ABBA ABBA

by Anthony Burgess

  John led his visitors into the parlour. Light was fading. He looked panting for candles. Panting less, he sat with Clark and Gulielmi, their shadow selves sitting huge upon the walls. "Wine," he said.

  "Tell me where the wine is," said Gulielmi, getting up. "Ah, I see it, I think."

  "Your English is astonishingly good, signore."

  "Not astonishingly. My maternal grandfather came from Manchester and was a staunch Stuart man. Disgusted and, indeed, disgraced by the failure of the rebellion of 1745, he exiled himself to Italy. He died recently, very old, in an apartment of the Castello on the lake of Bracciano. He was still brooding on the lost Stuart cause, execrating the puddingy Hanoverians, as he called them. My mother, his daughter, keeps my English alive, as does my work as a translator. Our friend Dr Clark has, I fear, little sympathy for the Pretenders. I, though an Anglo-Italian, am a better Scot than he." He smiled though, pouring the cheap golden Roman table wine, all that John and Severn could afford.

  "A question of faith," Clark said. "My family is allied to the Knoxes, meaning the great Knox who preached against Mary our Jezebel mistress. As for the Hanoverians, I'll serve them. As for puddingy, your bonny prince was puddingy enough."

  "You then, sir I will say and no longer signore, are of the Romish faith?" And then at once: "Oh, it seems I must spend all this evening in apology, for both stupidity and boorishness. Of course you are of the faith, and Romish is a stupid word. For my part, I belong to nothing. I recognise," looking at Clark, "that it might still my soul in face of we know what if I belonged to something. But it is too late, I think. Severn, if I may speak so without disloyalty, does not in his work in his work bear the best witness for the Christian creed. It does not help his art, shall I say. Too gentle-Jesus feathery where the iron groin should show through."

  "Art," said Clark, "is no, not everything."

  "Religious," Gulielmi said, wine up for sipping. "To be religious is to respond to the numinous. It does not have to be your Mr Severn's gentle Jesus. I have read your poems. You treat Apollo, may I say, as a living numen."

  John turned big eyes on him that flashed in the candles. "He is not mocked," he said. "That god is not mocked. That god can punish."

  "Punish may be, but no save," Clark said.

  "Save, yes, that too," John said fiercely. "I will say that only he can save. This you should know, as he is also the god of healing. It was to that side of him I was first led. I was," he told Gulielmi, "once a small sawbones."

  "I had heard that."

  "I knew that I was to serve one god, but I had mistaken which of his aspects it was to be. Save, yes, save. What does it profit a man to become a saint in heaven? What does it profit them he leaves behind?

  "He can intercede," Gulielmi said, with mock primness, "at the Throne of the Most High."

  "Saints do not create goodness, they but exemplify it. As for those called by Apollo, they make truth, they make beauty. They create, and in creating create also themselves. Let us not talk of the Christian God's part in the everlasting making and remaking of the world."

  "Ye're unco excited, man," in deliberate Scotch. "It will dae your stomach nae sort o' guid to be in that state."

  "My stomach will do well enough," John said stiffly. "It is not my stomach I have to worry about."

  "The trouble with the lungs is past. It is in the stomach, it is the stomach that must be watched."

  "Dr Clark," John said firmly, "I took this to be a social visit. In the presence of Signor or Mr Gulielmi this talk of stomachs is to say the least unseemly."

  I take to him, thought Gulielmi. He is a little man and no more than a boy, but he comports himself with Apollonian dignity. I take to the large eyes and the quivering nose and the big overlip, the strong chin, the hair that is both fire and cornfield. Can he live to be a poet? He cannot breathe well, but he looks well supplied of energy. He said: "I will be happy to hear of stomachs in a capacity not clinical. Are you eating well here in Rome?"

  "Now well," John said. "Filthily before. But I threw our imported dinner out of that window two afternoons ago. Scrawny raw chicken and filthy macaroni and filthier rice pudding out on to the steps for the dogs to pounce on. So the point was well taken and the trattoria now sends up food we can eat. The action was better than any speech. It was done with a smile and the fellow with the basket smiled too."

  "And your Italian, how is your Italian?"

