"Okay," a housewife in beads said, "but why did Rome ever think it had the right to set itself up as the only ah ah religious authority? I mean, you're the Pope, right?"
"Right," the Pope said, rightly.
"I mean, why should Luther be wrong and ah ah Calvin and Henry the Seventh no Eighth and ah ah Billy Graham and the Holy Rollers and William Penn and ah ah right?"
"The Church of Rome represents the primal historical authority," Carlo said. "There's an unbroken line of succession from Saint Peter, crucified in Rome in the place where the Vatican now stands, to myself who am, as you accurately remark, Pope. No sensible Catholic now denies that, in the sixteenth century and after, reform was needed in his Church. He regrets that such reform took the shape of new foundations of protest. But the important thing today is the whole Christian fraternity. Of that I may claim to be not the head but the coordinating minister. Such a claim is reasonable, being based on a historical tradition. Rome is the symbol of Christian unity, no more. We must talk no more of Catholics and Protestants--only of Christians."
I switched off. I had had enough. I knew all the arguments, which could have been as confidently entrusted to a wet-eared seminarian. But if the President of the United States could be expected to submit to the democracy of the small screen, why not the Father of All the Faithful? If you want the dope, go to the bossman. The bossman had been seated in the parlors of millions of Americans, dealing out the Christian truth, straight from the horse's. Dope was, Perhaps, the word. Tidings of comfort.
I went to bed wit a paperback copy of the novel called Africa! by Randolph Foulds, alias Ngolo Basatu. Seven hundred and fifty pages. Six million copies sold in the hardcover edition. Soon to be a major motion picture. I had bought it down below in the little gift shop of the Holiday Inn. I had not read The Cry of the Clouds, but I gathered it was rather like this: black sex and violence. It had sold well in Britain, where, despite cries for its suppression, the law had not pounced. The law had chewed up The Love Songs of J. Christ and was temporarily satisfied. I read a few pages of the later opus but found it tough going. The whole of Africa seemed to be turned into a bed on which a massive muscle-bound character named Bmuti thrust his fiery rod into everybody. Bmuti stood for the new prevalent black. He could have been the ebony Pantagruel or the Los of the Niger, but he lacked humor and poetry. He was a media robot with three or four computerized facial expressions. On page 23 he seemed to be polishing his weapon for insertion into a character named Bowana, whose model might well have been Ralph--a cultivated American black who didn't know the best way to become Africanized. I fuck you man but good. Dat de best way.
CHAPTER 70
"Next year," my nephew John said, "Africa!"
I seemed to hear it in italic with an exclamation point after. "You and Professor Bucolo?" I was back at Wisbech College in Indiana. Val Wrigley was no longer there to taunt me with frivolity and irresponsibility: nor would he now have had cause to. Val Wrigley, I gathered, was now in Christopher Isherwood country, Santa Monica or somewhere. I had given a lecture entitled "What Now in the Novel?" I had been fed and drenched by a students' committee. I was in John and Laura's campus house, taking a forebed whisky. They had been married about eighteen months, their wedding a solid old-fashioned Catholic one in Laura's hometown of St. Louis. John had gained a doctorate for a thesis on the matriarchal culture of a Mexican Indian settlement near Zacatecas. He had a full professorship with tenure. Wisbech College was notable for the close working relationship that existed between its Department of Anthropology and its Department of Linguistics. John was now working on analogues of familial structure in the structure of language.
"Yes, Jimmy Bucolo. He got us the grant. A pretty stingy one but it will have to do. One of these charter flights to Marseilles. Then a run-down steamer to port Said. Then a Hawaa Masir trip to Jibuti. Then the Erinmore Line takes us through the Gulf of Aden. And then--As you can see, too much time spent on travel. Of course, if we could both have a sabbatical four months' vacation doesn't give us much chance to see--"
"What do you expect to see?"
"Well--" A big handsome dedicated scholar with so much of his mother in his looks, he sat on the edge of the chunky russet sofa and clasped his hands as in prayer. "I've been gathering a lot of material from this side of the Atlantic on a particular marital custom. Among the Akanyi, the Ptotuni, the Zoloar tribe near Tegucigalpa--the names won't mean much to you--"
"Not a thing."
