Earthly Powers (90 page)

       "Ah, it doesn't work out that way at all, Toomey. The final road is back to the unformed mentality of childhood. Faith and loyalty and duty. The church on the hill and the known names in the graveyard. Dear Carlo is wrong. Faith cannot move forward to new loyalties and duties. If Carlo can do it, he is exceptional in his loneliness." Very acute, very. "We are loyal only to our mothers. We strive for the new but cannot attain it. We travel a circle. We want to get back."

       "Back to what?" Ralph asked suddenly.

       "Ah, my American friend, are you still there? In your case, back to Boston or Milwaukee or wherever you come from, I was never much good at American accents, all sound alike to me, back to your childhood there and all that that childhood inherited."

       "My people were slaves."

       "Slaves? Really? Your people? Then you must be an American Negro. I would not have thought it."

       "My people prefer black. I inherited a white culture and I don't want it any more. How far back do I go searching for faith and loyalty and the rest of the—" He was about to say shit, but this was after all a clergyman, just like his father, who would never permit foul language in the family cabin. "That nonsense?"

       "It depends on how Negro, excuse me, black, you feel." That too was acute.

       "Black enough to want to get away from the whites."

       "You can't do it, you know. You've absorbed too much from them. You might become Muslim, of course, but that would, in your view, only be exchanging one exotic abomination for another. Whatever you do, my boy, don't yearn after some long-buried juju. And never feel bitter about slavery. All races have at one time or another been enslaved by another race. Slavery is a mode of cultural transmission."

       "Don't call me boy. And don't give me that high-sounding crap." He had let the word come out without thinking but the quondam was delighted.

       "Craps," he said. "You remember, Toomey? Baby wants a new pair of shoes. Come on seven eleven. Ah well. Still, I hear there are Braille playing cards. You, sir," he said sternly to Ralph, "may cherish some romantic Rousseau dream of rational savagery, but let me warn you of its dangers. You will have to shed hardly won skills, especially in language. As a young clergyman in Africa, not this part of course, I saw what savagery was like. That would be going back too far. You, like our clerical friend Carlo, not yours of course, Toomey's and mine, are forced to go forward. No nostalgia for either of you." And then, petulantly, "Where is my companion, as I must call him? He is plucking sleep, as Virgil puts it, the flower of the siesta. I wish to go to my room. If you could telephone him, Toomey. His room number is eighty-one. His name is Gordon. He is a young Scotchman. He prefers to be called a Scot. All these taboos."

       "I'll take you," I said.

       "Would you, will you, Toomey? A very Christian act. Oh, how stupid, how narrow. My blind man's stick is somewhere."

       Ralph, who could very occasionally find pity for others than himself, took the quondam's right arm while I took his left. We got him to his room through various Moorish arches and along wide cool corridors with bronze shields on the walls and found ourselves near to our own two adjoining. I wanted Ralph naked in my arms for a space: the warmth and known lax ambience invited it. But Ralph was petulant and unwilling. Very well, then. There were things to tell Ralph, and these were not directly about love. I said, as I lay on the coarse Moorish coverlet on my bed under the ceiling fan and he sat flopped frowning in a wickerwork armchair: 'Ralph, I fear we shall have to leave Barcelona. For good."

       "And come here?" He was quick enough when he wished to be.

       'Here, this town, I think not, but I was anxious to see it. Perhaps Tangier, which I know well enough and find sympathetic. The fact is that I received a visit from the Deputy Chief of Police while you were, according to you, spending the day at the Museum of Catalan Art."

       "You kept this quiet. Why?"

       "Because you might have responded to what I reported with unseemly and perhaps criminal behaviour. You are what is known as a persona non grata, Ralph dear. Nothing to do with your race, I assure you, though that makes you conspicuous. It's just the way you carry on when not under my restraining influence. The police, in fact, have been very tolerant. But in several bars you have been heard saying derogatory things about General Franco and once it was alleged you attempted to urinate on his picture—difficult, as it was high on the wall. There are other things. You held a very noisy party in our apartment while I was seeing Gomez in Madrid. You played jazz on the harpsichord I bought you and then tried to throw the instrument into the stairwell. Black American sailors were present. Two of them did a mime of sodomy on the landing in the presence of Dr. Borges. When the neighbours sent the police round you were all abusive but you most notably so because you were abusive in fluent Catalan. These things add up. The Chief of Police and his deputy know my work and my reputation. They do not want scandal. The view is that we might be happier somewhere else."

       Ralph brooded on that. "Just me, isn't it?" he said at last. "You're the discreet English gentleman, the quiet bugger, what what. Okay, you stay and I'll go."

