ABBA ABBA

by Anthony Burgess

  "I must get Clark." There was no more gushing, merely a few blobs and strings of phlegmy red to lace the brimming cup. John lay back, wretched, ashamed, fearful, disappointed. "I will go find him now. Or I will ask Signora Angeletti." There was no blood, though the breathing rattled, now, two cups enough, more than. John lay back very pale.

  "You fetch him. We do not want. This is our little. Play."

  "I'll wait. I'll wait five minutes."

  "There'll be no more. Not yet. Get him. Though what he can do I. Know not. We must fulfill. The prop prop." A World of Words fell ponderously to the floor. "I'm cold. I must have blankets. Or a."

  "I'll light a fire when I get back. Huddle under the clothes. Our two greatcoats will help. I shall be back in no time."

  Clark, when he came, said nothing. He shook his head sadly at John and then nodded encouragingly. Meanwhile Severn, with old newspapers, candle ends, twigs, branchlets, tried to make a fire in the small grate. "Relieve inflammation." Clark said three or four times like a cantrip. Meanwhile he got some spirit alight with a spill from Severn's fire. He swirled the spirit about in a glass cup he had taken from his bag.

  "Have I not already. Lost enough. Blood to relieve."

  "Rest. Dinna, don't tire yoursel, self."

  Clark clamped the heated cup with its roughened edges to the skin of John's left forearm. It adhered. It cooled. The air it held contracted. Surprised at the diminution of the surface pressure, deep-seated blood rose to the skin. Clark removed the cup, took his knife, incised. Blood came royally up, richly red.

  "I have proof. It is not my. Stomach. The blood that came up had. Air bubbles. Air."

  "It gathered that on its journey frae the stomach. Rest." He packed his bag, grinned at Severn's smoky troubles, then said seriously to John: "Excitement. Michelangelo and wine, I doot not. Blathering aboot poetry. There'll be no more of that for a wee while. I'll be back." Then he went clattering down the marble stairs. Severn, looking up from his little flames, was very surprised to see John out of the bed, tottering, scarlet and grey phlegm on his nightshirt like paint on a smock.

  "No more, Severn. This is my. Last day."

  Severn was up then and with him, fighting him with some difficulty, God knew where he got the strength from, bled out as he was. "What is it you're after, what are you seeking? Back to bed, John, you've lost enough -"

  The great rabid eyes lighted on the penknife and flashed. "If you won't. Let me have my." Severn got the knife first. "Laudanum. Laudanum."

  "Into that bed, into it. I have no laudanum. Clark has your laudanum." John fainted, falling on the bed, then almost at once recovered. He was persuaded to lie in it. Severn added blankets from his own bed. The fire crackled feebly. John lay awake with his eyes shut.

  "John, listen to me, John, you are not to think of that wickedness. I know you've thought of it before, you thought of it even on the voyage. There will be no point in your looking for the means of self-destruction, do you hear me? There will be no knives or scissors or razors about, do you hear me? You are to lie still and get well."

  "I'll not get well, Severn. This day shall be my last."

  "A man does not take his own life. The law of Christ and the civil codes of the world alike forbid it. Be calm. I'll bring you milk. The room will be warm soon, you will see."

  "Oh, damn and bugger your civil code and your cold Christ, Severn. I want no more of this. Dying in bloody cack and sweat and shivers. I think of you as well as of myself." The clarity and energy of his articulation were surprising. Severn looked at the clear open rolling eyes with awe, penknife in his fist. "Do you want that then, weeks maybe months, wiping up shit and blood and vomit? Let me be out of it like a." He grinned viciously. "I am more an antique Roman than a. It's easy enough, the quietus, Severn. The wrist-cutting is messy, throat-cutting too much Drury Lane. I ask only laudanum. A sufficient dose and tuck me in for the night. I will pass and you will scarce notice. I will void bladder and bowels like a good boy first. Give it to me, Severn."

  "I told you, I no longer have it, Clark has it."

  "Well, fuck, fuck, it is in shops, it is in druggists. God knows we have hardly enough money left for living but there must be enough for the other commodity. There is a druggist's shop on the Corso, very near to here. Get it for me, Severn."

