Earthly Powers

by Anthony Burgess

  "Look at page one fifty-five," I said.

  "Let's see. 'I never saw the child again after his adoption and discharge from hospital, but I often wonder what happened to him. I remember his first name, which was Godfrey. The surname he came in with I cannot remember, but I remember the name he went out with--Manning. The childless couple who adopted him were not rich but they were clearly loving. They took him away to live in a humble but loving home in Decatur, Illinois. Godfrey Manning it seemed to me was a good name, bringing God and Man together.'"

  "Well," I said, with a mixture of emotions which I felt might break my body entirely if it had not been strongly encased in gesso and bandages. "Does the name mean anything to you?"

  "It's a good name, I agree. Not that names mean anything. No, wait, the name rings some kind of little bell at the back of me mind. Wasn't the name in the newspapers?"

  "It was in the newspapers about the time of the death of Carlo, His late Holiness I should say. A very terrible business. The body of Christ administered as a cyanide tablet. Nearly two thousand slaughtered in the name of the Lord. My great-or grandniece among them. And her baby."

  "Oh Jesus. Oh holy mother of God. That was the man. Oh may the Lord save us. Oh sacred heart of our blessed Saviour." He crossed himself many times but wildly, as a man might cross himself when suffering from Korsakoff's syndrome. And then, "Ach, it's not possible. It's a coincidence. It couldn't happen that way at all."

  "And if it's not, which it's not, a coincidence?"

  "The Lord gives all human creatures free will. If a man comes to a bad end it can't be blamed on the Lord. This is just a terrible thing that a human creature cut off from the Lord has done. You can't blame God for that terrible Hitler, can you now? Or for that Mussolini and the rest of the terrible people this terrible century's thrown up. Man's a free creature, and sometimes he uses his freedom in terrible ways."

  "Yes," I said, not believing that affirmation. Had I been free? Not for one solitary moment of my life had I been free. "But if God deliberately chooses to interfere in his free-running creation, which is what a miracle means, if he saves one life rather than another, what then? Doesn't it mean that he has a special intention for that life? That he puts on the foreknowledge he usually denies himself to ensure human freedom?" That last sentence exhausted me. Enough for one day; let me rest, let me not think on the matter. "Like," I said, "that legend of Saint Nicholas, since Saint Nicholas has come into it. Ah, never mind."

  "What you're trying to say about God it seems to me cannot be said ever ever, do you understand, about God. I read a novel about the life of Lazarus once--a wicked French novel I picked up on the quai in Paris. It made out that Lazarus had been brought back from the dead in order to live a life of riot and fornication. That was a wicked book. The human imagination is capable of a terrible amount of evil. God bless us, God save us from harm. Yes, yes, I know that story about the blessed Saint Nicholas. That Anatole France was a clever man but like so many clever men capable of great mischief."

  "He kept it," I said, "in the realm of the imagination. God prefers the realm of action. If God hadn't saved that child--Oh, let it pass. Let me sign whatever has to be signed in order to speed Carlo on the road to canonization. And then let me be done with him."

  "We have," Monsignor O'Shaughnessy said, "a lot of other miracles on record. Well, you know, things that will have to be looked into. An old woman in black recovered her sight when praying near his tomb. This communist leader in Bracciano found he could walk again. His Holiness had come to him in a dream. It didn't make him any less of a Communist. His Holiness himself was a Communist he said, forgive his stupidity. I think we can let this business go, very controversial. I think you'd best control your memory on that point, I know, I know, difficult at our age when our youth is the only thing we remember. I think this book had best be forgotten about. It's twenty-odd years old from the date on it I see, there can't be many copies around. There'll be enough support for his beatification which is the first step without bringing controversy into it."

  "It could be entered on the side of the advocatus diaboli."

  "There you're joking. That would make him out to be really diabolic. No, we forget all about it. For the good of the lot of us. Isn't that the best way?"

