Earthly Powers

by Anthony Burgess

  A psychiatric examination would decide whether Manning was fit to stand trial. At his first psychiatric session he seemed to will himself into a deep sleep. Voices spoke as it were from several layers of the psyche, all contending. Some howled or wailed in languages the waking Manning did not know. There was perhaps only one man qualified to deal with him, and he lay dead in Rome.

  CHAPTER 78

  And so, as I said many chapters back, my eighty-second year lay all before me. Ali drove from Luqa to Lija and parked the car by Percius's Garage. I got out and found the Poet Laureate, Dawson Wignall, chatting amiably to the two youngest children of Cicco Grima. They knew no English, he no Maltese. They compromised on Italian. They knew what a gelato was: they called it a gelat. Wignall gave them small Maltese coins and they ran to the little shop on the corner. Wignall came toward me smiling. He was in a cream tropical suit and carried a cane. "All right then?" he said. "They told me here what was going on. Jolly good. Got rid of him, eh? Better off without him. Too stimulating, I'd say. Come home to jolly sedative England."

  I let us both in and took him into the bar. He liked it. "Very elegant," he said. "Very nice for a game of bridge. Very nice piece of wood, that bar counter. Gin and tonic, yes. Thank you. Jolly good."

  We sat at a table. I said, "Yes, he's gone for the last time. During the near decade he was with me, off and on, he would run away and come back again, not too repentant. In my weakness I always took him back. He had some amiable qualities. These, in the last few years, have steadily decreased."

  "And who'll look after you now?"

  "Oh, I can manage. With Ali. Whether I stay here is another matter."

  "Oh, come home. And bring dear Hortense home too. A very estimable woman. She's out of her element out there. There was an exhibition of her work, you know, at the Southall Gallery. Including that admirable bas-relief she did for Milan and which Milan stupidly rejected. She's being regarded now as one of the genuine twentieth-century British sculptors. I saw the strength of her work when I first met her in New York. I saw the strength of the woman herself. And the charm. And the elegance."

  "Well," I said, "I came here because of Geoffrey. He didn't like Gibraltar when we holed up there for a fortnight, arranging transportation of furniture. He wouldn't go back to the States. In his innocence he thought that England might welcome him. He always had a remarkable innocence when it came to acts of transgression against morality, against the law. He just didn't somehow get the law. That was the Welsh blood in him perhaps. He honestly thought we could go on living in Tangier after what he'd done. Get the better of the bastards, he'd say."

  "What had he done?"

  "Incredible. There was a royal garden party in Rabat, to which we'd been invited. He publicly insulted His Majesty. Called him a wog and offered to fight him. Drunk, of course. The King was prepared to laugh it off, not knowing the term wog and thinking the aggression a kind of affection. But there were officials there who knew what was going on all right. The police in Tangier would be ordered to pick him up for something. Some of his sexual habits became, you know, aggressive. He'd been reading Sade and thought it would be a jolly good idea to try out some of the simpler adjuncts to perverted pleasure. He went too far, but the police hadn't found out yet. I got him on a flight to Gibraltar, told him to wait for me at the Rock Hotel while I sorted things out. They threw him out of the Rock Hotel, of course. They threw him out of several hotels. He could be very trying."

  "Oh, it's not easy," Wignall said. "Oh, it's not at all easy. We can all be bloody fools, you know. When I woke this morning I felt very unhappy about last night. I didn't come too well out of it, did I? Of course, there was a general irritability around. That little Maltese poetaster was absurd. And those two children with their sex and Coca-Cola. I'm sorry I said what I said."

  "That's all right. I mean, a poem is a thing of great specific gravity. To throw at you like that, I mean, casually, you know, something that obviously had bitter tears behind it."

  He did not seem to know what I was talking about. "I don't remember. It was the other thing that worried me. It was in very bad taste, but of course I'd forgotten, you know, personal applications and so on."

  I did not know what he was talking about. "I don't remember," I said. He should have let whatever it was drop. Instead, he uttered a word I remember seeming to have uttered, though in what context was at that moment not clear.

  He said, "That nonsense about anthropophagy. It was very tasteless of me."

  "Oh, yes. Very amusing, I thought. Tins of Munch or something."

  "For my part, I don't believe there's ever been much of it in the world, you know. Cannibal--a word you throw at an enemy, like Zola, you know. I mean Zola threw it at the Paris mob. Quite figurative. It always is. Nearly always."

  "Yes, I suppose so."

