Nothing Like the Sun - Anthony Burgess

by Burgess, Anthony

  Farewell, farewell, my blessing;

  Too dear thou art

  For any man’s possessing.

  And so we part.

  But WS by that time, high-flown but yet capable, was on his way to Swan Lane.

  ‘DRUNKEN,’ she said. ‘Dou hast drunken much wine.’ She twitched her splayed nose at him, her arms folded. WS had near-fallen into her chamber and now lay, booted, on her bed. He groaned.

  ‘Little for most,’ he said. ‘Much for me. I have no stomach for it.’ He closed his eyes. ‘Ugggggh.’

  ‘Dou had best sleep awhile den.’

  ‘Today it is finished. Our new playhouse. Cause for vinous joy. All were drunk but I less than most.’ He giggled sillily. ‘A brave erection.’

  ‘I have somewhat here dat you must drink,’ she said, and she began ladling a brown silvershot gravy from a pipkin into a horn cup. ‘You may drink it, it is not more wine.’

  ‘Nay, I cannot — I will——’

  ‘You may drink it and den sleep. It will give you a better stomach.’ She brought it over to him, holding his shoulders while he drank. It had a taste of somewhat fetid sweetness. ‘Dere,’ she said.

  He dived shortly after from a high tarrass into sleep. The dreams he had were enacted at some very deep level of his brain. There were not unhappy dreams, but their ingredients were unpleasant. He saw great crowds bearing down on him, familiar faces that he knew he had never seen before, mostly faces of the low, sweaty on the cheeks and jowls, bad-toothed, stinking of old garments that stank of rancid mutton stew and old brown earwax. The black pegged mouths roared at him, whether in anger or laughter or love he could not tell. But his own answering roar was a mirthful one, delivered from a high pillar to which he clung with lusty embracing arms and legs. He shouted words of occult meaning which he knew were also nonsense. At the same time, by some contorting miracle, he threw off various of his garments, of which he seemed to have many (a whole playhouse wardrobe), and hurled them at the crowd. In mid-air they changed to cuts of red flesh, inner organs, ribs, three necks (he smiled in his dream at the absurdity of it), and they were seized without thanks by filthy hands with ragged nails and then devoured with juicy munching.

  The scene changed to a great park in sad summer evening light, well-laid with young trees. An eternal silence covered all; he was aware of the roundness of the horizon, as though all this green were the green of the sea. The silence was, as it were, pinned to the tender heavens by the call of a solitary chaffinch. There sprouted from the ground at the tail of his darting eye statue after statue, each melting away as he looked full upon it; these were of ancients who, he swore in his dream, could never have existed: Totimandus, Efevrius, Blano, Follion, Dacles. A young boy in the costume of an earlier Tudor reign played hide-and-seek behind these statues; he did not move from statue to statue but, looking out brightly at WS, he was behind each one at the tail of the eye, vanishing with it at the dreamer’s full gaze. And now, trotting between the trees in a silver light that seemed his own emanation, a young man in a feathered hat sat his chestnut proudly, his sad eyes ever before him. The dreamer wept.

  And then it was the Tower and the block and a head rolling. A head, WS noted, could not roll like a ball because of the ears. The masked executioner laughed at the hogshead measure of blood that spurted from the severance while the rich-robed witnesses smiled gravely in their beards. But the head too smiled from the dirty flags, even while a file of blood-eating insects marched towards it. ‘Fall to,’ a voice said, and WS picked up the head with one hand. It was feather-light and spongy and its taste was of delicate honey-cake. WS, to the assembly’s murmured approval, was fain to gobble it all up.

  Then he was faced with the philosophical paradox of a globe being also a tower, but he saw in his dream the meaning of the riddle. From his own groin the new building steadily arose, a playhouse from a tangled garden, and he laughed in triumph. ‘But this is not Maiden Lane,’ he cried, and that seemed to be the best joke in all the world. So he climbed steadily out of sleep with easy breathing though a pounding heart to find himself cool in the July evening, washed by another shower as the drops on the window-pane attested, and that tall playhouse stood before him and everything was solved.

