Earthly Powers (61 page)

       There emerged from the façade of SS Vincenzo ed Anastasio what many took at first to be a comic duo. It was Carlo dragging out Domenico and both cursing each other in the Milanese of the streets, a tongue unknown to the Sicilian gorillas in tuxedos who, with their ears pricked to what should have been familiar but was not, were getting ready to move in there. But the fat dragger-out was clearly revealed as a priest, one who ought to know what he was doing. Domenico's coiffure was disarranged and recession showed. His feet were socked but unshod, and under his tuxedo a hairy chest wobbled. In flagrante was the term. Carlo, his face contorted to shame and rage, had no goodnight for anyone. He dragged and occasionally hit Domenico over the lawns toward the front of the house. I had, though discreetly, to follow. Toward the carpark. I knew Domenico's car, a Studebaker in lime and apple, but Domenico would, I knew, pretend not to know it. Dragged home, indeed, by his priestly brother, and he only (I assumed; what else was there to assume?) committing mandatory fornication. "There," I called, pointing, "is what I presume you're looking for. But what in the name of God has been happening?" Domenico twisted himself to spit at me and Carlo used his freehand to try the driver's door. Cars were not locked in this private carpark with its black, probably armed, attendants. And the ignition keys were left in so that these attendants could redistribute locations and facilitate egress. As now. A Plymouth huge as a rock was swung out of the path of the Studebaker.

       "Get in there in the back," Carlo commanded. "Both of you." And he pushed Domenico in and me after him.

       "Look," I protested, "I've done no wrong. I'm guiltless as the Pelagian snow." Carlo was not amused. "Damn it," I said, "this is none of my business. I'm going back to the party." But Carlo had slammed the door and was getting into the driver's seat. "You," I said to Domenico, "have presumably been doing something naughty."

       "Go and say the same thing to your whore of a sister," Domenico growled. I could not resent that locution: a husband had more rights than a brother. The back of Carlo's neck said: "You, Kenneth, remind me of the way. We are going back to the Garden of Allah. You, fratello, say no more. What you have to say I desire to see you saying. I need to look into your insolent and adulterous face." That was very Italian. Italians, like women, had to see the true meaning behind the spoken words. Or written. Italians did not write letters because there was no face in letters.

       "It was not adultery," Domenico said in sulky pedantry. "She is not married."

       "That Mexican puttana," Carlo corrected, "is a married woman. I follow these things. You will say she has been divorecd. There is no such thing as divorce. I do not have to tell you that. Now be quiet. You will have plenty of time to speak. Not about your fornication of which there is nothing more to say. About the thing you said and then said you did not say. Stai zitto!" he cried, though Domenico was taking a breath only to breathe. So there was a kind of grumbling silence as we passed facetious mansions and grandiloquent hash joints, though Carlo rumbled at the view as at a long scrawled signature of human depravity.

       "Left here," I said. He obeyed, thoroughly expert with somebody else's, anybody's, car.

       We arrived. "La ilaha illa'lah," Carlo mocked. He parked by the Black Sea, between Constanta and Cetatea. We got out, and Carlo was now free to shove Domenico brutally toward my apartment. I unlocked and put lights on. Two scowling brothers were now fully illuminated, sweat and rumples and all.

       "A drink?" I said.

       Carlo said, "For me yes, for him nothing. Now," he truculently invited. "The thing you said."

       "I said nothing except that you had no right." All this, by the way, was in English. "You call it sin and I say that everybody does it. It is the way here. And I say that whatever you call it a man is free to do what he wants. You had no right, you disgraced me, you made me look a fool."

       "You looked a fool and also an animal lying on top of that woman. Naked," as though that were a worse sin than fornication. "Your stupid cub working away." Carlo took his neat Old Mortality with no thanks and grimly mimed the movement.

       "You had no right to burst in, you knew it was not the gabinetto. I was ready to come, blast you, ready to come, and you have the filthy stupidity to talk about sin." He then snarled some filthy Italian. Carlo drank with one hand and slapped at him, though missing, with the other.