  "You know I cannot. It would be a kind of murder."

  "This is the true murder, Severn. Must I abide this murder by the evil spirits in control? It is a human duty to cheat them."

  "You're raving, John. It is the lack of blood. You must rest, you must, truly."

  "I desire rest, can you not see that, damned fool? I am not permitted rest. The malignancies are on me."

  "You must respect my faith, John. The Lord forbids suicide. He forbids the abetting of suicide. It is the final wickedness, to take one's own life."

  "Your damnable Lord did it. He knew he was to die and he did not avoid it. He did not wish to escape. He let himself be crucified. I call that self-slaughter."

  "He was killed by the Jews and the Romans. And he rose from the dead. We all rise, remember that. There is life after death for us all. But we forfeit that resurrection through grave sin. There is no sin graver than -"

  "You believe this. I do not. My ghost be with the old philosophers." He was better. The blood loss had cleared his brain. He was ready, mad as it all was, for intellectual argument.

  "Because you do not believe it does not mean it is not all true. If I do not believe that Florence or Naples exists it does not prevent their existing. Eternal life, eternal damnation – these are real, whether you believe or not." John listened to that. "Now rest," Severn said. John howled out:

  "Brainless fool. There are men come back from Florence. We have smelt Naples, stinking hole of sea rats. There is no traveller back from your. After this there is nothing but a great blackness and I wish to engage it today, now. My body to the worms and what is human in me to what of humanity may take it. I am all disease, Severn, and disease is to be burnt out. I am a living tumour, a kind of devil. Fuck and shit to your lying gentle Jesus and your stupid false hopes. If you will not buy me laudanum I will buy it myself." And he got out of bed, despite Severn's pushing of him back into it. He fought hard with Severn, gasping raucously, and even got as far as his stockings, which lay on a chair with his shirt and breeches. Tottering and hopping to get one stocking on, he nearly fell into the fire which, feeble yet, could scarcely harm him. "I cannot," he panted. "I must wait till the blood is back in me. You will not?"

  "Buy you laudanum, no. No and always no. Do not expect me to weaken on this. Back into bed with you."

  John lay again, sweating coldly, cursing quietly in the monotone of liturgy. Severn tended his fire, which began to chew languidly at green pine. Then he sat on a plain green rickety chair by the fire, his hands loosely joined, praying, fearful eyes on John. John's eyes were on the pale flowers of the wallpaper. "They do not know," he said, "any of them, what mischief they do when they bring a child into the world. They allow themselves to be driven to clasping and colling and kissing and then he is on to her, panting, to pump in a thimbleload of seed. And in the devil's due time, which is three moons by three, a morris of Hecates, comes the child, and he grows and grows to hope from life, and then the smiting. It can be at any time. In my student days I saw children die at three days, and they were lucky, they had not grown to a day of hope. But I saw Tom die too, not twenty. And Chatterton died at seventeen. And here is the little poet Jack Keats dying at twenty-five, one of the luckier, for he has made bad poetry and seen something of the world. But it is the hope that is the curse, to be given hope and then hear the laughter."

  "No curse, John. It is the second of the three great things, hope. Charity, which is the greatest, you have shown in abundance. It's only faith you lack. Hope that faith may come, hope for the sight of heaven."

  "Severn," John said with calm quiet, "I will, I swear, gain enough strength to kill you if you spurt this sewage out
at me. I have faith enough of my own, and it is faith in beauty that is eternal, so long as there are eyes to see it. I do not mean my own eyes, I have neither faith nor hope that these eyes will see a beauty not of the earth nor of the imagination. The earth and the heart and the imagination are all, and I am to have no more part in them. Oh, I may wake tomorrow and have hope that all will be well again, I feel better, I have appetite, the blood courses in its proper channels. But I do not wish more hope so that it may be cruelly quelled. Do you not understand me? There is neither virtue nor use in suffering. If the end is to come, let us have it, and not have the fiends of time at their game. But I will not ask again for a poor blessed twopenny engine of the end. I will lie here and see my body as nothing of mine. This hand I try to lift, see how cunningly fashioned, and it ploughdrove a pen once that scrawled bad hymns to beauty. But it is something now impertinently fastened to me and no longer anything of mine. I am something altogether apart from this machine. Yours, while this machine is to him. Shakespeare knew it all."

