Earthly Powers (29 page)

       "Yes, I've seen that. But he's just nodding with satisfaction. He approves of you. Domenico's been a bit of a wild one, as you know. Now he's going to settle down."

       "Yes, that's it, everything's going to be fine for Domenico, it's always what everybody else wants, nobody thinks of me. And then Carlo starts talking of the children we're going to have, and he sort of sees them as though they were already there. Every good Catholic family, he says, gives somebody to God, what does he mean? Anyway, I feel all shut in, and I can't get out, ever. I'll never forgive you for this."

       "This is the most absolute nonsense."

       "It's not nonsense, and you know it's not. I mean, what's happened to us, to our family? We don't exist any more, and there are the Campanati, with the Church behind them, flourishing like a like a—"

       "Vineyard?"

       "No. Yes. Oh, alive, and not falling to bits despite the old man being near death, and there am I being swallowed up by them."

       "You can walk out," I said, "now."

       "You know I can't. That damned Carlo won't let me. Oh, perhaps it is nonsense."

       "More than perhaps," I said, and I went on eating my steak au poivre, though not with much appetite. And then, with Signora Campanati next to me, I was eating a slice of the wedding cake, a most brilliant rococo edifice of many tiers, infested, as with flies, by fat-arsed patti or cherubim, designed and built by architectural confectioners in Milan. I was also drinking a glass of Dom Perignon, which helped it down. The paralytic head was fed some crumbs of the cake by Nurse Fordham. Hortense was somewhat drunk, which was in order, but not so drunk as Domenico, who flashed extravagant joy, though with an Italic leer in it, at uncles, aunts, cousins, school friends, monsignori, retainers, operatives of the caseificio, nuns. Among the nuns was the sole daughter of the family, Luigia, Suor Umiltà, a big moustached girl in her middle twenties, openly and without visible effect steadily tippling. Carlo gave a long ribald speech in dialect and sank a half-litre of bubbly in one applauded go. Signora Campanati's forced smile told me that this was not the way of the family: they were staid moneymaking people, speakers of a language called Italian, meaning a neutralisation for national use of the Tuscan dialect, with all its nuances of culture and rule, while Carlo, as a kind of pastoral duty, would perform the stage act of one marrying the speech of earth to that of heaven. Another thing: Carlo was physically gross in comparison with that pared and elegant family. In a flash I saw him as a changeling, a goblin baby dumped in a Campanati pram. He was certainly unlike his elder brother Raffaele.

       Raffaele was in Italy not because of the wedding but because, at this time of the year, he always left Chicago and came home. He looked like what he was, an international businessman, but there was an aura of refinement and even piety over him, as if the impulses that had made, respectively, Carlo a priest and Domenico a musician had been arrested and frozen into the intriguing inconsistencies of a personality which, I understood, was ironlike in its concern with commercial success. He was about thirty-eight and already a widower. His wife had been an Anglo-Saxon Catholic from St. Louis, dead of septicemia after her third, aborted, attempt at providing a Campanati heir. He had not remarried and said he would live and die a widower. The line was to be continued through Domenico and my sister, hence the importance of this occasion.

       "He can show nothing of his sentiments," Signora Campanati said, "but I know he is happy." Meaning, again, her husband, a desiccated parody of Raffaele, dumb, bewildered, but theoretically under the necessity of being happy that the family was not to die out.

       "Our happiness," Raffaele was telling the guests in Italian. He was as richly black-haired and moustached as King C. Gillette on the safety razor blade label. Also as handsome, in the old stiff way of the turn of the century-statuesque, stern, with no connotation of the flirt or masher. He was naturally chaste, so I had been told, and his appetites were, in comparison with those of Carlo, very frugal. He had eaten little and drunk less. He, I and his father were the only totally sober males present. "La nostra Jelicith," he said gravely.

       The happy couple were to leave for Rome on that evening's sleeper. They could dine on the train, if they still had appetite, and might conceivably attempt formal consummation on one of the narrow bunks. But they had already anticipated that, the hypocrites, and would probably wait for the following afternoon, the shutters closed on the large Roman heat in the Hotel Raphael on the Largo Febo near the Piazza Navona. None of my or anybody's business.

