Earthly Powers (94 page)
The second and final act began with Nicholas in sackcloth doing penance. Word came from Rome to say that all episcopal duties and privileges were now restored. The Pope was well pleased with Nicholas's treatise on the Holy Trinity and his eloquent denunciation of Anus. Unfortunately, a great number of Germanic tribes had been converted to Christianity by Arians and the heresy was deeply rooted among them. Fra Giovanni appeared to announce that he had been given a special imperial appointment to extirpate with fire and sword the damnable aberration. You? Yes, I. And the friar removed his habit to reveal himself clad in armour. Kill them all. Torture them before killing. Cleanse them with fire before plunging the knife in. No no no, our faith is a faith of love, cried Nicholas. So we love the foul heretics who believe Christ to be non-coeternal with the Father? Nonsense. War. The vaguely ecclesiastical decor, with its pillars and mullions, ascended to the flies, and the scene thereafter was a kind of blasted heath, with Nicholas crying like Lear against the roar of the tempest, the tempest being battle conducted in the orchestra on good Hollywood principles, mainly plagiarism of Holst's Mars. The producer, helped I presumed by Bevilacqua and abetted by Domenico, had episodes of Nazi-style interrogation slotted into scenes of massacre, and all the time Nicholas protested or looked on helpless. "Dove sono i carri armati?" a man asked behind me, and he was answered by bits of film of modern war projected onto the cyclorama. At one point Nicholas besought heaven to send down Love, and Venere herself appeared as a goddess of brothels for soldiers. Bereft mothers pleaded with Nicholas for a miracle. One of them placed the bloody corpse of a child in his arms. And then Nicholas was alone with the child, his eyes again up to heaven. The noise of war receded to allow him to ask God why why why. There was no answer. "You are a God of hate," Nicholas cried, "a God who murders the innocent. Why did you permit that miracle? See what that miracle is doing to the world? Tell me why you put that power into my hands." I waited for the racket to modulate into soothing chords for high strings, roseate clouds to gather and hover, the blasted heath become an Edenic landscape, angelic voices intone a hymn, the voice of God say this was all a temptation to Nicholas to curse his Creator and, see, he had come through uncursing: get ready for sainthood. But all that happened was that Nicholas gave out Maledico maledico on a high B flat and, as the curtain slowly descended, was drowned by the renewed din of war, the child still limp in his arms.
There was applause enough, but there were also catcalls. Spectators in our gallery began to get down to the rails to look at what was proceeding in the stalls, for the shouts of battle seemed to have been transferred thither from the wings. Conservative musicians were standing to denounce the work as a disgrace to La Scala and one another as insufficiently conservative or something. The young were cheering: the God addressed by Nicholas was really the Italian establishment. Punches were launched at the young by the less young. The less young were punched back by the young. The singers took their bows and were mostly bravoed. Small contained lights went on in the auditorium. A fracas with unhandy blows began not far from myself. Domenico appeared on the stage with the singers and was booed and acclaimed. I got out.
CHAPTER 66
The bas-relief representing the birth, life and death of Saint Ambrose, patron of Milan, was, until Carlo's successor removed it, to be seen in the Duomo di Maria Nascente, affixed to a patch of wall near the marble altar created by Martino Bassi, with Giulio Cesare Procaccini's statue of Saint Ambrose not far away. It should, if a modern monument to the saint were required at all by the Milanese, properly have been set up in the Basilica di San Ambrogio, but this has always been a near autonomous temple, with its/own (Ambrosian) rite and confidence in its own principles of sacred art/which do not encompass the modern and exotic. The marble which Hortense had incised was good New York State stone, as firm and lovely as Carrara and far better than San Pietro. On it she had sculpted the infant Ambrose's head, with bees swarming about his lips in token of heaven's favour; the young Ambrose togaed as prefect of Milan; Ambrose naked, casting off his garments along with his wealth; Ambrose in full bishop's fig from the waist up, all balls and leg muscles beneath, cursing Anus; Ambrose raising a stone head of Zeus to smash it, cursing Aurelius Symmachus; Ambrose naked on his deathbed, singing one of his own hymns. The style, which mixed Eric Gill and Epstein, was not appreciated by the Italians, and there were powerful complaints about Ambrose's explicit masculinity. It was likened to a strip cartoon in the Daily American: it needed only fumetti with ZOWIE and EEEEK; one critic called it SUPERSANTO. Carlo stoutly defended it as a tribute from the New Catholic World to the Old; the Milanese must start learning the meaning of the term Catholic.
