Earthly Powers

by Anthony Burgess

  "A full quiver," Carlo told his crotchet-pencilling brother in English. "A quiver full." He liked the phrase. Bow, bow, quiver, shiver, quaver. I was looking at the newspaper, which Carlo's weight had turned into a kind of shallow bowl.

  I said, "Good God, Joseph Conrad is dead." Neither Campanati cared. I got a swift and complex image of the austere agony of a white man's soul in the midst of heat, humidity and pullulation. "India, Carlo. Are you going to tell them there about the virtues of multiplying? A child every year and little to eat. A Tamil girl starts at the age of nine and goes on till she drops. Girls old at thirty and breeding like flies or dying of septic midwifery." I had been reading something, not Conrad. A world full of howling kids with wet bemerded bottoms. I was aloof, not breeding, a harbinger of a new rational age in which breeding would be no virtue.

  "Souls for God's kingdom," Carlo said. "God will take care of the ratio between the world's population and the food supplies of the world. Today we celebrate the tenth anniversary of the outbreak of a war which reduced the population of Europe by some millions. Out of evil good. Famines, earthquakes. Everyone has a right to be born. No one has a right to live."

  This is terrible, I said, he who had been made to opt for sterility and was, presumably, drawn into Carlo's network of checks and balances, along with wars and earthquakes.

  "You think it terrible? There are many things that people say are terrible. They are mostly things that are decreed by the laws of nature, which are God's laws, or by the laws of the Church, which are also God's. A child every year, you say. God foresees all, ensuring that children are not born according to the pattern of cats or ants or rabbits. Hortense and Domenico had to wait five years. He saw that the wait was expedient. And now they may not have to wait so long. The seed flows blessed or unblessed, but man must always assume that it is blessed. And if it does not flow, if it is withheld by holy celibacy, in marriage or out of it, then the term blessed or unblessed has no application. You understand?"

  "Why are you telling me all this? I do not, if I may say so, find it pertinent to my situation."

  "I worry sometimes about your situation," Carlo said, shaking his head over a page of Domenico's score. "Do you really mean that diminuendo there?" he asked the composer, who both shrugged and nodded at the same time. Oh my God, he knew far too much about everything except common sense, which is not the same as Aristotelian logic, and homosexuality. They ought, I thought even then, to turn the ugly greedy bastard into a saint. "I wonder," he addressed me, still looking at the music askance, "often what your situation is. Do not you, Domenico?" Domenico said, with a sort of guilty loyalty: "He does not much care for women, marriage, children. God has said that he shall be lonely. You too, Carlo. In a way. You and Kenneth are in a way like each other." I could not see that. I said nothing. An artist myself, I knew better than to scoff, even inwardly, at another artist's insights.

  "It sometimes seems to me," Carlo said, wagging the music at me and creating a small pleasant breeze in the flybuzzing heat of the apartment, "that we will have you back only when you are ready to engage life. Even in sin to engage it. Do you understand my meaning?"

  "I must," I said, "have a word with Hortense." She was in the shaded bedroom where a small electric fan sang and staidly wimbledoned. The naked twins punched and kicked as they were fitted with fresh clouts. "I brought," I said, "the spare key. If you have occasion. I mean, is everything all right?" She looked at me coolly but not with hostility, a safety pin between her lips. She removed it to say: "Everything's all right. Except that I have to find something to do. I thought of learning to sculpt."

  I nodded in sympathy. "Being a wife and mother. I understand. Who will teach you?"

  "Sidonie Rosenthal."

  "Ah." I knew her, a high thin blond woman in her late thirties, a heavy smoker with irritable but clever hands, with a studio just off the rue de Babylone. She had recently entered a metallic phase: high thin men fashioned out of bolted steel. "Do be careful," I said. "I mean, don't hurt yourself." And then, astonishing myself, "You, Hortense, are the only one I love. Do please remember that. You know I mean it." And I kissed her on the cheek, smelling her faint sweet toilet water, as she bent to pin a clout. Then she unbent, placed her hands on my forearms, this tall lovely young woman who was my sister, and kissed me lightly on the lips. I felt a beneficent current cool me and, for some reason, I caught a brief cinema image of Moses coming down with the tablets of the law. "I'll be back," I said, "in the New Year. If he ever wants to hit you, interpose a twin."