"Well, what happens when a girl marries is a kind of ritual incest without impregnation. It's the girl's uncle or even great-uncle that spends a week with her--sexual initiation partly, partly a sort of reminiscence of endogamy. Sometimes it's a week, sometimes more, less--more than two days, anyway. What happens to the language as spoken by the whole group during that period is of huge interest. Sentences get inverted, and if anybody forgets to invert there are punishments--not severe ones, more like comic humiliation. About a dozen words in the lexis--sometimes more, sometimes fewer: 9.05 on average so far--come under taboo. All the words belong to the same semantic area--I mean, they all have something to do with covering things up--loincloth, lid, including eyelid, palm of the hand, darkness, the skin of an animal--you get the general idea. The words can't be used except under penalty. The substitute words are sort of complementary to the taboo ones--you can talk about the covered but not the covering--you can even use the word for genitals, which is normally taboo in a lot of the groups I studied. But only during this period."
"Fascinating."
"You think so? You really think so? Now in the Americas the possibility of cultural transmission can't be left out of account, but Jimmy feels sure the same sort of thing goes on in Africa. You remember the Oma people? He gave you that offprint, didn't he? He couldn't understand why the word for eye was oro and the word for eyelid the same. He must, he thinks, have been in touch with somebody who'd gone into the mission hospital while a taboo of that kind was operating. And this guy was stroking the hospital cat and he called its fur its kidneys, which is the generic word for the insides of an animal--"
"Fascinating."
"So it may be there's something built into what we laughingly call the primitive mind--you see what I mean?"
"Is Laura going with you?"
'You kidding? On a grant that size?"
"John," I said, "I've told you before that you must not be afraid to ask me for money. The money I have has been earned through the purveying of a kind of trash--"
"Don't call it that. A lot of it's very good."
"On the strength of my reputation as a purveyor of this trash I've been paid two thousand dollars for a single lecture at your own college. How much will you need to get the three of you to East Africa in moderate comfort and at reasonable speed? And back, of course. Ten thousand? Would that help?"
"Uncle Ken, you're too good."
"No, I'm making amends for a wasted life. I'm proud to be contributing to scholarship."
"Well, you know, I don't know what to say. Except thanks."
"I'll make out a check in the morning. My checkbook's in my luggage in the president's guesthouse."
"Thanks and thanks again. When do you leave and where for?"
"I lecture at the University of Oklahoma on Monday. I'm spending tomorrow night in New York. There's a flight after lunch."
"Fine. Tomorrow morning you can see the film that Dotty's brother sent. Of course, you know him, I'd forgotten. The glories of Rukwa, rather a nice bit of propaganda. They want black American skills. The building of a modern African state. At least I know what the place looks like."
"It's there that you're going? I hadn't thought."
"There seem to be a fair number of unassimilated tribes on the borders. Including the Oma people." And then, "Dotty's far from well."
"I heard that. The great twentieth-century slayer. Evil made flesh. Not flesh, rather antiflesh. Ah." for Laura had just come in from a visit to a neighbor, Professor Szasz's wife, i
mmobilized with a slipped disk. So lovely a girl, spilling over with health, those startling warm ice blue eyes framed in well-brushed lustrous blue-black, the neat pliant body in a shift dress of cinnamon wool.
She said, "How's my favorite writer?"
"Laura dear, your job is to improve literary taste not debase it. You must really stop feeling such enthusiasm for my work."
"Okay, the short stories are great, the novels are lousy, will that do?" And she dimpled with a flash of serried snowgems.
"Laura, you're going to Africa. Uncle Ken's putting up the money."
"Say that again."
"Africa. Not just Jimmy and me. You too. And not on banana boats either."
"Oh gosh," she said, sitting with grace in the second of the chunky russet armchairs, myself being in the other. "You mean that? Hemingway country. Oh gosh."
"Not Hemingway country," John said. "Not safariland. A bit rough, some of it, but I'll keep you away from the more harmful fauna. You'd better get that cinecamera mended."
"Dear Uncle Ken," she said, and she came over and sat in my lap and kissed me. Then she sprang up very lithe and switched on the television set. "There's your other uncle on, Johnboy. I want to hear what he has to say about birth control. Sorry, Uncle Ken, I have to know, we both do. But thanks and thanks and thanks. I can hardly believe it."
