Earthly Powers

by Anthony Burgess

  "Do you miss Washington?" I asked over the mixed fry of tiny fish.

  He was not dressed at all episcopally. He was still feeling the cold after the central heating of Washington and wore a heavy fisherman's jersey. In the fireplace with its ornate proscenium (nude ladies stretching their arms toward the focus or fuoco) some green logs spat and the resin in them flared like bad temper. He frowned at the cold splendour of the room with its peeling frescoes of the codpieced chase. "I knew it couldn't last," he said. "Not with that bastard jealous of my English." He meant the Apostolic Delegate to the United States of America. "I knew what would happen when fat Bertoli died of a stroke." He meant the previous incumbent of this diocese. "Send him home, they said, give him a bit of pastoral experience. Not that I mind," he added. "I have to be home if I want to make Pope." A very American idiom. This was the first time he had mentioned that ambition, but it had been always implied in his hints about secret meetings to change Christianity, had been as good as articulated the day he handed me that typescript in the Garden of Allah. "When I'm Pope," he said, "I won't have to worry about the name they gave me. I'll be able to choose one of my own."

  "It's not the Carlo you mean, I take it, it's the Campanati."

  He brooded as Mario, his butler, took out the fish dish. "Not to know your mother. I tried, I asked around. The father doesn't matter, the father's always God. But not to know who your mother is or was. Was. She has to he dead."

  "Look," I said, "it was better the way things worked out. You got an education. You got English as a mother tongue. That's going to make a difference when the time comes."

  "Some of these bastards don't believe Catholicism exists outside of Italy."

  "Why do you say bastard all the time?"

  "Eh?" Mario brought in very pallid veal and served it. He was an old man, very bent, a skilled snufferup of impending dewdrops. He too felt the cold. "Oh, they say it a lot in Washington, especially in politics. It's a neutral word, like bugger in British English. Besides, I'm a bastard myself. I mean in the literal sense."

  "You can't know that."

  "I do know it. That's the one thing I found out sniffing around Gorgonzola." The phrase was apt. He saw it was apt. "The mites of gossip, the green mould of scandal. There were some old women bribed to forget all those years ago, but some of them remembered. But they didn't remember any surnames. Surnames are a kind of modern luxury in some parts of the world." And then, chewing without relish, he said, "What are those lines in Oedipus Tyrannos?"

  I knew which ones he meant. And he meant not the original but my own translation, which I had made with the help of the Loeb crib. Ernest Milton had commissioned it, more of an adaptation than a translation, more in the manner of the new poetic drama that Auden and Eliot had been bringing in (that Tarleton bitch had been right) than in the old Gilbert Murray style. Carlo had seen it in New York with, sitting next to him, the quondam Bishop of Bombay, flow Archbishop of Old York, down from visiting his sister in Toronto where, incidentally, he had received emergency dental treatment from an old shaky man named Toomey. I quoted:

  "I must unlock this last door to the last room

  Where I myself am lodged.

  I must look on myself.

  At worst, I am the son of the goddess Fortune.

  Who would not have such a mother? I am

  Kin to the seasons--four-legged spring,

  Summer upright in his pride, tottering winter.

  I rise and fall and rise and fall with the

  Rising and falling and rising year. This is my breed.

  I ask no other."

  "That's it," he said. "But why all that rising and falling?"

  "The riddle of the Sphinx," I explained, "integrated into the imagery. Four legs, two legs, three legs man with a stick. Four, two, three--a pattern of return, circular. You see that?"

  "I don't," he said with apparent irrelevance, "believe in tragedy. It's not a Christian concept."

  "You can't blame Sophocles for not being a Christian."

  "This vitello," he said, "is horrible. I'm going to have some changes round here. The only good thing is the wine."

  "The wine is good." We raised glasses grimly to each other.

