The Complete Enderby (48 page)

‘Not me.’ Enderby made a noise which he at once realized was like what the cheaper novels called a gay laugh. He must be very ill-at-ease then. ‘I’ll have a Bloody Mary, if you have it, that is.’ He clanked out a few dirhams. The tomato-juice would be nourishing; he needed nourishment.

‘
Sangre de María
,’ shrugged the filthy-shirted man, who seemed to own this place, going to behind the bar. Enderby went to climb a stool.

‘Very baroque, that is,’ he pronounced. ‘They all call it that, I believe. They lack a knowledge of English history, naturally, the Spaniards, I mean, so they make a kind of Crashaw conceit out of it, though, of course, the Crashavian style derives, so they tell me, from Spanish models. Or that statue of St Teresa, I think it is, with the dart going through her. But this, of course, is the Virgin Mary, bleeding. A virgin, you see: blood. The same sort of thing, though. Professor Empson was very interested in that line of Crashaw – you know: “He’ll have his teat ere long, a bloody one. The mother then must suck the son.” Two lines, I mean. Baroque, anyway.’ All who were not in a drug-trance looked at Enderby. He wondered why his nerves babbled like that; he must be careful; he would start blurting everything out if he wasn’t. ‘And your Gomez,’ he said, ‘is, I am credibly informed, something of an expert on Spanish poetry.’

‘Gomez,’ said the mortician, ‘is an expert only on the involutions of his own rectum.’

The man with the blackboard shakily wrote
Comings in the Skull
. The white-haired reader said, very seriously:

‘Now, this, I reckon, is
not
shit. Listen.’ And he read out:

‘Society of solitary children –

Stilyagi, provo, beat, mafada,

Nadaista, energumeno, mod and rocker –

Attend to the slovos of your psychedelic guides –

Swamis, yogins and yoginis,

Amerindian peyote chiefs, Zen roshis.

Proclaim inner space, jolting the soft machine

Out of its hypnosis conditioned by

The revealed intention of the Senders –’

‘But,’ said Enderby unwisely, dancing the bloody drink in his hand, smiling, ‘we don’t have mods and rockers any more.’ He had read his
Daily Mirror
, after all, to some purpose. ‘That’s the danger, you see, of trying to make poetry out of the ephemeral. If you’ll forgive me, that sounded to me very old-fashioned. Of course, it isn’t really clear whether it
is
actually poetry. Back to the old days,’ he smiled, ‘of
vers libre
. There were a lot of tricks played by people, you know. Seed catalogues set out in stanzas. Oh, a lot of the
soi-distant avant-garde
were taken in.’

There were low growls of anger, including, it appeared, one from a man who was supposed to be in a trance. The white-haired reader seemed to calm himself through a technique of rhythmic shallow breathing. Then he said:

‘All right, buster. Let’s hear from you.’

‘How? Me? You mean –?’ They were all waiting.

‘You know the whole shitting works,’ went the mortician. ‘You’ve not quit talking since you came in. Who asked you to come in, anyway?’

‘It’s a bar, isn’t it?’ said Enderby. ‘Not private, I mean. Besides, there’s this matter of Gomez.’

‘The hell with Gomez. Crap out with your own.’

The atmosphere was hostile. The owner air-dabbled from behind the bar, sneering. The pianist was playing something deliberately silly in six-eight time. Enderby said:

‘Well, I didn’t really come prepared. But I’m working on something in the form of an Horatian ode. I’ve not got very far, only a couple of stanzas or so. I don’t think you’d want to hear it.’ He felt doubt itching like piles. All that stuff about swamis and inner space. A sonnet, yet. Horatian ode, yet. He was not very modern, perhaps. A critic had once written: ‘Enderby’s addiction to the sonnet-form proclaims that the ’thirties are his true home.’ He did not like the young very much and he did not want to take drugs. He was supposed to have killed a quintessential voice of the new age. But that voice had not been above gabbling Enderby’s own
work
and getting a fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature for it. Enderby now recited stoutly:

‘The urgent temper of the laws,

That clips proliferation’s claws,

Shines from the eye that sees

A growth is a disease.

Only the infant will admire

The vulgar opulence of fire

To tyrannize the dumb

Patient continuum

And, while the buds burst, hug and hold

A cancer that must be controlled

And moulded till it fit

These forms not made for it.’

Out of a trance somebody farted. ‘That last couplet,’ Enderby said trembling, ‘needs a bit of going over, I see that, but I think you’ll get the general idea.’ In confusion he swigged his Bloody Mary and presented the flecked glass (splash of some small slaughtered animal on a wind-screen) for another. When Enderby had been a boy he had gone to sleep on the upper deck of the last tram of the night and had awakened in the tramshed. Leaving in shame he had noticed uniformed men looking at him in the quiet wonder which was the proper tribute to an act of an imbecile. He seemed to be getting that same look now. He said: ‘I stand for form and denseness. The seventeenth-century tradition modified. When is this man Gomez coming in?’ The mortician resumed snipping and gumming, shaking his head, grinning like a clown. The white-headed cropped man hid his own grin in a new slim volume. The entranced offered the loudest criticism, great farts cometing through inner space. ‘Well,’ said Enderby, growing angry, ‘what about that bloody act of plagiarism of bloody Yod Crewsy?’

A man came limping from behind the blackboard (which now had, very vulgar,
My cuntry is the yoniverse
scrawled on it) and said: ‘I’ll tell you about that, friend.’ He was totally bald but luxuriantly
bearded
and spoke in an accent Enderby had hitherto associated with cowboy films on television. ‘That was pure camp. Is, I guess. A new frame of awareness. It’s not the poems as such so much as how he looks at them. Like you get these good pictures with shitty Victoriana in them, a frame inside a frame. Man, it’s called the Process.’