I did not attend the dedication of this work (for which Hortense was paid five thousand dollars) on December 7. Instead, after writing a letter to Domen ico deploring the alterations to my libretto, especially the blasphemous truncation, and demanding that my name be withdrawn from the programs and posters, I flew back, via Rome and Madrid, to Tangier. I was angry, but my anger was a little appeased by the notices in the Italian newspapers. The critic in the Corriere della Sera said that the opera was an affront to the cardinal, the saint, and all true believers, but its perversion of the hagiographic truth could have been swallowed had there been copious draughts of music with, if not originality, at least character to wash it down. La Stampa of Turin called it a Broadway musical without tunes and hinted at a vendetta within the Campanati family. Ii Messaggero said that the true blasphemy was not the cynical twisting of a sacred legend but the pollution of a noble temple of art by a confection which was pure Hollywood. The communist papers on the other hand praised the work as a slap in the face for the forces of reaction, though they ignored the music.
When I got back to the house on Calle Mozart I found that Ralph was still away in Rabat. Ali said, with all the deference in the world, that I had neglected to pay the wages due at the end of November: much on the se–or's mind, no doubt, a trivial matter like wages easily forgotten, but if the se–or would be so good—I apologised and went round to my branch of the Banque du Maroc on the rue Spinoza: I was quite cashless after my trip. I made out a check and the clerk took it away. He returned puzzled and apologetic. He said that, except for a few dirhams, I had drawn out the entire balance of my current account on December 5. Impossible, I was away in London on that date. He brought the check. The sum drawn was one million four thousand two hundred and fifty dirhams; the date was as he said; the signature was mine. The signature was not mine; it was Ralph's facsimile of mine; he had shown that minor talent before, in abusive letters to publishers and others purporting to come from me. "Mon secrétaire?" I said. "Le monsieur amen cain?"
"Oui, le monsieur ngre."
He'd brought checks signed by me before for encashment, though never before for a sum so large. I kept calm before these bank menials with their large wondering brown eyes. I even smiled. I gently cursed to them my absentmindedness. I would cable Geneva and arrange for a transfer of funds. Meanwhile I needed cash. "Bien sz2r, monsieur."
I went home, paid Ali his wage and gave him money for marketing. Then I looked at Ralph's room. Everything was gone, but there was no farewell message. There is no need to transcribe my feelings. Indeed, feelings are always a most difficult thing to convey. I rage I melt I burn and so on, like Polifemo in Acis and Galatea. And yet it had always been to be expected, it had always been in the nature of the relationship and every relationship of that order. The foreknowledge had been part of the furniture. Still, I felt excoriated, flayed, dreadfully abused. All over, good riddance, forget him, yet I could not forget him. The musky exhalations of his skin were printed on my epithelium; I saw his fingers walking on the harpsichord keyboard, his teeth stained with fig juice; I heard the resonances of a voice hued like his body.
I watched the mail, I watched it for a month, hoping for a letter whining that he was stranded in Mombasa or on Aldabra Island, disabused, desperate, begging to be taken back. I had no doubt that it was to East Africa he had gone, thinking he was homing. I am here in Mogadishu, and it's hell, man. Dearest Ken, please fly to Arusha and bring me back, I've learned my lesson. And then, in February, when I had experienced the first sweet pangs of awareness that I could adjust myself to his absence, I received a letter, the address typed, the stamp the gaudy assertive one of a new African state, with the name RUKWA crowning a black Mussolinian profile, gaudy jungle flora behind. "Dear Ken," I read, "I know you regarded the taking of the money as the least of my crimes. One of the good things about you was not caring too much about money. If you want the money you can have it, though there will have to be some fiddling because there's a severe limitation just been put through on the amount you can legally export from Rukwa. As you see from the letterhead I'm working in the Information Department. The official language is English at present and English will be the second language when Rukwayi has been properly modernised and established, which will be a long job. I knew I was right to come to Africa. Randy Foulds is here with the official title of Minister of Education but he spends most of his time on a new book which he says will be the first real African novel. The big job is total Africanization. You don't want to hear about making omelettes and having to break eggs, but some Asian hearts have to be broken. All the commerce in Tukinga, which is being built up into a modern capital city, has been in the hands of the Asians for as far back as you can go, but now there has to be expropriation and enforced repatriation and the rest of it. That goes too for the whites including the missionaries who run the hospitals and the technicians who were brought in under the late unlamented Hossan Zambolu. Peaceful unification is another of our slogans, which means working on the tribal mind, as the boss calls it, and instilling the idea of a bigger patriotism. No violence, no police state mthods. My knowledge of a little Oma surprised the boss and showed him I was ~erious. I've a hell of a lot to do. But I'm happy, very happy. For the first time. You might not recognise me now in my red handwoven robe. I sign myself as always but I have to think of myself as Kasam Ekuri. Believe it or not, but the name Kentumi exists here. I tell them there's only one Ken Toomey."