  "The tragic victim," he said. "They use the term very loosely. Especially in newspapers. Tragic victim of a road accident. Sacrificial victim. Christ is that, but he's also the victor. That's the big difference between Oedipus and the mass. Christian victims have to be victors as well." There was a big brass bell by his plate. It had the lion of Saint Mark writhing all about like a Chinese dragon. He raised it in the air like a town crier and tolled it with vigour. When Mario snuffled in like, I thought, a personification of winter, Carlo asked him what else there was to eat. Pollo alla diavola. Patate arrosto. Fetch them in and take this muck away. To me Carlo said, "I don't like failures."

  "We're all failures."

  "Damned nonsense. You're not a failure." How little he really knew. "Neither am I. Listen, I'm glad to be out of that family. All failures."

  Shocked, I said, "Your sister is a kind of Saint Teresa. Your brother Raffaele died for the cause of civil decency and justice. Your mother was a witness for the victims of Nazi persecution. Domenico," I said, and then stopped.

  "Domenico is a fool. A Godless fronicating idiot with a talent for spinning silly music for silly movies. Well, not all of them silly perhaps. That one with Astrid Storm, The Passion and the Pity, was not, but it was nearly ruined by Domenico's half-witted music. And I know all about my adoptive father, another fornicator and a syphilitic one, leaving the running of an ancestral cheese business to his brother who called himself my uncle Gianni. Luigia became a nun because she's sexually cold, couldn't bear the thought of the touch of a man, a negative vocation. The woman I called my mother committed suicide"

  "Look, I was there--"

  "It was like those amok people in Malaya. Kill so that you can be killed. She didn't even kill."

  "That," I said contritely, "was really my fault."

  "Where's her victory? The SS turned her into a spoonful of ashes, Luigia brought her home in a jar. Stamped out of history, as though she'd never existed."

  "There's this book I'm doing."

  "Which no one," with prophetic accuracy, "will read. Raffaele let himself get hacked to pieces by the Chicago thugs. Another failure."

  "So all the Christian martyrs were failures too?"

  "That's different. They went into it singing, damn it. They shook the Roman Empire. Damn it, Raffaele was killed by Catholics, he only bore witness to a half-baked secular faith that he didn't even have the eloquence to articulate. He was a fool for getting on the wrong side of you, you could have been his voice."

  "Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa."

  "Don't mock," he cried as the charred chicken and spuds came in. "The woman I called my mother said she was a Jew, but the Jews didn't want her. She knew cancer was going to kill her and she cheated it, which was undoubtedly not God's intention."

  "I see. So the cancer was God's idea?"

  "Ah no. Ah no. That comes from the other side. But you have to suffer it to the end. Christ could have lunged out and got a sword in his guts in Gethsemane. But he didn't. He didn't cheat. He went right through with it to the limit as the rest of us have to. And he had his victory."

  "Concetta and Raffaele will have theirs. Their reward will be great in heaven."

  "Ah no." He scraped some burnt skin off his pollo alla diavola. "They'll be lucky to get in. They both committed suicide."

  "You're harder than you used to be. You used to have a lot of compassion."

  "I brim with compassion," chewing and brimming grease. "I feel desperately sorry for them. But my compassion means nothing. It's God's compassion that counts. This chicken is pretty terrible." He forked a cube of potato, four faces golden, two black. "I know what's on your mind. You think I'm being suicidal too."

  "I don't. You've shut up about the fascists."

  "I speak my mind
, but I'm not political. I don't condemn their filth as political filth. I just say that that bullfrog had better remember his Christian duties. And the rest of the thugs. There's nothing political about that."

  "And the war in Spain?"

  "There's wrong on both sides. I leave it to you English to call Franco a Christian gentleman. The Church in Spain is wrong to side with the Falangists just because they make the Virgin Mary a captain general in their damned murderous army. The Church should get on with its job, which entails being persecuted. The Church is never a victim, remember that. The Church survives. And I," chewing comfortably, "intend to survive. Do you honestly think I could allow myself to die before that pyknic atheist? I'll live to see them all hanged or else die screaming in their guilty beds like Herod the Great. I," he showed his big fine teeth as he tore at his meat, "am not going to be a victim."

  His ugliness was taking on a kind of beauty as he strode through middle age. His fat was solidity not flab. There was nothing of the victim about him. "Beware," I said, "of hubris."