John said, eyes narrowed, as she turned the dial and got the NBC channel and a fat splotch of blessing papal white, "He's not my uncle. Everybody's father and brother but nobody's uncle. We all let him down. He's disowned all of us."
"Oh, come off it, Johnboy. Listen."
We listened. Carlo was quite at his ease among a mob of militant women. The venue seemed to be a press conference room, the women, from their hard smartness, journalists. "Ordained priests," one of them was saying.
Carlo replied, "Once you grant men the power to bear children your sex will have a powerful claim to the right to ordination. Not before. Remember, all women are, in fact or potency, vessels of the mystery of birth. Kindly, ladies, permit a few men to enact the mysteries of the priestly craft. Another thing, the priest is the inheritor of the mission of Jesus Christ. God in his mysterious wisdom incarnated himself as a human creature of the male sex. He granted, as God the Son, the right to spread the Gospel to male missionaries, not to their wives. Things may change, things will change. But not while I sit in Saint Peter's chair."
"Why can't priests marry?"
"There's no doctrinal reason why they shouldn't. But there's every possible commonsensical reason why they should remain celibate. The story is told of an Anglican minister and a Catholic priest sharing a friendly glass of beer in London at the time of the Battle of Britain. An air raid began. The Anglican said, 'I must get home to my wife and children.' The Catholic said, 'I must go and look after my flock.' The family of a minister of the faith is his congregation, and a special, more personal relationship would be an obstacle to his impartial love and devotion. As for sex, don't think that some of us have not known, and still don't know, the agonies of sexual frustration. Deprived of a wife, must a priest then go to a brothel? Sexual deprivation is a cross the priest must bear, And the Pope too. It is a fleshly sacrifice he offers daily, hourly, to God."
"Why won't the Church permit birth control?" asked a woman with big blue granny glasses and an evident pregnancy.
Ah, that question," Carlo smiled. "It will plague me to the end of my ministry. Human seed, containing as it does the mysterious potency of new life, must not be regarded as a mere by-product of the sexual spasm--sometimes kindly permitted to do its biological work, sometimes regarded as a deadly nuisance. If Mr. and Mrs. Shakespeare had indulged in birth control there might have been no William Shakespeare. And so for the parents of Saint Paul, Abraham Lincoln, President Eisenhower. And so, if I may say so, for my own parents, whoever they were--"
"The ultimate celibacy," John said. "You wipe out the past as well as the future."
"Quiet, Johnboy."
"--What we have to think of is the immense potentiality of the human seed, the desperate turpitude of wasting it. Very well, very well, I can anticipate your objections to these words, which are not, remember, words I utter in uncaring callousness. They are the words of the Church I inherit, not of the Church that is still to be made. Tradition says that a woman's chief function is to produce new human souls to the glory of God. Our own age says that a woman has duties to her own soul, and that she must not be condemned to a life of labor pains. Well, the control of birth lies in the will of the man and woman alike the will to abstain from total sexual congress. This may be difficult, but it is also good, even holy. But remember"--he grew fierce, his chin jutted in a Duce manner, his nose trained itself on his audience like a dangerous weapon--"we must beware of accepting the deadly heresy that life is sacred only when it crosses the threshold of the womb--that, as yet unshaped, as yet unnamed, it is expendable. It is a short step then to condoning abortion, which is no more than a form of infanticide."
There were angry shouts from these hard and emancipated women. Carlo's great voice rose like a lion's above them. "Love," he cried, "love is greater than animal coupling. The love of man and woman which is a figure of God's love for humanity. Are we to be no more than brute beasts howling in perpetual heat? Can we not learn that love of the spirit that transcends the lust of the flesh? Love, love, let us have love."
The anger had to subside, because it seemed now to be directed against love. Carlo spoke more softly. He even smiled as he said, "Your Heavenly Father is not a personification of biology. He knows your problems. He weeps over the spectacle of a hungry world. Do not blame him for his own hunger, which is a hunger for human souls."
"Baal," John said, "Moloch."
"Johnboy."
"Heaven is limitless. It is not confined as our earth is confined. Its crops do not fail, no famine oppresses it. And yet, says the Lord, this house must be filled. Filled with countless human souls, and each one reveling in its divine uniqueness."
"Mongoloids?" someone shouted. "Thalidomide cases?"
