Earthly Powers

by Anthony Burgess

  He said, "I am, as you see, a priest. Visiting my brother Mr. Campanati in the end room there. I heard a cry of pain. I came to say a prayer. This," he added, oversimplifying, "is another brother. We're leaving now." She frowned less than before but still frowned, probably Lutheran.

  "Not a relative," she said, concentrating on me. "I thought not. That poor child has no relatives. Okay, I guess praying can do no harm, but do nothing without permission from me is the regulation here."

  "Tuberculous meningitis," I said for want of something to say. She looked at me with the small resentment that nurses, if not doctors, always show at evidence of medical knowledge in the lay. "The second phase," I added boldly. And then, "Poor child."

  "You can't say poor parents," she said. "Small mercies. One of the kids at the Saint Nicholas Orphanage. A saint. I guess a Catholic prayer was okay then. Okay, but see me first next time, okay?"

  "Okay," Carlo said, making it sound like an amen.

  We went out onto Michigan Avenue. Friday noon, sunny but, as so often here, windy. "Shall we," I said, "go and eat some fish somewhere?"

  "Their lake fish is good," he said. "The Indians called this lake Gitche Gumee," looking at me as if he were a tailor. "You seem better. You have more flesh on you. No, I must eat with some other people now. Nun's cooking, never of the best. But tonight we will have dinner together and then come in to witness the end of poor Raffaele." He made it sound a treat, like going to the movies. "The swine," he said, but in an unrancorous sacerdotal manner. "The, to borrow your word that time, bastards. But they will see in God's time. Where?"

  "At the Palmer House. I'll see you in the lobby at seven."

  "Good." And he walked off with the casualness of a man who knows his city. I waved for a taxi.

  I slept that afternoon after a grilled steak and iced water, and I woke shaking after a bad dream. I was standing by Philip's deathbed in the rumah sakit of Kuala Kangsar and Philip suddenly blinked, then came out of his coma, then leered at me with a face that was not his. Get you all before we're finished, he said. So long, old thing. Then he settled that face into a gargoyle of horrible cunning and died leering at me. I fought my way out of the monsoon flood yelling. The shirt and underpants I had slept in were covered in sweat, and my civilised muscles had checked at the moment of waking a bowel loose as after eating chilies. I went to void and then bathe. I knew that my reaction to Philip's death, long delayed, was soon to overtake me in some kind of breakdown. I thought of the purge of writing it all out, making a book or a story or a confession a surrogate for the illness. But I knew this could not be done, now or ever. My facile craft did not go deep enough.

  Carlo arrived at the Palmer House Hotel clutching two bottles of, I assumed from their common label of Christ on the cross, altar wine. He bore them into the dining room and plonked them firmly onto the table we were allotted. Then the maitre d'hotel expressed disquiet. He seemed, from his accent, German Swiss.

  "Is there hard liquor in those bottles, sir? The law does not allow...

  "The law," Carlo said, "does not allow a priest to be in possession of the wine he must use on the blessed altar? This seems to be a very bad law."

  "Everybody thinks the law is crazy, sir, but we must obey the law. You may have that, true, in your possession, but not here to drink. This is a hotel not a church. I know," he added with sad humour, "it looks like a church in the lobby."

  "Priests do their work where they must do it. On a hilltop or in a field or even in the catacombs. Or even at a restaurant table. If I propose to say mass now are you going to tell me that there is a hotel regulation which forbids it? If there is such a rule, I beg to be allowed to see it."

  The maitre d'hotel was unhappy and looked round for the manager, who was not there. He was a short man in middle age with a crest of ginger hair and too much blood in him. The other diners, who were drinking Coca-Cola and fruit juice and, God help them, rich full cream dairy milk, gazed with interest at our table. Carlo relented and told one of his easy lies. "The juice of the grape only. I am a Baptist minister, Is the juice of the grape also forbidden? If not, kindly fetch a tire-bouchon and arrange for our order to be taken."

