Earthly Powers (28 page)

       "Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, I have spoken of a great evil and I will speak now briefly of a lesser one—though I would stress, had I the time and, indeed, had I the expository skill and the eloquence, that we may not properly make quantitative judgments on the devil's work, since every act whether great or small that he perpetrates is an abomination, is an attempted defilement of God's goodness and majesty. Let him slaughter a myriad of the flower of the world's manhood, let him enter the being of an innocent child, and he must call forth from us an equal voice of protest in the name of the All Highest. I, the humblest and weakest of God's servants, have been engaged these last days on one of the regular duties ordained to the priesthood, commanded to His disciples by Our Lord Jesus Christ, I mean the driving out of evil spirits. I have been engaged in the quelling of small and dirty agents of the Father of Lies, filthy but formidable creatures and yet cowardly, striking in their cowardice at the innocent and defenceless. They settled, as arbitrarily as a swarm of bees, on the person of a small boy, the son of a good and humble Catholic family, and sought, by driving this poor child to madness, to destroy one of God's perfect creatures. There they were, their voices many but their theme the common one of whining blasphemy and obscenity, snarling back at God's minister, spitting at the holy cross, howling down the holy words of exorcism. But at the end they fled screaming and, praise be to God and His Blessed Son, the innocent was restored to his innocence, and there will be forever in that humble family a lively sense of God's greatness and of the final impotence of evil.

       "I say these things to you, brethren, that you may be newly made aware of the struggle that God, in His ineffable wisdom, has decreed shall be the lot of our days. The struggle takes many forms but at bottom we must recognise the one enemy, the army whose name is Legion and whose warriors are many. Let me now make clear to you the true meaning of a very terrible word that you use and hear used every day of your lives, that you have shouted at you by prelates like myself, but which you perhaps have never sufficiently pondered upon. The word is péché, peccato, sin. I ask you to distinguish very carefully between that word sin and that other word evil. For sin is a thing that human souls can commit, but evil is the already existent entity that, through the act that we term a sin, a human soul may voluntarily embrace. Holy Church teaches that the capacity for sin derives from that first sin committed by our first parents when they listened to the seductive voice of the Father of Evil and ate of the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. We have inherited this capacity for sin from them as we have inherited the other features of the Adamic, or human, identity. Now sin we may define as a transgression made possible by our ingrained capacity for confusing the truly or divinely good with what the fallen Son of the Morning represents as a higher good. Of course, there is no higher good than God's good, but, in our blindness, in the fleshly net that exalts mere appetite, in the credulity of our fallen state—a state we must blame on the fact that evil had already been brought into being by the devil—we may all too often succumb to the diabolic skill and cunning, accepting the ugly as beautiful, the false as true, and the evil as good. Now I say to you this: do not mourn that this should be so but rather rejoice in the struggle to perceive the truly and beautifully good, in the great and divine gift of freedom to pursue the struggle.

       "Man was made by God in His own image. God made man without flaw, but also free to become flawed. Yet the flaws are reversible, the return to perfection is possible. If we call ourselves, sometimes with great justice, 'miserable sinners,' we must remember that we have willed ourselves to be so, that this is not the state which the Divine Creator has imposed upon us, that this is the working of free will. But that free will which enables us to sin is the most glorious gift of the Heavenly Father. We must learn to join that will to His, and not to that of the Adversary. This is, in a word, the meaning of our human life. The urge to sin is in us, but sin presupposes the prior existence of evil, and that evil is not in us but in the Powers of Darkness that harry us. Rejoice because God is in you. Rejoice in the war that God ordains. 'Our name is Legion, and we are many.' Yes, but the armies of divine grace are infinitely greater, flash in armour a million times more shining than the sun, brandish weapons of ineffable terror. Do not be afraid. Even from the most noisome evil the most radiant good may spring. We have fought the beast at Ephesus and elsewhere, and we shall fight him again and all his progeny, great and small. He shall not prevail. God is good and so is His world, so are His children. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen."

