Earthly Powers

by Anthony Burgess

  This third, last and longest story was the one, fairly well known I think, of the aged dilettante who dwells in a fine country house in Sussex surrounded by fine pictures, bronzes, priceless first editions. He has a lovely rosewood harpsichord on which he plays corantos and galliards by Byrd and Weelkes. A faithful old servant serves him exquisite food in dainty portions on silver plate; he drinks costly wine from a chased Florentine goblet. He is living in an ivory tower or Axel's Castle. Then the modern world breaks in in the shape of four louts with coshes and razors who proceed to smash up this hermetic retreat, having first beaten up the servants and left them for dead. The horror is that the leader of the louts knows precisely what he is doing. Throwing a first quarto Hamlet into the fireplace he discourses learnedly on the bad 1603 pirated edition of the play. He talks of incunabula. Before slashing Toulouse-Lautrec's oil (actually in the Kunsthaus in Zurich, but none of the audience seemed to know that) of the Fat Proprietor and the Anaemic Cashier, he points out the weakness of the foreground detail compared with the masterly economy of the proprietor's head. All this time the suffering dilettante sits bound and gagged in a chair, listening incredulously to the sneering erudition of this lout with the cockney whine. The lout plays a coranto by John Bull before giving orders for the smashing of the harpsichord. The camera tracks slowly on to the old grey head and aristocratic features while the noise of gleeful destruction crescendos. The eyes stare, the breath grows more labored, the image blurs as he seems to suffer a cardiac arrest, the image fades out. Fade in of him waking from sleep in a Queen Anne canopy bed. His butler, unharmed and suave, is bringing him tea. It was all a dream, thank God thank God. The audience, aware of being cheated, began to growl.

  The aged dilettante, taking a walk with spaniel and silverheaded cane in autumnal Sussex, suddenly sees something and starts. It is a group of four young men, identical with those of his nightmare. They have lighted a little fire in a spinney and are cooking turnips on it. They are polite, dispirited. They have been in Kent for the hop picking but no farmer wished to hire them. They are jobless and after their half-raw turnip meal will trudge to the nearest casualty ward. The old man empties the contents of his wallet--fifteen pounds in notes and all his silver. The men are grateful but suspicious. They see him as he walks with old man's bones, spaniel and stick back to a big house on the horizon. The leader of the young men says, in a cockney whine, that if he can afford to give this amount of cash as a handout there must be plenty more where that came from. "Some are born to money," says the young man, "others to poverty. I've studied in the public library and where has it got me? I know all about painters like Toulouse-Lautrec but I can't afford even a picture postcard of the Fat Proprietor and the Anaemic Cashier. Tonight we're going to break in there and grab what we can." But they go with their fifteen pounds odd to the nearest village and get drunk and disorderly. They are arrested and put in the lockup. They lie down to fuddled sleep and the educated young man has a vision of vandalism and carnage. He says: "No, that's not my line." He drops off. A final shot of the old dilettante in his gorgeous bed, smiling in his sleep. FINE.

  Whether this would have happened anyway, or whether it was the influence of that last third of the film, pulsing through the air on those even who had not seen it, I do not know. I mean, what happened to me as I walked the dark sidestreet leading to the lights and taxis of the Via Arenula. I was eighty-one years of age and had lived in a violent epoch, but I had only once been subjected to violence. I had imagined it, written about it, but the chief pains I had known, apart from the agonies of the spirit which are tolerable and can be quelled with sleep and wine, apart from dyspepsia, twinges in the joints and the sort of mild toothache that had been quelled that morning, had been referred--my sister, the victims of the camps, poor dear Dorothy writhing in the pincers of cancer. Now, at an age when my body was not well equipped to take it, I was subjected to physical outrage which makes me doubt the capacity of literature to cope with human reality. Four Roman boys jumped me from a side alley. They were generic modern youth, with much hair, good teeth, mindless eyes, slim loins, strong fists.

  They wanted money, and they took it. They took also my watch. The cigarette lighter I carried, Ali's birthday gift with the Maltese cross, they dis dained so they threw it down the drain whose metal my head struck when I was borne over. Robbery was a mere preliminary to gratuitous violence. They could find a pretext for this violence if they sought not too hard: my age, their youth; my wealth, their poverty; my despicable foreignness despite the correct Italian vowels I uttered in words like perche? and basta. But violence needs no pretext: it is good in itself like the taste of an apple; it is built into the human complex. I was kicked. I was picked up from my blood and moans and, light as a bicycle frame but less solid, held by two while I was punched by the two remaining. I felt things break within me, dully but accompanied by a blaze of lights. I was hit in the mouth by something metallic and felt teeth go loose, one of them, I knew, the tooth for whose surgical extraction my dentist had seen no necessity. "Sono vecchio," I groaned. Yes, they agreed, vecchio: that merited another crack in the driedup testicles. "Basta," one of them said. That was the last thing I heard.