  And so, fairly soon, off. Planters and government officers and their wives going back off leave, leaving regretfully a European summer: the sun back there was no gift wrapped in two layers of cold, it was an irksome and daily aspect of duty. Children imperiously yelling "Ayah!" or "Amah!" Kenneth M. Toomey at the captain's table.

  A curry was always served as a first course at luncheon in the first-class dining saloon. The passenger three or four places distant from myself regularly ordered the curry with nothing to follow except a jug of milk and some sugar. He ate the curry with bread, then poured the milk and sugar into the rice dish and spooned that up as a dessert. "Sir Albert Kenworthy," the steward told me. "Needn't tell you what be's worth. Always does that, always has done."

  The point was: could you make a short story of it? Probably not. Ever since embarkation at Southampton I had been taking notes. I had even been writing stories, typing them straight off on my portable Corona in my Bibby, or L shaped, cabin. The first was a free fantasy, ready to be mailed by the time we reached Gibraltar, based on the couple in the double cabin next door. He was a fat beersoaker who planted tea near Jaffna, she a high thin blond not unlike Sidonie Rosenthal, though dried up and with a tropical pallor. He snored to wake up the whole corridor. Presumably back on the plantation they had separate rooms, perhaps even separate bungalows. Here she could not sleep, and she was not the only one. I lay awake analysing the snore, timing periodicity, separating out the snorts and the squeaks, noting the lip shudder, the choke, the groan that occurred in irregular spasms. In my story I made her get up one moonlit night in the Bay of Biscay and lean on the taffrail in her summer frock, pondering her marriage, Philip such a good man except for that snore, and they had tried everything, cotton reels tied to his back, a strip of sticky plaster on his mouth to force him to breathe through his nose, but nothing any good. Then she meets the man from the next cabin, also kept awake by poor Philip, and they commit adultery in his narrow bunk, her very first time but all really Philip's fault, and Philip snores away out of rhythm with their transports. When they get back to Jaffna she insists Philip and she share the same bed again. It is her guilt, she must suffer, but this time, walking sleepless in her negligee under the Ceylon moon, she commits adultery with a big blueblack Tamil, the bookkeeper of the plantation. Overcome with remorse, self-deprived of sleep, foreseeing the impossibility of her position henceforth, she tells Philip she must go home, can't stand the climate any more. He never sees her again. He takes into his bed, on fraternal urging, the sister of the Tamil bookkeeper, a snorer who can outsnore even him, and they live happily ever after. You may know the story: "The Watch of Night." (Henry IV, Part II, IV. v.28. Philip and Helen Biggin. Look it up at your leisure.)

  There was a fair amount of shipboard fornication, though none for me. Below decks, I understood, there were riotous midnight parties with stokers in party frocks. The leader of the ship's orchestra and the chief barman in first class were, I could tell, seasoned buggers. The unreasonable prohibitions of land were at sea all suspended. Are navies, marine or fighting, a cultural product of sexual inversion? I sat around with pink gin, the notetaker. My typewriter could be heard during the hours of the siesta. Some of the passengers knew who I was. Going to put us in your next book, Mr. Toomey? They spoke better than they knew. Mrs. Killigrew, whose husband played bridge all the time, discovered a passion for a man whose face was covered with warts. Why was this? In a story you had to find a
reason, but real life gets on very well without even Freudian motivations. I asked Sir Albert Kenworthy about the rice business, had to, excused myself as a pathologically curious writer. He was good-humoured over his big cigar, said he liked rice cooked that way, salted, unsugared, the sugar added after. Had never cared for rice pudding. Got your main course and your dessert at one and the same time, no waiting. Got lunch over quickly. But why did he wish to get lunch over quickly? This I did not ask.

  I had a copy of R.O. Winstedt's English-Malay Dictionary, second edition, Singapore, 1920, and I tried to learn five words a day. Open at any page. Demon. Black earth spirit, awang hitam, jin hitam, hantu hitam. Muslim demons. Shaitan, iblis, afrit, ifrit, jin kafir. No way to learn the language, a tin miner from Ipoh told me. You can't go into a bar and ask for a hantu hitam. Though perhaps you could in time. Good name for a black velvet.

