Earthly Powers (34 page)

       Carlo said to Hortense, with a heavy jocular fingerwag, "Too much of this quarrelling, Orténsia. You need that place of yours crawling with babies." He made them sound curiously unsavoury.

       Hortense struck back. "Are you speaking as his brother or as a bloody priest of the Church?" Leclercq, who spoke little English, responded to the tone with bland puzzlement, wetting with his lips the while a Monte Cristo he had taken, uninvited of course, from the humidor. But O'Shaughnessy was delighted.

       "That's the way, girl. You give it him hot and strong. Bloody bloody bloody." His psychology was good: she blushed. Carlo remained goodhumored. He was really terribly ugly, fatter than when I last showed him, his big complicated nose a cornucopia of hairs unplucked. His head hair though was fast receding. Those were very gross fingers for the pincering of the host. His clerical suit was crumpled and spotted. Formidable, however, always formidable.

       He said, "Mother sends her affection."

       "How are things there?" I asked. "How's everybody responding to Mussolini?"

       "There's a man," Carlo said to Hortense, "you can say bloody at all you will. Because he is a bloody atheistical farabutto with his bloody blackshirts that don't show the dirt. Full of devils and perhaps the big one himself. And nothing inside him to fight back at them. The devil taking possession of bloody Italy."

       "But now," I said, "you've nothing to fear from bloody atheistical communism."

       "You do not use Beelzebub," he cried, "to drive out Beelzebub. Let us pray, I mean play," he said more gently. "Orténsia, you seem to be very tired, cara.

       Your brother perhaps has been taking you to the Four Arts Ball." It was meant as a joke, but I got a sudden novelist's vision of Carlo disguised as a saxophonist in one of the two bands, seeing it all, including Hortense yielding (now where did that detail come from?) to a young pared man wearing drooped Icarus wings. Hortense, not blushing, said: "Poked about by Dr. Belmont. At his centre gynécologique. A very tiring experience."

       "Aaaaaah," Carlo went. "You will have good news for us all?" He was already at the card table, flicking a new pack skrirr skrirr with powerful gambler's fingers. He had a stock of packs, a gift, for some shady reason, from the manufacturer Rouach et Fils. Or perhaps he had just waddled in and said: "Give me those."

       "Life is more than that," Hortense said. "A woman is not a childbearing machine. There is the whole of life to be lived. Je vous quitte, messieurs," pertly. "I leave you to your fun." And, with no other valediction but "I won't forget my night prayers," she padded on her lovely rosy feet to the spare bedroom.

       "A delightful wilful girl," O'Shaughnessy said, "and very close to the Almighty, I should think. Is there any Irish in either of you?" I served him Irish, saying nothing. Gin and alt. Scotch, scotch. O'Shaughnessy raised his Irish whimsically to Carlo, bowing as he did so. "Your health, Monsignore."

       "Monsignore?" I said.

       "Not yet, not yet," grumbled Carlo, dealing.

       Nineteen twenty-two would seem in the far future to have been a momen tous year for literature, what with productions like Ulysses and The Waste Land, though not of course my own Windfails of the Storm. That it had been a big year in the sphere of public enactments was, to some, already evident. Mussolini had marched on Rome, or rather his henchman had marched and he had rolled into Termini in a wagon-lit. Pope Benedict XV, that great pacific prelate to whom neither the Germans nor the Allies would listen, Giacomo Della Chiesa, James of the Church, lawyer and diplomat, hopeless with money, his prodigality of aid to the needy having put the Vatican in the red, had died and been succeeded by Pius XI, Achille Ratti from Desio near Milan, Archbishop of Milan for a year, a friend, I gathered, of the Campanati family. "Monsignore?" I should have expected that there would be something for Carlo in the new dispensation.

       "The supervision of the spreading of the word," O'Shaughnessy announced as though it were the title of a brief. "The imparting of efficiency to the propagation of the faith. Three diamonds. He'll lose some weight now perhaps."

       "Four spades," Carlo said. "I told everybody that the war would seem like a childhood memory of a country outing compared to what would come afterwards. Well, here it is, the diabolic forces more vigorous than ever. Ah, let us play our game."

       But we did not play it, chiefly because I was playing like a fool. "You make it too simple," I said, throwing down my cards. "God and the devil stuff. Childish."

