Earthly Powers (17 page)

       Spring came, and the war rolled destructively toward its end. The new battle of Arras. The new German offensive. The British naval raid on Zeebrugge and Ostend. The appointment of Foch as commander-in-chief of the allied armies. The sinking of the Vindictive in Ostend harbour. The last German offensive. The successful attack of British Dominion forces at Amiens. The end of the Turkish army at Megiddo. By that time, summer had gone and I was basking in the Cagliari autumn. I had obtained an Italian visa at Nice, spent some weeks in Florence, taken a boat from Leghorn to Corsica, jumped across the narrow Strait of Bonifacio into Sardinia, then travelled slowly by train down the west coast to Cagliari. The Bulgarians signed an armistice, the last general offensive in the west began, the Germans accepted President Wilson's Fourteen Points, the Italians massively advanced, the Turks surrendered, the Austrians accepted the Italian terms. Bell-clashes and vinous rejoicing on the Via Roma while I sat, friendless, chaste, unloved, at an outside table of the Café Roma, with a bottle of black cold local wine. On November 9, the day of the Kaiser's flight and abdication, I was writing in my hotel room on the Largo Carlo-Felice: I do not want to use terms like good and evil. If such terms possess a meaning, it must be only in a general context of theology. Right and wrong will do for me, variable in meaning though they are. It has been right to hate the Germans; soon it will be right to love them. It was wrong to eat overmuch bread; soon it will be wrong to deprive the wheatmen of their golden profits. I know that many have been talking of an evil war, as though God had abdicated like Kaiser Wilhelm and the Devil presided over his own Revolution, but can one say more than that the war was both wrong and right? It was right to spring to arms to the defence of the little nations, wrong to condemn so many to death and mutilation. Men do what has to be done in order that some great basic principle of movement may be fulfilled. History is movement and movement is life. Who, except Hegel or Marx, would be so bold as to affirm that the movement of history is toward the better and may end with the establishment of the satisfactory and unchangeable? All we know is that men move, men change, and that the sufferings they undergo—and will themselves to undergo—are both wrong and right. As for good, do not tell me that God is good. If God exists, he is indifferent to men, and if he is indifferent, then he may as well not exist. Good is what I find in the taste of an apple, in the curdling of the clouds over the sea here at Cagliari, in the benison of the sun in the morning, new bread, coffee, friendship, love.

       Oh my God, I can say now, and shudder.

       On November 11 I wrote my final words: We have all suffered, in one way or another, and now many of us will unreasonably expect a reward for having borne up so bravely. We have taken our medicine, and father will buy us a bag of sweets. The truth is that father will buy us nothing. The truth is that father does not exist, either as unpredictable Jehovah, beneficent Nature, or omnipotent State. We must look for our own sweets and not be disappointed if they are hard to find. For strictly we deserve nothing. We wanted this war. If we had not wanted it we would not have had it. Whatever we want we shall always have, but we ought always to calculate whether we can afford to pay for it. Ask little, expect less: let that be the pokerwork slogan we hang above our beds this eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. The little and the less are sufficiently satisfying. Seek the good.

       I was young, a very young and immature man who believed it was a fine thing to be a writer. Sufficiently satisfying, indeed. Satisfactorily satisfactory. These things are almost as shameful in old age as fleshly sin or spiritual meanness, and they spring out of the same fault, which we may term unawareness. If I could write so blatant a tautology, I could write also of the goodness of evil or the badness of good, and probably, somewhere or other, did.

       I had finished my little book, then, and I went out to celebrate a double completion. The bells clanged and whirred, and men and women in native costume and in the drabber garbs which aped the bourgeois modes of Milan strolled happily in the evening passeggiata or drank at the outside café tables in the mild autumn air. I climbed a corkscrew street down which a late loaded donkey slithered, whoaed by his master, moustached, fierce-eyed as a warrior, with his sock-cap twisted in the Phrygian mode. I entered a little wineshop and was welcomed, the Englishman, his war ended only a few days later than theirs. I drank too much of a colourless spirit that smelt of old sheepdog, brought, winking, by the fat proprietor from a back room: something strong, special, reserved. I sang: "You wore a tunic, A dirty khaki tunic, While I wore civilian clothes."

