Earthly Powers (111 page)
"I've no intention of doing that."
"That is in order then. Your servant has overstayed his visa and must now be under notice to leave. He is employed by you. That is not allowed. Only Maltese citizens may be under employment. I have the notice here. Perhaps you could read it to him and explain."
"He has to go? I hadn't thought of that."
"Oh yes. He may leave the territory and enter again for a stay of three months. But not under employment, only as a visitor."
"Look, inspector, I have to go to Rome tomorrow. It's ah Vatican business connected with the visit I had yesterday from His Grace. I will be away three days at the most. May the matter rest as it is until I return?"
"No difficulty there, sir, we can always stretch a point. But he must understand that he is here illegally. We naturally overlook the illegality for so short a time."
"Thank you, inspector."
"It is my pleasure, sir." And he saluted. A bus crammed with screaming schoolchildren, holy inscriptions on its flanks and an electric-lighted shrine to the Blessed Virgin in its driver's cab, was coming round the corner, filling the width of the street and blocking the inspector's path of return. We heard a struck garbage can going over. "Once in Attard," he said, "I saw an old woman crushed to death by a bus.' Wittily he added, "It is like the law."
For luncheon today there was an innovation Joey Grima had brought back from the Great Wall restaurant in Sliema: strips of pork in a plum sauce. I sent it away, contenting myself with a bit of bread and a half bottle of Pommery.
CHAPTER 79
The young dentist, grandson of the old dentist who had tended my mouth in Mussolini's day, drained the abscess efficiently, saw no need for extraction. "A fine set of teeth," he said, "for a man of your age. I only knew of one other man who could touch you. That was His Holiness Pope Gregory. He died with every tooth in his head."
"Good mastication," I said, "good digestion. That explains his optimism perhaps."
"Well, then, you must be optimistic too."
I paid him in cash. I had drawn a big bundle of ten-thousand-lira notes from the Banca Commerciale. Italian royalties. I left the surgery and walked for a little around the Piazza Navona and its environs: it was a glorious day, the baroque musculatures daring the gods to hurl thunderbolts, rainbows in the fountains. I had spaghetti alla carbonara for luncheon with a half bottle of chilled Frascati. Then I walked to the Raphael on the Largo Febo and went to my room for the siesta. I lay on my bed reading the newspapers. Riots, political assassinations, robberies. An American writer whom I knew, Martin Bergman, complained in the Daily American of the inefficiency of the police when it came to dealing with scippatori. He had just finished a book which had taken him a year to write and was carrying it under his arm in a Gucci case to have it copied at a Xerox shop. Scippatori had whizzed by and the pillionrider had snatched the case from under his arm. They would keep the case and throw the typescript into the Tiber. A year's work wasted. Why did not the police insist that all motorcycles carry a numbered targa? Were the police in league with the scippatori? There was a photograph of the police dealing with a divorce demonstration—riot shields and tear gas. Professor Amalfi, lecturing at Rome University, had been shot in the middle of his lecture. Bless you my children. Reading through the entertainment section of the Messaggero I was interested to see that my old film Terzetto was being shown at the Farnese, a cinema d'essai in the Campo dei Fiori. I would, I thought, go to see if time had been good to it. Then I slept.
I had no bad dreams. I had never yet had a bad dream when sleeping in Rome, perhaps because all the badness of life there was reserved to the waking time. Here was the sewer of history, and it was an open sewer. There was nothing cynical about the glory of its art and architecture. Beauty was set on a line parallel to morality. Faith too had nothing to do with being good. What I dreamt of was trivial enough—eating a curry in an open-air restaurant in Vienna, a bottle of ketchup on the table, Christmas songs being played in waltztime by the orchestra—but I was buoyed up on a kind of air cushion of acceptance. I awoke sweating but rested.