  She lay beside him stark naked, slim and straight, a wonder of gold. He was unlaced and unbuttoned but he must have this full nakedness too. He threw off his clothes like emblems of guilt and then, full of strength and readiness, clasped her in his arms. It was the best of plays, act melting into act and ending in death that promised resurrection. His seed spurted, it seemed, straight into her own cry of attainment. Tightly clasped, they billowed down together through miles of aromatic air to come to rest on swansdown. And the glory and, as it were, grace were proclaimed in the ease of renewal, so that the night was a counterpart triumph to the day.

  His youth, sought afresh with her before but pushed out by guilt, now knew its flower; his dream of plunging into the Indies was fulfilled, his appetites for strange fruits fed without disgust or guilt or the gnaw of responsibility. There were no bounds set to pleasure: every tiniest vein on wrist or breast or ankle, each finger-joint, each several black filament of her eyebrow, even a shed lash marooned on her cheek could rouse fire. His hard strength was incarnated in a familiar that yapped like a dog tugging then snapping his chain, he was else all trembling jelly. Treading the pavement, he could feel the earth beneath it; he would start and whinny at a fly. He entered her like some fabulous sphinx that, raging into a royal city, was suddenly awed by the gold surrounding it, made aware thus of the spark of divinity that begot it, then was driven to the expression of this godhead by a sort of quintessential beastliness.

  London, the defiled city, became a sweet bower for their lover’s wandering, even in the August heat. The kites that hovered or, perched, picked at the flesh of traitors’ skulls became good cleansing birds, bright of eye and feather, part of the bestiary of the myth that enthralled them as they made it. The torn and screaming bears and dogs and apes in the pits of Paris Garden were martyrs who rose at once into gold heraldic zoomorphs to support the scutcheon of their static and sempiternal love. The wretches that lolled in chains on the lapping edges of the Thames, third tide washed over, noseless, lipless, eye-eaten, joined the swinging hanged at Tyburn and the rotting in the jails to be made heroes of a classical hell that, turned into music by Vergil, was sweet and pretty schoolday innocence. But it was she who shook her head often in sadness, smiling beneath her diaphanous veil as they took the evening air in passion’s convalescence, saying that autumn would soon be on them, that love’s fire burned flesh and then itself — out, gone for ever.

  ‘Dou must go on, dou wilt sail past mine island, dou hast work to do.’

  ‘This is my work and this our island.’

  And indeed they were, twined and knotted into each other, all insulated from the panic news of the Spaniards landing on the Isle of Wight, the women screaming through the streets that clanked with heavy chains, the city gates shut. The trained bands paraded, citizens in armour, free from their wives for a space, made free of the taverns. She kept indoors after one trembling encounter. ‘She is an Hispaniola. See her black skin.’ She had run, had sniffed at one of her bottles (dis is for a beating heart) and bloomed faintly in a transitory blue tinge about the lips. She locked both herself and him in her lodgings, both in her bedchamber. The Spaniards, it was said, were at Southampton. Scotland harried the border with forty thousand foot and two hundred screaming pipers; Ireland darted her head from the bogs, yelped and bit rabid; the friends of Spain stiffened her armies; France sneered and waited. But, on that narrow bed, right history was enacted and true reality revealed: it was holy, a sort of nobleness. The struggles and invasions were toward the setting up an honest short peace, not a cynical eternal one; the engaging armies carried the same banner.

  And then the alarms of the City proved without base: the thirty thousand tramped home from Mile End, the gates were opened up. But there
had been a demonstration of the easy gathering together of an army, that at least. But in defence of Spain only? Ireland, for its lack of news, seemed blanketed in summer snow, no campaigning weather. But who knew when he might not return, insolent in victory to claim what he believed his due? There would, however, be an unpaid rabble behind him, beguiled with talk of pillage, feet rotting from the eternal Irish damp, pox-stricken.

