Earthly Powers (19 page)

       I worked not in Nice but in Monaco, in the Condamine on the rue Grimaldi. I had a bare and airy top-floor apartment rented, on a six months' lease, from a M. Guizot, who was visiting Valparaiso. When I had finished the first draught I telegraphed Domenico in, or just outside, Taormina. He came. I hired a piano, a tinny Gaveau. He stayed. We ended with two versions of the libretto, one in Tuscan, the other in a kind of American with the title The Richer the Poorer. I learned a lot of Italian. He learned something about English prosody. He began to dream of doing something popular for the New York stage. He had no strongly individual musical style but could imitate anybody. This opera was mainly in the style of late Puccini, with acerbities stolen from Stravinsky. It had a ragtime sequence and a drunken duet. A drunken quartet would not fit into the narrative pattern, but the finale was loud and vinous.

       While Domenico warbled and struck chords on the wretched Gaveau in the long bare salon, I worked on my novel two rooms away. This was The Wounded, about the legless man coming back from the war (poor Rodney) and nobly trying to make his betrothed marry another, a whole man. But his betrothed is blinded in a car accident and the whole man who has fancied her no longer does so. So the two maimed marry and live happily and beget limbed and sighted children. This sounds worse than it really is, though, pace Don Carlo Campanati, it is still pretty stupid. What I was trying to do at that time was, in a sense, Shakespearean. I was taking a story that could not fail to be popular, especially when adapted to the screen, as The Wounded was in 1925, and attempting to elevate it through wit, allusion and irony to something like art.

       And all during this time I lived a loveless life. Domenico, without my telling him, divined quickly what and how I was and regretted that he could not help. He took the train to Ventimiglia once a week, sometimes twice, and came back looking rested. I for my part bitterly masturbated, sometimes seeing, as I approached climax, the figure of Don Carlo spooning in soup and shaking his head sadly. I tried to purge some of the rage of my loneliness in housework and cooking, though Domenico was a better cook than I and an old woman came in to clean three times a week. Friends, we were friends, he said, as well as brothers in art, but—ah, that kind of love seemed to him, if I would forgive his saying so, an abomination.

       When Don Carlo came from Paris to stay with us for two days, I looked guiltily at him, as though his image had been a real presence. He had come, he said, when he had done panting from the long climb to the top story, to play roulette.

       "Is that," I asked, getting him a whisky with a little water, "permitted? To a priest, that is?"

       "The first shareholders of the Casino," he said, "were the bishop of Monaco and Cardinal Pecci. And you know what Cardinal Pecci became."

       "Pope Leo the Thirteenth," Domenico said.

       "We must exorcise the puritan in you," Don Carlo said, roguishly wagging his whisky at me without spilling a drop. "You think there is something irreligious about gambling. But it is only the opposing of one free will to another—"

       "Talking of exorcism," I said. "Domenico promised that you would tell me the whole story. About this boy in Sardinia possessed by devils or whatever they were—"

       "Domenico has no right to promise anything on my behalf. It's of no interest to you, who would not believe it anyway."

       "What right have you to say what I believe and what I do not?" I asked, and that made him grunt as at a light blow struck at an ailing liver.

       He said, "It is a thing I do. Indeed, any priest. But some do it better than others. Some take a chance."

       "What do you mean—a chance?"

       "You bring me back to what I was trying to say. One free will against another—that of the player, that of the little white ball on the big wheel—"

       "You mean that figuratively? You mean an inanimate object can really have free will? What do you mean?"

       "I am rebuked. You must soften the rebuke with more whisky." I took his empty glass. "I mean," he said, while I poured, "that what cannot be predicted looks very much like free will. I meant no more than that. I need," he said to his brother, "a necktie. I must go in as one of the laity. I must not scandalise the faithful. It is bad enough," chuckling, "to scandalise the faithless."

       "Me? You mean me?" I said, giving him his fresh whisky.

       "Why not you? You are not of the Church. You are not one of the faithful. Ergo you are one of the faithless. Does that annoy you?"

       "I would," I said sadly, "be one of the faithful if I could. If the faith itself were more reasonable. I was in the faith, I know all about it."

       "Nobody knows all about it," Don Carlo said.