  "I read Dante with the help of Gary's translation. Reading is, however, not speaking."

  "You must learn our Roman speech, it may amuse you."

  "There's hardly time." It was said without self-pity. They heard boots on marble approaching. "Severn," said John. "Sabrina fair." The young man who entered, mouth open smilingly as to drink in cheerfully whatever the evening sent by way of company, was indeed fair though somewhat washed out, his good looks girlish enough. He was introduced to Gulielmi. He said, with an atrocious accent:

  "Parla bene il signore la nostra lingua."

  John said: "It's his mother's – Italojacobite exilic, Charlie is my darling. How were the Ewing marbles?"

  "I think," said Severn reverently, "he has an exquisite talent. There is a quality of true sentiment, the stone eyes have a look positively languishing in one of his demure maidens. He has done a pair of spaniels that belie their marble. His marble comes from Pietrasanta, where Michelangelo got his. That alone makes him take fire. Oh yes, exquisite work."

  "Alas alas," Gulielmi said, "it was not the marble that Michelangelo would have chosen if he had had any say in the matter. His and everyone's preferred blocks come from Carrara. But he was at work on Medici commissions and the Medici family owned the Pietrasanta quarries and imposed their stuff upon him. Soft and dirty he called it." The poet's eyes smiled. I take to him, thought Gulielmi.

  "Ewing in Italy," John said, "hewing so prettily."

  "Oh, very prettily, John," Severn said. "You must come, you will be impressed."

  "I must be impressed to come, press-ganged. I have had my fill of marble and only half-digested it. The Elgins, I chew their cud still. Give us some music, Severn. Something not too melting."

  All this time, nursing his rebuke, Clark had said nothing. Now he said: "Haydn."

  John smiled and said: "We are grateful, Dr Clark, you must know that. For the loan of your music. For much else." Clark reluctantly smiled back.

  Severn pulled at his fingers, cracking them, then sat at the ill-tuned pianoforte they had rented. He played the first movement of a Haydn sonata, one in D major. John leaned on the instrument, surveying Severn's dancing or walking fingers in wonder. "He's like a child," he said in glee at the end. "You never know what he will do next."

  Severn looked faintly offended. "I can assure you, John, I followed the notes as written."

  "I meant Haydn, not you. And yet we do know what he will do next. I dedicate this evening to the bubbling out of stupidities. Play that movement again and I will know what he is going to do next. If I could read those hieroglyphics I would see it all planned, not at all childlike." In comic gloom, "It justifies or vindicates or something Dr Clark's John Calvin. All planned from start to end and I am fool enough to talk of childish unpredictability." He chuckled. "Still, it is a good impersonation of childlikeness. Not like old Willy Wordsworth."

  Severn did not attack the second movement. He folded his hands and looked up in reproach. "These days you laugh at everything."

  "Not at everything, Sabrina. I do not laugh at our comic writers."

  "I think," Gulielmi said, "you must plunge into our Roman dialect at once. It is not like the Tuscan. Its very make and sound is different. And it has never had the terrible dantesco vision imposed on it. It does not have that sense of high responsibility that for half a millennium the tongue of Florence has had to bear. The Roman tongue is coarse and rough and full of the Rabelaisian. There are, for instance, hundreds of words to describe, to describe, well, the -"

  "Ah," John said, "I see we are on the mar
ge of bawdry. Can you stomach some of that commodity, Dr Clark? Severn can drown his ears in Haydn."

  "I have a friend," Gulielmi said, "a poet, scholar, actor, a fine-looking man, a fine man altogether, who did an admirable thing and then, in a sort of pudic remorse, destroyed it. His copy, that is. I had and have my own. A sonnet based on the Roman cant terms for the ah male pudendum. A long sonnet."

  "I do not think, with respect," John said, "you may speak of a long sonnet."

  "Come, you will have met sonnets with codas. Petrarch wrote them. Your, our, Milton wrote one too."

  "I'm stupid again. Of course. A sonnet on the penis with a tail. Just, very just. Who is your friend?"

  "A man tugged many ways – towards respectability, even holiness, towards the dirty suffering life of the holy and unholy city the papal rule has made, on its surface, somewhat dull and conforming. You see, sir, we may love our popes spiritually but, in the secular sphere, be unhappy about them. However. If you want laughter here, you will find it in the obscenity of desperation."