  At Gibraltar embarked the Bishop of Gibraltar. He was in the bar before dinner as we eased our way away from the Detached Mole with hoots and moans, the great rock to starboard under a sumptuous sky of mauve and gamboge and smashed eggs, the sun's upper tip burning Willis's Farm. He was elegant in lightweight episcopal evening dress, gaitered, his silver shoebuckles ashine. "Toomey," he greeted. "It was at Monte, as I remember, with Carlo. Craps, eh?" A blear-eyed lay drinker, still sweaty from his shore trip, looked at him, not sure whether he had heard right. "I heard of the alliance of your families. A good thing, we need such alliances. What will it be, gin and something?"

  "May I," I said, when my stiff pink gin came, "say something about bless thee Bottom?"

  The blear-eyed drinker shook his head sadly while the bishop laughed boyishly. "Jolly good, thou art translated. Bombay. One hellhole of a diocese. Pullulation, what will Carlo think when he sees it? A remarkable man. News came of him via Tangier. Legends quickly accrete around him. He is said to have played poker with sa majeste and been able to hand over ten thousand francs to the discalced Carmelites of Rabat or somewhere. He won a sheep eating contest in Colomh. Bechar. Needless to say, I don't believe any of these stories."

  His lordship was the life and soul of the captain's table. He could cap Captain Ferguson's tales of typhoons with horrors of his own, shamelessly lifted from Conrad. He spoke of rat stew on a China freighter, delicious enough if you did not know what it was, like small rabbits, and clean enough, you know, really, none of your sewer chaps, all fat and sleek with the finest grain. He organized a ship's concert the night before we reached Port Said and showed his skill as a light comedian. "A female passenger," he recounted, "on her first evening out of Southampton asked a steward in the first-class bar where the ladies' heads were situated. The steward responded: Portside, madam. Gracious, she exclaimed, don't we stop at Gibraltar? Now I have pleasure in calling on Kenneth Toomey, renowned author and playwright, to sing for us 'Une Petite Specialite Called L'Amour.'" I could not well deny knowing this song, since I had written the words. It came in that wartime horror, Say It, Cecil. So there I was, Miss Frisby vamping the accompaniment.

  All the city sparrows

  Are chirping at the sun,

  Market stalls and barrows

  Say morning has begun.

  Light as bright as taffy

  Is sugaring the day

  While you sip your caffy

  Au lait.

  Bite upon your croissant

  And smile upon your love,

  Hear the larks en passant

  Above.

  Paris may be wicked,

  But one thing's pure

  They make it every day

  In their own Parisian way:

  It's a p'tite specialite

  Called l'amour.

  Then Miss Pauline Higgins of the mottled limbs like underboiled spotted dick danced to "Narcissus" and an asthmatic district officer did card tricks. What a good lot of people they all were, I was betrayed by their applause and too many pink gins into thinking, the red-jowled sustainers of a great empire and their ladies, quafters and yarners and players of deck games. And this imperial bishop, being shifted along three diagonals across the great board of the great game, was as damned good a chap as there damned well were.

  Ah, how I fear this needless clarity of memory. I see it so sharply, the cardroom at three in the morning. His lordship led the nine of clubs and discarded the six of hearts. So Collins the planter threw an eight of hearts and I unblocked the ten of diamonds. His lordship, not too sure about the position of the queen of hearts, led the queen of spades from the dummy. I won with the king of hearts and led the eight of diamonds. His lordship won with the dummy's ace of diamonds and continued spades. I won with the ace of spades and led the seven of diamonds to Collins's nine, squeezing his lordship in the major suits. His lordship knew that Collins still held the nine of spades so had to discard the nine of hearts. I won the next trick with the ace of hearts, but his lordship scored the last trick with dummy's knave of hearts. A bloody damned well-played contract.

  At Port Said with the heat really starting the gullygully man came aboard and performed a trick straight out of the Old Testament. He had a drugged snake that was locked into a sleep of absolute straightness, an olive-hued cane with snakehead handle. He threw it to the deck of the lounge and it coiled out of its trance and wriggled. Gullygullygullygullygully. "As for miracles," the bishop said that evening as we drank Stella beer in a shore cafe where a fleshy Greek belly dancer performed, "when we reach the stage we must some day reach, they will be the first of the discardables. Optionals for the superstitious, of course, no harm in a bit of superstition, like that bloodlike stuff that melts in Naples under the auspices of Saint Januarius. The Eucharist--Carlo and I had a long argument about that in Rome or somewhere. That's where Rome and Canterbury don't see eye to eye, but there must be a way out somewhere--"

  The belly dancer oozed toward our table, her cuplike navel apout. The Bishop of Gibraltar gravely tried to insert a British sixpence in it but she grabbed it and said, "Efcharisto."

