Earthly Powers (7 page)

       The faceless and nameless narrator (I apologise to those who know the story already) is a British journalist visiting Chicago to write about the Reverend Elmer Williams, publisher of Lightnin', a periodical devoted to the exposure of gangsterism and corrupt politics. In the foyer of the Palmer House Hotel he renews acquaintance with a priest, Father Salvaggiani, whom he knew ten years previously on the Italian front, the priest a chaplain, the journalist an ambulance driver. The priest, a fat undistinguished little man who smells of garlic and speaks comic English, is distressed. He has come all the way from Italy to see his brother, who is dying in a private ward in a hospital from multiple cranial fractures and ice-pick wounds in the stomach. The narrator realises that the brother, Ed Salvaggiani, is a noted gangster and, scenting material for a little colour story, goes along to the hospital with the priest. Father Salvaggiani gives his brother the final comforts of the Church and, knowing that he cannot last much longer, weeps. Passing through a public ward he hears terrible screams from a child dying of tuberculous meningitis. The doctors shake their heads: nothing can be done. But Father Salvaggiani lays his hands on the child and prays. The screaming lessens and eventually ceases and the sufferer falls into a deep sleep. To the surprise of the doctors there is a progressive improvement, recorded each day as the priest comes to weep over his dying brother. The brother dies but the child recovers. The faithful among the hospital staff do not doubt that this was a miracle. But Father Salvaggiani talks, in his comic English, of the terrible unintelligibility of God's will. Why could he do nothing for his brother, whom he loved, and yet be the agent of divine mercy for a total stranger? Perhaps the Lord intends this child to grow into a vessel of his own redemptive purpose and has used this meanest of his priestly servants to defeat nature and initiate the accomplishment of that end. He thinks these thoughts aloud at his brother's funeral, a great affair of flowers and unshaven mourners. The narrator thinks such speculations are idle. Life is a mystery and God probably does not exist.

       I fitted a cigarette into my holder and flared Ali's lighter, which, for some reason, I had brought down with me in my dressing-gown pocket. There was hardly a table in the whole house that did not have its own cigarette box and matching heavy Ronson, Queen Anne silver or chunky onyx. Ali ought to be pleased. I thought about the story and could not for the life of me reassemble all the historical facts upon which the fiction was founded. There had certainly been a magazine called Lightnin', and its publisher had been the Reverend Elmer Williams. Father Salvaggiani had really been Monsignor Campanati, at that time a kind of wandering chairman of the Association for the—was it the Propagation of the Faith? His elder brother, Raffaele, had indeed died of gangster violence in Chicago, but as a loud and annoying voice of decency and incorrupt politics. I had been in Chicago, staying at the Palmer House, but not to write about brave crusaders against cruel racketeers. I had come to see the Manet and Monet and Renoir collection of the Chicago grande dame Mrs Potter Palmer, so much I remembered. To write about it? To buy from it? Sell to it? This had disappeared from my mind. I saw clearly still the agonised face of Raffaele, whom I had, though with certain qualifications, admired but who had never much cared for me. This had everything to do with my homosexuality, which, in the manner of decent Latins, he believed was a matter of free election in brutal sinfulness. Carlo was never so censorious. He never saw my homosexuality in, as it were, action; he was not inclined to be interested in stories retailed about me. The sins of libido he knew of were strictly limited to the heterosexual sphere and were two in number. If men desired little boys or each other, that was because they were deprived of the company of women. Or perhaps, though rarely, they might have been set upon by exorcizable demons of buggery. As for those with a holy vocation who had chosen the celibate way, God's grace sustained them like quinine, and that was that. Of such is the kingdom. I Campanati were a highly moral family, except for the youngest boy, Domenico, whom my sister married. The only daughter, Luigia, became a very martinetish mother superior.

       Which hospital had it been? Had the miracle, if it was a miracle, been after all so spectacular? Was the disease in my story the same as the disease in fact? Might it not have been some disease not quite so lethal, its course reversible under the influence of a powerful benign will united to the wavering will of the sufferer? I had, of course, no real need to puzzle all this business out; I was under no obligation at all to help turn Carlo Campanati, a good but greedy man, into a saint. But there was this niggling matter of the truth. The term truth did not flood my eyes as did faith and duty and sometimes home, but a man who serves language, however imperfectly, should always serve truth, and, though my days in the service of language were over, I could not deny the other, timeless, allegiance. But I was less concerned now with that deeper truth, the traditional attribute of God, which literature can best serve by telling lies, than with the shallower truth we call factuality. What had happened in Chicago? I was not sure.