  WS was aware of a qualifying of the euphoria of that spring that had so speedily caught up with summer. It could not, he thought, be expected to go on for ever. He had belike over-taxed his powers, he was no longer a young man, he had drunk overmuch (without wine Venus takes cold) to prick the renewal of appetite. He stood naked one morning in his own chambers and curiously surveyed his body. It was, on one level of viewing, as ever — thin, white, with a gentleman’s lack of muscle; on another level it was a temple glorified by her. Standing thus, surveying, he felt a response appropriate, through this last month’s associations, to his nakedness. He desired her then so much that he would willingly have thrown off the easy lust as a thing of no great value, unworthy of her, as one might rinse a cup clean with the first wine from the bottle: he would have projected her image on to his chamber wall and fought out the night’s gathering of seed against one of her garments (he had begged a piece of her underlinen, a stocking, a shoe). And then he noticed a minute spot, drab red, of the size of a small coin, matted into a manner of a plaque, sharply defined on the tight-stretched skin. He had, a day or so before, seen but a lentil-sized mark there, pink. Puzzled but not alarmed, he gently drew back the hood from the bishop-head and found that the sore (and yet it was not a sore; there was no pain) flicked over like a coin with the movement. Well, this was strain, no doubt, or her passionate nails, or his own importunate harsh frotting. The body smiled on love’s misuse of it; what complaints it ever made were gentle good-humoured murmurs. But he would not, even with so paltry a blemish, dare to approach that golden tabernacle in any finality of hunger …

  ‘I am,’ he said to her, ‘a little unwell. I am not,’ he smiled, ‘so young as I have been.’

  She was all cool soothing solicitude. ‘It is a pain? Where is de pain? See, I have dis — dis ubat here.’ Ubat was ‘medicine’ in her language. ‘I can make better most every pain.’

  ‘No pain,’ he told her. ‘I am something tired, no more.’

  ‘An dou art tired come now to bed.’

  ‘I cannot stay long. There is the new play. I am expected for rehearsal.’ She pouted at that. And then he was aware of the promise of a strange slight heaviness in the glands of his groin. He frowned and she saw him frown as she lay, half-naked for expected love, on the bed. She also saw his hand move incontinently to the site of this small hidden drama and she became solicitous again. She came over to him, saying:

  ‘Let me see.’

  ‘It is nothing. I had best be going now. I but called — We shall meet tomorrow.’

  ‘I will see,’ she insisted. And she probed at him, unresisting, and she saw. What he saw first was the shocked widening of her eyes and then, in this context of her presence and desirability, that the embossed red coin was more than something to be given and quickly spent in love’s trafficking. It came back to him — the time of his writing Romeo and Juliet and his smirk at the irony of Girolamo Fracastoro’s being a physician of Verona. What had been the name of that shepherd in Fracastoro’s poem? A Greek name, he thought, meaning ‘swine-lover’ or some such thing. But the subtitle: ‘… sive Morbus Gallicus’.

  They looked at each other. Instinctively she drew round her the loose night-gown that had lain open; her tawny nakedness was packed away, like everything else of summer at summer’s close. He had a confused accession of images — sacked and burned cities, a roaring rabble of soldiers, a mob swarming across the Thames to hack down the Globe. And then, with almost the bright tones of actuality, he saw himself as a happy child in Stratford (’76? ’77?) reading a book from his father’s scant shelf: A Breviarie of Health, by Andrew Boorde. ‘In English Morbus Gallicus is call’d the French pocks, and when that I was young they were named the Spanish pocks.’ He had asked his father: ‘What then are these pocks?’ His father had replied: ‘Oh, it is some ailment that they have and their bodies are all eaten and they go mad with it.’

  They looked at each other still, and then she backed away to the farthest corner of the chamber as though what had been drawn there was not a flaccid two ounces of sad flesh but a sword. He had the sensation of being pulled on, as from this late August day, to the slow unravelling of his last instalment of destiny. He waited for rage to well up in his throat as he looked at her brownness, the colour of a dirty river, but he knew only this compassion, itself perhaps a disease.

  ‘I will go now,’ he said. ‘There is work to do.’

  ‘Yes, yes, go den.’

  ‘If you need money——’

  ‘I have dat.’