There was more, but not much more. My heart sank further with every line I read. The innocence of the boy, the political ignorance, the damnable optimism. He made it easy for me to put him out of my mind. Ralph didn't exist any more. There was a black functionary in a new state that would soon learn to be repressive. He wore a red robe and was named Kasam Ekuri. I did not know the man.
On the very day I received this letter that terrible issue of La Domenica AmbroSiana appeared which, under the title Peccati Cardinali and the by-line Massimo Fioroni, devoted many pages to the denunciation of that other innocent, Carlo Campanati. I did not see a copy until a fortnight after its publication. I was taking a gloomy cocktail in the bar of the Rif and saw an Italian tourist yawning over the magazine. There was Carlo on the cover, caught by a camera in an unfortunate posture—raising a glass of what could have been blood, Tuscan cigar in mouth, cigar smoke billowing as amply as steam at night from a Manhattan street grating. I asked if I could borrow. The man said I could keep, he had done with it. But, with reference to the picture on the cover, he showed fine vicious teeth and made a thumb-down gesture. That was a fair précis of the article. I read: "I membri del regno Si POSSOflO nconoscere Sempre dai loro frutti "Those who belong to the kingdom are easy to recognise: by their fruits shall ye know them. We may ask: which kingdom? We may also add to fruits circumcrescent greenery. With the failing health of the Holy Father the question of his successor inevitably arises, and among the number of the papabili the name of Carlo Campanati, Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, has been glowing, especially in the gutter press, with a proleptic nimbus of election. It is time to consider not merely the fruits of his reign in the archdiocese of Milan but also the odours of his associations." I regret that this does not always sound like English. Pompous Italian journalism translates ill. "The Campanati stock offers much of bizarre fascination to the student of family backgrounds in the Italian prelacy. Its commercial side began humbly enough with the production and national retailing of one of the more famous, and certainly most redolent, of our cheeses. Later it branched out and grew an American affiliation. The father of the present Cardinal Archbishop of Milan married an American lady of mixed Northern Italian origins and begot three Italo-American sons and one Italo. American daughter before fading out of both commerce and society to await the lethal outcome of a disease whose dire nature may be surmised if not, in the considerations of decency, named. The daughter became a sister of the contemplative order of Saint John the Divine and reached the venerable eminence of mother superior. The youngest son became a musician of mediocre talent who found his vocation in the composition of mediocre music for mediocre Hollywood films. The eldest son emigrated to Chicago as the director of an organisation dedicated to the importation into the United States of Italian foodstuffs. We know what the third son became.
"Before we examine this son's career let us consider what happened to those members of the family which remained in the secular world. The mother coura geously allied herself to the cause of persecuted Jewry during the time of the Nazi regime, contracted a deadly disease, and sought a way out of her own suffering by an action which might technically be considered suicidal but which the more charitable could construe as a selfelected matyrdom. Attempting to assassinate Heinrich Himmler outside a Berlin cinema, she was deflected from success by the prompt action of a companion of the ReichsfŸhrer and herself met a prompt end at the hands of gunmen of the SS. The eldest son had, some time earlier, been drawn into conflict with Chicago gangsters. Apparently illequipped to fight Al Capone and his myrmidons with the right moral and legal weapons, and certainly quite unequipped to oppose him with a more telling armament, he met mutilation and death in the sordid circumstances inseparable from a Chicago gang warfare which most of my readers will be acquainted with only from its glamorous exploitation on the cinema screen.