       "A lucky accident, little brother, that it was you and this puttana and not the gabinetto. I caught you in sin and your shame may lead to sincere repentance. I want to know what it was you said."

       "I said you had no right."

       "No right as what? As a priest of your Church? Or as your brother?"

       "I said you had no right."

       "I ask," I said, "by what right you call my sister a whore?"

       "That," Carlo said, "is another thing. One thing at a time."

       "I said you had no right."

       "Why," I asked loudly, "is my sister a whore?"

       "I will say nothing else until I too have a whisky like this drunken priest here." Carlo, of course, hit out at that, but Domenico dodged. I slopped a cheaper whisky into a tumbler and handed it to Domenico. Domenico drank thirstily, all the time dodging Carlo, who was trying to knock the glass out of his fist. "You will listen." Domenico was panting less from emotion than from the single swift draught. Carlo could not now take that drink away from him. He held on to the glass firmly, his knuckles creamed, any more hitting and he would counter with that. "It's not my habit," he said, "to fornicate and commit adultery. I am not like the other people here." Carlo combined a whoop and a sneer. "If you want to listen, listen. If not I will go home."

       "Home," tolled Carlo. "You will not sleep in her bed or even in the same room. You defile her purity with just being there. You will keep away from her until you receive absolution and do penance. And, by God," Carlo fiercely promised, "it will be a long and hard penance. Many many many many decades of the rosary. You will never have done with saying them."

       "You have no right. I have the right to go to my own priest."

       "I know the man. I will tell him all. I will tell him what to give you."

       "You have no right and you know you have no right." And then Domenico sneered. "Purity. Chastity. Fidelity. These fine big words that mean nothing. What I say now is: whose are those children? Who is the father of those two kids who call me dad?" Ah. "It's from the orecchioni I start to learn the truth."

       "Orecchioni?" I did not know the word. Both Carlo and Domenico distractedly mimed big ears and big cheeks. "Swollen glands? Oh, mumps." I remembered. Johnny and Ann had had mumps. Domenico had been infected. It was a painful harmless ailment. There was a certain danger when male adults caught it. Hortense too had caught it but there was no danger for adult females.

       "I go to the studio doctor," Domenico said, "because I do not like the shrinking of the balls. What he calls with his big words partial atrophy of the testicles. He neither likes it nor dislikes it. He says it happens in thirty percent of the cases. I tell him they are not his balls to like or dislike. They are my balls. And I do not like it. He says to give him some of my seed. So I go into another room to get some. It's not easy. He gives me a book of dirty pictures and that helps."

       "Filthy," Carlo pronounced. "Pollution. Masturbation."

       "Ah, cazzo," Domenico cried in disgust. "You know nothing about anything, stupid priest." Very fascist. "He takes my semen and he puts it under a microscope. This afternoon he gave me the results. He said there was nothing. He said," crescendo, "there was nothing there. He told me that there was the most perfect example of infertility he had ever seen. Perfect was the word he used. He said another thing. He said that it was very very very unusual for the disease of orecchioni to make a man infertile. He said that it was almost certain that I had been born like that. And then I told him I had two children, twins. And then he said very quickly, too quickly, very well then obviously it must be the orecchioni that are the cause, very rare but it does sometimes happen. But I can guess he's saying this to quieten my mind. But my mind is not quiet, very far from it. Now you see the doubt that comes into my mind."

       "There must be no doubt," Carlo bellowed. The Manhattan humorist in the next apartment laughed. "For a man to doubt his wife, especially when his wife is a woman like Hortense, is not to be considered. How dare you ask who is the father of your children!"

       "Staying the night with you," Domenico scowled at me. "How do I know where she spent the night? How do I know where she would go when she said she was spending the afternoon at the Louvre? I've seen her smile at men in Paris. You're her brother, I suppose you will protect her."

       "There's nothing to protect," I said fiercely. "Hortense has been a good and faithful wife and also a much provoked wife if you wish to know the truth. You know your terrible tempers which you would call temperament as if you were Verdi or Puccini and your cowardice in lashing out at a woman."