       "Very well," Carlo bellowed, fanning me with his cards as though the flames were getting at me. "You look at last yearnineteen twenty-two. Stalin elected to the general secretaryship of the central committee of the Communist Party and talking about making the central control commission clean up the country. Purges, he talks of. Look," he turned to O'Shaughnessy, "at your Four Courts being blown up in Dublin and killing everywhere. Greeks," he turned to Leclercq for symmetry's sake, "being massacred by the Turks." We were talking, by the way, in French, except for certain proper nouns. "Nineteen twentythree and the villains are settled in, grinning. Villainy is very simple, Kenneth caro. And the weapons for quelling it are very simple too. The first thing is to stop the flames spreading." He fanned me again. "That is my task."

       "The Volstead Act," Leclercq said. "Evil also."

       "Evil breeding more evil," Carlo agreed. To me, "I have something for you. From Raffaele." He pulled out a fat wallet whose leather had been nourished, in the manner of Tartar horsemen, by greasy fingers. He looked, grumbling, through its contents. O'Shaughnessy was very red and wagging a nicotined finger at Leclercq. His French became very Irish: "Don't you call a thing evil that will be the occasion of less of the damnable thing that happened to my sister Eileen in Baltimore. Black men drunk on cheap gin molesting white women."

       "They will still get their cheap gin," Leclercq said. "Gin or whisky or cognac that will blind them and give them paralysis and even kill them."

       "The Volstead Act was right, the Volstead Act was needed."

       "Something from Raffaele to me? Another rebuke for writing filthy novels?"

       "He read your new one. He said it was wholesome and not at all filthy. He talks about a change of heart. Ecco." He gave me a folded newspaper cutting.

       "So," said Leclercq. "Have it in Ireland too. Have it here. Let us empty those bottles into the vaysay."

       "It's different with us. We're civilised. We have self-control. A thing like the thing that happened to my poor sister Eileen would not have happened in Westmeath."

       "All men are the same. All men have the same rights. To get drunk. To molest women. To repent."

       "Wine," bawled Carlo, "you miss the point. The falsification of doctrine. They are saying that Christ turned unfermented fruit juice into his own precious blood—I read. It was a brief article written by Raffaele and published in some newspaper. I was presumably to read it in order that my pride in being a professional author should be mitigated by the reminder that anybody could write if he had something to write about. "The law is evil and cannot be enforced in the great centres of population. Scotch whisky being shipped to the British islands of the West Indies and to the French islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon off the Canadian mainland is being smuggled into the United States by means of swift motorboats. The whole of the eastern coastline of the United States is insusceptible to adequate policing. The expected rivalry between bootleg gangs seeking rule over city territories is already being expressed in murder which the police are too corrupt to wish to investigate. I condemn this lawlessness and anarchy, but first I condemn the United States Government and all of the blind Rechabite persuasion of such as Congressman Volstead...

       "Yes," I said. "He's right, but he'll get himself into trouble. Why do you want me to read this?"

       "He writes well, yes?"

       "Well enough. Grammatically, clearly. And so?"

       "He wants you to write. You have a name, he says, in the United States, you are known. Articles, he says. You are right about the trouble. He has names and facts. He has contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation but so far they do little. There is need for great airing of the question. To shame the Congress and the President and the people. Articles, perhaps even stories. You will be safe, you see. He not so safe. He was shy of writing to you direct. He asks me to ask you."

       "Carlo," I said, "this is not my trade. I practice an art, such as it is. I'm unskilled in propaganda. Besides, there seems to be a lot of fear in America. Land of free speech but, so I hear, the consequences of free speech can be lethal. Editorial offices set on fire. Editors with meat axes in their bellies. I can write, but there's no guarantee that I'll be published."

       "Propaganda," Carlo mused an instant, his scarlet lower lip thrust out. "What is this I hear about your writing propaganda for the children of Sodom? Domenico mentioned seeing something of yours on that desk there."

       "I write no such thing," I said, flushed somewhat. "I'm a teller of tales. Domenico had no right—" When could that have been? But publication, the making public, began with the rolling of the paper into the typewriter. I had given up the pen, a more private instrument. Domenico coming in one evening to say he had a solution for one of Joyce's problems. Joyce had said to me something about insect and incest. The dread word could not be uttered even in a dream, hence the metathesis. But there was something superficial there, whimsical, a mere snigger. There had to be another justification. A musical one? I had suggested. Domenico told me one was available. Joyce's hero HCE resolved into a musical theme, H being the German for B natural. The SEC of insect was, again in German, E flat E natural C. The two three-note themes went together in perfect harmony. CES would not do. (Joyce had been delighted.) And I had gone to the toilet and Domenico had read part of Chapter Two.