‘I’d very much like to see –’ Enderby’s nausea was complicated. And if that sonnet-draft was in there, the Satan one. And, whether it was there or not, could he control himself, handling richly rewarded flagrant sneering theft?

‘You can learn any place,’ said the bald bearded man. ‘You’ll find it in the john library.’ He pointed beyond the curtain of many-coloured plastic strips with a finger that seemed half-eaten, a kindly man really. ‘And as for plagiarism, everything belongs to everybody. Man, that’s called the Lesson.’ He returned to behind the blackboard, limping. On the blackboard was now written
Vinegar strokes through magnified sebacities
. Enderby went, his heart fainting, towards the john. There was a dark passage, sibilant with the wind, and crunchy rubbish underfoot. In a kind of alcove a man lay on a camp-bed under a dull bulb, another man beside him with a notebook. The supine man, on a drugged trip, sent reports up from the unconscious. Down there ghostly scissors were at work on newspapers out of eternity. It was a lot of nonsense.

The lavatory was small and dirty, but there was a red light of the kind used in electric log-fires. There were a lot of books, many of them eaten by mould. Enderby sat heavily on the hollow seat and disturbed the books with a paddling right hand, panting. That sinful volume was not far from the top. The title was
Fixes
; there was a bold leering portrait of the pseudo-author. The sixteenth impression, Enderby noted with gloom. He noted too that many of the poems were not his own; it was a case of multiple theft, perhaps, unless bloody Vesta or that Wittgenstein man had written some of them. Enderby found six unpublished poems by himself and, a small mercy in a world of filth, not one of them was that sonnet. There was, as Miss Kelly had said, a poem entitled ‘Sonnet’, but that had twelve bad unrhyming lines and might well be something that Yod Crewsy himself had composed at his secondary modern school. Enderby read it shuddering:

‘God,’ said Enderby to his shrinking bowels. ‘God God God.’ So they had come to this, had they? And his own finely wrought little works desecrated by contact. He dropped the book on the floor; it remained open, but a sharp draught from under the far from snugly fitting door pushed at the erect fan of its middle pages and disclosed a brief poem that Enderby, squinting in the dim red light, seemed thumped on the back into looking at. Something or somebody thumped him: an admonitory goblin that perhaps lived wetly in the lavatory cistern. He had not noticed this poem before, but, by God, he knew the poem. He felt a terrible excitement mounting. He grabbed the book with both hands.

Then the door opened. Enderby looked, expecting to see the wind, but it was a man. Excited though he was, he began to deliver a standard protest against invasion of privacy. The man waved it away and said: ‘Gomez.’

‘The fact that the door isn’t locked is neither here nor there. All right then, I’ve finished anyway.’ Something in the spread sound of his words seemed to tell him that he was smiling. He felt his mouth, surprised. It was the excitement, it was the first rehearsal of triumph. Because, by God, he had them now. By the short hairs, as they said. But was he sure, could he be sure? Yes, surely he was sure. Or was it just a memory of having foreseen it in print? He could check, he was bound to be able to check, even in this bloody
heathen
place. There might be some really cultivated man here among the expatriate scribblers.

‘Gomez. Billy Gomez.’ He was a bit rodent-like and, so Enderby twitched at once, might be dangerous. But in what context? Gomez finned out his paws in a kind of cartoon-mouse self-depreciation. He had a dirty white barman’s jacket on but no tie. He seemed also to be wearing tennis-shoes.

‘Ah.’ That other structure of urgency was suddenly re-illuminated. Heavy as an ivied tower, it crashed the blackness, decollated, to the sound of brass, like something in
son et lumière
. ‘
Sí
Enderby said. ‘
Su hermano
. In London, that is.
Mi amigo
. Or colleague, shall I say. Has he sent anything for me?’ That sonnet by Wordsworth, on the sonnet. Key becomes lute becomes trumpet. This book he now thrust into his side pocket. Load of filthy treachery becomes, quite improbably, sharp weapon of revenge.

‘You come.’ He led Enderby out of the lavatory down a passage that took them to stacked crates of empties and then to a garlicky kind of still-room, brightly lighted with one bare bulb. Enderby now saw Gomez very clearly. He had red hair. Could he possibly be the true brother of swarthy John? Gomez was a Goth or perhaps even a Visigoth: they had had them in Spain quite a lot, finishing off the Iberian part of the Roman Empire: they had had a bishop who translated bits of the Bible, but that was much later: coarse people but very vigorous and with a language quite as complicated as Latin: they were perhaps not less trustworthy than, say, the Moors. Still, Enderby was determined to be very careful.

In this still-room a small brown boy in a striped nightshirt was cutting bread. Gomez cuffed him without malice, then he took a piece of this bread, went over to a stove maculate with burnt fat, sloshed the bread in a pan of what looked like sardine-oil, folded it into a sandwich, and, drippingly, ate. He took in many aspects of Enderby with darting pale eyes. The boy, still cutting bread, as it were clicked his eyes into twin slots that held them blazing on to Enderby’s left ear. Enderby, embarrassed, changed his position. The eyes stayed where they were. Drugs or something. Gomez said to Enderby:

‘You say your name.’ Enderby told him what he had been called in his regenerate, barman’s capacity, but only in the Spanish version. Enderby said:

‘He said he’d send a letter through you.
Una carta
. He promised. Have you got it?’ Gomez nodded. ‘Well,’ said Enderby, ‘how about handing it over, then, eh? Very urgent information.’