"Souls, souls, I speak of souls. And I speak, and will always speak, of love. Let me end on that note. God's love is great enough to condone our weaknesses. He asks us only to do what we can to fulfill his kingdom. He does not ask the impossible."
"Switch him off," John said.
"Yeah, switch him off," obeying. She sat down again and we looked at each other. She was a good housewife as well as, I gathered, a fine teacher and, I could see, a lovely girl. This little drawing room was conventionally enough furnished with its wedding-gift suite and rocking chair and coffee table with coffee-table Tiepolo album, but there were her own touches of greenery--fern and wandering Jew--as well as a well-dusted disposition of knickknacks (John's jujus and totems, her own pieces of colonial glass and china) and flower paintings on the strawberry and cream walls--love in idleness, love in a mist, love lies bleeding. She was, I knew, a good American cook, expert at spareribs, pineapple-orange glazed ham, southern luncheon bake, frosty ribbon loaf, dad's denvers. Tears came to my eyes as I looked at her: what I had missed, what I had been predestined to miss. The tears welled and had to be sucked back as I looked fondly at them both. I saw them in bed naked together, intent on each other's joy, not engaged in the making of a new William Shakespeare, while Carlo frowned down from the ceiling.
"Another whisky?" John said.
"One for the road. A lionfrightener."
"Condone our weaknesses," Laura said. "What did he mean?"
"He meant, I think," I said, "that the seed containing a new Abraham Lincoln may flow but not be too upset if it meets obstacles. So long as it doesn't know in advance that it's going to meet obstacles. If it knows this, it had better not flow."
"It didn't sound to me as if he meant that."
"You wait. As his tour of the Americas continues he'll talk more of love and less of dogma. He'll shelve more and more of the hard questions. He'll talk of love because he wants to be lo
ved himself. Gregory the Beloved."
John gave me my nightcap. "Did you hope," he began. "I suppose I shouldn't ask. What I mean is--"
"Did I hope that the new Church would condone my particular weakness? No, I didn't. Not that it applies any more, at least not to me. The fire has been doused. I'm an old man. I could go back to the Church tomorrow if I wished."
"Do you wish?" Laura asked.
"I've got on well enough as a cynical rationalist."
'Come on," she said. "What you write isn't like that at all."
'Sentimentality," I said. "That's the other side of the coin." I drained my drink and got up stiffly, an old man as I'd said. "Can you pick me up?" I said to John.
"Is ten too early?"
"Fine."
"Thank you again," Laura said, "a million times thanks." She got up to kiss me goodnight. And then, her lovely eyes full of it: "Africa!"
The film was called Rukwa Reborn. John ran it for me himself on the sixteen-millimeter projector which belonged to his department. I recognized the voice of the commentary: Ralph's. Its vibrations struck my glands and gave the lie to my talk of the dousing of the fire. And there was Ralph himself onscreen, in hot-colored robes, tigerskin shako, leather riding boots, mounted on a white Arab, leading a kind of detachment of native cavalry over a grassy plain. We saw oil rigs and earnest black technicians in hard silver hats poring over charts, a black finger pointing, a black head nodding. There was a black technical college with black students in snowy shirts and well-cut pants examining the gleaming maquette of a power station. Backward tribes were being gently taught, seated on grass on loinclothed haunches before a whiteboard and bespectacled black teacher, about the need for their assimilation into the new progressive state. A black audience laughed its head off at a black comedy film in color. Here was the capital with its white-box commercial buildings, football stadium, the ten-story Mansanga Hotel. "They seem to be doing all right," John said. Ralph's commentary, more grandiloquent, said the same thing. It also said something about freedom of worship while a black muezzin called to the blue heavens and black schoolchildren, led by a black nun in white, trooped to a little church with one clanging bell. Ralph admitted that the state had problems: jealousy on its borders, no direct access to the Indian Ocean, heavy duties imposed at the port of Kilwa. But all problems could be solved with good will, the right Pan-African spirit. The author of Africa! appeared, smiling, muscular, a possible candidate for the Nobel Prize. And, finally, there was the great Mansanga himself, greeted by a loving people with excellent teeth, or getting a laugh in the council chamber, or inspecting troops from the saddle of a black Arab, while Ralph rode behind him on his white. Jaunty music, weak on melody but rich in polyrhythms, swelled on pipes and a multitude of drums. The film was over.
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