After dinner I stood in the Campo dei Fiori, looking up at the statue of Giordano Bruno, the Nolan as Jim Joyce had called him. Whether he had been burnt on this spot in person or in effigy had never been clearly established. He had been chased all over Europe for teaching the heresy that soul or spirit cannot exist apart from matter, that dissension and contradiction between the elements of the multifarious universe are to be welcomed and blessed since they justify the existence of God as the only reconciler and unifier. Though a Neapolitan, he was a true patron saint of Rome, a president of discord. I went into the cinema. Going in I was stared at as an oddity because of both age and elegance. The audience was made up almost entirely of international youth, bearded and jeaned and unwashed. The auditorium stank of old urine. The lights went down to catcalls and there on the screen was a grainy copy of Terzetto. After the main titles I myself appeared on that screen, in a great garden with shaven lawn and swimming pool, seated on a cane chair in tennis clothes, behind me a table laden with all the expensive liquors that ever were. I was much younger then than now but still, in the view of the audience, a very old man. There were cries of vanculo and stronzo, also raspberries and squeaks made by blowing at bits of the plastic that wraps cigarette packets. I had been made to speak good Tuscan. I told my audience that here were three of my stories brought to the screen, all based on events that I had either witnessed or been told of during my long life. Then came the first story, the one I had written when sailing to Singapore, about the planter's wife who grew faithless because her husband snored. The snores of the husband were, of course, augmented by carks and lipfarts from the audience. I, an aged intruder here, seated right at the back, grew angry. I cried "Silenzio," but the response was petulance and greater noise. These young people were quieter for the second story, which was about a young American boy deep into drugs whose mother, out of a pelican love, stole money to buy him cocaine from the pushers. Then the screen signalled PRIMO TEMPO and the lights went up. Many now stared at me in puzzlement. I was like somebody they had seen somewhere, though of course much older. I coughed briefly and a Roman girl who looked like an American said "Silenzio." A fat sullen bald Roman brought a tray down the central aisle calling in a profound broken voice "Bibite fredde." The lights went down again and SECONDO TEMPO was flashed.
This third, last and longest story was the one, fairly well known I think, of the aged dilettante who dwells in a fine country house in Sussex surrounded by fine pictures, bronzes, priceless first editions. He has a lovely rosewood harpsichord on which he plays corantos and galliards by Byrd and Weelkes. A faithful old servant serves him exquisite food in dainty portions on silver plate; he drinks costly wine from a chased Florentine goblet. He is living in an ivory tower or Axel's Castle. Then the modern world breaks in in the shape of four louts with coshes and razors who proceed to smash up this hermetic retreat, having first beaten up the servants and left them for dead. The horror is that the leader of the louts knows precisely what he is doing. Throwing a first quarto Hamlet into the fireplace he discourses learnedly on the bad 1603 pirated edition of the play. He talks of incunabula. Before slashing Toulouse-Lautrec's oil (actually in the Kunsthaus in Zurich, but none of the audience seemed to know that) of the Fat Proprietor and the Anaemic Cashier, he points out the weakness of the foreground detail compared with the masterly economy of the proprietor's head. All this time the suffering dilettante sits bound and gagged in a chair, listening incredulously to the sneering erudition of this lout with the cockney whine. The lout plays a coranto by John Bull before giving orders for the smashing of the harpsichord. The camera tracks slowly on to the old grey head and aristocratic features while the noise of gleeful destruction crescendos. The eyes stare, the breath grows more laboured, the image blurs as he seems to suffer a cardiac arrest, the image fades out. Fade in of him waking from sleep in a Queen Anne canopy bed. His butler, unharmed and suave, is bringing him tea. It was all a dream, thank God thank God. The audience, aware of being cheated, began to growl.
The aged dilettante, taking a walk with spaniel and silverheaded cane in autumnal Sussex, suddenly sees something and starts. It is a group of four young men, identical with those of his nightmare. They have lighted a little fire in a spinney and are cooking turnips on it. They are polite, dispirited. They have been in Kent for the hop picking but no farmer wished to hire them. They are jobless and after their half-raw turnip meal will trudge to the nearest casualty ward. The old man empties the contents of his wallet—fifteen pounds in notes and all his silver. The men are grateful but suspicious. They see him as he walks with old man's bones, spaniel and stick back to a big house on the horizon. The leader of the young men says, in a cockney whine, that if he can afford to give this amount of cash as a handout there must be plenty more where that came from. "Some are born to money," says the young man, "others to poverty. I've studied in the public library and where has it got me? I know all about painters like Toulouse-Lautrec but I can't afford even a picture postcard of the Fat Proprietor and the Anaemic Cashier. Tonight we're going to break in there and grab what we can." But they go with their fifteen pounds odd to the nearest village and get drunk and disorderly. They are arrested and put in the lockup. They lie down to fuddled sleep and the educated young man has a vision of vandalism and carnage. He says: "No, that's not my line." He drops off. A final shot of the old dilettante in his gorgeous bed, smiling in his sleep. FINE.