       There were records. There had been witnesses. They could be found, consulted, though with trouble. But the real question for me was: how far could I claim a true knowledge of the factuality of my own past, as opposed to pointing to an artistic enhancing of it, meaning a crafty falsification? In two ways my memory was not to be trusted: I was an old man, I was a writer. Writers in time transfer the mendacity of their craft to the other areas of their lives. In that trivial area of barroom biographical anecdotage, it is so much easier and so much more gratifying to shape, reorder, impose climax and denouement, augment here, diminish there, play for applause and laughter than to recount the bald treadmill facts as they happened. Ernest Hemingway, as I remembered well (but what do I mean by remembering well?), reached a stage where, even though he had virtually ceased to produce fiction, he was totally in thrall to its contrivances. He told me, and he was only in his fifties at the time, some years my junior, that he had slept with the beautiful spy Mata Hari and that she had been "good though a little heavy in the thigh." I knew, and records could confirm, that Hemingway had not yet even paid his first visit to Europe at the time when Mata Hari was executed.

       I had, it is true, been in the habit of keeping certain records, especially in my first twenty years as a professional writer of fiction. The little notebook in the waistcoat pocket, Samuel Butler said, betokens the true writer. And so I had jotted down mots, ideas for stories, descriptions of leaves, the flue on women's arms, dogmerds, the play of light on gin bottles, slang, technical terms, naked factualities of time and place (the better to fix some extraordinary, to use Jim Joyce's term, epiphany), and these notebooks survived, though not in my possession. The notebooks of Kenneth Marchal Toomey were lodged in the archives of some American university, to be published—probably with all the trimmings of scholarship—after my death. I did not object to the opening up of the junkshop of my brain when that brain had ceased to be mine and had become merely part of the economy of the soil; for the present, considerations of reserve and privacy prevailed. Now which was the university? There were letters to and from that university on file, also details of the few thousand dollars paid for the dubious treasure, but my files, thanks to the hurried move from Tangier but also, and mainly, to Geoffrey's inefficiency, were in total disorder. I did not want to bring on another heart attack by insisting on at least a minimal sorting-out, though Geoffrey could be reminded of his grudging promise of the afternoon. What afternoon? What day? Did I? Geoffrey lived entirely in the present; he had shed, perhaps wisely in his case, the burden of being burdened by memory. No, not strictly true: he remembered, far more clearly than I, what it suited him to remember. I trembled again as I remembered what things he had decided to remember about me.

       Best let Carlo achieve sainthood through other miracles, better attested. But then faith and duty trumpeted a muted two-part invention in a chamber of my brain. Saint Gregory, enthroned to some extent by grace of the attestations of K. M. Toomey, Companion of Honour, pray for us. Pray for me, hypocrite, lecher, waster of seed in sterile embraces. Not just faith (lacking now, long volitionally discarded, but, because of a new and final sterility, contemplating return). Not just duty (servant of faith and hence disregarded, but reread that last sentence). Fear then, a kind of fear.

       I knew what I would find in Geoffrey's office. A ghastly mess of toppling files, a snow of unopened letters, corded bundles of the same, books, periodicals, press cuttings, earnest theses with titles like K. M. Toomey and the Thanatic Snydrome, filing cabinets lying on their sides like dead square dogs (K. M. Toomey and Figurative Ineptitude), empty bottles, heel-ground cigarette ends, a desk covered with "gay" periodicals showing naked simpering boys and frank scenes of pedication, a chair sticky as with semen. Nevertheless, I took several deep breaths, and then some Peveril of the Peak watered from the tap in my adjoining washroom. Then I softfooted into the hallway, passed the bar, and entered Geoffrey's office. I switched on the light, whose rawness flooded the foul leer of chaos. I expected to be appalled but not so appalled as I was.