       Even though nobody there knew English, I perverted the words of the parody to the truth. I had come through, better men than I had been slaughtered or maimed. And here I was, speaking bad Italian on behalf of my victorious nation. My fellow drinkers were in the bright stockings, bunched-up clouttrunks, flop-caps, stiff red jackets of rural Sardinia, or else in the baggy trousers and clumsy boots of workers of the town.

       "Oh the moon shines bright on Charlie Chaplin, His boots are cracking For want 0f blacking."

       They all knew Charlie Chaplin. I believed that writers were fine people and the legislators of the world and so on, but I was already desperately out of date. The future belonged to the universal eye, to be tricked and overfed with crude images; it did not belong to the imagination. The last thing I clearly remember of that evening was a young man doing a very competent imitation of Charlie running from the cops and braking on one foot as he turned a corner. And then I was waking up in my hotel room at four in the morning, queasy and drymouthed, with a naked woman next to me.

       Feeling warm flesh there, I thought at first it was Rodney. Then my hand caught the protrusion of a female breast. I was in bed with my mother, Hortense was in bed with me. Wait, I was in Sardinia. The woman snored. There was not enough light from outside the window for me to see what or who, how young or old. A church bell told four. I began to retch. I got out of bed hastily. I too was naked. On the table over there there should be mineral water. I could, I knew, find it in the dark. I retched. I must get to the gabinetto two doors down the corridor, but not naked. My dressing gown hung behind the door; I got it on.

       I came back shaky to drink off the half-full bottle of mineral water. I shivered. It was a cold night and dawn was a long way off. I took off my dressing gown and got back into bed. My bedfellow stirred and muttered something about, or to, somebody called Pietro. I was lying on my back to her left, she was turned away from me. She then supinated briskly and struck my chest with the length of a hard forearm. The bed was narrow. She rasped out a single harsh snore that woke her. She smacked her lips. I could almost hear her eyeballs rolling, trying to pierce the dark as she wondered where she was. A distant cock crowed viciously at some sudden light somewhere, an immature cock with an illlearnt cocorico. She knew where she was. Then she was on her left side, breathing on me. I could hear the swishing of her eyelids. I expected garlic and the foul accumulations of the night, but she smelt of apples. I pretended sleep and feigned slow sleeper's breaths, spiced now and then with a snort. Her right hand was on my penis. She tweaked my nose with her left. I acted the part of a man waking.

       "Eh what who." And then: "Francesca."

       I was damned if I could remember any Francesca. If one got drunk enough one could commit murder and know nothing about it. I remembered once in London surfacing from somewhere or nowhere to find myself in a strange bedsitter full of affable strangers, sitting on a divan-bed genteelly eating a kipper. What had happened in that little wineshop up the hill? The Englishman, one of a notoriously tepid race, taunted rollickingly with his stiffness, or lack of it, forced to prove his virility by taking off a girl notoriously loose, knowing that the virility would not have to be proved to the hilt? Or a prostitute picked or picking up on the Via Roma afterwards? You fall, you drunk, I take you ome. I cautiously felt Francesca's face with two fingers, a young smooth face with a frame of wild hair that smelt faintly scorched. She took my hand and firmly put it to her clitoris.

       I was technically a virgin. I had spilled seed in sleep or with other males but never with a woman. I knew what men did with women but now for the first time (November 12, 1918) was drawn from duty not desire, far far from desire, to enact what I had learnt in sniggering school urinals and later, somewhat modified, from bar talk and books. The sexual stimulation of an invisible but very warm and solid female body I performed coldly and with distaste. I tried to turn myself into a character in one of my novels, initiating the act in joy, which the Germans call Lust, but I could not. I was disgusted with the hypocrisy the trade committed me to, since the time for homosexual fiction was not yet, and might never be yet. I would continue to write about male and female reeling and writhing and fainting in coils, but it would always be a foul lie for me, also disgusting. I was damned if I was going to carry over a simulated tropism from the desk, where it was necessary, to the bed, where it was not. I removed my hand but not, it seemed, prematurely. She grasped my penis with the intention of guiding it toward herself, but there was nothing to guide except an inch or so of flaccid indifference. She laughed. I turned from her and mumbled into the pillow: "Via via, non posso. Via via via. Voglio dormire." She laughed.