       Nor was I myself, I considered, having done my duty, or my father's, anybody's business but my own. I, the free writer. I intended to get away along with the other guests and spend another night in the Excelsior Gallia in Milan. I had left my bag there. A Dottor Magnago was very ready to give me a lift in his chauffeured limousine, no problem, not out of his way at all. Then, the next day, I would have a brief look at the islands of the Lago Maggiore, going from one to another in pleasure steamers, and catch the Lyon-bound train at Ascona. But it was Raffaele who insisted that they would all take it hard if I did not spend the night at the Villa Campanati: a room had been prepared in the west wing; toilet articles had been laid out. "We must have," he said, "a talk."

       "About what?"

       "A talk." We were all down at the big open gates in the first of the evening, delicious with lemon and magnolia, a peach-coloured moon hung aloft. The car had arrived that would take the happy couple to the railway station. I kissed the bride in her grey going-away dress with crossover straps at low waist and neck, light satin coat over it open to the balm of the evening.

       I whispered, "Everything will be all right, you'll see. We'll meet in Paris. Am I forgiven now?" Not, of course, that there was anything to forgive. She was grasped at once by Carlo, who hugged her till she howled, and then I had to kiss, though on the cheeks, a Domenico ready for tomorrow's shave. Kisses and cries and blessings and a nightingale in the cypresses.

       Old Campanati had been wheeled to the gates. His nurse grabbed his right arm, limp as a piece of rope, and waved it at the departing couple. "They're off now, sweetie," she said. Like a dog being made to wave he looked the other way. Signora Campanati alternately wiped her sniffs and waved with a cambric handkerchief. Ribald Milanese advice was shouted at Domenico by his coevals, one of whom made a vulgar gesture with a clenched fist. Waves and waves and cries and a couple of frail showers of flower petals from, to my mild surprise, the nuns.

       "Good luck to you both," Sister Humility called in English.

       In England or Ireland the wedding party would have gone on all night and finished, certainly in Ireland, with a brawl. Here it ended with the departure of the bride and groom. There was family dinner, cold, rightly. A platter of leftover meats and an insalata mista. Estate red wine in bottles without labels. We ate, Suor Umiltà, Signora Campanati, Carlo, Raffaele, myself, in an aggressively antique dining room that smelled of damp. Over the sideboard was an Ultima Cena by Giulio Procaccini. The electrolier had many dead bulbs. Carlo ate as though he had fasted all day. When coffee was brought he asked for the estate liqueur, a grappa with a powerful reek of unwashed sheepdog. Nothing was said about the absence of Nurse Fordham. I presumed, having fed her charge with something from a feeding bottle, she cooked something American for herself in her own kitchen. We all spoke English—it was as easy for them as Italian. Raffaele said to me: "Where in Paris?"

       "Me or them?" He looked at me sternly and silently. I was in his view being frivolous. "Well," I said humbly, "I promised to help there. Find a studio or something. And if Carlo too hears of anything—" Strange, we were a sort of relatives now. "I have a large second bedroom they can use while we're looking. If, that is, nothing satisfactory has been found by the time that... Domenico said something about a grand piano. I mean, there's no terrible hurry, is there?"

       "Domenico," his mother said, "is anxious to start earning money. It is difficult with music, as we all know."

       "No hurry there either, is there?" I said, perhaps insolently. "At least," while they looked at me and said nothing, "I understood that all that was realised, the difficulty, I mean, of Domenico's earning his living as a composer of serious music. He says he is still learning his craft. He talks of taking lessons in orchestration. He talks also of playing the piano in nightclubs. For the experience, that is. He believes ragtime and jazz and so on have something to give to serious music. Ravel thinks so too," I said defiantly, "also Stravinsky."

       "A player of jazz music in nightclubs," Raffaele said. "Married to the sister of a writer of novels. How things change, how life changes."

       "You made," I said boldly, "both those trades sound unseemly. Your tone, if you'll forgive me, was somewhat disparaging. Any trade that brings harmless solace is a respectable trade. Remember also, please, that Domenico and I first became, well, friends, through collaboration on an opera. It was intended for La Scala. I take it you will not be disparaging about La Scala."