Whether this would have happened anyway, or whether it was the influence of that last third of the film, pulsing through the air on those even who had not seen it, I do not know. I mean, what happened to me as I walked the dark sidestreet leading to the lights and taxis of the Via Arenula. I was eighty-one years of age and had lived in a violent epoch, but I had only once been subjected to violence. I had imagined it, written about it, but the chief pains I had known, apart from the agonies of the spirit which are tolerable and can be quelled with sleep and wine, apart from dyspepsia, twinges in the joints and the sort of mild toothache that had been quelled that morning, had been referred—my sister, the victims of the camps, poor dear Dorothy writhing in the pincers of cancer. Now, at an age when my body was not well equipped to take it, I was subjected to physical outrage which makes me doubt the capacity of literature to cope with human reality. Four Roman boys jumped me from a side alley. They were generic modern youth, with much hair, good teeth, mindless eyes, slim loins, strong fists.
They wanted money, and they took it. They took also my watch. The cigarette lighter I carried, Ali's birthday gift with the Maltese cross, they dis dained so they threw it down the drain whose metal my head struck when I was borne over. Robbery was a mere preliminary to gratuitous violence. They could find a pretext for this violence if they sought not too hard: my age, their youth; my wealth, their poverty; my despicable foreignness despite the correct Italian vowels I uttered in words like perche? and basta. But violence needs no pretext: it is good in itself like the taste of an apple; it is built into the human complex. I was kicked. I was picked up from my blood and moans and, light as a bicycle frame but less solid, held by two while I was punched by the two remaining. I felt things break within me, dully but accompanied by a blaze of lights. I was hit in the mouth by something metallic and felt teeth go loose, one of them, I knew, the tooth for whose surgical extraction my dentist had seen no necessity. "Sono vecchio," I groaned. Yes, they agreed, vecchio: that merited another crack in the driedup testicles. "Basta," one of them said. That was the last thing I heard.
CHAPTER 80
I was, I gathered, in the Ospedale Fatebenefratelli on the Isola Tiberina. In, of course, a private ward with the smell of the river coming up to the quarter-open window. The nurses were male, members of a religious order of some kind, sweetsmelling and softfooted. Dr. Pantucci, young, bearded, balding, in a white coat, had studied for a year at Johns Hopkins: he insisted on speaking English. Multiple fractures, three teeth fell out, danger of pneumonia averted, averted with difficulty but averted. "You're a lucky old man," he said. I was encased in gesso and bandages. I asked, and with the impaired dentition my voice, I noticed, had an altered resonance: "How long?"
"How long do you stay here? Oh, a long time. And when you go home you must be long immobile."
"I live alone. I've nobody to look after me."
"You must have nurses. In Malta there are good nurses."
"I have problems in Malta. I must find a way of getting through to my servant. I must contact the local police station."
"You must not be agitated. Agitation is inimical to recovery. Calm is needed, resignation."
"My servant will be thrown out of the state. I have not been able to regularise his position." I noticed a white telephone by the bed mounted on an expansible and contractable metal trellis. "If I could get the number of the police in Lija, Malta. Perhaps I could obtain it from the Maltese Embassy here."
"Do not think of that now. You are agitated. I must give you something to induce sleep."
It was two more days before I was able to have that telephone call made for me. Speaking to the inspector at Lija, I could hear my voice piping and whistling as in caricature of age. "Oh," he said, "I am very sorry to hear this. Law and order are necessary in any city. Your servant was told of his situation. He has already left. He complained that he had no money. We turned our eyes away while he took certain items of yours and sold them at the Indian Bazaar in Valletta. This had to be done, there was no alternative, you had not returned, we had heard nothing from you, now I see why, I am very sorry."