       She did not seem to require any light. A farm girl perhaps, not used to light that the Lord had not said let there be. I heard a rustle and a clop of shoes. Like a cat. But she laughed all the time. Enough to make a cat laugh. Charley's Aunt had preempted that slogan. It could not be used of the comedies of Kenneth M. Toomey. "Soldi?" I said, still into the pillow. But she laughed at that too. She had probably been paid in advance. I remembered nothing. Before she opened the door she said something rapid and derisive that might have been a Sardinian proverb about men not able to get it up. Then she was off. I felt terrible. Thank God I was leaving. She would know me all right, the Englishman who had sung about Charlie Chaplin. She would bring her friends to see me. Sitting at a café table I would be pointed out and giggled at. Let them do what the hell they wished. I was not staying, but I would go in my own good time. Where, though? To a place where I could find an English-language typist and a reliable postal service. I had a book to send to England. Had this sort of thing ever happened to Norman Douglas? He was probably an omnifutuant swine who could do it with anything. Watch this tautology, Toomey. That is what omnifutuant means. Live for style.

       I sat at an outside café table next day going over my manuscript with a thick blunt pencil. Nobody laughed at me, but I had the feeling that I was looked at occasionally with grim wonder: a genuine English homosexual, regard. It may, of course, have been my lonely literary fussiness—tutting and striking things out. The tables were full except for mine, which had two empty chairs. None wished to take them. My loneliness was a visible property. Then a bulky shadow blotted the sun out. I looked up. My God, they were sending a priest after me. A bulky priest, his black rusty. A layman was with him. He flashed a handsome mouth at me, indicated the free chairs and said, "Possiamo?"

       "Si accomodino."

       They sat, and the cleric wrinkled a little at my foreign vowels. They talked quietly to each other in what I took to be the Milanese dialect. It was a busy noontime and they had trouble in getting a waiter. The layman clicked and clicked his fingers, then smiled at me as in deprecation of a vulgar but needful gesture. He looked down frankly at a page of my manuscript. "English?" he said.

       "Yes, it's English."

       "No, no, you. You are English? Or American?"

       "English will do. British really. Britannico."

       The waiter came, upright, fierce, moustached, a warrior. He took an order for vermouth from them, from me the same again. Coffee. Cognac. I was trying to cure my hangover. The priest drank and said, with comic tartness: "We end a long war and we celebrate by drinking wormwood."

       "Such excellent English," I said. No flattery was necessary. The accent was faintly American; there was none of the interpolation of a linking vowel that so many Italians use to protect themselves from the bruising of our final consonants. I had taken this man to be a parish priest of no particular distinction, though I might have asked myself what a Milanese was doing in Cagliari. The layman was very ready to answer all the questions I had not yet asked.

       He said, "Our mother, you understand, was born in the United States. In New Jersey, though Italian. Our father met her when he was in America on business. He brought her back to Milan, or near to it. The place of the famous cheese, Gorgonzola. She insisted very much that we should learn English. It was the language of the future, she said. I have been staying here to work at my music. My brother has come for a holiday. We have both been in the war, but he was in the war longer than myself." There it was, then, all: no picking and guessing and holding back, as with British table acquaintances.

       "I am an English, or British, writer. I have published certain books. I have had certain stupid comedies presented in the London theatre. I have just completed a little book. I am sitting here correcting it. I have not been in the war. My heart was said to be unreliable."

       "You knew these comedies were stupid when you wrote them?" the priest asked. "Or have you since discovered they are stupid? Or have others told you they are stupid?"

       "When I say stupid, I mean not of the highest artistic excellence. The comedies were intended as devices to promote laughter, in a bad time. They succeeded in promoting laughter."

       "Then you should not have said that they were stupid."