ABBA ABBA

by Anthony Burgess

  It began to sunrise upon him slowly what this meant. It meant that he was being granted a vision (not the just word. Audition?) of how Shakespeare spoke. He spoke like an Irishman, cazzica. He said not flea but flay. He pronounced reason as raisin. And now it flashed in where the joke was in Falstaff's words: "reasons are as plentiful as blackberries." Of course, raisins. With awe and something of fear, John felt as if he were being instructed by the dead in person, souls of poets dead and gone. Doors were being opened. Welcome to long life and further revelations. The gods were accepting the blood sacrifice of Lieutenant Elton. He, John Keats, was being reserved for, preserved for -

  He was on his feet, hands behind him, pacing from wall to wall when Dr Clark came in. Clark said: "Good morning," tossed a coin in his head it seemed and decided on Scotch. "Ye seem – restless, restive, unrested. Ye luik to me to hae a fever, mon."

  "I am well, I never felt better. There are so many things I have to do. Let me tell you my -"

  "Ye may tell Signor Gulielmi, wha's waiting for ye ootside. I hae nae time the noo for poetical blatherings. Weel, the starvation diet is haeing its effects. Ye are thinner though, aye."

  "Being thin I conform the better to your view of how a consumptive should look. You never liked the appearance of unsick normality. I am hungry all the time, and I cannot think that to be good, I am damnably hungry."

  "That's subjective, mon. But, to be objective, nae bleeding."

  "No, no blood comes up. Or down."

  "Weel then, that is because of the licht diet. Persevere, and ye may weel soon be like Lieutenant Elton, the blood-spitting gone and he on his way hame."

  "I shall end up here, sick or well, dead or living. I think Rome and I have things to say to each ither, other."

  Clark waved that away as of no moment. "Gulielmi has a mind to take ye to see Roman things, meet Roman folk forbye. We'll gang doon together." He suddenly grew weary of Scotch, it seemed, as of a language it required concentration to speak, a sort of Italian. "It is not all that warm outside. The sun is a deceiver. Take your topcoat." John listened with interest to the patrician accent. He caught a flash of Clark in high places, a physician to the nobility perhaps, saw him in a gilded bedroom with a scutcheon over the bed, but heard comforting Scotch treacling out like a placebo: Aye, aye, ye rest yon heid the noo, yer grace.

  "Aye," John said.

  Gulielmi, raw northern bones and droll Roman eyes, drably dressed for the bright day, smiled faintly at a mother seated on the Spanish Steps, giving her great breast to a boy who was surely more than ready for weaning. Both wore costumes of the Campagna, artist's models both. The Steps were a lolling minced rainbow of artist's models, and there were also the flowersellers. The church bell sang once, and in some strange way it embraced the scene. John saw why, and his heart jumped. The whirring fragments of sound that splintered off from the bell's main note were those colours, and the fundamental bongggg was white. Colours whirred or whirled into God's white and away and back again. What did God have to do with anything? No, here in Rome you could not say that. There was room for Apollo and Venus and still some for God. He tasted the faint aloes of resentment at the hunched coughing narrow-chested God of the English.

  "Mr Keats," Gulielmi greeted, "I see the rose of health on thy cheek."

  "Master Kates, Shakespeare would call me. I have had the revelation this morning of hearing Shakespeare's voice. Florio's Dictionary. I have learned that Shakespeare said têle for tail and mêde for maid. Their sounds were not ours, they were European sounds. I wonder if Shakespeare was ever in Rome."

  "Well, he was closer to Rome, and to Veneto, and to the whole of Italy than any of your poets have been since, Mr Shelley and Lord Byron not excepted. England seems more and more to move away from Europe. Speaking of moving, do you feel yourself well enough to move by ferry and carrozza to the Cappella Sistina?"

  "Not too much excitement," Dr Clark answered for John. "Let us no undo the salvatory work of the light diet. Fish. If there is to be dinner, let it be fish."

  "Fish, yes. But Michelangelo before the fish," Gulielmi said.

  "Michelangelo is unco' exciting." And Dr Clark fussed off to see other patients. Gulielmi hailed a carrozza on the Corso, telling the rogue of a driver to drive to the Porto de Ripetta ferry. John's supply of breath was not enough to sustain the skyboat of his enthusiasms. He tried to tell Gulielmi about the idea within himself that was trying to attain the first crude crudely workable shape, the – "Blobs of mercury – being brought together – by some helpful fingertip – to form the one – quicksilver disc -"

  "Calm. You must be calm. It is good for you to be calm."