  CHAPTER 80

  I was, I gathered, in the Ospedale Fatebenefratelli on the Isola Tiberina. In, of course, a private ward with the smell of the river coming up to the quarter-open window. The nurses were male, members of a religious order of some kind, sweetsmelling and softfooted. Dr. Pantucci, young, bearded, balding, in a white coat, had studied for a year at Johns Hopkins: he insisted on speaking English. Multiple fractures, three teeth fell out, danger of pneumonia averted, averted with difficulty but averted. "You're a lucky old man," he said. I was encased in gesso and bandages. I asked, and with the impaired dentition my voice, I noticed, had an altered resonance: "How long?"

  "How long do you stay here? Oh, a long time. And when you go home you must be long immobile."

  "I live alone. I've nobody to look after me."

  "You must have nurses. In Malta there are good nurses."

  "I have problems in Malta. I must find a way of getting through to my servant. I must contact the local police station."

  "You must not be agitated. Agitation is inimical to recovery. Calm is needed, resignation."

  "My servant will be thrown out of the state. I have not been able to regularise his position." I noticed a white telephone by the bed mounted on an expansible and contractable metal trellis. "If I could get the number of the police in Lija, Malta. Perhaps I could obtain it from the Maltese Embassy here."

  "Do not think of that now. You are agitated. I must give you something to induce sleep."

  It was two more days before I was able to have that telephone call made for me. Speaking to the inspector at Lija, I could hear my voice piping and whistling as in caricature of age. "Oh," he said, "I am very sorry to hear this. Law and order are necessary in any city. Your servant was told of his situation. He has already left. He complained that he had no money. We turned our eyes away while he took certain items of yours and sold them at the Indian Bazaar in Valletta. This had to be done, there was no alternative, you had not returned, we had heard nothing from you, now I see why, I am very sorry."

  "What items?"

  "A set of chessmen, I think. A small picture. You will see when you return. He has flown to Tunis. The keys to the house are with the Grima family opposite."

  "Could you kindly inform the postman I wish to have my mail directed here? I shall be here for some time: 126, Ospedale Fatebenefratelli--"

  "That is all one word?"

  "That is all one word."

  "Do not be away from Malta too long. There are these new housing regulations, as you know."

  "What regulations?"

  "Absence for a certain period of time is regarded by the Prime Minister's Office as permanent abandonment of residence. There is the new law about the confiscation of property."

  "But, damn it, I can't help being broken and
near dead. I'll be back when the medical authorities give me permission to travel."

  "Gort verneyflood ablesforth nardfire."

  That was the line breaking. I lay exhausted as if from a two-mile walk.

  After two weeks mail began to come in. Two of the nursing brothers brought me a sack of it. I was not able to open any of it myself, one arm being totally disabled and fixed in the air like a fascist salute. The near imbecilic brother who did odd jobs and had, after a day's journey, brought my luggage from the Raphael, willingly sliced the envelopes open and crooned over the beauty of the exotic stamps. Another brother, quick and terrierlike, collected stamps and snarled for their possession. There were a lot of books--bound proofs which American publishers sent in the hope of a kindly publishable word. I donated them to the hospital library. After six weeks a book came from Geof frey. This I did not donate. With the book was a letter. The letter I was now able to hold, though feebly, in both hands. It was brief. It said:

  Dear old dearly and genuinely though intermittently beloved bastard. I'm here in ah should have written the address at the top righthand corner and all that Sunday writing home to dear mater and pater ballocks, shouldn't I, here in the city of Seattle in the state of Washington and very nice too really, the street being Rainier and the number 1075, and I'm with Nahum Brady who is back in his native habitat to research some great scandalous blockbusting shithouse of a book about the Boeing aircraft people. I'm all right really and don't propose seeing you in London if that's okay with thee, so if thou wouldst be kind enough to remit sum in dollars to above address I shall be more than beholden. Which means that I have done what I was asked, old dear, to wit requesting your archives to be copied and sent to Malta, an easy job that one, and then, much more difficult, scrounging around Chicago after this evidence you were after, you know, Pope Buggery's miracle all that way back. Of course, what with it being His Ballsiness, everybody I met in the hospital line was all too ready to declare on oath they'd seen him turn horsepiss into Johnnie Walker, but I was very very firm as you know I can be, and I said there was one particular doctor and he was the man to make the opissial dispissition, I was tight of course, not really been sober since I landed at O'Hare. Anyway, to make a short story long, I got the name, and there was the name in old ledgers and reports, and even on a plaque on the wall in letters of the Purest Gold as one who had served his country, saving life not taking it and the rest of the inflated ordure. This was a certain Dr. B. C. Gimson, M.D., well remembered by the old and admired too because he'd written and moreover my dear actually published a kind of memoir, the one you should have now in your hands or on your lap rather, unless ha ha it or both or all three are hotherwise hoccupied you come along a me sir don't want no trouble do we now-ah, how often those words have been addressed to yours truly. But of course there was just no copy to be found. Published 1948 and remaindered, and then Dr. B. C. Gimson suffers a slight fatality in the sport of gliding whereof he was most inordinately fond. So they send me to the widow, who lives in the posh suburb of Oak Park, where old Hem came from, and still as it was in his day, uncountable churches and no bars--thirsty me, you've just no idea. Nor did she offer me one, not having a thing in the house. Nearly almost completely and totally blind, my dear, but getting along on her own except for the neighbors helping with the shopping. She said look on those shelves there and you may find it--Medic it is called, Medic--1 don't read no more, me eyes, see, charming old lady though really, take it to that table there, copy out what you want and then put it back where you found it, it is one of my most precious possessions, and then bugger off drinkless. Alas I took advantage of the old trout, pretended to scribble a few lines, made as to put the precious volume back but in actual fact, oh cunning shameless me, stowed it under my handsome handknit cashmere pushover. The crimes I have committed on your sodding behalf, you sod. So here it is. Page 153 is where you have to look. Don't forget the cash, be careful of those elegant though brittle limbs. A fall could be very very nasty at your age. I have something good coming up soon, I think, I hope, fingers crossed. Your loving faithless Geoffrey. XXXXXXXXX.

