Earthly Powers (52 page)

       "What," I said, "can you do in a place like Chiasso?"

       "Live out my days. I might travel a little. Visit the States and put flowers on poor Raffaele's grave." But she said that perkily, as if Raffaele had been a dog known back in New Jersey. Still, as hearing that tone and wanting to correct it, she added, "Poor boy. Poor good boy. You didn't get on too well with poor Raffaele. But I'm glad you were there at the end. Perhaps he knew."

       "I admired him. The trouble was that he couldn't accept that a writer like me has to touch pitch and be defiled. It seemed a rather sinful trade to him, writing. He was a very upright man."

       "Oh yes, very upright. And look where it got him, poor boy." She had not been told all the details of where it had got him. It had been made to sound like a clean death. "I gather they were all there, all in black, mountains of lilies. The hypocrisy. My own people, Italo. Americans. Catholics, good sons of the Holy Apostolic Catholic Church." She said it bitterly and seemed to shrink from some inner image, as of a big black spider lowering itself from an ombrellone.

       I said, "Carlo said you'd turn from God for a time. That was to be expected, he said. He talked about divine mysteries and so on."

       "Divine mysteries, all nonsense," she said. "There are bad men and good men, it's as simple as that. Greed and malevolence face moderation and decency. Carlo always wants to bring theology into things, blame everything on the devil."

       "That's his trade."

       "Yes, his trade. Evil's necessary to his trade. Without evil he'd have nothing to do.5o go on, let's have more evil." I gave her a Gold Flake and lighted it for her with Ali's Maltese cross gift, no, with a Swan vesta. She puffed it like a girl with her hair newly up, daringly, at some dance, not inhaling, wetting the end so that the paper dissolved on her lips and she had to throw it away after three puffs. She ground it out on the brown grass with a firm high heel. "You won't be shocked," she said. "Your own Catholicism," she added.

       "What about it?"

       "Carlo says you've lost your faith and he'll have you back one of these days. When he has time to work on you. He seems very busy making money at the moment. For the Holy Apostolic et cetera."

       "For the propagation of the faith among the Hindus and Muslims and Taoists. And the black benighted Africans. Carlo, as you know better than any, is a very remarkable man. But he'll never get me back in the Church. Perhaps when We're both old men together. But not nel mezzo del cammino." I had just 2 celebrated my thirty-fifth birthday. A little dinner at Fouquet's with Hortense and Domenico, Hortense's left cheek heavily made up to hide the purple of a slap, she and Domenico having had a blazing row about something.

       "God make me pure," Concetta quoted, "but not yet. Saint Augustine, apostle to the Chicago Neapolitans." I could see now why she could be the sort of person whom Gaetano Salvemini might want to visit. And then, "May they all rot in hell." Very American, the sound very dark. "Bleeding statues and ignorance and superstition and violence and villainy. Scared of the thunder. The Catholic Church can accommodate anything." It was a passage of bitterness, but like something in an aria, the fulfilment of some obligatory form. I waited for it to pass. She said, with affection only slightly bitter, "Carlo believes that good always wins. In the long run. Well, that long run's just a little bit too long." It was a long long, American. "What I've heard called a desperate optimism." And then, somewhat defiantly, as if I might not wish to believe her, "I've read books, you know. I've tried to keep up with my two religious children. I go on reading books. I've read yours. I've even checked the Italian translations with the originals. They're not too good in Italian."

       "They're not too good in English. But I go on trying to make them better."

       She said, "There's a limit to the amount of improvement you can make in anything. Despite what Carlo believes. I think what Carlo believes may not be quite orthodox. But orthodoxy may be a matter of strength of will. Carlo thinks you can will anything. Oh, with a bit of grace and prayer as side dishes. You've evidently," in a teasing tone, "not willed yourself to be Shakespeare."

       "Nor did Shakespeare," I said. "You've hit the root of the trouble as regards my faith. I should be going with you to Switzerland. Money breeds and watches tick, and it's nothing to do with free will. I was predestined to be Kenneth M. Toomey, indifferent and overrewarded scribbler."

       "And predestined to lose your faith?" She was smiling. "That's a little hard, I'd say. God willing you not to believe in him."

       "Oh, I believe in him all right, whatever he is. The enigmatic Jehovah of the Old Testament. You don't know whether he's good or bad but he's there all right. Giving us a hard time when he bothers about us at all."