  So John saved his breath and took in the Romans – workmen, carriers, barefoot child beggars skilled in adult obscenity: cazzo… coglioni… puttana… vafnculo. He would have to start reading hard. He would have to think of a stanza form. Blank verse, rhymed couplets, no. Terza rima? But that would seem like a mockery of Dante. The sonnet used as a stanza? That meant each phase of the story would thud or sweep or sidle in like a wave, then recoil. And why not? The octave for the public event, the sestet for the unchanging Marius or Mario. Unchanging, there was the rub. Could you really compose a lengthy poem about what never changed? His heart began to sink, and he recognised that, in a manner, his survival depended on the right burgeoning of this poetic idea. But to what category did the idea, would the poem, belong? Tragedy? Hardly, great men dying but a small man eternally remaining. Was he capable of it? It was some new thing, some category to be freshly invented. It was not the comic of Don Juan, not squibbish and irreverent. It was mightily reverent to this persistent Roman. Yet (heart dropping further, awareness of light flooding his eyes as his eyes further widened) what does Marius-Mario do but persist in living, begetting, working, owing rent, borrowing, drinking? He does not move, he does not generate a narrative.

  They had been set down in the piazza of St Peter. "You look pale," Gulielmi said. "You need some grape spirit." And he led him, hand gently on his arm, to a wineshop off the square, cave-like, dusty, not warm.

  "It tastes," John said, when he had sipped a little, "not unlike the way an old dog smells."

  "It will do you no harm."

  "I'm trying to bring to birth a long poem which shall somehow celebrate Rome. I'm disturbed by certain difficulties, and I cannot afford to be so disturbed, not now, not not now."

  "Tell me the subject." Gulielmi looked grave as he listened.

  "You see, for the first time in the history of poetry we have a common man, an ordinary soul – with Wordsworth you have peasants and shepherds but the poet imposes on them his own metaphysic. He pretends to present the speech of ordinary men, but does not. Here, through a common Roman -"

  He stopped, in evident distress. Gulielmi waited. Then he said: "Go on."

  "How could an Englishman do it? The ordinary speech of Romans is to be set down by Romans, not by Englishmen." The sudden distress seemed to make him thinner and smaller. He hunched over his little glass of grappa as to draw warmth from it. Gulielmi wished to say, but dared not: It is not for you, this thing is reserved for another. The muse presiding over this notion has hit the wrong season and the wrong poet. Aware of the depth the despondency could reach and of its danger, he said instead:

  "Most fine notions begin in despair. This you must know. There is a whole wing of your mind's mansion unknown to you, where, as it were, work is already proceeding on your notion. A thousand clerks are scratching away. Or shall we imagine that it is the headquarters of a Grand Army of the poetic imagination, with some inner Napoleon plotting with his staff, maps spread, dividers calculating the day's march, while a whole corps awaits its orders. You must not think of this again, not with your brain of the daylight. Let us go and see Michelangelo."

  John's face seemed to fill out again and the rose returned. He smiled, though ruefully, and let the last drop of dog-smelling grappa fall on to his tongue. He said:

  "How old was Michelangelo when
he died?"

  "Ridiculously old. In his nineties and working till the end. But he felt he had learned nothing of his art. If he had lived to one hundred and ninety he would perhaps have felt the same."

  "The life so short, the art so long to learn. I have done nothing."

  "His very words. Come."

  They entered the chapel by way of the Stradone dei Giardini. A guard responded to Gulielmi's triple knock and they were almost at once set upon by Michelangelo. It tired John to throw back his head, like a hen drinking, to be drowned by the muscular ceiling. He concentrated on the Last Judgment. "It is very fine," he said politely. "But not very Christian."

  "It is a statement of Christian doctrine. Christ shall say to the wicked: Depart from me ye cursed into everlasting fire -"

  "Yes, I know of that, Godless one as I am. But he also welcomes the blessed into everlasting bliss. Where are the blessed?"

  "There you see them. There, you see, is the flayed Saint Bartholomew, and the skin he is holding is the skin of Michelangelo himself. You see the ghost of his face in the skin. That is very much a self-portrait."