       Don Carlo, who occupied the master bedroom while I—on my own unresisted insistence—slept on a couch in the salon, considered himself in charge of the household and as good as commanded me to attend the mass at which this sermon was preached. So, with a kind of sour good humour, I attended, along with my prospective brother-in-law. Hortense, of whom Don Carlo deeply approved as a good pretty innocent Catholic girl, went to an earlier mass, so that she might have ready for fasting Don Carlo a large English Sunday dinner of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding with Colman's mustard. She was a good hand with a Yorkshire pudding: it rose high on one side of the baking tin and was crisp brown without, gold feathery within. Don Carlo ate with the relish that he must have brought to the exorcising of Chouchou, Ranran and Piquemonsieur.

CHAPTER 28

"He can show nothing of his sentiments," Signora Campanati said, "but I know he is happy." She referred to her husband, who sat in a wheelchair, five years paralysed. He was the still centre of a lively open-air wedding party.

       I have moved now to the summer of 1919, and soon I can be done with that first of the postwar years. In this summer Alcock and Brown achieved the first direct flight over the Atlantic and the interned German fleet was scuttled at Scapa Flow. On June 28 a Treaty of Peace with Germany was signed at Versallies and, the day after, Domenico and my sister were joined by Don Carlo in the bonds of holy matrimony in the chapel of the home of the Campanati family just outside Gorgonzola, a small town east of Milan. My and her father, whose permission for the marriage had had to be sought, sent a brief cable from Battle expressing no objection. He left the job of giving away the bride to me.

       I had now left Monaco and moved to Paris, where I had an apartment on the rue Bonaparte. Hortense and Domenico, more he than she, talked of coming to live in Paris after a honeymoon in Rome and a spell at Gorgonzola again, where they had now been for a couple of months. All of us in Paris, then, Carlo at the Catho, me breathing in the oxygen of literary modernism, Domenico, as he said, making a name with the new jazzy spices of Les Six, perhaps studying under Nadia Boulanger or Martinú, certainly, for the fun and money of it, playing jazz piano with nègre saxophonists in night boItes. Paris was the only place, he said.

       As for Gorgonzola, this place, as the reader will know, originated a famous cheese, and it was the manufacture and foreign sale of this cheese that had made the Campanati family rich. Everyone knows the cheese but few the town, so that to set down the name is to evoke an oxymoron of savoury taste and foul aroma rather than merely to indicate a locality. I travelled by wagon-lit from the Gare de Lyon to Milan, had luncheon (riso al burro, vitello, a bottle of Vighinzano) with Elio Spagnol, who had published two of my books, spent the night at the Excelsior Gallia on the Piazza Duca d'Aosta, and was driven in a hired open coupé the following morning to the Villa Campanati by way of Cernusco sul Naviglio and Cassina de' Pecchi. The driver, who was well-fed and scornful of peasants, spoke of the tribulations of postwar Italy, which he blamed mostly on the British, and found his only hope in a communist revolution. It was a beautiful day, and the larks, unshot at, were permitted to ascend. He had a weak r sound, rhotacismus as it is called, a speech peculiarity not popularly associated with the Italians but common in Lombardy. 'voluzione. 'bellione. Lo spi'ito 'ivoluziona'io. It made his tumbrils roll as though with muffled wheels. It was a beautiful day, heady with magnolia and cedar. "Capitalists," he said when we arrived at the high walls of the Villa Campanati. "Those walls will be down, you will see." On the gateposts were the huge stone balls, left and right, which the English used to call infangthief and outfangthief. "Their heads will be placed here," the driver promised. He haggled bitterly over the fare. It was a beautiful day, and the breeze that blew in from the town brought no whiff of its specialty.