       "To do with sex, isn't it?" and she gave me a straight gaze. "I read this novel of Aldous Huxley's. The best thing about it was the quotation on the—what's it called?"

       "The epigraph?"

       "That's the word. Created sick, commanded to be sound. Look, I don't mean you're sick. Poor Raffaele talked about sickness, though poor Carlo can't believe it really exists."

       "It exists all right. If there's only one kind of soundness, then I suppose I'm sick. But I don't feel sick. This postwar world's learning to separate the act of sex from the act of generation. The Church says that's a sin. But it's deliber 2 ately chosen, a healthy act of wicked free will. If it's a sin then I'm predisposed to sin. The Church and I can't agree on it. So I'm out of the Church. Very simple and very unfair."

       "You've talked with Carlo about this?"

       "He'd only bring up the sin of Sodom. Kaum nabi Lot." Then the tears came. I forced them back into their ducts.

       "Carlo wrote about—No, I won't mention it. Love between men. He could see that all right. That's Malay or Arabic or something you were saying, isn't it? Yes, he wrote about that. Bereavement, bereavement. What a world it is. Do you want to take a siesta?" Forced back, the tears revolted and had their own way.

       "Sorry. Sorry sorry sorry." So I shook and shook on the white iron chair, eyes in hands, feeling her hand tapping my shoulder in dry sympathy. After all, she needed sympathy too.

       She said, "The agency in Milan was pretty quick getting somebody. Some big art professor from Philadelphia on what he called a sabbatical, meaning a Sunday one year long. A wife and seven children and he moves in at the end of the month. Then we don't know what. Sell the place? Italy's crammed with unsalable palazzi. Is there any odd picture you want to look after for me in Paris? I can't make up my mind about putting them up for auction. I suppose London would be the place, Christie's or somebody. I guess I must wait till Carlo gets back."

       "Sorry sorry sorry."

       "That's all right, you get it out of your system." I could tell my sorrow was a bore to her and she couldn't be blamed. "You take that siesta. I've some letters to write."

       In my cool room with the shutters shut and the thin shives of air and light coming through the slats, I cried myself to sleep in an overloud selfpitying transport. I heard briefly a couple of servant voices in the corridor muttering about it, not displeased probably with, at last, some noisy manifestation of grief, the vedova Campanati having been unnaturally quiet through two bereavements and those close together. I dreamed the dream I ought to have expected: a fusion of Raftaele and Philip devoured by something in the Australian wastes. Waking in terror I was aghast to find myself grotesquely engorged and pumping out seed onto the white top sheet. I saw, in the forewaking instant, the metal lettering of the King's Cross hotel on its white façade, and heard a voice saying o ye of little faith. And then the flood of semen.

       There were just the two of us at dinner. Zuppa di verdura, veal fillets, a zabaglione, a very cold spumante to drink. She said, "That one, for instance," meaning the Tommaso Rodari above the sideboard (had it been there last time? I thought not) of Lot and his daughters. Nabi Lot, having fled the incinerated Sodomites, ready now to be made drunk and incestuous. Was there a delicate 2 malice here? I thought not, judging from her eyes, serious but not sad. "Or something else, take your choice."

       "Too great a responsibility," I said. "Thanks all the same. Won't your sabbatical professor expect to be surrounded by Great Italian Art, no extra charge?" Then, aghast again, I found a fresh engorgement beginning, hidden for now by the white damask: what the hell was going on? I said quickly, "October the seventeenth. Domenico's concerto, a great event. Will you be coming to Paris? You could stay at my place, plenty of room."

       "That concerto," she said, her slight venerean strabismus glinting, as her daughter-in-law's so often did, in faint mockery. "He put all that scribble between himself and his own father's funeral. Rubbing things out and pencilling things in and bitting out at poor Hortense, the great artist not to be diverted from his great art even by a death in the family. Is it good, this concerto?"

       "I've only heard fragments. Besides, I'm no judge. Will you come?" A dangerous question with this throbbing engorgement under the tablecloth. But then old Rosetta, who had not so far entered the dining room, came in with coffee and a harsh look for me, my incontinence of the siesta perhaps already discovered. The engorgement, embarrassed, receded.