  So we ate lobster and lake trout and strawberry shortcake. And we drank what, protected by the image of Christ crucified, turned out to be a good if warmish Chablis. Carlo said during dinner what I myself had, more briefly, said to my agent. "A country that denies itself the solace of wine in theory but is drunk in fact. Blood and hooch, as they call it. And also very prosperous, but that cannot last. If you are buying, buy quickly and sell quickly. This country has gotten the devil in it." When coffee was brought he took from an inside pocket what looked like a missal but proved to be a liquor flask. He shamelessly glugged cognac into our cups. Then he offered me a horrible Burmese cheroot, which I refused. He puffed away, saying to the hovering German Swiss, "Is this too forbidden? Are all harmless pleasures banned by the law?" Then, to me, "We will go to see poor Raffaele." Quite cheerfully. So we went.

  Raffaele's face was covered with a bedsheet. A doctor in a white coat was there, along with a nurse, Spanish-looking this time, and a gum-chewing orderly. The doctor, a decent-faced Anglo-Saxon of about my own age, was filling in a form clipped to a clipboard.

  "When?" Carlo asked.

  "You are.it says here Monsig," the doctor read off, "nore Campaneighty. His brother, right. About fifteen minutes ago. We did all we could. We're moving him off to the morgue now. You'll need to register the death at City Hall. Miss Cavafy in the main office can give you a list of names of morticians." This was the first time I had heard the term, a commodious and dignified one. "At nine tomorrow."

  "You," Carlo said to me, "can attend to that business." I bowed in acceptance of my punishment.

  "Okay, Ted, here's Larry." Another orderly, not gum-chewing, his face arranged in decent gravity, had just come in. The doctor handed him an official bit of paper and Larry, thrusting it into the breast pocket of his soiled white coat, nodded.

  Carlo said, "One moment." Then he muttered over his dead brother and blessed him. I bowed again and stayed bowed. Then, "He may go now." So the bed was creakingly wheeled out, the Spanish-looking nurse holding open the door. The end of Raffaele, brutally murdered by mobsters of the Camorra. Then: "The child in the bed at the end of the long ward."

  "What about the child?"

  "The child with what my other brother here says is meningitis."

  "Oh, you another Mr. Campaneighty? How do you do, sir, and my sincere condolences in your grief. You were right. Tuberculous meningitis. Ah. Was it you two gentlemen who were in there today? Sister said something about a priest. Well, that child's doing just fine. Taking nourishment. Seeing and hearing. Paralysis going from the lower limbs. There's always some unknown factor. The disease travels the road and we expect it to move on to the end of it. Then something sidetracks it. Especially in kids, you can never tell with some kids. Pardon me now, I've my round to do. Nice seeing you two gentlemen. We did all we could, but you know how things are. He was lucky to be brought in here alive. Well, you know what I mean." And he went nodding pleasantly, leaving us to a totally empty room.

  "You see," Carlo said. I did not know what I was supposed to be seeing. "You'll ask yourself the question why that child. A child whose name I don't even know and don't want to know. But the mystery of God's will is beyond us."

  That, then, was the miracle. Raffaele Campanati, on whom no miracle could be worked, had been a prominent and respected citizen of Chicago, a devout Catholic who deserved the requiem mass that was held for his soul in the cathedral the following Thursday. The archbishop himself presided, and Carlo delivered what began as a panegyric and ended as an anathema. There was a full congregation, and concentrated at the back were a number of southern Italians unshaven that day in token of mourning. Carlo kept his eyes mostly on those as he tolled out ringing English words from his diaphragm. His brother, a man whose dedication to virtue and to justice was exemplary
but regarded by the stupid and the wicked as a sort of imbecilic weakness, an infantile inability to come to terms with the sophisticated world of affairs. Because he was just he was to be seen as a quixotic madman, because he was virtuous he was to be taken for a eunuch, because he was magnanimous he was to be gulled and derided. Because he was Christlike he had to be barbarously tortured, mutilated, left to die like a dog in a ditch.