  He spat out a small bone and hubris with it. "I'm not pitting myself against God. God knows his servants. Listen," he said. "About the Campanati family. I may need it, and I may not. It depends on the general atmosphere when the time comes."

  "Which will be when?"

  "After the next one, probably Pacelli. I don't think Ratti has long to go now. Pacelli's been doing a lot of his work for him--Mit brennender Sorge is his, I'm sure. And perhaps Divini Redemptoris. One fist for the Nazis and the other for the Russians. But I think there's a way of beating the Communists at their own game. They'll try and take over here when Mussolini's had his throat cut. I'll be ready for them."

  "I read all about that. Damn it all, it's in that book I foolishly put my name to. What do you mean about the general atmosphere?"

  "Eh? Oh, that. It may be a good thing to have a mother who fought for the Jews and was shot by the SS. And a brother who was public-spirited in Chicago. And a sister who's a mother superior."

  "And another brother who's a fornicator and doesn't go to mass and wants a divorce."

  "I'll bring," he said, "that bastard to heel if necessary. I'll have him back with poor Hortense if need be, God's light shining on a reformed sinner."

  "And if poor Hortense doesn't want him back?"

  "Matrimony is an indissoluble sacrament."

  "You're the bastard, Carlo. A bloody opportunist, that's what you are." He liked that. He beamed greasily then wiped grease and beam off with his napkin.

  He said, "Or it may be better to be like Oedipus. Child of the goddess Fortune. Everything depends on how things will be at the time."

  "Which, I ask again, will be when?"

  "After Pacelli. I bet you a thousand dollars that Pacelli will call himself Pius XII. I give Pacelli till, oh, say the middle nineteen-fifties.

  "And then you'll be Pius XIII?"

  "Oh no, thirteen's unlucky. I'll be something else."

  "What?"

  "Ah," as Mario, having forgotten first to remove the meat dishes, brought the cheese in, no Gorgonzola there but nearly everything else, a stinking anthology of Italian caseation, "that must remain a secret." And then, carving himself a hunk of lactic decay, he said solemnly, "Death."

  "It does smell like death, yes. The corpse of milk, Jim Joyce used to call it.

  "No no no, I mean we're going through a time of death. Death's riding, the skeletal horseman. We must all watch our health--you, Hortense, me. We have to survive a bad time. You and Hortense are my family. You know that."

  "Yes, I do." And then, "Poor Tom."

  "I'm sorry," Carlo said cheesefully, "I never knew him. But I don't think we would have--"

  "Got on?"

  "You told me those jokes of his but I could never see them as very humorous. About Hamlet really being an omelette and so on."

  "Tom," I said, "was a saint." Val Wrigley had said that, but he'd been right.

  "What do you think you mean by a saint?"

  "Tom was a man who did no harm to anyone, who brought a good deal of harmless pleasure into people's lives, who was chaste and charitable, who suffered pain uncomplainingly, who died saying God's will be done."

  "He said that?"

  "No, he made jokes. He made the doctors laugh and the nurses cry at his courage. He insisted on dying undoped. He wanted to meet God, he said, as he used to meet his audiences--smiling but bemerding himself with fear. He was too good, perhaps. His wife left him because of that. Women can't stand goodness. Some people said it was she who was the saint. Always going to mass and confession and saying her bloody rosary. Talking about the delights of chastity. And then she went off with a low comedian." Carlo frowned at the technicality. "Tom was what is known as a light comedian. Without a red nose. Not dirty. Not like George Robey who peels a banana and says one skin two skin three skin five skin." Carlo's blank face reminded me of the temperamental and cultural gap between us. He would not be a humorous pontiff.

  "A saint," he said, "is something different from what you seem to think. I've known cats and dogs that were saints by your definition. A saint," he said, "has to modify the world in the direction of being more aware of the presence of God in it."

  "Feeding an illusion," I said with some bitterness. "God's removed himself from the world. As we'll see. As we'll see more and more." Mario brought in a zabaglione in a blackened pan in one hand and two plates and two spoons in the other. He snuffled up a dewdrop loudly. Carlo shouted No! Mario dumped all down and got out quickly.