  "So that's how it is," he said. He had drained his gin and tonic with hale thirst. Ali was now at the bar to serve him another. "Thanks awfully. Jolly good boy you have there, I can see that. Big bowl full of ice already set out and so forth. No," he said in the English manner, contradicting nothing, "I met this fellow at Columbia, said he knew you, spoke very warmly about you. Black chap called, as I remember, Ralph something, Welsh, that's right, Pembroke, straight out of Pudd'nhead Wilson. Fine book that."

  "Good God." And again "Good God. He ought to be running an African dictatorship by now. In Columbia? Good God. Back home. No nonsense about that damned African name he took on. A very mature student, exceptionally mature. He got that from his poor sister, she was a mature student too."

  "Oh no, not a student, Toomey. Member of the faculty. All these American universities have departments of what they call Black Studies now, you know. Ralph what yes Pembroke is very prized in that sort of thing. Actually been in Africa, worked there, speaks Swahili and the rest of the nonsense. He showed me the African mass."

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "Oh come come, Toomey, the African mass. He showed us a film of it. Very professionally made film, sound and everything, full color, but all done from a hide, you know, like wild animal life, this particular tribal group not greatly relishing being photographed at what I suppose they regarded as their devotions. You've seen it on your travels?"

  "No. Only heard of it. The Kampala innovation and so on. What was it like?"

  "Well now," shifting his limbs as though with anal irritation, "you can't translate some of these things, you know. Pembroke himself made that very clear afterwards. Not during the damned thing because we had these Columbia fuzziwuzzies shouting right on and get in there man and so on. Afterwards. Some of the local languages can't carry the weight of Western theology."

  "You mean like not being able to count beyond two? Very awkward, I always thought, for the Holy Trinity and so on. Continue, this is very interesting."

  "Interesting. I see. You obviously know nothing. Shouldn't perhaps have broached the business. The African mass, you see, is performed in full regalia of lionskins and cock's feathers and drums and stamping and shouting. The consecration is to the Western eye very barbarous. This is my body, this is my blood, they see that all right, but they don't see about changing it to bread and wine. In this film we saw the priest--a real ordained priest, mind you, despite the rippling black muscles and the ornate headdress--what he did was to consecrate real flesh and real blood."

  "Oh Christ."

  "Precisely. The body and the blood of the Saviour, the real thing. Bits of cooked meat, jungle pig probably, and a calabash of warm pig's blood. They saw that all right, no communion under one kind chicanery. And highly rhythmical language. A cross up there with a painted Saviour on it and the pigmeat attached in little strips with pins or something and the calabash underneath as though his blood were draining into it. Very successful, genuine religious fervour, like the American South, you know. Blessed by the Vatican, the fine flower of the Kampala innovation. Do you see what I'm getting at, Toomey? Pembroke said something about difficulties with the litur
gy, problem of getting the Holy Ghost across. He said this too often worked out as an unclean spirit or taboo spirit or something."

  "Look," I said, "where was this?"

  "A little enclave in Rukwa where Pembroke worked. The Omo or Oma people or something. Some of them took this flesh and blood business a bit too literally. I don't think I have to say any more. You can understand perhaps now why I think you ought to get your delightful and talented sister out of an America full of very aggressive blacks. Right on, man, slay the white bastard. She's saying too many of the wrong things. Ralph Pembroke should have shut up. He should have known. There are things you don't say to certain people."

  "Are you," I said, "in effect telling me something about my poor dead nephew? And his wife?"

  "I'm not in effect telling you anything except that your sweet sister has got something very firmly into her head. I heard about the archiepiscopal visit you had yesterday--many belated happy returns, by the way--what you've been requested to do. There was a little item in the Times of Malta. Our American pals call that jumping the gun, Toomey. You'd better not start turning His late Holiness into a saint without consulting your sister first. That in effect is what I'm telling you."

  "In effect you're telling me as I've already said that my nephew John and his wife Laura were not killed by terrorists. You're telling me in effect that they were killed by remote control with a death gun from the Vatican. Is that what you're telling me?"

  "Your old friend Pembroke had to tell her about it, you know, everything. The state of the bodies. Oh, they may have been killed by terrorists with knives instead of guns. But terrorists don't cut off little strips of the flesh, you know. They just kill. They rape too, of course, if they have time. They rob, always time for that, Toomey."

  "There's no proof of it."