       "It was rejected by La Scala," Raffaele said, and his look implied that that had been the fault of the libretto, something dirty in it perhaps.

       "It may not be rejected by Covent Garden."

       "That is where you have your English opera. I know." He made the shrug that used to be made by Germans and Italians when music and England were mentioned in the same breath.

       "A theatre surrounded by vegetables," Suor Umiltà said. Nun though she was, she knew the great world.

       "That too," I said, now my hand was in, "sounds disparaging."

       "Asparaging and cabbaging," Carlo struck in. "Come, come, let us have less gloom and more rejoicing." He meant Raffaele, whose fine eyes seemed to see a melancholy future for somebody or everybody in the bowl of oranges set out on a bed of their own leaves that stood in the middle of the table. "Change," Carlo said. "You say change as if it were not the essential property of living things. What would this family have been if it had not opened itself to the world? You fear the world of jazz and novels and Anglo-Saxons will swallow us up? No, it is we who swallow up them. You fear the loss of family dignity? We never had dignity, meaning we were always on the side of change and life. Take our poor father. He plucked our dear mother like an orange from East Nassau or wherever it was—"

       "East Orange." His mother smiled sadly.

       "Very good, like a nassau from East Orange then. He brought America into the family and with it the language of America. And now we have English blood and French blood coming in. If Raffaele would marry a black girl—"

       "Enough," Raffaele said. "There are some jokes that ought not to be made."

       "I say blood," Carlo went on, "but all blood is the same. Well, no, there is hot blood and cold blood. Cold blood like Kenneth's here, and hot blood for the Mediterranean—" It was the first time he had used my first name: I was really in the family now. "Well, no, we are all septentrional here, all a bit cool. What is Mother? Genova and the Alto Adige. Coolest of them all."

       "I thought," I said, "all Italo-Americans came from the south. Calabria or Sicily. I had assumed Sicily."

       "We want nothing to do with Sicily," Raffaele said. "It's the Sicilians who are ruining the United States. Chicago is mostly Neapolitans, who are bad enough, but at least the Sicilians are kept out. New York," he said, and shuddered.

       "Change change," Carlo cried. "There you are, Raffaele, a real Chicago man, though you know by right and tradition you should be here in poor Father's seat. But change told you that the future lay in American big business—"

       "I've thought much about that," Raffaele said. "But Zio Gianni does well here. Besides, our product is becoming a very small part of the whole. Panettoni. Canned pomodori—"

       "Zio Gianni?" I asked. "Was he the one who sang the song with the comic stutter in it?"

       "Stutter? Oh, balbuzie. No, that was old Sambon," Carlo said, "the manager. Uncle Jack, as you would call him perhaps, is in agony with his stomach and could not come. He ate something bad in Padova. Outside his own region he cannot eat. You will see him tomorrow or the day after perhaps."

       "I'm leaving tomorrow," I said. "I have a book to finish."

       "I must leave now," Suor Umiltà said. "Till ten o'clock only I was given." Her convent, I understood, was at Melzo, no great distance. "No, nobody rise." Her English was less idiomatic than that of the others. She kissed her mother and brothers and then kissed me, saying, "You have given dear Domenico a wife," which was not strictly true. Then, "Can you remember where my bicycle was put?" Carlo remembered.

       When she had left, Carlo said, "A book? A novel?"

       "Yes. Twenty pages or so still to do. About a blind girl and a crippled man who marry and produce lovely children." Unwisely I added, "Not very good, a lot of nonsense really."

       "There you go," Carlo cried. "Why do you write these things if they are a lot of nonsense?"

       "They start off," I said, "by being promising and even exciting. Then I become conscious of my own ineptitude, the streak of sentimentality in me that is ineradicable, the poverty of the style and my inability to improve it. Yet I cannot destroy what I have done, because that would be to destroy what to me are still living creatures. Moreover, I have a living to earn and readers who are less fastidious than myself. So, in a kind of hopelessness, I complete the book, send it away, try to forget, hope I will do better next time."

       "Pray too, perhaps?" their mother said.

       "In a way," I said cautiously. "In a way pray, yes."

       "But," Raffaele said, "if the book were an immoral book and one that would make scandal, you would still think it possible to pray to write the book better?"