  "Fathers," I said, and it did not seem at first to be a proposito, "are terrible people. We can do without fathers." Coming at me with redhot forceps, had that been it? "Mothers are altogether different. Our Mother the Church. Our Father in Heaven. I wonder whether it's time for me to come back into the Church."

  "Sure, you've never been out of it, isn't that so?"

  "The nature of my sexual endowment," I said prissily, "obviated from about my fourteenth year on any possibility of my--" Breath, I needed breath. "It was in Dublin it happened, but let that pass."

  "You're finished with the life of the flesh now," he said jauntily. "You'd better be back in again at your age and in your condition, what I can see of it. I'll get them to send in a priest to hear your confession."

  "No," I said. "No, thanks. Thanks all the same, but no."

  "I had a brother, Terence was his name," Monsignor O'Shaughnessy said, "who had some of these wild ideas, reading too many of the wrong books. He joined the IRA and was shot by his own people, can you imagine that? He said with Mother Church you could save yourself from the everpresent wrath of the Almighty but only if you concentrated on it as a foundation of Jesus Christ as the suffering Son who protected you from the Father. That the Father only showed himself in thunder and lightning and things of terror in the world. But the Son, he said, couldn't be the same as the Father. That was a shocking heresy, I used to cry at him. Arianism, if you know the term. Anyway, for yourself now, I should start preparing your confession, it must be a long time since you've approached the altar. And when you're ready I can have a priest sent in. To be frank with ye, I'm in deadly need of a drink. Would you have such a thing as a drop tucked away in that cupboard of yours there?"

  "I could send out for something. We have a kind of errandboy brother but he tends to get lost on the way. It would take some time, I'm afraid."

  "Ach, never mind. One final question. What was it your sister and the Holy Father talked about when he was at the point of death? I'm anxious to know if ye know yourself that is."

  "He said," I said clearly, "that he loved her. But only as Dante loved Beatrice. She to him personified the Divine Vision made flesh. As for the flesh, he added that if they'd been able to meet early enough he would never have taken orders but would have asked her to marry him. He was not altogether compos mentis at the time."

  "Ach." And, unexpectedly, "'Eternal Woman draws us upward.' Goethe said that. Perhaps with all your learning you'd know it in German."

  "Ja," I said. "'Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan.'"

  "That's the truth, and there's no denying it."

  What accelerated my recovery more than anything was a letter from the Department of Housing of the Government of Malta informing me that, since my property in Lija had clearly been uninhabited for some time, this was taken as an indication of my intention to give up residence on the island. Abandoned houses of expatriates were to be taken over by the government as a means of easing the accommodation shortage for native Maltese. I was to be good enough to arrange for the keys to my property to be deposited in the office of the Department of Housing in Floriana at my earliest possible convenience. Your obedient servant, P. Mifsud. I wanted to get out of that hospital and onto that plane.

  CHAPTER 81

  Mifsud did not come himself. He sent Azzopardi. Mr., not Fr. Probably no relation. I was in my self-propel chromium and leather wheelchair when he arrived. Maria Fenek, my eighteen-year-old nurse, opened the door to him. I interviewed Azzopardi, a dark young man with bland black eyes and deep sideburns, in my study with, behind me on the shelves, evidence of my long industry. Azzopardi made it clear to me that he was doing me an exceptional favor in coming at all: according to the re
gulations it was my duty to go to him, meekly rattling the metallic symbols of my submission to expropriation. I pointed out mildly my condition. That my absence from Malta was enforced by an act of gratuitous violence to my person, the necessary and I might add very expensive treatment, including value added tax, a total immobility which, as he could see for himself, continued, and that it was hardly seemly for a man in my condition and of my reputation to propel himself along busy roads the several miles between Lija and Floriana. He quite understood, that was why he had left his busy office to come to me. Now would I please hand over my keys?

  Where was I myself to dwell on the completion of the act of expropriation?

  That was not his concern. There were several hotels on the island. There were also hospitals and nursing homes. And if I told him now that I had already sold the property to an Englishman desirous, ill-advisedly, of establishing residence in Malta?