       "It's easy for you," I said, somewhat loudly. "You've put off the needs of the flesh. You've been gelded for the love of God."

       "Gelded? A rare word, I think."

       "Castrated, deballocked, deprived of the use of your coglioni."

       "Not deprived," he said in no gelding's voice. "Not not deprived. We choose what we wish, but nobody may choose deprivation. I will take a bath now."

       He took a very loud splashing bath, singing what sounded like highly secular songs in a coarse dialect. He shouted, in the same dialect, what sounded like a complaint about the lack of a bath towel. "I'll take it," I said to Domenico, who was scoring what looked like a semiquaver run for the strings at the round centre table. I got a towel from the corridor cupboard and took it to Don Carlo. He stood in the swimming bathroom, squeezing a blackhead on his chin. His eyes flashed from the mirror at my entrance. He was naked, of course, big-bellied but also big-ballocked, with roadworker's arms and shoulders, very hairy everywhere. He took the towel without thanks, began to dry himself, balls and belly first, and said: "If all goes well, it will be dinner at the Hotel de Paris. But some light nourishment is called for before we go. Bread. Salami. Cheese. Wine."

       "Certainly, Father."

       "What is your father?" he asked sternly.

       "A dentist."

       "In England?"

       "In the town of Battle in East Sussex. The name celebrates the disaster of Senlac, when the Anglo-Saxons lost to the invading Normans."

       He dried his shoulders, exposing his balls and what the Romans called dumpennente without shame. "And when are you going home?"

       "I have no intention of going home. Not yet."

       "It is not now the invading Normans," he said. "It is what some call the intangible visitation. You have read the newspapers?"

       "You mean influenza?"

       "The Anglo-Saxons are being invaded worse than most. It is a cold country. February is a cold month there. A long war ends and a long winter follows. Paris suffers too. I lost three students this week. I hope you do not have to go home."

       I shivered, as though the influenza were being conjured here in mild safe Monaco by this naked priest. "Why did you mention my father?" I said. "Have you some occult vision of his succumbing to the—?"

       "Occult," he bawled. "Do not use that word to me." And he pushed me out of the bathroom.

       "Occult," I bawled back through the shut door. "It only means hidden. It only means concealed." But he was singing again.

       I was sulky and vaguely fearful as we walked together up the road which separated the Condamine from the Casino. But I was maliciously glad too that Don Carlo was puffing and wheezing from the steep climb. Also the February sea wind was stiff, and he had to hold on hard, grumbling, to his black trilby, while Domenico and I wore sporty caps that could not be buffeted off. We were in country day wear, though of course with stiff collars, while Don Carlo was in wrinkled alpaca and an overtight shirt of his brother's, the tie rich but not modest. He looked like a cynical undertaker. He was panting hard when we reached the Casino, while Domenico and I, with breath to spare for the crescendo, were singing a chorus from our opera: "Money isn't everything, It's only board and bed, The only thing distinguishing Being living, being dead (So I've heard said)."

       Domenico liked those ings and had stressed them in the orchestration with triangle and glockenspiel.

       But there was no grumbling when Don Carlo began to play. Domenico and I staked our few francs at roulette and promptly lost them, but Don Carlo was rapt in the miracle of winning. We were, of course, in the "kitchen," not one of the salles privées for the rich and distinguished. It was the depressed postwar time and there were not many playing. We had heard that the Société des Bains de Mer was being saved from bankruptcy only by the pumping in by Sir Basil Zaharoff of thousands out of his armament millions. We had seen him and his Spanish mistress, the Duquesa de Marquena y Villafranca, getting out of a huge polished car outside the Hotel de Paris. He wanted to take over the principality and instal himself as its ruler; his fat mistress longed to be elevated to princess. He never came into the gaming rooms; he did not believe in gambling.

       "Messieurs, jaites vos jeux."