  "Oh no, no proof at all. No proof that your nephew and his wife were used as what are known as the accidents of the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist. But your sister, who lost an eye prematurely in grief of bereavement--I know it all, we talked, we've talked on many occasions, Toomey--your sister is a woman and women take very short cuts in thinking. You know, you Catholics make fun of the Church of England--"

  "I'm not a Catholic."

  "Oh, yes you are. You're not a Protestant and you're not a Jew, neither do you subscribe to this children's nonsense of Zen. You have to be a Catholic. Do you ever consider that the real reason for the Henrican break with Catholicism is that the meat of Catholicism is a little too strong for reasonable appetites? British appetites especially. Along comes a Pope, dear dead soon to be canonised with your help God forbid Gregory the Seventeenth, and he wants to cut out the mumbo jumbounfortunate word in the circumstances perhaps, but never mind--bring the faith closer to the people. Examine the implications of that faith, Toomey, and it's damned hair-raising. It ends up in the jungle. Or in the vulgarities of Scouse."

  "Of what?"

  "Oh, I was at one of these damnable poetry festivals. A Liverpool beardie with glasses got up and began to recite something like 'When I feel proper umpty E makes me feel gear. Jus so I do credit to im he moodeys along wit me into de real best specs in dis world.' That, Toomey, is meant to be the Twenty-third Psalm. You have to leave well alone, get on with the job, don't examine too deeply the meanings of those terms which, I remember clearly, that Maltese poetaster threw at us last night--home, duty, love and so on. You and your sister ought to come home, Toomey. I'll have one more for the road--a lionfrightener or tigerfrightener, it all depends where you are."

  Ali had gone out. I served Wignall.

  I said, "By his lights he did the right thing. By Christ's lights. I can't blame him."

  "Perhaps not, but your sister blames him very bitterly. Very dangerous stuff, Toomey. Hoc est corpus meum--hocus-pocus, as it became in the mouths of the ignorant. It was better as hocus-pocus, keep it distant."

  "Your church," I said, "anticipated Carlo's reforms."

  "My church knew what it was doing. It knew it would turn into a club for upper-class Englishmen. You may laugh at it, but it's a safe church, not like yours. It's tepid, because it knows that fire burns. It thinks fire should be imprisoned in an Adam fireplace, not held in the hand. Never despise tepidity, Toomey." The doorbell rang. "Right," and he drained his drink with a wag of wattles. "You have another visitor."

  Ali came in and said, "Policia."

  I accompanied Wignall to the open front door, where the inspector from the station across the road stood with papers in his hands. He raised a hand to salute us both. Wignall saluted back with a wave of his cane and said "Jolly good." I asked the inspector to come in. He said no, hardly worth it. Wignall went off to lunch at the residence of the British Council representative, waving his stick jovially at everybody on Triq al-Kbira.

  The inspector said, "Asked by the Office of the Prime Minister to check certain things, sir. The gentleman who was with you has already left? I mean, the gentleman who was living here?"

  "He left for the United States this morning. He will not be coming back."

  "That is in order then. He had overstayed the time on his visa by three days. The servant you have from Morocco, he too will be leaving?"

  "He's in my employ. He stays."

  "Sir, you have been issued with a letter from the Prime Minister's Office confirming that you have permanent residence here on condition that you do not take paid employment."

  "I've no intention of doing that."

  "That is in order then. Your servant has overstayed his visa and must now be under notice to leave. He is employed by you. That is not allowed. Only Maltese citizens may be under employment. I have the notice here. Perhaps you could read it to him and explain."

  "He has to go? I hadn't thought of that."

  "Oh yes. He may leave the territory and enter again for a stay of three months. But not under employment, only as a visitor."

  "Look, inspector, I have to go to Rome tomorrow. It's ah Vatican business connected with the visit I had yesterday from His Grace. I will be away three days at the most. May the matter rest as it is until I return?"

  "No difficulty there, sir, we can always stretch a point. But he must understand that he is here illegally. We naturally overlook the illegality for so short a time."

  "Thank you, inspector."

  "It is my pleasure, sir." And he saluted. A bus crammed with screaming schoolchildren, holy inscriptions on its flanks and an electric-lighted shrine to the Blessed Virgin in its driver's cab, was coming round the corner, filling the width of the street and blocking the inspector's path of return. We heard a struck garbage can going over. "Once in Attard," he said, "I saw an old woman crushed to death by a bus.' Wittily he added, "It is like the law."

  For luncheon today there was an innovation Joey Grima had brought back from the Great Wall restaurant in Sliema: strips of pork in a plum sauce. I sent it away, contenting myself with a bit of bread and a half bottle of Pommery.