  The book was still in its dustjacket. Medic, yes, with the rod of Aesculapius to whom Socrates owed a cock on the cover, and on the back a cheerful photograph of the author in military uniform. The face was not familiar. I was reluctant to get to page 153 too soon, so I leafed, with some pain, through the earlier pages. Here was a medical practitioner who, after fifteen or so years of varied hospital and private experience in Illinois, served as a medical officer in the U.S. Army from Pearl Harbour to the end. His aim was to show, rather in the spirit of Carlo, how good came out of evil, how he learned to believe in the essential benevolence and certainly courage of ordinary human beings, and how, after an adolescence of glum agnosticism, he came to accept the notion of a God sometimes enigmatic but always loving. As for his own craft of curing diseases, the area of the inexplicable grew as he practiced: patients died when they should have lived and vice versa. On page 153 he mentioned an inexplicable remission of disease in a Chicago hospital and followed it with a glib paragraph on the possible meaning of the term miracle. On page 155, which Geoffrey evidently had not read, he stated the name of the child cured by prayer and speculated on the possible future of one so signally picked out by the Lord for special favor. Here I felt my eyes must be deceiving me.

  I asked that a call be put through to Monsignor O'Shaughnessy at his private apartment on the Via Giulia. When I got through to him I talked of the good old times. Those bridgeplaying days in Paris? How could he ever forget? The voice sounded slurred by whisky. Whisky, whiskey rather, had perhaps hindered his advancement. He was not even a bishop. He had a variety of odd jobs in obscure departments of the Vatican. One of the jobs was the making of saints. There were not, of course, many occasions for saintmaking. He said he would come round and see me, though he found getting about difficult these days. Anno domini, you know. He was seventy-nine, he said. I'm eighty-one, I said. Are you now, who would have thought it?

  He shuffled in two days later. Old, yes, whiskeypickled, the long Irish neck I remembered, the eyes like watered milk blinking in Irish neurosis, the face a map of an unpopulous Irish county with dusty tracks leading nowhere. He sat down by my bed.

  I said, "About the canonization of our late friend Carlo. I'm ready to sign the appropriate form. I definitely witnessed a miracle. And here, in this book just sent to me from the States, is corroborative evidence. The doctor himself. Page one fifty-three. Could you read it out to me? I had a bad accident. My sight isn't so good."

  He put on horn-rimmed glasses and smacked his lips. He was not particularly interested in my bad accident. "Fell, did ye? Ach, that's all too easy at our age. Giddy fits, then the bones break. Here we are, then." He held the book near his eyes and read:

  "'I remember the name of the priest. He was the brother of a certain Mr. Campanati, a well-known Chicago businessman. Father Campanati was in the hospital, along with an English friend or relative, I forget which, because his brother was a victim of the bootleg racketeers who flourished in those unhappy days. He could do nothing for his dying brother but he went into the public ward near by where a child was dying of meningitis. This child was my patient and was in the hopeless terminal stage of the disease. With nothing more than a prayer Father Campanati reversed that stage and the child began to recover. The recovery was incredibly rapid. In two more days the child was sitting up and taking light nourishment. He had come to us from the Saint Nicholas Orphanage, a non-religious establishment despite its name, Saint Nicholas of course being the patron saint of children. As a bonus to his recovery the child was adopted while still in the hospital and left it with a new father and mother.'" Monsignor O'Shaughnessy looked up. "That seems definite enough. That can certainly go on file." He looked down at the book again. "Then he goes on about his skepticism about miracles and how it was cured by this event. Miracles he saw as a medical officer in the army. How one man said he'd drink himself c
lear of pneumonia and did. That's interesting, but it's not a miracle."