Earthly Powers (103 page)

       He growled, "I heard you were in Tangier. What are you doing in these parts?"

       "Cannes, Cannes, Cannes. Where I heard about this musical Ulysses. Congratulations. I'm sure it'll be a riot."

       He was living near monastically in three rooms, though the biggest room appeared, apart from its upright piano, to be equipped with machinery apt for propelling a nuclear submarine. That would be the synthesising apparatus. In another room there was only a camp bed and music paper. The living room had one armchair and two canvas chairs of the kind used by film directors on location, no carpet, a kitchen table with metal legs and a jazzy plastic top with three stained coffee mugs. I caught a glimpse of what looked like a submarine galley, too small to hold that table, a cooker filthy with spilt coffee and tomato sauce. The splendid evening light fought to pierce dirty windows. Domenico settled heavily and wincing into the armchair. It was old and it creaked. "What's the matter with the legs?" I asked.

       "The arteries are getting clogged. It's agony most of the time. Sometimes it lets up. But not for long."

       "I know. Intermittent claudication. Why are you living like this? Surely you've plenty of royalties coming in?"

       "Alimony. Money's no good if you can't buy services. You can't buy services these days."

       "I'm glad you've gone back to composing real music," I said. I did not trust the canvas chair I was sitting on. I got up and sat on the edge of the kitchen table. "I mean tunes and so on."

       "I got a prize at the Venice festival of electronic music," he said gloomily.

       "But you hanker after the big world of the tone deaf?"

       "This Ulysses is supposed to be a great book. I remember in Paris everybody saying it was the book of the century. I remember Joyce, that thin drunk blind man. I worked with Irving Hamelin once. It was his idea I should do the music. You've caught me just before I go to New York."

       "Travelling must be pretty painful."

       "They have wheelchairs at all the airports."

       "You need somebody to look after you. A wife, for instance."

       "You know all about that. You know I tried. Telephoning on my knees, damn it."

       "Less painful than standing?" A telephone wallstand was the only item in the vestibule. "Listen to me, Domenico. Listen to me with care. I want to talk about your son John or Gianni."

       "He's not my son."

       "Look, we're not getting into all that again. Paternity is a fiction. The law says you're his father."

       "How can it say that when it says his mother is not my wife?" That was a complicated statement for Domenico, a twelvetone ground with a couple of appoggiature.

       "You know perfectly well what the Church says, and to hell with the secular laws of America. You were married once and once only. You're still married. And you're the legal father of two children. You have a certain duty to per form."

       "Try and tell Orténsia about the duty. I'm ready to go back. But not as the father of those two kids."

       "You thickheaded bastard, can't you take in what I'm telling you? The Church says you are the father and the Church is right. And the duty you have to perform is to tell your wife that one of your and her children is dead."

       He grunted at me with his eyes wide: the whites looked as though they ought to be washed. "Dead? Who's dead?"

       "Your son John is dead. And his wife Laura, your daughter-in-law. I got the news today. Along with their wretched orphaned luggage. They were in Africa. They were killed by terrorists in the tiny republic of Rukwa. Somebody has to tell John's mother. You know what happened fifteen years ago when that stupid girl went in with a telegram screaming. Somebody has to tell her quietly, gently before any fool sends her a devastating letter. I just stopped one fool from doing it."

       "Johnny's dead?"

       "John is dead. I think the responsibility of telling her is all yours. Carlo, if he were interested in anything but humanity in the round, would think the same thing. I'm only Hortense's brother. I've already suffered enough with her. I'm suffering now, prospectively. But I'm not going to bear the news and see her collapse. That's your job."

       "I hardly saw Johnny. I don't know what he looked like even. He changed his name. He abandoned me."

       "You did the abandoning, you bloody fool. When are you going to New York?"

       "Day after tomorrow. I'm sorry he's dead, I'm sorry when anybody's dead. Anna will know already. She always did know when he was sick at school or something. I knew that. She wrote letters to me for a time. I didn't answer. It comes of being gemelli."

       "Twins, I know. Twillies, the doctors call it. Twins' ESP. Domenico, you and Hortense are going to be together again. She's alone now. She won't say no this time. You have to give her the news."