  More gently Carlo said, "You're not ready yet. But you may be ready for the noche oscura. Have you read San Juan de la Cruz?"

  "We're all ready for the noche oscura." And then I considered it was time to have the whole thing out. While spooning in the zabaglione. "Carlo," I said, "for some reason you refuse to understand my situation. The way I am. The sexual way I am."

  "I've never seen evidence of this way you say you are despite the talk I have heard. You don't behave like a finocchio, you have no eye for seducible boys. I know sodomites, foul perverted sinners. I've seen in you only something which I'd regard as Christlike--the urge to love another man and thus rise to that higher sphere of love which stands above the commerce of Nature. An urge so holy that it had to be diabolically frustrated. I know of my failure there and I regret it, but I cannot be blamed. Perhaps the road to that kind of love had to be beset by physical temptations, but I cannot see those as at all like the dirty elected lusts of the city of Sodom. I think you will find that love again. I do not think," scraping up the last of the dry flakes of zabaglione from the pan, "that you and I will find it together. Our relationship is a fraternal one, very different. You must never hesitate to say to others that that is our relationship: the Bishop of Moneta is my brother, the Archbishop of Milan is my brother, the Holy Father of the faithful is my brother." He had it all worked out. "The love you seek may perhaps only be satisfied in the personality of Christ. It may be you who are destined for sainthood." He let his spoon clang into the pan like a promise of eventual bells. He wiped his fingers on his fisherman's jersey.

  "Carlo," I said with some weariness, "fratello, God made me as a being desirous of spilling seed in forbidden places. God made me incapable of the ordinary philoprogenitive lusts of man."

  "God did not make you so. We leave that kind of implantation to the devil. It does not come at birth, even Dr. Freud says that, a man who could be a very good Jewish theologian if he stopped inventing terms like id and so on. If the devil has done this to you, then it is as I said your duty and your glory to convert a desire for the flesh of your own sex into a desire purely spiritual. You must not yield."

  "I haven't your sense of vocation. I need the release and comfort of the flesh. I'd hoped that the book I published on your behalf--how ironic, my sponsoring of a view my nature forbids me to hold--One of these days you'll have to change that dogma. There's plenty of seed in the world, too much. Onan committed no real sin. He was just ahead of
his time."

  "The devil, you see," he smiled, "lashing his tail like a cat. God's kingdom was built for an infinitude of souls. God's love of individual human souls is insatiable. With the frustration of the seed you enact the deadly sin of frustrating the satisfaction of the divine appetite."

  "Moloch, Moloch," I groaned. "Feed him with newborn babies in a land lacking bread and water and hardly enough spittle for the desultory rite of baptism. No no no, Carlo, it won't do. Your logic ought to have priests and nuns leading the way in the thriving of uncondomed copulation."

  "We," he said, not without complacency, "are different. We attest the divine paradox. We are barren only to be fertile. We proclaim the primary reality of the world of the spirit which has an infinitude of mansions for an infinitude of human souls. And you too are different. Your destiny is of the rarest kind. You will live to proclaim the love of Christ for man and man for Christ in a figure of earthly love." Preacher's rhetoric; it would have been better in Italian, which thrives on melodious meaninglessness.

  I said, with the same weariness as before, "My destiny is to live in a state of desire both church and state condemn and to grow sourly rich in the purveying of a debased commodity. I've just finished a novel which, when I'd read it through in typescript, made me feel sick to my stomach. And yet it's what people want--the evocation of a past golden time when there was no Mussolini or Hitler or Franco, when goods were paid for with sovereigns, Elgar's Symphony Number One in A flat trumpeted nobilmente a massive hope in the future, and the romantic love of a shopgirl and a younger son of the aristocracy portended a healthful inflexion but not destruction of the inherited social pattern. Comic servants and imperious duchesses. Hansom cabs and racing at Ascot. Fascists and democrats alike will love it. My destiny is to create a kind of underliterature that lacks all whiff of the subversive."