  "That," John said, his face glowing in the pianoforte candles, "is a fine phrase, obscenity of desperation is a."

  "I will give you a fine word," Gulielmi said, "that you will not find in Dante. It is for the male organ and it is dumpennente. Is not that a fine word?"

  "I think," Dr Clark said, in unscotch, "Mr Keats has had enough excitement for the evening. I would say it is time for him to go to his bed."

  "Taking with him his lonely dumpennente," John said. He kissed the delicious word. "Duuuuuum - A pendent pen, dumb and in the dumps."

  "Yes, you see the way Roman language operates. An n and a d following become a double n. Dumpendente. The origin of course is the Latin dum pendebat. You catch the reference? No?

  Stabat mater dolorosa

  Apud lignum lachrymosa

  Dum pendebat filius."

  "An unholy reference, if I may say so," Severn said, unwontedly assertive, the Haydn slow movement evidently not now to be attacked.

  "Come, Mr Severn, I take you to be of the Reformed Faith. It is our Stabat Mater, not yours, and we may do blasphemies with it if we will."

  "Blasphemy is blasphemy."

  "One and indivisible," said John with joy. "Severn gets his Stabat Mater from Haydn or Mozart or somebody. But how wonderful – dum pendebat - while he was hanging. From the cross, from the crotch. But this is exquisite, and in no feathery way. This is the good groiny iron. You've given me a fine present, Mr Gulielmi."

  "There are more in store, if you will have them."

  "We will go," Dr Clark said sternly. He returned to Scotch, language of health and holiness, for his patient. "Ye're unco excitable, ye ken that? Bye and bye I maun consider what tae dae wi' yon stomach."

  John facetiously took the yon for a true yonder and peered for the stomach in the corner shadows. "Aye," he then smiled. "Bye and bye is easily said. I do not mock. Remember I am still, on engrossed and wax-sigillaed parchment, of your confraternity. I do not think it is the stomach."

  "We will see."

  "Alas, yes. You will see."

  When the visitors had left, Severn and John looked at each other. Severn brought the pianoforte lid gently down and looked again. John's eyes were now dulled, stilled, the lids brought gently down. He was sitting with left foot on right knee, shoe off, fondling his instep. He said:

  "You were shocked. You will be shocked more before we are done."

  "It is not to my taste, no more than that. It will seem namby pamby to you that I spoke so, but it is the way I was brought up. You are unused to Christians, I know. I think sometimes now of Providence. My being here, I mean."

  "Cant and humbug, by your leave. Anyway, I talk of bigger shocks. The obscenity not of desperation but of dying. It will not be pretty, like some marble spaniel of Mr Ewing. Are you sure you wish to stay?"

  "If I did not love you I would still speak of my Christian duty. Besides, I do not believe it. You are already better."

  "In terms of my posthumous life, yes. I am not spewing blood. I fear our friend Clark may be right. I have pains in my stomach. I may add I have pain in my dumpendebat. Oh no, don't look newly shocked, nothing to do with the clap, big or little. Shall I say that I have loved like a gentleman, meaning to end unfulfilled, not to have cupped those breasts naked or even kissed deeply, and as for the other, the right true end – And I am wrong too to say gentleman, because we have been confined by our class which is neither gentlemanly nor ruffianly but plain pure middle, and poets of the middle zone are not permitted, by reason of their small sales, to be married. So I end unsatisfied, Severn my dear boy, and I would curse loudly now if I were not so, ah, spent. Spent without spending."

  "But you have – You told me. I mean, the experience, though not with."

  "I've drabbed, briefly and cheaply. That I try to forget."

  "You really mean," Severn said, with the eye of fascination all against his better instincts, "you think she should have – given herself to you?"

  "Like you, like Lieutenant Isaac Marmaduke Elton, she accepts the cant of the feathers and the iron meeting holily when the holy words have been burbled. Poets do not marry, though. Not on a sale of fifty copies."