  "Forgive me, John, do not be angry if I say you speak now more like a Christian. The soul, I mean. It is your soul you are thinking of now. Please, please, no anger, I say no more, but you must admit the truth of it."

  "I do not mean that." John rolled his head feebly on the pillow. "Nor anything like that. For what you call my soul is the sparking of this machine. The brain too is the body. It is a fine and cunning trelliswork, but we may eat brain as we eat feet and flanks. But there is one thing that is not to be eaten and that is the little fire saying I am I am I am."

  "That is God, that is the name God himself gave to Moses."

  "And that little fire you have made there, no burning bush, that says it, and my fountain out there will say it long after this I is no more. So I will consign my own I elsewhere before it is wholly buried in this body that was named John Keats."

  "John Keats is more than a body, as you know. Is not the imagination part of the soul? Forgive me again, I try not to speak too much like a Christian."

  "It's all in decay, Severn. It was a clever machine, with the tongue and the teeth and the lips clacking and cooing most clever clusters of noises, and the noises long by common acceptance attached to things and thoughts and eager to be juggled in pretty poesy. But at the end there is only this I, shapeless and without memory or intelligence unless I consign it elsewhere. So for the moment I join it to the I of that singing water in the piazza and lose even my name. Or, if you will, write that name on water and hear the water gurgle on uncaring singing I, I, I."

  "I wish I could understand you."

  "Don't try, Severn. I'm not converting you to Keatsism – God forgive me and you forgive the empty formula, I-ism I would say. All of this machine is tired now, and the I, though never tired, must be courteous and lie quiet with it. I'll sleep back some blood." To Severn's surprise he sank instantly into sleep, and Severn thanked God. Then he tiptoed about the entire apartment, picking up razors, scissors, forks and table knives, and he locked all those death dealers in his trunk. But, he saw sadly, a man intent on his quietus could always find the bodkin: a sliver of windowpane, that firm lamphook there in the ceiling with the noose of his own bedsheet, the bodkin itself long mislaid by a long-dead seamstress. Severn went sadly to the black hole where the jakes was, then came back to John's bedroom to drink milk and gobble a hunk of yesterday's bread. As though he had awaited the return of his audience John started back to waking. He spoke quietly, saying: "Charles Jeremiah Wells is behind it."

  "Wells? Wells behind what?" Severn choked on crust and coughed. John looked at him with calm eyes.

  "Your cough is good and dry, Severn. It is not the fanfare heralding the princess in purple. I dreamed just now of that water outside, and there was a grinning man poisoning it. Wells poisoning wells. Did I not say I would poison him? He knew, you see, and now it is he does the poisoning. He is clever. All the way from London he sends his poison."

  "John, you must not talk so. You know this is not possible."

  "He was and is pure malignity. Why else should he hoax poor Tom with the dream of a foreign lady in love with him and drive poor Tom to desperation and death? I saw the letters he wrote about this lady. Tom dead of the phthisis, they said, but you and I know it was of a broken heart. But Wells will not let me too die of a broken heart. He began his poisoning before we left England. He contrives now to have the poisoning go on here in Rome. How is it done, all the way over the land and sea? He has his engines, Severn."

  "You and I eat the same food. I am not poisoned."

  "Ah no, he is above mere Renaissance subtleties. He is the Napoleonic poisoner and makes use of the telegraphic semaphore. You must exorcise with your Christian mumbo jumbo. But no, you have thrown out the devil, since gentle Jesus has not the Michelangelo muscles to fight him. He must not exist, the devil, and all must be pink froth of sweet goodness. Well, there are burly priests enow here and eke Latin. Stabat mater dolorosa. Their Christ here is the stiff standing prick, Signor Cristo Cazzuto. Dum pendebat filius."

  Severn was distressed. "John, we cannot have this. It is very unreasonable. Your mind is too busy. Let me read to you."