       And there was Don Carlo playing consistently a cheval, greedily wanting a return of seventeen times his stake. He got it too, twice. The plaques were piling up. Then he went into an anthology of other possible stakings: en plein, which should have brought him thirty-five times his money but didn't; transversale—I think it was 25, 26, 27—and there he won, eleven times his stake. Carré? Quatre premiers? He shrugged at losing: you only got an eightfold return. He went back to horseback, his stake on the line between 19 and 22. By God, it came up. Then he put three hundred francs on 16, en plein. He lost. Muttering something to himself, he tried a sixain, putting his plaque on the line dividing 7, 8, 9 and 10, 11, 12. It came up—five times the stake. He shrugged. He returned to that damned intractable en plein—16. He approached it cautiously, with a fifty-franc stake. He lost. "Basta, Carlo," his brother said. Don Carlo frowned, grunted, then seemed sotto voce to curse. He reverted to putting three hundred francs, the "kitchen" upper limit, on 16 once more: the curse was on his timidity. The croupier spun the cylindre.

       "Les jeux sont jaits, rien ne va plus."

       There were about ten round the table. Domenico and I dared not, of course, breathe. A middle-aged man with only three fingers on his left hand and on his right eye a black patch kept his singular gaze on Don Carlo's face, as though his study were gamblers' reactions to their own self-imposed hells. A silver-haired beldam seemed ready, blue at the lips, to suffer cardiac arrest on Don Carlo's behalf. "Oh my God." That was myself. Don Carlo looked sternly at me and my vain name-taking. Then he looked at the wheel, where the ball was just rolling to rest.

       On 16. He went: "AH"

       "The luck," I said infelicitously, "of the devil." He did not seem to hear. He hugged his chips to his bosom, then threw one, in the incense-splashing swipe of the asperges at high mass, at the croupier. The croupier, who had never, to my knowledge, seen him in his life before, said: "Merci, mon père—" Don Carlo sketched an unabashed blessing and moved away from the table.

       "That's wise," I said.

       "Trente-et-quarante," he said.

       "No, Carlo, no. Basta."

       "Roulette," Don Carlo said, "is really for children. Trente-et-quarante is for men. Tonight I feel myself to have," and he frowned at me humorously, "the devil's luck."

       So we watched him while he sat at the trente-et-quarante table with untrustworthy-looking Milanese and Genoese who had come over the border for the weekend. He quipped with them in various dialects while the seals of the six new packs were broken. Trente-et-quarante is simpler than roulette, since it deals not in specific numbers but in pair, impair, couleur and inverse, but the stakes are double those of roulette: it is the serious gambler's game. Don Carlos staked a cheval most of the time. He seemed to know more about it than anybody there, including the chef de partie, and, stacking his winner's plaques in two high piles, he delivered a little lecture or sermon on the mathematical probabilities of recurrences—card rows to the value of 40 coming up only four times, as compared with thirteen times for a row of 31 and so on. He aspersed gratuities at the croupiers, then got up sighing with content as from a heavy meal. But the heavy meal was to come; he had promised us that.

       Before cashing his chips he hesitated, looking back at the gaming salon with, in his eyes, the signs of a lust not sure yet whether it was satisfied. "Two things I have not done," he said. "The finales sept and the tiers du cylindre sadest. In both cases par cent, I think. I think I shall do them now."

       "Basta, Carlo."

       "What in the name of God—"

       "You are too ready," he told me, "with your casual use of the holy name of the Lord God. The finales sept par cent is one hundred francs on 7 and 17 and 27. The other one is one hundred francs a cheval on the numbers on the southeast segment of the wheel—"

       "Where did you learn all these things?" I asked. "Is it a regular part of theological instruction in Italy?"

       "Have you read," he counter-asked, "but I know you have not so there is no point in asking, the books of Blaise Pascal?"

       "I know the Pensées. I glanced at the Provincial Letters. You have no right to assume to assume—"

       "The holy and learned Pascal was first to use the word roulette. He was much concerned with the mysteries of chance. He also invented the calculating machine and the public omnibus and the watch on the wrist. The mystery of numbers and of the starry heavens. Who are you to sneer and scoff and rebuke?"

       "I'm not sneering and scoffing and... I merely asked—"

       "You would do well to think about the need for harmless solace in a world full of diabolic temptation. I will not play the finales and the tierce." As though it were all my fault that he was thus deprived of further harmless solace, he sulkily cashed his plaques. He was given a lot of big notes, some of which he dropped and Domenico picked up. Then he began to waddle out. Domenico shrugged at me. We followed.