CHAPTER 9

The crackling of the letter in my left dressing-gown pocket was a crackling as of fire. But I was maintaining calm pretty well. The letter had, to cool the metaphor, ignited my cerebral engine, which was throbbing away nicely. I had everything worked out, I thought. When Ali rose at dawn, he found me seated at the kitchen table sipping Blue Mountain. He respected, as ever, my preference for total morning silence and merely nodded a buenos dIas. Nor was he surprised to see me there so early: he knew my scant need of sleep. He nodded and nodded as I poured coffee into another cup, added ample sugar, filled a glass with orange juice from the refrigerator, and put the two eye-openers on a tray. Geoffrey's were the eyes that had to be opened. I left the kitchen, balancing the tray with an admirable (I admired) control of nerves, and mounted to the master bedroom.

       Geoffrey lay across the bed, his head over the edge like a man lapping from a pool. I put down the tray and shook him. He made foul noises and at last awoke, blinking down at the floor as if wondering what it was. Then he forced himself onto his back in a crucifixion posture, groaned, coughed, blinked rapidly, then almost sightlessly grasped the orange juice I proffered. He drained it blind, smacked, shuddered, belched, shivered, sighed deeply and handed back the emptied glass. I gave him his coffee. He was half awake now.

       He sipped, then muttered "Cat piss." He did not mean the coffee. "Mouth like a fucking all-in wrestler's jockstrap. Awfully kind, dear." I sustained my morning silence. "Any more there?" He blinked for the tray and, he hoped, coffeepot. I gave him a cigarette and lighted it with Ali's lighter. He coughed long and obscenely and then said, "Better. Much." Then he lay down again and smoked, rolling the dirty whites of his eyes at me. "To what do I owe the inestimable so to speak fucking honour?" I cleared my throat and spoke my first words of the day, saying: "Last night you asked me for ten thousand pounds."

       "Did I? Did I really? A nocturnal inspiration, as they say." And then, "Oh yes, my God, last night. Behaved badly, I seem to recall. It was that bloody Maltese raisin jam and vinegar." He recalled more. "Ah yes, indeed." He appraised me, who was sitting on the edge of the bed. "You seem fit, dear. Does you good, that sort of fuse-blow, so it would appear, yes. Must do it more often. What's that about ten thousand pounds?"

       "Geoffrey," I said. "Listen with very great care and do not say anything until I have finished. First, you shall have your ten thousand pounds."

       "Jesus Beelzebub, are you serious?"

       "I said no interruptions, didn't I? Attention now, please, close attention."

       "Hanging on to your lips, sir."

       "In the early hours I was in your office, which, I may say, was and still is in an unbelievable state of squalor and disorder. It was by sheer chance that I found this letter on the floor, a cigarette-end crushed into it by, I presume, your heel." I took out the dirty envelope and, from that, the letter. "This is from Everard Huntley in Rabat."

       "That shit."

       "Geoffrey, please. You have no conception of the effort I am expending on keeping calm. I will not read out the letter, which is to me but altogether concerns you. I will merely tell you what it says. It says that a certain Abdulbakar called on the British consulate in great and indeed tearful distress. He spoke of the death of his son, Mahmud."

       Geoffrey went terribly pale and whispered, "Oh bloody Jesus."

       "Yes, Geoffrey, the injuries you inflicted in what you termed play proved lethal. This letter, I must inform you, is already a month old, and I have no knowledge of what has happened since. However. Abdulbakar quickly modulated his distress to cries and angry shouts and demands that justice be done. He expected justice to be done by the consular representative of Her Britannic Majesty. First, though, he had gone searching for you in Tangier, finding at length our house, only just vacated by us and already in the possession of the expatriate painter Withers."

       "Oh Christ, get on with it."

       "That was while Mahmud, poor boy, was still alive and in hospital with an even chance of recovery after his operation."

       "What operation for God's sake? Oh Christ, yes—"

       "Abdulbakar had only a garbled version of your name. My name fits easily into Arabic, as you know. The teller of tales Tumi, so said Withers, had departed. Abdulbakar will have no difficulty in finding out where he is now, though Huntley kindly kept quiet about it. Huntley says that you, Geoffrey, are in grave danger."