular arms with their delicate flue, the smoothness of the taut belly, the silkiness of the back, the delicate moving contours of the breast, where the tiny nipples had already begun to respond to the moist fervour of Robert's kisses. It was while his mouth held his in passionate prolongation that Robert blindly tore at the buttons of the boy's trousers. He whispered, "See, Ralph my darling, we must be the same, naked as the day when we were born, and rightly so since we are both at this moment being reborn. The whole world will seem to have changed, you will see, it is the beginning of a life for both of us." The world outside, the alien world of disgust and hate, impinged in the clash of the Angelus bell, but, yes, it was the bell of the Annunciation, the Angel of the Lord, an impending miracle. His questing hand was aware of the boy's own nascent excitement, the silken sheath about the iron of tumescence, and he smoothed with a shaking hand the royalty of the sceptre and the twinned orbs. Then: "It must be now," he gasped, "it is the moment, do not move, Ralph my love." Thus, newly locked in a kiss, Robert found the antrum amoris and eased his body up to engage it with his own palpitant rod, now grown and glorified to a mace of regal authority. The boy cried out, and it seemed not to Robert to be a cry of pain, rather a call or crow of acceptance. Encouraged, Robert gently eased his throbbing burden into the timid heat of the sacred fissure, soothing with gentle words, words of love, while the angelic bell pounded and pulsed without. And then the promise loomed, the declaration of the Angel of the Lord, and the rhythm of ancient drums pulsed in imperceptible gradations of acceleration under a choral utterance that was emitted from the silver throats of all the Angels of the Lord, filling the universe to the remotest crevices where lurked, like shy sea beasts, stars not yet named, galaxies uncharted. And then the madness followed, the drought of a demented hoarseness of arcane and terrible incantations, the rasp of words ineffable, prayers to gods long thrust under earth or set to gather the dust of eons in caverns remote and hallowed only by mouths themselves long filled with dust, for the rancorous hordes of those who flaunted the banners of Galilee had smitten and broken and flattened the ancient empire of Faz and Khlaroth.
And then, O miracle of miracles, the drought was overtaken by the bursting of the dam, by the flooding of the whole desiccated earth, and Robert's voice rose like a trumpet in the ecstasy of his spending. A love nameless, unspeakable, spoke the name over and over again, "Ralph Ralph my beloved," and the lips that were agape in a wordless prayer of gratitude now closed about the head and flower of the boy's Aaronic baston, mouthed softly as about a grape to effect and yet delay its bursting, and Ralph writhed and groaned and the words were strange. Solitam... Minotauro...pro caris corpus... Latin, the memory of some old lesson, of some ancient attempt at seduction in that Jesuit school library he had spoken of: the supposition flashed in Robert's cooling brain. Then, with the speed of incontinent youth, Ralph gushed his burden out, sweet and acrid and copious, and Robert gulped greedily of the milk of love. Then they lay a space, wordless both, the thunder of their twin hearts subsiding, Robert's head couched on the boy's loins, Ralph's right hand smoothing his lover's wet and tangled hair.
They did not, when they walked to the cafe around the corner, do so as lovers, hands entwined or even touching. They walked discreetly an arm's breadth from each other, as though to admit room for a third, silent, invisible, whose presence they sensed but whose identity they lacked words to define. Then they sat at an outside table, Robert with his absinthe and small bottle of Perrier, Ralph with his pressed citron. August Paris breathed exhaustion about them. A bearded Franciscan went by, swinging his breviary in rhythm with his jaunty step. "Sin," smiled Ralph. "He would say sin."
"Did it feel like sin?"
"It was enjoyable enough to be called sin. No, enjoyable is a stupid word. It can't be described. It can only be done again."
"What would you like to eat for lunch?"
"Meat. Red meat." And Ralph smiled knowingly. He put out his freckled hand to touch Robert's, brown, lean, unfreckled, and then drew it back guiltily.
"States and churches alike," said Robert, "must forbid pleasure. Pleasure renders the partaker indifferent to the power of both. I would like you to look at this," he then said. "It won't take long. A little thing I started to write." He had taken from the inside pocket of his jacket a page or two of his neat script, the ink purple, the deletions fastidiously ruled, the insertions enclosed in delicate boxes sharply arrowed.
Ralph said, "You read it to me. There's nobody around who speaks English. Indeed, there's nobody around." So Robert read slowly and clearly: "In the beginning God created heaven and earth. And the lights in the sky and the thundering sea and the beasts of earth and air and water. And he created a man named Adam and set him in a fair garden and said to him: 'Adam, you are the crown of My creation. Your duty to Me is to be happy, but you must work for your happiness, discovering that it is in work that happiness lies. Your work will be pleasant work, that of tending this garden wherein all manner of pleasant fruits and roots have been planted by My Divine Hand for your delectation and sustenance. And you shall overlook the lives of the beasts, that none may prey wantonly on another. And this must be so that death may not come to the garden, for it is a garden wherein immortality must flourish like the rose.' And Adam said, 'I do not know these words, death and immortality. What do they mean?' And God replied, 'Immortality means that each day will be followed by another day and there will be no end to it. But death means that you would not be able to say: This I will do tomorrow; for the existence of death means the doubting of the existence of tomorrow. Do you understand?' Adam in his i
nnocence said that he did not understand, but God said it was no matter, the less he understood the better. 'There is,' God said, 'a tree that I have planted in the middle of the garden and this tree is called the Tree of Knowledge. To eat of that tree is the surest way to understand death, for its fruit brings death. Touch it not. You know that to touch it is forbidden, but the beasts do not and I may in no wise make them understand that to eat of its fallen fruit is to court death and the means of death. But it shall be part of your work to keep the beasts away from the fruit of the tree, but therein you shall not wholly succeed, for there are beasts subtler than Adam, and the subtlest of these beasts is the crawling snake of the meadow. No fence shall keep it from the tree or its fruit, but I, your God and Maker, abide by this, since it is I Myself that have implanted the subtlety in the brain of the serpent. To work now, for the day is come, and you shall, when the dark descends, cease from your work and eat of the fruit unforbidden and drink of the water of the crystal stream that runs through the garden, and then you shall compose yourself to rest.'
"So Adam toiled and ate and drank and slept, and day followed night and night followed day and Adam was content but for one thing, and that was his loneliness. For the Lord God had given him the blessed power of speech, but this gift he had not granted to the beasts. Yet sometimes the serpent, that coiled in a kind of love about Adam's body, seemed to understand his words but could not himself reply to them. One evening, when God was walking in the cool of the garden, Adam spoke boldly and said, 'Lord, I am lonely.' The Lord exclaimed at that and said, 'Lonely? How can you be lonely that have My love, that were created to ease My own loneliness, for in you I see the lineaments of Myself and in your voice hear something of My own voice.' But Adam said, 'Lord, I would that You created one like to myself, endowed like myself with speech, one that could tend the garden with me and, at day's end, eat and drink and rest in companionship, two of one kind, the one like to the other.' And God said, 'It is right that I made you, Adam, for you conceive of things whereof I do not conceive, and in this are you become an arm of Myself, Who am Lord of all conception and creation. It shall be as you ask. Eat, drink, retire to rest, and when you wake with the sun you shall find lying beside you one like to yourself who shall be as a companion to you, and his name shall be Yedid, whose meaning is friend.'
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