       "I don't want to, I can't. Jesus, the trouble we all have."

       "I know. But it's better to have the trouble and not be lonely. It's hell being lonely. I've been lonely all my life. When Carlo opted for loneliness I knew what I'd always suspected. That he wasn't, isn't human. It's like opting for hell."

       "It's hell all right. Carlo thought we'd all let him down. By being human." And then, "How did Johnny die?"

       "Simple. He died by being in big dirty black Africa. A place where white men are supposed to die. White women too. I paid her fare. But I take no blame, none at all. You must never blame yourself for good intentions."

       "My intentions were good," Domenico said, "with our Saint Nicholas thing. I mean, I mean that God's a bastard. He is too." His eyes began to wash themselves. I could see that he was seeing himself as Nicholas, after all Hollywood had called him Nick, with a dead kid in his arms. He dried his eyes on his sleeve and said, "I see what you mean about it's my job. It's a hell of a job."

       "Nobody else can do it, Domenico."

       "You're right at that." And then, "That apartment in New York. It's yours, isn't it? There are some things a man can't do. I'll have to look around."

       "Don't talk wet," I said in Hortense's manner. "If I gave it to her I gave it to both of you. One flesh as they say."

       "That's out," he said. "That's all over. That's what makes it possible to think of starting all over. Sex," he said, "is a fucking nuisance. Thank Christ I'm over it."

       I went back to Cannes. Bucolo had gone, taking all that luggage with him. He had left a note: "I tore up the letters I wrote but writing them got a lot out of my system. I'm catching the evening flight to Paris. Professor Levi-Strauss is giving lecture on incest and riddles at the Sorbonne. I intend to hear the lecture and get very drunk and then be poured on the plane to New York. I'll leave telling poor John's mother to you. Thanks for having me. The hot tea did a lot of good."

       The final meetings of the jury were vituperative. The Russian war epic kept getting two votes only—Comrade Lazurkina's and M. Brochier's. A message came through telling us that if the Algerian entry, Fen et Fer, did not receive the award for best film a bomb would go off in the Palais. There was much hot talk about honour and impartiality. M. Brochier worked my dossier to the limit and combined with his journalistic confreres to denounce the perfidious and Pederastic Albion I personified. The prize for best film went to a Yugoslav entry which nobody liked. The best director was the director of Feu et Fer, which was disgustingly directed. The best court métrage was the technically incompetent Soviet cartoon film Shtopor. Thus Comrade Lazurkina's sentence might be mitigated to public castigation and expulsion from the appropriate union. I feebly hit out at M. Brochier during the final buffet party and was much photographed. M. Brochier grabbed my weak wrist and sneered. "Sportsman," he said. "Gentleman. Fair play. Vous tes tous foutus. Tous."

CHAPTER 73

The Broadway first night of The Blooms of Dublin came after tepidly received tryouts in Toronto, Boston and Philadelphia. The book and songs were frantically worked upon during this provincial run, like repairing an aircraft in flight. Action was what was missing from the original novel, and this had to be coldly injected, like adrenalin. Haines, the Englishman, went round with a gun and the intention of killing Stephen Dedalus, whom he identified with the black panther of his dreams. A strangulatory rope was made ready for Leopold Bloom in Barney Kiernan's. There was a copulatory chorus of drunks and whores in the brothel scene. The songs, I thought, were good: Domenico's Italianate lilt was not inappropriate in an ambience where bad Italianate opera was adored. In the first scene Buck Mulligan (played by Roy Hahn) did a Greek dance and sang "Hellenize the Island": Let's turn this dim necropolis into a real metropolis Put a ton of high explosive Under Mary and St. Joseph Groves where no lime or lemon is May still see agapemones Ouzo drinking will spell finis To the wealth of Arthur Guinness Exorcise all gloom and sin Let the pagan sun shine in!

       Stephen, played by the fine young tenor Tony Haas, sang an acrid mother song: A Mother Ireland How many lice in your comb? Bitter and bitchy though sweet of tongue The original sow that devoured her young I gave you my heart—what more can I give? For God's sake let me alone and let me live.