       "All words are propaganda," Carlo said. "Propagandise for a good cause. The sodomites are always with us, happy with their self-elected devils." Innocent, always. "You can speak out and help a man who has become your brother. He must fight with caution. He says the situation will get worse."

       I looked at him. "What does Raffaele import, besides dry goods? Chianti, Strega, Sambuca, grappa?"

       "The liquor trade has been liquidated. But that is not his main concern. Will you think about doing what he says?"

       "No harm in thinking," I said, thinking the foolish laws of the United States to be no business of mine. They had chosen independence a century and a half back and could now stew in their own Californian grape juice. I had my own things to do.

       "Let us," Carlo cried, "have a few hands of poker. I cannot concentrate on bridge. That freak in the tournament at Juan-lesPins," he said in sudden English to O'Shaughnessy. Then he went on rapidly about the proper defence to North's bid of seven hearts, West ruffing the conventional club lead. Then he was overrufled and lost his trump trick. To be expected. A formidable man, the new monsignore.

       "Formidable," Pre Leclercq said, meaning, of course, something different, the flavour of the Romeo and Juliet I had just lighted for him. Or something. I cannot be expected to remember everything.

CHAPTER 32

On the first day of spring 1924 my sister Hortense, in the nursing home run by the Petites Soeurs de la Passion, gave birth to jumeaux, gemelli, twins. Joy and wonder. Especially since they were, like William and Anne Shakespeare's own pair, a girl and a boy. Two girls would have looked like deliberate Anglo-Saxon insolence to the Campanati family. Two boys might have involved disputes about seniority. A boy and a girl, splendid, both doing well, mother too, genetically artistic, so neat, like an Easter gift box of a red and a white of the same cru. The twins seemed to me when I saw them plausibly Anglo. Franco-Italian.

       No black or yellow blood there, which was a relief. Hortense, sitting up in early spring rainlight in her turquoise bedjacket, looked me in the eye and I looked her back in the eye. "No more," she said. "I thought you were all for repopulating the world."

       "This is enough."

       Call them Hamnet and Judith. No, perhaps Harry and Caresse.

       "You nasty filthy sterile disgusting pig."

       "My fertility has never been, nor will it ever be, tested. It doesn't worry me in the least. I am not Domenico."

       "Go on, get out of here."

       "You used to like me, Hortense. You used to admire me. There was a time when I could honestly say that I believed you adored me."

       "Don't make me laugh," she scowled. "Get out or I'll get the nuns to throw you out." I wondered whether to take away with me the huge bunch of mimosa I had brought and give it to the first poor old woman I saw on the rue des Minimes. But Hortense was, after all, my sister.

       The twins were christened in the Madeleine, which was the parish church of Hortense and Domenico, since they had now moved to the rue Tronchet. The names chosen were John and Ann, simple names that did not lose their identity when put into French or even Italian: Giovanni would quickly become Gianni, and that sounded like Johnny in American English. Indeed, the boy was destined to be Johnny Campanati when he was taken to California. Those poor children, I think, looking back, one of them to suffer directly and terribly, the other vicariously; but I must not anticipate. I must be like God, giving them the illusion of free will, allowing their future in the spring of 1924 to be as velvety blank as the fine bond which the author, all too soon, will commence to defile with his pen.

       Nineteen twenty-four was a good year for Domenico. He rode on the wave of the success of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, first performed that year, being commissioned to compose for the pianist Albert Poupon, who had heard his ridiculous fantasia the previous October, a jazzy concerto with saxophones and wa-wa trumpets and the rest of the nonsense. This work was considered by Vladimir Jankelevitch (Ravel; Editions du Seuil, 1958) to be a sleeping influence on Maurice Ravel, who produced his own jazzy concerto seven years later. This year Ravel had his L'Enf ant et les Sortilges presented (libretto by Colette Willy, a very catty woman with a considerable sensual appetite), and there was talk of preceding it with my and Domenico's Les Pauvres Riches, but Ravel's friend Ducrateron got in instead with his banal and now forgotten Le Violon d'Ingres (which was actually about Ingres and his violin, as though putting all your eggs in one basket meant literally that). Domenico did not repine since, as I have already indicated, he considered that he had travelled beyond that early rubbish, though I observed that he was not above using one or two of its themes for his jazzy concerto. He and Hortense and i gemelli were in a much bigger apartment than before, and he had an old j3roadwood grand bought at the auction of the effects of poor Edouard Hecquet.