  ‘I will be back,’ he said, ‘in a day or two. When I am feeling less unwell.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  As he made his way to the Globe in sunlight he had the somehow joyous sensation of his having become, in mad contrariety, filled with seed, though not by her: she was but an agent of the unseen and unknown. What he must, in the fullness of gestation, give birth to could hardly be human or mortal. He saw with a kind of terrible clarity that gods and goddesses did not, after all, descend; they were immanent but rarely willing to emerge, they made themselves blind that they might not find a door too easily. But when they did find a door they might burn up the globe.

  The flag slept, furled. It would break in the sun with trumpets that afternoon — Hercules with the globe on his shoulders. WS felt his own shoulders ache in anticipation of a burden not so easily limned though, he was sure, no lighter. As he approached the playhouse entrance he had to stand aside an instant to let a bowing smiling wraith come out — sweet Master Shakespeare.

  EPILOGUE

  i.

  I AM near the end of the wine, sweet lords and lovely ladies, but out there the big wine is being poured — thin, slow, grey. Never more shall I taste the oncoming of this particular darkness. But I shall not be sorry to go. I am not seduced to this life by the dainty lusts, clothed in cold green and clean linen, of an English spring. If you plunge into that dark there you will emerge at length into a raging sun and all the fabled islands of my East. And that is what I shall be doing tonight, off like a bird. I see you have your pennies ready, ladies. Twitch not, hop not about nor writhe so: I shall not be long now.

  Let’s swell a space on the irony of a poet’s desperately wringing out the last of his sweetness while the corrosives closed in. It was she, though, the goddess, unseen as yet but stirring and kicking like a foetus, that dictated the titles, for this was indeed much ado and that what they willed and the other as they liked it. Meanwhile that bud I carried opened like a pomegranate, the roseate macules and papules blossomed and later grew to a tint of delectable copper — coins over my body, the hint of a leopard’s (not a tiger’s) hide. When it left, it left a stain as of dirty eaters. All my parts must be hoarse parts (thou wilt make a ghost yet, see if thou wilt not, that is a very graveyard voice). Had I had the clown’s gift I could have ambled about the stage to great laughter, drawing out teeth with little pain, blinking from gummy eyes, breaking off bits of finger-nail.

  — Here, look you, is demonstrated the frangibility of the body.

  — Bless thee, thou art by no manner of means immaculate. I’ll tan thy pelt to Dalmatian leather to make outlandish shoes withal.

  — We will have astrologians pore over thee like a very map of the heavens.

  — Scratch, sirrah, scratch.

  And the fever, the delirium. It was like wandering through mist, wondering whence came that music, all thin piping and lutes, the distant voices of buried ancestors (Do you not know us? Do you not remember?), the dream-poems which contained time’s secret and dissolved on my waking to fix them on my tablets. Rhythms cran
ked through, of remote but terrible meaning:

  And odds affriculous their fancies break

  But to give ear to none. Soft then, thy might,

  Lest Titan burst the tenor of his eyes

  And grant the owl for waxing …

  It was at nightfall the fevers were most intense; then kings came down on ropes and Gilbert had many faces, all of which frothed, and the heroes creaked by, all mounted on the periphery of a fiery wheel, each crying ‘Ooooooooh’ from the square lips of a Grecian mask as he touched my pillow and revealed himself made of candlewax.

  All this could be borne by myself, but I wept at the injustice done to my poor body. A hundred ulcers pitched their tents on my skin during the night and were, in the winter morning, a neat and well-ordered camp. Oh oh oh, I cried and tried to kneel to my body to beg forgiveness, though I must first beg forgiveness for making my body kneel with me. In sleep I could step out and look down on it and drip my compassion. If I had done wrong my body had not, and yet my body must bear the punishment. I saw my paper as the body I once had, I longed towards it. I was fearful, though, of disfiguring it with blots and scratches; I must limn always on this smooth whiteness words of fair and even shape. Take breath, I told myself each morning, and then create your improbable Edens all remote from this after-fall state of a dishonoured body crusted and oozing and swimming in a fever that is like fingers of mist. Undress these creatures of Arden and you will find them sans holes sans rods sans even the most minuscule pimple. They are pure and know nothing of the Seven Deadly Sins.