       "But I know he is happy." My chair at the great open square table on the great lawn was next to hers. The house behind us was a queer architectural mixture. It was basically a small mansion completed, I gathered, in the year when, at Bosworth Field, the English ceased to have English rulers, and formerly in the possession of a cadet branch of the Borromeo family. The eccentric Principe Dragone had raved there, riddled with syphilis, till his violent suicide in the 1880s, and the property had been put up for sale. The Campanati family had taken over the house complete with certain artistic treasures, including a Venere e Cupido of Annibale Carracci, an Annunciazione of Bernardino de' Conti, and a Maddalena Penitente of Antonio Boltrafflo. A large library of rare erotica was said to be bricked up in the cellars and an obscene stone satyr by, I think, Tallone had been permitted to go on cavorting among the cypresses. The family chapel, where my sister's wedding was solemnised, lay at the back of the house, across a wide courtyard, and it had four holy pictures by Lanzetti as well as a swooning Christ (eventually claimed by the Borromeo family: you may see it in the Palazzo Borromeo on Lago Maggiore) attributed to Zenale. I Campanati had added two undistinguished wings to the original structure, big stucco boxes full of hotel-style bedrooms, rather American, foreshadowing indeed the flavour of a Holiday Inn. On the ground floor of the left, or east, wing was the suite of the paralysed head of the family, with a sort of subsuite for the resident nurse, a Miss Fordham, an American.

       "Happy," Signora Campanati said, a lady in her early sixties, Italo-American, her family from Leghorn, with a slight venerean strabismus that made Hortense, who, as you will remember, had the same charming ocular abnormality, seem more her daughter than her newly created daughter-in-law. She was slim and smart in the American manner. Strictly, it was the responsibility of the bride's family to provide the marriage feast, but, despite my offer of a catered banquet (I had the money, the royalties were not ineptly named that year), the Campanati family had insisted on taking charge of everything. There was a kind of relief in the air, even among the servants, that Domenico was being made to settle down at last.

       He and Hortense had spent some time with me in Paris, she to see about her wedding dress and trousseau. The dress was made by the rising house of Worth and was very modern, that is to say it had a tubular bodice, low waist, gathered skirt that only just covered the knees, shirt-type sleeves, flared lace oversleeves, low U-shaped neckline, and a fine chiffon veil with embroidered edges. It was in Paris that she said, while Domenico was meeting the composer Germain Tailleferre somewhere, that she would never forgive me.

       "For what?" I said in honest astonishment. We were having lunch at a restaurant that has now long disappeared, the Pélléas et Mélisande on the rue Buffon, south of the Jardin des Plantes, and I had just cut into my steak au poivre. "For what, for God's sake?"

       "For your vulgarity. It was a beastly and vulgar thing to do, forcing things like that. It made me feel unclean, and Domenico too. It was not up to you to start saying when's it going to be and get on with it, make an honest woman out of my sister you cad and all that sort of thing."

       "But you said you wanted to marry him."

       "In my own good time. It was up to me to make up his mind for him, and there you go with your nasty heavy-handed hypocrisy and bless you my children and the rest of the filth."

       "I don't understand, I just don't. I just wanted you to get settled with the man you say you love and—"

       "Shuffle me off, a burden to you, and get on with your nasty pansy life. Besides, I'm not sure whether I do love him now."

       "Oh, that's common, just before marriage, the realisation of till death do us part and so on. And," I said, "I will not have you using expressions like that about my life, the one you used then. My life is my own life."

       "And mine's mine, or was till you decided to take it over."

       "You're a girl, you're under age."

       "That's only what the law says, and the law's an ass. Now I feel caught and trapped and hemmed in and not free any more. And it's all your fault."

       "It is not my fault. You took him to bed and then said you were going to have him and—"

       "Those are English people over there. They're listening. Keep your voice low."

       "You started all this. Look," and I put knife and fork down, "you don't have to, you know. There's many a marriage been called off even at the altar."

       "Oh, I'll go through with it." And she picked at her endive salad. "I'll be very very happy," she said bitterly.

       "The way you feel, or think you do. It's not uncommon, you know."

       "You know all about it, of course."

       "I know a bit about life. I have to. I'm a writer."

       She pushed the salad aside and joined her hands as though about to say grace.

       "He scares me," she said.

       "Domenico? Oh, that's imp—"

       "Not Domenico. Carlo. There's something creepy about the way he looks at me. As though he can see what's going on in my mind. He looks at me, then he sort of grins and nods."