  CHAPTER 79

  The young dentist, grandson of the old dentist who had tended my mouth in Mussolini's day, drained the abscess efficiently, saw no need for extraction. "A fine set of teeth," he said, "for a man of your age. I only knew of one other man who could touch you. That was His Holiness Pope Gregory. He died with every tooth in his head."

  "Good mastication," I said, "good digestion. That explains his optimism perhaps."

  "Well, then, you must be optimistic too."

  I paid him in cash. I had drawn a big bundle of ten-thousand-lira notes from the Banca Commerciale. Italian royalties. I left the surgery and walked for a little around the Piazza Navona and its environs: it was a glorious day, the baroque musculatures daring the gods to hurl thunderbolts, rainbows in the fountains. I had spaghetti alla carbonara for luncheon with a half bottle of chilled Frascati. Then I walked to the Raphael on the Largo Febo and went to my room for the siesta. I lay on my bed reading the newspapers. Riots, political assassinations, robberies. An American writer whom I knew, Martin Bergman, complai
ned in the Daily American of the inefficiency of the police when it came to dealing with scippatori. He had just finished a book which had taken him a year to write and was carrying it under his arm in a Gucci case to have it copied at a Xerox shop. Scippatori had whizzed by and the pillionrider had snatched the case from under his arm. They would keep the case and throw the typescript into the Tiber. A year's work wasted. Why did not the police insist that all motorcycles carry a numbered targa? Were the police in league with the scippatori? There was a photograph of the police dealing with a divorce demonstration--riot shields and tear gas. Professor Amalfi, lecturing at Rome University, had been shot in the middle of his lecture. Bless you my children. Reading through the entertainment section of the Messaggero I was interested to see that my old film Terzetto was being shown at the Farnese, a cinema d'essai in the Campo dei Fiori. I would, I thought, go to see if time had been good to it. Then I slept.

  I had no bad dreams. I had never yet had a bad dream when sleeping in Rome, perhaps because all the badness of life there was reserved to the waking time. Here was the sewer of history, and it was an open sewer. There was nothing cynical about the glory of its art and architecture. Beauty was set on a line parallel to morality. Faith too had nothing to do with being good. What I dreamt of was trivial enough--eating a curry in an open-air restaurant in Vienna, a bottle of ketchup on the table, Christmas songs being played in waltztime by the orchestra--but I was buoyed up on a kind of air cushion of acceptance. I awoke sweating but rested.

  After dinner I stood in the Campo dei Fiori, looking up at the statue of Giordano Bruno, the Nolan as Jim Joyce had called him. Whether he had been burnt on this spot in person or in effigy had never been clearly established. He had been chased all over Europe for teaching the heresy that soul or spirit cannot exist apart from matter, that dissension and contradiction between the elements of the multifarious universe are to be welcomed and blessed since they justify the existence of God as the only reconciler and unifier. Though a Neapolitan, he was a true patron saint of Rome, a president of discord. I went into the cinema. Going in I was stared at as an oddity because of both age and elegance. The audience was made up almost entirely of international youth, bearded and jeaned and unwashed. The auditorium stank of old urine. The lights went down to catcalls and there on the screen was a grainy copy of Terzetto. After the main titles I myself appeared on that screen, in a great garden with shaven lawn and swimming pool, seated on a cane chair in tennis clothes, behind me a table laden with all the expensive liquors that ever were. I was much younger then than now but still, in the view of the audience, a very old man. There were cries of vanculo and stronzo, also raspberries and squeaks made by blowing at bits of the plastic that wraps cigarette packets. I had been made to speak good Tuscan. I told my audience that here were three of my stories brought to the screen, all based on events that I had either witnessed or been told of during my long life. Then came the first story, the one I had written when sailing to Singapore, about the planter's wife who grew faithless because her husband snored. The snores of the husband were, of course, augmented by carks and lipfarts from the audience. I, an aged intruder here, seated right at the back, grew angry. I cried "Silenzio," but the response was petulance and greater noise. These young people were quieter for the second story, which was about a young American boy deep into drugs whose mother, out of a pelican love, stole money to buy him cocaine from the pushers. Then the screen signaled PRIMO TEMPO and the lights went up. Many now stared at me in puzzlement. I was like somebody they had seen somewhere, though of course much older. I coughed briefly and a Roman girl who looked like an American said "Silenzio." A fat sullen bald Roman brought a tray down the central aisle calling in a profound broken voice "Bibite fredde." The lights went down again and SECONDO TEMPO was flashed.