  "There are no signs of blessedness. It is all horror. All hell. Nor is that the Christ they teach of in the churches. Look at his great muscles. Look at his bearded ferocity. He is more Prometheus than Christ, except that he has no love of mankind. He does not bring us fire, he throws us into it. Where did he get those huge shoulder muscles? Not from a year or so of work in a carpenter's shop."

  "San Bartolomeo," a voice said behind them. "Lui stesso." They turned. John saw a neat young swarthy man with one bigger and tougher, great-eyed, ebon-locked, mustachioed. This latter was carrying a sevenbranched candlestick, the seven flames dancing in unison to a breeze that wafted through the chapel. Gulielmi said:

  "Belli. Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli, poeta. John Keats, poeta." The two poets piacered each other warily. Belli was gorgeously decked in the flames of his candles, all gold and shadow and face-caves. Belli said:

  "Don Valentino Llanos." A Spaniard, then. The Spaniard bowed. He said in very fair English:

  "A poet from England? I am most happy." His aspirate had the swift throatiness of a jota. "Your name again, sir?"

  "Keats."

  "But I know your work," Llanos said in delight. " 'Much have I travelled in the realms of gold.' " A Spanish roundness in that gold, the jav and the trav true rhymes, a slack b quality in the v. And the much a truncated mucho. He, John Keats, had travelled to the realms of gold. "I study the poets of England. I am happier to meet a poet alive than a painter dead. I shall ever remember meeting Mr Keats under the Day of Judgment."

  "Better under than on." He despised himself for the joke in the act of making it. "All Don Juans go the same way."

  "But this is no true hell. It is as it were all pure energy with nothing of sin or judgment about it."

  "I first saw it as terrifying, now as absurd. The painter has filled it with his own guilt. I can guess at the nature of the guilt, I think. He was too fond of broadshouldered boys."

  Meanwhile Gulielmi spoke to Belli.

  "You were where?"

  "In the Marche."

  "You saw young Leopardi?"

  "Leopardi, no. Not Leopardi."

  "So. I ask no more questions. Is your Laura turning you into a Petrarch?"

  "Do not joke, friend. I will show you what she has inspired. You will not grin then."

  "Sonnets?"

  "And more than sonnets."

  John said to Llanos: "My last unfinished poem was, I suppose, about Michelangelo giants. Ponderous. It will not now be finished and I have few regrets. Michelangelo cures through his pretensions pretensions of our own. I am sick of big men. I would write of little ones if I could."

  "Why are you here in Rome? You join the exiles like myself?"

  "A matter of my health, señor. I have offended no tyrant, I think."

  Belli was saying to Gulielmi: "What is his name again? Kettis? Kattis? These English names are impossible." John heard that and said:

  "Keats, signore, Keats. You have the combination of sounds already in your language. As in cazzo, as in cazzica."

  Belli emitted a long mouthful at that, which John understood to convey the shock Belli felt at the impropriety of the employment of such language in a holy place before and under holy pictures.

  "Mi dispiace, mi dispiace molto. I am a horrible obscene irreligious Englishman and mi dispiace moltissimo." That mollified Belli somewhat but reproof, dramatised by his flapping candle flames, rested in the fine eyes.

  "Signor Belli," Gulielmi explained to John, "is, shall we say, professionally prone to sensitivity about these matters. He is a papal officer, you see, and is sometimes assigned to the duty of showing distinguished visitors the holy art of our city. However what you would wish to do now, I think, is to rest. We shall go to my apartment in Trastevere. I will go out and send some urchin tor a carrozza."

  "Michelangelo," John said, "does seem somewhat to breathe all the available air. But I am, believe me, grateful for this opportunity to see his masterpieces. They are a terrible warning "

  Un ammonimento spaventoso," Gulielmi tranlated. Belli nodded his great eyes full of candles, and beat his breast thrice to the loud bassoon of the Judgment.

  FIVE

  Belli had spoken French but now, for some reason, clung to Italian, Tuscan mostly but sometimes Roman. He spoke the Roman in a strange mixed tone of shame and defiance. He said something about Dante and Gulielmi translated.

  "Michelangelo knew Dante by heart. Any good Italian poet knows Dante by heart. Any good poet anywhere knows some Dante by heart. Do you know any of Dante by heart?"

  "The opening lines of the Inferno."

  "Let us, he says, hear them from your English mouth."