  "What," I asked, "is going on precisely? A unification of the Christian churches?"

  "It will take a long time." This, remember, was late August 1924. "A hell of a time. But there are a few of us--I mean, it was I who proposed a kind of subterranean doctrine that could be called plain substantiation. I don't know why I'm telling you all this. Not much of a religious man, are you?"

  "Either," I said, "it's really the flesh and blood or it's not." She now had her complicatedly working bottom toward us, charming an embarrassed table of beef-red laughers.

  "A kind of modification," he said vaguely. "Metaphysical, epistemological. It will all have to be thought out."

  We were easing through the Suez Canal the following day, Sunday, and the Bishop of Gibraltar held a well-attended morning service on deck. The final hymn sung was "For Those in Peril on the Sea," which was bawled without irony or smiles, though our only peril seemed to be that of grazing the canal embankments. You could see a town clock on one side and one on the other, and they showed the same time. When we entered the Red Sea the heat really raged.

  The bishop, in deck-game vest and shorts, sweated under lank hair, an empty pipe between his yellowing teeth, and he pointed to the grim pentateuchs of red rocks and the arid texts of bitter custardpowder desert. He removed his pipe and it nearly tumbled to the deck from his sweaty butterfingers. He pocketed it and pointed again at the fearsome aridity in the grinding churning heat. Women went by positively wilting, underwear straps visible beneath frocks that sweat had rendered transparent. My dear, I'm positively wilting, my dear. Soon be in Aden, my love, demiparadise. "Islam," the Bishop of Gebel-al-Tarik said. "A desert faith, sworn enemy of Christendom, though they have Jesus as a prophet, Nabi Isa or Esa. The inveterate foe. Though can we say that now when a newer foe has arisen, that of Soviet materialism? Once the Christians fought the Muslims, and then the Christians fought each other. Faith is hard to sustain unless it is either beleaguered or dreams the imperial dream. So what fight do we fight now? Are t
hose who accept the dominion of the spirit, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, to unite against its despoilers? God versus Notgod? I must go to my game of quoits."

  Halfway between Aden and Bombay there was a dance, evening dress not fancy (that would come the night before Singapore), and the bishop to applause performed a demonstration tango with a Mrs. Foxe. During "Felix Kept On Walking" a typhoon struck. I found myself toiling uphill with my partner, a little girl, Linda something, astonished at the behaviour of the chandelier which, with a tinkly warning, agitated all its tentacles to starboard. People passed me downhill as I climbed, bright silks and tuxedos and one woman tumbling to show peach camiknickers. Then the tilting floor recovered and the yelling-andscreaming-no-longer dancers sought the bijou bulkheads, the bandstand, tables before we tilted the other way. Spray and then slogging knouts of water hit the windows or lights like snarling disaffected at a mansion of the rich and frivolous. The Bishop of Gibraltar had somehow got to the bandstand and was clinging, as to a rock, to the fixed grand piano, shouting Courage courage or some similar word. The violinist-saxophonist and drummer were packing up, the pianist swigging from a bottle. The ship seemed to labor forward a space without rocking, rolling in a slow and brief rutting movement, then plunged like an otter, then emerged, it seemed, shaking itself, and I and little Linda sat on the bandstand's edge, my arm round a piano leg, she with her arms about me. Could that singing of "For Those in Peril on the Sea" work proleptically, cash paid into the musical bank against an eventually like this? Ship's dancing officers, ready to leave discipline and encouragement to the man of God, this being an act of God, embraced their temporary girl friends, some of them married women, comforting. Then everything steadied, and the bishop, as in a child cyclist's no-hands gesture, raised arms of supplication or praise to heaven. The ship lurched again and he went sickeningly over, embarrassingly, drunk at the altar, cracking his head on the bandstand's sharp selvage. This was shocking, a senior officer of God struck by brutal agents of his own master. He was out and bleeding, and the orchestra leader, who had, I saw, a Craven A between his lips, bent down to inspect the damage.