       "All right, I'll be there. Though I'm no judge either. There's no music on either side of the family. Well, that's not altogether true. His father was a great frequenter of the backstage of La Scala. When there was an opera with a ballet in it. He never cared much for Puccini or Wagner, not enough legs." I couldn't help smiling at this tartness: she acted neither the widow nor the mother in the right Mediterranean tradition. "Raffaele," she said firmly, "my husband that is, not my son, developed paralysis out of a condition of syphilis."

       "Good God, I'd no idea." I even spilled my coffee.

       "No reflection on the belle ballerine of La Scala. Good clean girls, many of them. But Milan has other girls, not so good, not so clean, not to mention the other cities where a businessman goes on business. Raffaele was considerate enough to develop his condition fairly late in life, when he could do no real harm at home. He went to mass every Sunday, of course. He'd committed no sin. He'd merely done what a good son of the Church was expected to do. Perhaps you wonder why I'm telling you this."

       "I can see," I said, aware of a total flaccidity now, "that you'd want to tell it some day to somebody."

       "Domenico has a lot of his father's temperament. But I think he has shown more, what's the word, prudence." She smiled, quite without bitterness. "Pru denza. That, incidentally, was the name of one of Raffaele's longer lasting mistresses. My husband, I mean, of course. Domenico at least has not begotten bastardini in the neighbouring villages. So far as we know. Your dear sister," she drank her coffee unshakily, "has taken on something of a handful. But I'm glad 2 about the twins. The twins are adorable. Domenico doesn't seem to think so. He thinks Hortense should regulate their crying and screaming more efficiently. They get in the way of his composing concerti and so on. The twins," she said, "have a lot of their mother in them, but not much of their father. To look at, I mean. I think," she said, and she gazed at me directly, "Hortense is a very good girl, but not too good a girl."

       "I don't," I said, "think I know altogether what you mean."

       "Oh come now. A girl of fire and spirit and perhaps talent. I understand she has taken to art, sculpture I think. She will not he browbeaten by Domenico the great musician. I should think she hits back. All this is very good for Domenico. Shall we go and walk in the garden a little? There's a fine moon and we may hear a nightingale." Her intonation on that last word had the faint mockery she had given to concerto: something showoff and male and sexual and lacking in fundamental substance of a nutritious character. Gilt and ginger, not bread. The talk about Hortense had, not shamefully for this was clearly a pathological condition, brought the engorgement back. I thought of iced water and felt a sufficient slackening. I was able to get up from the table.

       The moon was like a round of Breton butter with fromatical veins and a nightingale gushed ridiculous cadenzas. The fig trees proffered limp mittens and the oleanders were rich with heartless daisies. "You'll be sorry to leave this?" I said.

       She did not answer that. She said, "Hortense cried when she spoke of her mother. She cried more when she spoke of her father. She talked of betrayal, a silly thing to do I think. You can't be loyal to the dead."

       "It was the speed of it that upset her. Or ere those shoes were cold. Funeral baked meats and so on. He's really the dead one, I suppose. I telephoned him from New York. He seemed quite the stranger. There was nothing to say. He sounded disappointed because I wasn't a potential patient. Parenthood is probably a lot of nonsense."

       "Unless," she said, always ready like Carlo with some little shock of truth, "it's a willed relationship. I'm glad to have Hortense as a daughter. There's nothing stupider than that in-law thing that's tacked on. Very cold, like somebody forced onto you by the state. The Italian's better—nuora. And you, of course, ought to be a son since you're her brother. But I don't think you need anybody."

       "I need somebody," I said fiercely, and then, "Forget that. It will give you the wrong kind of image." And then, "Female Friend. That has a fine Augustan ring. It sounds like a better than family, better than sexual relationship. You remember Cyrano—just before he dies, what he says to Roxane. I can't remember the French. I've had one friend in a silken gown in my life." And then, "Do, if you wish, consider my place in Paris as another home. There's room 2 enough there. And," I added, "you won't find little naked Thorvaldsen shepherd boys disporting themselves, whatever that means. Heterosexuals aren't always expected to be in action, why we others?" She smiled as we strolled under the moonwashed quercus, or it may have been a cypress. I said, fiercely as before, "I need somebody. I found somebody. I lost somebody. We're the same as the ones blessed by Church and biology. Do you see that? Do you?" And in mockery the devil at the base of my belly began to rear.