  John recited, with near-Elizabethan vowels:

  "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

  Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura

  Che la diritta via era smarrita."

  Llanos, who was at supper with them, gave John a bravo; Belli merely grunted. Then he recited, roughly and defiantly:

  "A mitaa strada de quell gran viacc

  Che femm a vun la voeulta al mondo da la

  Me sont trovata in d'on bosch scur scur affacc,

  Senza on sentee da pode seguita."

  "What language is that?" John asked.

  "Italian. Another kind of Italian. The dialect of Milan. And that is Carlo Porta's translation of those lines of Dante into the tongue of the common people of Milan." Belli added a sort of growl of challenge.

  John did not truly know what response was expected of him. He cut his tough veal and chewed. They were in a tavern in a low street off the Corso. A meat meal and to the temporary devil with Dr Clark's bloodless diet. And the wine they had now was red and ferrous as ink, all the way from Piedmont. John had eaten an obedient small portion of fish that afternoon in Gulielmi's house and spent two hours trying to explain certain passages in his Odes, which Gulielmi wished to translate into Italian, meaning Tuscan. Then he had rested and tried not to think of the agonies already springing like warts from the long poem he had to write. Yet he knew that something must go down on paper soon. It was a matter of choosing between two thick fluids.

  Belli said something and Gulielmi translated.

  "You would call yourselves in England a unified people with a unified people's unified language?"

  "A matter of being a kingdom and what is known as the King's English, though our kings are German. All printed books are in that English. Save for the few poets who write in Scotch."

  "Your King is the head of your church?"

  "He is the head of the Church of England, yes."

  "If you have a Church of England then you have a God of England. Your so-called Reformation cut you off from the family of Europe. Like the other snorting and hawking peoples of the North." Gulielmi said: "The words are stronger in Roman. Snorting and hawking will do, though. I apologise," he added.

  "You mean
the God of Italy?" John said. "Cut us off from that, him? You say the North, but till Bonaparte brought God back to France France lived for some few happy years with a naked Goddess of Reason." John felt uncomfortable talking of God, more uncomfortable hearing his words about God put into Italian while Belli listened with gravity. Was it true gravity or an enacted one? Was Belli drunk? The thin sharp Roman wine had micturated round freely before his Piedmontese ink had begun its slower inscriptions. Who or what was this Belli, besides some vague official of the papacy? If a poet, what kind of poet? A writer of hymns?

  "Inni?" Belli had a harsh laugh at that. And then he grew too swiftly grave again. "In a sense perhaps. Hymns to beauty, to love, to the Platonic essences. Little holy hymns we leave to Fra Sperandio."

  "Who?"

  "Fra Sperandio," Llanos said. "Brother Trustgod, Godtrust."

  "God trussed up in glib poetaster pieties. I see. I know nothing of God or faith or churches," John said. "I believe in the holiness of the human imagination, the brotherhood of all elements of the cosmos, the creation of the human soul through suffering and love, the divine revelations of poetry."

  That sounded imposing in Tuscan. Belli spat something small on to the floor. "The goodness of man? Man's innate goodness?"

  "If man is not good, it is because he has not yet learned to be good. He can learn, however. Perhaps he is learning already."

  "So man is born good?"

  "He is born neither good nor bad." And then: "I am not even sure what the words mean. So many of our troubles spring from Nature, not from the actions of men. Or women." He almost put an urgent hand on Gulielmi's arm, to stem his translating. This translating of everything made everything seem like something sworn on oath, or printed, given to the Edinburgh Review, to sneer at. Llanos, bored rightly, was telling the host of the tavern how veal was cooked in Madrid and district, Gulielmi had turned into a mere translation engine, Belli was John's only audience; still, commit words even to the empty air and you were committing your soul to some ultimate judgment, Apollonian perhaps, nothing to do with the Michelangelesque nightmare. Poetry was different; poetry was not judged in terms of sense and nonsense, except by the Edinburgh Review. Belli seemed to carry with him the disturbing listening emptiness of a hypothetical futurity. John began to sweat. He sweated more when he saw something in the undoored kitchen at the room's end: a slattern, wiping her red hands after washing trenchers, seized eagerly by the waiting-lout and fumbled: a bare bosom flashed, strawberry-nippled, and was pawed. She ran, giggling, he ran after. John sweated.