  Severn, still standing by the pianoforte, lifted the limp wings of his arms to waist height then let them limply fall. "Lord Byron can live on his verse. But who would wish to be Lord Byron?" A candle flickered at that question, and a wind brought the chuckle of the fountain a fraction nearer. "It is love that is the thing, remember, the warmth of two hearts conjoined. She returns your love."

  "Dum pendebat on the crux she returned his amore. And yet her name, now I say it to myself in this room, Rome I would say where names are tunes -" He was weary. "The name of any leering fishwife. A seller of headcheese. Give me some of my laudanum, Severn. I need sleep."

  "I gave it to Dr Clark, you know that. I want no repetition of what of what."

  "Happened on the ship to Naples. Good. The suicidal poet must be protected from himself. Good good. Meanwhile I may not sleep."

  "The fountain will send you off. You say it does."

  "By the waters of babble on there we shat down and flung our arses on the pillows."

  "That is not funny."

  "No, merely blasphemous. I blaspheme against love and against both testicles I would say testaments. But a testimony is to do with swearing on one's balls. An old Roman custom. And there are two testaments. Interesting."

  "If blaspheming makes you more cheerful, then I suppose you must blaspheme," Severn said stoically. "But I wish there were some other way of making you cheerful."

  Soon John lay in the Roman dark listening to the fountain he thought of as his. It was not a question of being cheerful, rather of shedding the shameful rotting stuff that was himself by making that inner nub which cried I, I, I into the centre of something free of the agony of thought. He tried to turn himself into the music of Haydn that Severn had played, but the image of Severn's all too human fingers intruded like a meddling elf. As for the water of the fountain, it remained obdurately other, singing mindlessly and unoppressed by time.

  TWO

  Giovanni Gulielmi, doctor of letters of the University of Bologna, had a small private income, derived from the rents of the land in Lazio left him by his father, who was untimely dead of Naples cholera, some British gold invested with the banker Torlonia, and what he got from the tenants of the first and second floors of the large house facing the Basilica of Santa Cecilia in the piazza named for her in the Trastevere district of Rome. The third, top, floor was enough for his mother and himself. Their cook and maid lived out. They had no coach. Gulielmi had a study of his own, very bare, with rugs on the marble, a massive English mahogany table that had been his maternal grandfather's, and three pictures on the walls. These were respectively by Labella, Macellari and Zappone, minor painters of respectively the Umbrian, Florentine and Venetian schools, and were respectively of the Annunciation, the Jordan Baptism and the Scourging
at the Pillar. Here he worked at translations from English into Tuscan – unprofitable work, except for his version of Byron's Beppo, which had gone into three Turin printings. He sat with Endymion and the 1820 poems of John Keats and the fine-eyed, wavy-maned Guiseppe Gioacchino Belli one forenoon of November sunlight and intense blue Roman sky, song and the noise of fish and vegetable vendors coming from below. Belli looked without favour at the beginning of Gulielmi's draft translation of the Ode to a Nightingale.

  " 'My heart is sad and my senses are oppressed by a stupor as of sleep, as if I had been drinking hemlock.' Yes yes yes. What does he know about drinking hemlock? We have all heard this kind of thing before."

  "The content, yes. The shape, the melody, no."

  "Which you cannot translate."

  "That argues its superiority as poetry. Byron is all too translatable."

  "Poetry should be about things. What things is poetry about since 1815? The poet's mistress is cruel to him. The poet fears he is going to die or fears he is not going to die. Rather like seasickness. The world is a fearful emptiness, but birds and flowers grant some little consolation. Perhaps next year there will be a new subject, but I think most poets have their elegies on Napoleon waiting."

  "Here is something different," Gulielmi said, picking up a single sheet from his table. "The young man gave me this as an example of a sonnet in the Petrarchan form, difficult in a language like English, which has so few rhymes."

  "Why does it have few rhymes? It is not natural for a language to have few rhymes. Italian is full of rhymes."

  "Something to do with the endings dropping off," Gulielmi vaguely said.

  "I cannot understand English and you say this little man is untranslatable."

  "This poem is about a cat. A cat belonging to some lady called Signora Reynolds."

  "Facetious then, light, nothing."

  "Catullus wrote on a sparrow."

  "Light, nothing."

  "But listen to the sound. It sounds like a cat."