  Carlo said, "Yet when the value of the estate he leaves, the amassment of personally and realty, shall come to be computed, it will be seen that the building of wealth is not incompatible with the prosecution of the Christian virtues. There are many here today in this great modern temple of the Lord who have come not out of the piety of friendship or respect but following sickening forms of hypocritical convention, and among these are some that are soiled, bemerded, stinking with wealth amassed unjustly, wealth made out of torture and murder and the exploitation of human frailty, a precarious wealth as insubstantial as fairy gold, demon gold rather, that will crumble into dust at the dawn of the recovery of sanity and virtue by a great nation temporarily demented, an angelic land to its immigrants that is now set upon by the devils of greed, stupidity and madness. Men in this city who now consider themselves powerful and prosperous shall find themselves peering for crusts in the gutter, but the wealth of Raffaele Campanati will survive, the just reward of justice.

  "He accrued this wealth in a land he loved and a city he loved, and he sustained his love even when both land and city became most unlovable. He cried out for justice when justice was ground under the heel of those whose duty was the maintenance of justice. He saw great wrongs done and he tried to bring those great wrongs into the light of day that all men might look upon them. But the forces of civic justice were intimidated by the threats of cornerboys and hooligans grown into great men. The law became what it is--a bitter joke at which only the devil laughs. You have here a city made filthy and cruel and corrupt. You have a country that ignored the word of the New Law of the Christ that came to save men and accepted in blindness the eccentric rules of the sect of Rechab. Christ our Saviour manifests himself in wine, but the wine casks were adjudged wicked and smashed, and the elixir of the sun flowed into the sewers. But the law of the abhorrence of the vacuum is man's law as well as Nature's, and it was only through the breaking of the state's laws that men could find again the solace that God had always deemed a wholesome and holy solace from the day that Noah grounded his ark on Ararat. Yet break one law of the state because, rightly, you consider it demented and you must inevitably be drawn to breaking others, and those others may not be demented. Now there is no law, only anarchy. You all drink blood along with your liquor.

  "The words I will now speak I will speak in a language known to many here. It is not my language, though I know it. It has become in this city the language of wrong, of violence, of corruption, of death. A curse lies on the language. Listen." Then Carlo crashed into what I recognized as the Neapolitan dialect, a speech distinguished by ah-sounds made at the back of the mouth which make it seem to the English ear vaguely aristocratic, though it is the tongue of poverty and crime. Listening, I heard the tones of malediction and I seemed to hear a litany of names. The unshaven at the back listened with total understanding, but the understanding was unexpressed in any decipherable response of shame, fear or resentment. Heavy eyelids came down over inkblack eyes and then up again. The owners of the names, if they were present, did not twitch in the reflex that even a sleeping dog will show when its name is spoken. Then Carlo said in English, "I have been granted archiepiscopal permission to end with the liturgy that calls on the demons that infest the wicked to obey the word of the Lord and depart. I select from that liturgy the following." And then, in Latin delivered with what seemed still to be a Neapolitan accent, Carlo howled out the words I had already heard in Kuala Kangsar, ordering the most unclean spirit, every incursion of the adversary, every phantom, every legion to, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, pull up its roots and quit the plasm of God. "Recede ergo in nomine Patris et Fuji et Spiritus sancti: da locum Spiritui sancto," crossing and crossing and crossing in the air. There had to be a response among that silent sullen gang of the swarthy unshaven, there had to be, and there was. A short plump man with immense shoulders stood up gurgling, hand to throat, hand toward the vaulted roof. Then both hands became occupied with breaking open his stiff collar, baring his chest for better breathing. The rasp in his tubes was audible all over, many turned mildly shocked to look. The man's neighbors, as if fearful of contagion, kept their hands to themselves and their haunches glued to their pews, lids slowly going up and down in a diversity of rhythms over black indifferent eyes. Then the man collapsed to his knees, which thudded on the oak kneeler, and his upper body drooped limp on the backrest of the pew in front, which was, at that point, conveniently empty. It was a posture of terrible penitence but it meant only that he was unconscious. Fainting, after all, was not unusual in a long mass like this. It was left to four Irish-looking sidesmen to lug him off, eyes shut, mouth gaping for air. Carlo finished his Latin, glared at the entire congregation, made a last sign of the cross, then bulkily got down. The mass for the soul of Raffaele Campanati was resumed.