  "What will you read – the Holy Bible? I approve the style but condemn the content. God's name, making man sinful so he could play with his hopes and terrors, has God nothing better to do? I figuratively cack on your Holy Bible, Severn." A bell started outside. "All gone already, the morning? Is that the Angelus?"

  "It's too early for the Angelus. They toll the single bell."

  "Well, not for me, not for the dirty Protestant. The filthy atheistical English poet. You know, Severn, when the time comes I must be buried at night? Belli told me that. Only the sons of the True Church may be earth-committed in daylight."

  "You must not speak so, John. You must rest and be calm and get well again."

  "Get Wells again. Isaac Marmaduke said he would kill Wells for me, but I think it will have been put out of his mind by other things. An unfairness about somewhere. Elton was to have done my dying for me." Then: "Severn, buy me laudanum."

  "I said no, John, and must say it again. Please let us have no no no. More of this." Severn, to his own surprise, was weeping. John was sardonic-fatherly.

  "Aye, aye, weep, dost thou, little one. Like Niobe. Well then, thou shalt be made laugh. Diddle diddle dumpling my son John beshat himself with's breeches on. It shan't happen, don't you see, Severn, it must not happen to this one. Can I not be preserved from that indignity?"

  "You make me. I do not know what to. I wish I."

  "Go paint the death of Socrates or some other bearded ancient, Severn. Be about your business, what you call your art. Or shall we have a symposium about my bed? Call them all in, Belli and hewing Ewing and Gulielmi, no he is with Shelley and his lordship in in where the tower leans, and our anglophilic Spaniard. But keep Clark in the dark, for he will be full of Calvinistic engines whose creaking jars. The Pope we could have if he would come, to see how a vile atheist dies."

  "I will not have this," Severn, on his feet, his fists clenched with thumbs inside, cried, control lost. "I will not have this, do you hear?"

  "Marry, because thou art atheistical dost thou think there shall be no more crusts and vinegar? You are right, Severn. I must look after you, I must not let you have hysterica passio."

  "I will not have it, do you hear?"

  "And I agree, do I not? Well, I will be calm." And then: "Wells, poisoning wicked Wells, the foul swine, you shall not prevail, there are engines to crush you and strong thumbs for the strangling."

  Severn sobbed.

  SEVEN

  "For us," Cardinal Fabiani said, "the future exists."

  "Yes, your eminence," said Belli. They had finished dinner – pasta with a rich meat sugo, Bracciano lake fish stuffed with sage and rosemary and roasted, roasted fowls, a winter salad, Sardinian cheese, eggs whipped with sugar and sherry, white and red wine, grappa and coffee – and sat before a log fire as wide as a stage in a ch
amber theatre. The salone of the villa on the Via Aurelia was full of holy and comfortably Italian art, but there were one or two pictures by the Spaniard who was really a Greek, containing placid whales into which crowds of people placidly proceeded. There were some Etruscan cups and vases filched from the tombs of Cerveteri, and there was some frank neopagan statuary by Canova. Cardinal Fabiani should have been fat but was thin, as if gnawed by an undying worm. He had vigorous ringed hands that flashed in the firelight. He poured more grappa for Belli. "Thank you, your eminence."

  "We must not confuse the future with eternity. Eternity is not an endlessly prolonged future, it is a timeless state that wraps itself about time and, in odd places perceived chiefly by the holy, nibbles at it. Do you follow me?"

  "Yes, your eminence. Very poetically put."

  "However, to return to the future. In a few weeks 1821 commences. It will be a strange year. You know in what way or ways?"

  "The death of Bonaparte, to begin with."

  "Well, yes, the reports I have received, stemming ultimately from the Corsican physician Antommarchi, point to the completion of the task by early summer."

  "The task? The completion?"

  "The English are killing him under the guise of giving him the best medical treatment. Slow poisons, one presumes. However, however. He is to die, and he has time to die holily. He has murdered many by one means or another, and his purgatorial sojourn can hardly be brief. He has changed Europe," the Cardinal said sharply, as though making an epigram.