  That was against regulations with which clearly I was not conversant. Foreigners were not now permitted to sell property to other foreigners.

  I said, "I am a very old man. I have worked hard all my life and had, I thought, sailed to my haven. If I am rich, and hence to be considered a legitimate prey to confiscatory upstart governments, the riches have been gained legitimately. I have paid my way, Mr. Azzopardi, and stolen from no man's pocket. On the other hand, I have myself been much stolen from, and I have had enough of it. I see very little difference between the violence done to my person in holy Rome and the violence your government is now proposing to do to my natural right to enjoy the possession and use of my own property."

  Such a natural right did not exist. Rights were conferred by governments not by Nature.

  "My books, my papers, my furniture--are these too under confiscation? Is there nothing here your government will allow me to call my own?"

  If movables remained on the premises at the time of the government's taking possession in the name of the Maltese people, then these too must be deemed confiscate. However, the government was no monster. Three days as from this day would be granted for the removal of what could be removed.

  "I have no telephone. Would you be good enough to contact on my behalf Messers. Cassar and Cooper in Valletta and ask them to arrange for the removal of my movables and their transportation to the United Kingdom and their storage in a metropolitan depot of their choice?"

  I was asking a lot, but he perceived my difficulty and would of his goodness arrange for the implementation of what I had requested.

  "There is one more thing you will do for me," I said, "and if you do not do it I will revile the name of your government in the world's press as the monster you say it is not. Do not underestimate the power of a pen universally known and, may I say, revered, Mr. Azzopardi. I will have press photographers here to record your brutal eviction from his own property of a man distinguished, old, injured, ill, wretched. Tell your Mr. Mifsud that. Tell that also to your Prime Minister. And to your archbishop. By the living Christ, there was a time when British destroyers would have blasted a capital from river or harbour at even the mere whiff of a hint of a suggestion that a British national was to be treated in the manner you are treating me."

  Times had changed. This was no longer a colony. Britain no longer had any power in the world. Malta was not herself powerful either but she had powerful friends. My words were opprobrious. Let me beware of uttering calumnies against the Maltese state and the elected leader of that state. What was the other thing I requested to be done?

  "You will have prepared," I said, "a large round plaque to be affixed to the facade of this property. On this plaque the following words are to be engraved or embossed in some durable form. Take down these words in your little notebook. Go on, sir, take them down. KENNETH MARCHAL TOOMEY, BRITISH NOVELIST AND PLAYWRIGHT, LIVED HERE UNTIL EVICTED BY THE GOVERNMENT OF MALTA IN SEPTEMBER 1971. Have you got that?"

  That could not be done. That was not the responsibility of his department nor of any other department of government. That could be effected only by myself or by some interested private organization if, that was, the government permitted such a memorial of so little interest to the Maltese people on its own property.

  "That bloody well will be done," I cried in great rage. "And now remove your nasty little bureaucratic presence from what is so long as I am on it still my property before I deliberately induce a terminal heart attack and curse you at the moment of dying. I, sir, have lived my life and am quite prepared to do it. Get out. Get out, you bloody nasty little grub in the cheese of the modern world."

  It was not quite in this manner that I had foreseen my going home.

  CHAPTER 82

  "I shall call it, I think," I said, "Confabulations."

  "That's a wet sort of title."

  "Well, consider. In psychiatry, according to this dictionary here, it means the replacement of the gaps left by a disordered memory with imaginary remembered experiences believed to be true. Not that I see the difference. All memories are disordered. The truth, if not mathematical, is what we think we remember."

  "There's another of these things," Hortense said. She was going through the mid-morning mail. The sight in her remaining eye was not good and she had to peer. "It seems to have been mailed in Toronto."

  "The usual?" I asked, bundling my final manuscript together at the escritoire and squaring it off.

  "They're sticking the pin in the heart part of the image. Do you feel a stabbing pain in your heart they want to know."

  "Not at all. My heart is in very good fettle. Geoffrey is not going to kill me that way."