       "Oh, now it's she who does the lashing out," Domenico cried, "when I speak to her about the doctor and his damned microscope and his saying there are no spermatozoa swimming around. And I spoke reasonably, ready to forgive if she's done wrong, because after all it was a long time ago. She said how dare you how dare you louder even than Carlo here. Be honest, I said, dear Orténsia, be honest, I'll forgive you, I love these children whoever the father is or the fathers are, and then it's how dare you and she lashes out with her fists. And then she said go and ask your brother Carlo about the purpose of the act of marriage, the act of marriage is for producing children, how many children can you produce now, you infertile bastard, keep away from me in future."

       "She's wrong, Carlo said, though weakly. The Church doesn't penalise anybody because of the failure of Nature. When the sacrament of matrimony is entered on in good faith then the pleasures of matrimony are legitimate."

       "Ah," Domenico said, "she wants different pleasures. We Italians are all innocent fools, not like the French and the English. I wondered about this friendship between her and my fagotto. Bassoon, if you like," he said to me. "In the studio orchestra. All this friendliness and how are you darling and little kisses when they meet."

       "A male bassoonist?"

       "No no no no no no, stolto, a woman bassoonist," as though it were selfevidently a female occupation blowing that long heavy thing. "Her name is Fran Lilienthal, a ridiculous name, but she's a good fagouista, she can reach high ml bemolle, E flat if you like. That is not the point," with ferocity as though somebody else had gotten him off it. "Hortense said to me several times that men know nothing about making love to a woman. Especially Italian men. I asked her what she knew of other men, and she said she talked enough with other women and learned plenty from them, and also she reads books. She says it requires a woman to understand a woman. So now I begin to think. There is a lot of this among the women of Hollywood." We were all still standing up, but now Carlo sat down. The whisky in his glass tried to stay where it was and splashed his black jacket. He ignored this, looking, frowning, up at his brother. "You know the word," Domenico said to me. "I think there's something wrong with your family."

       "That's a stupid and cruel thing to say," with much heat. "Retract those words or I'll push them down your throat. Along with your silly crowned fornicating Latin lover teeth." The humorist next door clapped and went hooray.

       "You're saying stupidities," Carlo said, "as you so often do. You're being insincere and sinfully so, as you so often are. You wish to commit adultery or at least fornication, so you find all the excuses you can. Your wife pushes you away, or so you like to think, then you dream up this abomination of perverseness. Women," he pronounced sagely, "are not the same as men. They kiss each other and embrace each other. I've seen this among young nuns even, novices. It's friendship, no more. Women are more emotional and more demonstrative than men, it is their nature. Women are incapable by their physical nature of committing the sin of Onan. But now you dream up this filthy calumny and because of a frustrated and bitterly broken love of Kenneth here, which you know all about, all, you say words he is right to want to ram down through your throat. You justify your sin of tonight. You will go on trying to justify similar sins. I know your nature. Now go down on your knees. Go on. On your knees." He pointed to a suitable spot on the thinning rust carpet. "Beg forgiveness of God. Now."

       "Ah, merda," Domenico said, not kneeling. "You don't know anything about the real world and what sex is and the different kinds of sex and what sex does to people. But what you do know now is why I did what I did this evening. And you stopped me. You damned and fucking well stopped me. The worst crime in the whole of life, the worst sin, worse than murder. When a man is almost coming." He shuddered with genuine horror. "To stop a man at that point is a terrible terrible sin. It is you who should be down on your knees."

       "Don't tell me what's sin and what isn't sin," Carlo said, getting up again, "and don't say filthy words to me, a priest and a monsignore. So, we have your sin sin sin, do you hear me, and we have your feeble motivations." He sounded a little like the head of the MGM script department. "But you have not repeated what I asked you to repeat. The thing you said when I was forcing you into your trousers in that disgusting bedroom with the naked puttana laughing and showing her brazen bare body. I want to hear that thing again. I can bear it. It was a terrible thing to say to a brother. It was a denial. But I can bear it."

       "I said you had no right."

       "No right as a priest or no right as an elder brother?"