       Mr Deasy during this first scene in the Martello Tower came in to announce that there was no school today and to foretell the death of the British Empire: England's in the claws of the Jews The paws and maws of the Jews Swarming in monied hordes Into the House of Lords Corrupting youth and the truth With their organs of news The children of Israel own The imperial throne And then, with his line about Ireland's never having persecuted the Jews because she had never let them in, the lights dimmed and came up on the great Alon Schemen as Bloom singing that today was the sixteenth of June: Let's see If there's anything else in store Let's be having it soon This sixteenth of June Nineteen hundred and four A. D.

       Molly, the professional soprano, played by the voluptuous Gloria Fischbein, herself a professional soprano, sang in bed a duet with her own recorded voice, a counterpoint of "Love's Old Sweet Song" and At four o'clock this afternoon he's coming Twirling his mustachios and gaily humming With, later, Bloom adding his own baritone counterpoint about Boylan Boylan Blazes Boylan. h the newspaper office scene Schemen had a superb long sung monologue about the tribulations of the Jews—"Wandering, Wandering"and, in the middle of a reverie near Nelson's pillar, the hit song of the show: Flower of the mountain Crown of the Head of Howth That's what I called you then Day of full summer Day of the spring of love Will you come back again?

       The decor, mostly backcloths based on Edwardian photographs of Dublin, was the work of Hortense Campanati. She, with her husband, was present at this Palace Theatre premiere, slim and elegant in her early sixties, the eyeshade now wholly accepted as a property of couture—tonight a flash of brilliants flung onto a black velvet ground, the hair, frankly a blued grey, falling in a coil over it. She sat in the back row of the stalls, near the aisle. Next to her, in that aisle, in the wheelchair which she had herself propelled into the theatre, sat Domenico Campanati. Was, I wondered, this musical remake of a, to be totally honest, totally unadaptable masterpiece of literature recalling for them the good Paris days of the avant-garde, youth and hope?

       When, in the first act, JE, George Russell, walked on briefly with a copy of The Pig's Paper, I recalled vividly the event that Dublin day which demonstrated to a young boy the nature of his sexuality. Ulysses had given Russell an alibi which no appeal to history could break. At the going down of the first-act curtain, with applause and the deafening cuckoo song which bellowed to the world Bloom's shame, I thought, grinning to myself, of how times had changed and I had had something to do with changing them. It was now possible to publish, in the Joyce Newsletter or something, an article on the maimed historicity of that novel, revealing why Russell had not been able to be in the National Library when Joyce said he was. Going into the vestibule I saw Professor Breslow, husband of my niece, and said: "I was in Dublin on that memorialised day. I lost my innocence in the Dolphin Hotel. I must tell you the story sometime."

       "Do." But he was not really interested. "I never thought," he said with scholarly resentment, "that they'd be able to make a public entertainment of it."

       "I agree. First they've had to turn it into a genuine novel, with action and motivation. Great though Ulysses may be, novel it is not."

       "They'll be doing The Magic Mountain next. Or Strehler's masterwork."

       "Strehler wouldn't have minded."

       "Or Der Schloss."

       "That's been done," I lied. "A very perky Broadway style version. I saw it in West Berlin."

       "I don't believe it. Shall we go for a drink?" There was a little bar almost next door to the Palace drama. We fought our way in and I automatically ordered Guinness.

       , IS, Ann didn't come," I said. "I thought she liked the lighter kinds of theatre?'

       "Ann," he said, with froth on his lips, "is far from well. She's had fits of suicidal depression after the hysterectomy. Not well at all. They're giving her a course of electric shocks at the Hedley."

       "I didn't know. I've been out of touch."

       "First the death of her brother. That hit her harder than I thought it would. They were never close. Except in the sense that they were twins."

       "I know. Twillies."

       "And then the business with Eve. That made her very hard, very shrill." A strange choice of word, a literary academic's choice. "Very Victorian father."

       "What business?"

       "Didn't anybody write to you?"

       "I've been on my travels," I apologised. "Mail wasn't forwarded. I flew to New York this morning from Copenhagen. I went straight from Idlewild to the Algonquin. I came straight from the Algonquin to the theatre. Tomorrow I have to fly to Los Angeles. You see the situation."