  "Why does he want so desperately to publish?"

  "Money money money. Thirlson at Doubleday told me that he'd get the second half of the advance when the biography is completed. It can't be completed till I'm dead. Meanwhile, there's this. Confabulations. It will, I hope, make his own work somewhat redundant." And I chuckled in the manner of a wicked old man.

  "You wicked old man," Hortense said indulgently. In her mid-seventies as she was, she retained much of her youthful lissomeness, grace, fluidity of movement. I cannot remember what she was wearing that morning, just one week ago. The time is too close. But I remember the eyeshade, a matt beige to match something. Her shoes, probably, the beige shoes. She peered at her wristwatch, a big one, bigger than a man's. "They're open," she said.

  I got up from the desk chair, stiffly, rightly, in my mid-eighties. The long ground-floor sitting room looked well in the Sussex summer morning sun that bathed it mildly from the seaward side. The french windows were open to it and the sloping garden, the recently shaven lawn and the apple trees. My furniture and bibelots had found, I was pretty sure, their final place of repose. It was a pity about that missing Picasso sketch, but Al's need had been greater than his master's. The bronze bust of myself, which Hortense had threatened long ago to model and had at last achieved in her shed, a converted garage to the right of the cottage, dared me to take myself seriously, the Great Author. I had never, I thought, taken myself seriously. "Come then, my dear," I said. We went out by the front door, arm in arm. In the kitchen Mrs. Hill was mixing something loudly in a bowl. In the front garden her husband was pruning the old walnut tree. "Morning, Tom," I said. He intoned a groundrow of country vowels.

  "Talking of Tom," Hortense said, as we walked, her steps short only to match mine, up the shallow hill toward the Royal Oak, "I think that flat parcel I haven't opened must be the long-playing record. We'll hear it over lunch."

  "It's always the orchestra that sounds tinny in these rerecordings," I said. "And the voice seems to belong to another age. Nowadays voices try to chew your ear. That young lout on television the other night had the damned thing in his mouth, did you see that?

  "Morning Mr. Toomey, morning Mrs. Toomey," Jack Laidlow behind the bar said. It was easier that way. Mrs. Campanati would never have done in these parts: it would have been like having spaghetti alla carbonara on the Royal Oak luncheon menu. But that doubtless would come. I underest
imated, having been out of touch so long, the capacity of even the rural British for adaptation to the exotic. After all, there was a pizza parlour in Battle now. Still, with the extinction of the Campanati family, there had not been much point in waving its pennant in the void, and Hortense had naturally reverted to the name she had been known by as a schoolgirl in these parts. Under the pressure of the new suffragettes or whatever they were Miss and Mrs. were being subsumed under the unpronounceable Ms. The Sussex mouth had never differentiated strongly between the two titles. Both derived from Mistress. The Hills assumed we were man and wife. We slept in narrow beds by opposing walls in the same master or mistress bedroom. If one of us cried out in the night the other was only ten stumbling paces away. The village rector, however, knew differently from the others.

  "Half-pint of best, Jack please, and a scotch and water."

  The village rector now came in, the Reverend Bertram Murdoch, a man of good Kentish family who did not have to rely for living on his living. "A large Gordon's, Mr. Laidlow, and a mere whiff of lime juice." Unlike the priests of reformed Catholicism, he kept, except for squash and cricket, to clerical black with dog collar. "A gorgeous day," he said, "but I fear a change in the weather. The farmers will, theoretically anyway, be pleased." A handsome irongray man in his sixties with very little humour in him.

  I said, "An admirable sermon yesterday, if I may say so, rector. It was kind of you to quote from me. You needn't have done it, you know."

  "It was altogether apposite. I have ah news for both of you." Hortense and I were perched on barstools close together. The rector got his head between our heads and said, in a lowered tone: "The mass in Latin. The Tridentine rite. It will be celebrated at dawn from next Sunday on in the house of Lady Fressingfield. I thought you might be interested to know. A young French priest named Pre Chabrier will be the regular ah celebrant."