  CHAPTER 41

  We sat on the lawn where, six years previously, there had been a marriage feast. An ombrellone against the fierce sun languidly flirted its decorative fringe in the almost no breeze. The pole of the ombrellone was stuck in the centre of a round white enamelled iron table on which were Sambuca, grappa and empty coffee cups. The widow Campanati, pale but not looking her sixty-odd years, sat in black silk on a chair that matched the table; so did I, in white silk shirt and grey flannels. She had eaten a, so to speak, defiantly hearty lunch; I little. It was not the pain of bereavement she had been defying, it was the emotional consequences of a visit from a trio of blackshirts. They had come that morning while I was still on my way from Milan. They had heard that Professor Gaetano Salvemini was staying at the house, and Salvemini was an enemy of the regime. He had written that Mussolini was a bloated bullfrog and that the sole fascist achievement so far was the contrivance of a brutal cure for constipation, and much else in the same spirit. Salvemini had indeed visited the widow Campanati the previous week, but he was not there now. The blackshirts, without warrant, had insisted on searching the house for incriminating documents. They had found nothing but had been insolent and one of them had ostentatiously pissed against the wall. The widow Campanati would be glad to be leaving Italy. She was going to take a small house in Chiasso in Switzerland, a brief train ride away. It would be like being in an Italian town but without the blackshirts.

  "Look," I said, "what do I call you?"

  "Concetta," she said. "Very Italian, very Catholic. I don't think there's an equivalent in English. The boys used to call me Connie, much more of an American name." The American tonalities were now more evident than they had been six years earlier. The American look was stronger too. What was or is the American look? The mouth more generous, less cautious than you find in Europeans, the eyes too. Her white hair was fashionably shingled. The skin was moist. A milk diet perhaps. The chin was firm. "Concetta Auronzo, that's what j was. It still says that on my U. S. passport. I kept it and I keep on renewing it. Cheating, according to the Italian government. But they've never known. My mother said, 'Concetta, we've come out of the Old World into the New. Don't lose the advantage. Don't let the Old World swallow you up again.'"

  "What," I said, "can you do in a place like Chiasso?"

  "Live out my days. I might travel a little. Visit the States and put flowers on poor Raffaele's grave." But she said that perkily, as if Raffaele had been a dog known back in New Jersey. Still, as hearing that tone and wanting to correct it, she added, "Poor boy. Poor good boy. You didn't get on too well with poor Raffaele. But I'm glad you were there at the end. Perhaps he knew."

  "I admired him. The trouble was that he couldn't accept that a writer like me has to touch pitch and be defiled. It seemed
a rather sinful trade to him, writing. He was a very upright man."

  "Oh yes, very upright. And look where it got him, poor boy." She had not been told all the details of where it had got him. It had been made to sound like a clean death. "I gather they were all there, all in black, mountains of lilies. The hypocrisy. My own people, Italo. Americans. Catholics, good sons of the Holy Apostolic Catholic Church." She said it bitterly and seemed to shrink from some inner image, as of a big black spider lowering itself from an ombrellone.

  I said, "Carlo said you'd turn from God for a time. That was to be expected, he said. He talked about divine mysteries and so on."

  "Divine mysteries, all nonsense," she said. "There are bad men and good men, it's as simple as that. Greed and malevolence face moderation and decency. Carlo always wants to bring theology into things, blame everything on the devil."

  "That's his trade."

  "Yes, his trade. Evil's necessary to his trade. Without evil he'd have nothing to do.5o go on, let's have more evil." I gave her a Gold Flake and lighted it for her with Ali's Maltese cross gift, no, with a Swan vesta. She puffed it like a girl with her hair newly up, daringly, at some dance, not inhaling, wetting the end so that the paper dissolved on her lips and she had to throw it away after three puffs. She ground it out on the brown grass with a firm high heel. "You won't be shocked," she said. "Your own Catholicism," she added.

  "What about it?"

  "Carlo says you've lost your faith and he'll have you back one of these days. When he has time to work on you. He seems very busy making money at the moment. For the Holy Apostolic et cetera."