       "We're supposed to be together, dear Ralph. I believe in the ancient virtue of loyalty. I wanted to come back to Morocco to see how things were. Marrakesh seems a little dull and run-down. In Tangier there are expatriate writers like myself. There's a great deal of tolerance for, well, aberrations. Poverty, though, slavery even of a kind, thievery. My more precious possessions could be put in store somewhere, I have looked on them long enough. We could rent a little house and have smiling Moorish servants. A little garden, too. There are the charms of the souk. We could at least try it."

       "No," Ralph said. "You brought me to this mock Africa. Now I want to see the real thing. I might even find something to do in black Africa."

       "You mean revert? You heard what the former Archbishop of York said. The romantic Rousseau dream. Douanier and JeanJacques together. You're not talking sensibly."

       "Okay. It was you who said that failure in art can only be compensated by a life in action."

       "Did I say that? I think not. I probably said that people like Hitler and Goebbels and Mussolini got angry when their artistic drive was frustrated and could only find an outlet in revolutionary politics. You, dear Ralph, can't write but you can do other things. You played Mozart very nicely until you decided he was a white reactionary slave-owning fag. You can direct plays. For God's sake don't start believing that you have a place in any of these damned revolU tionary movements that are fomenting in postcolonial Africa. Stay with me. Don't desire to move too far from the Atlantic or the Mediterranean. We'll start househunting in Tangier. The day after tomorrow, if you like."

       Ralph sulked, and I could have torn his clothes off with anger. "Don't you start thinking of the two of us settling in Tangier. The time's come for you to settle, I can see that. With me its different."

       "Ralph," I said, feeling my glottis constrict, "have you no love or loyalty? Does it all have to be on my side?"

       "You pay me a salary. I'm kind of an employee. Those two things don't have to come into it."

       "Yes," tears were starting, "and if it weren't for my own love and loyalty I'd say that you were a bloody bad employee."

       "You mean I don't hold my ass at the right angle?"

       "That's a cruel thing to say. I mean that you sent a letter to my British publisher saying Fuck off and signing it with a facsimile signature that was taken to be my own. I mean other things. I mean that my love for you, which cries out for a physical expression you tolerate brutishly, induces a cecity to your inefficiency and your bad behaviour. I don't want to think of you as an employee. You are given all the money you require, and it is far more than I would give to an employee. I want to think of you as my loving friend."

       "Oh Jesus." Ralph grinned. "Loving friends. Like that story of your about the other fucking Ralph. Let me take your pants off, darling."

       "That too is cruel. If you were a real writer instead of a bungling amateur, you would know that the names of one's own fiction can take on a kind of magic, can achieve something like prophetic stain, I mean strain. I have to confess that, when my sister suggested you as a secretary and companion, your name was much in your favour. Now please let us try not to be unpleasant to each other. Perhaps you and I could arrange a little trip to East Africa. The British Council has frequently proposed that I exhibit myself on their African ah circuit."

       "Ah shit," went Ralph, beautiful wretched boy. "You keep missing it, don't you? Uncle Tom colleges. I want to see where I come from."

       "As I have said many times, your provenance is the West Coast, where a gentle artistic people allowed itself to be exploited by predators of many colours. YOU will see genuinely black Africans on the East Coast, as well as Arabs and Asians, but they will have nothing to say to you, nor will you have to them. This is the worst kind of uninformed romanticism."

       Listen," Ralph hissed. "Blacks don't stand an ice cube in hell's chance in the States. What history meant by black slavery was equipping a whole continent in retaliation with the ideological and technical resources of the West to rise in power and authority and dignity to make the whole fucking West tremble. And you talk of the British fucking Council."

       "You have been reading something," I said. "And I don't mean just that little book on the Oma people who can't count beyond two. You have been reading the windy rhetoric of some of the new African politicians. I don't like it, Ralph."

       "Okay, you don't like it. But don't talk to me any more about seeing the tourist sights. Life's short. And I'm hungry."

       "Hungry for what?"

       "Hungry for food. Jesus, come down off it. What they gave us for lunch on that Sopwith Camel was like a snack for a canary. Let's go out and eat someplace."

       "We're meeting the ah operatic contingent in an hour or so. We eat then."

       "Listen, I'm not eating with Nick Campanati. You call him and cancel it."

       "We have work to discuss, dear Ralph. I came here primarily in connection with work."

       "Give me money then. You brought me to what you call Africa, okay, I'll go and see what it has to offer. Money money."

       "I gave you money."

       "I spent it on those shirts at the airport. Money, give."

       I sighed and sighed. "In my inside pocket there you will find a supply of what they call dirhams. Take what you wish but leave me enough to pay for dinner."

       A very ungracious boy. I dined with Domenico and his in situ colleagues not at the Maimunia, where we only drank, but at a dark and oily garlicky restaurant more Neapolitan than Moroccan, though its name was the Shiwa, a sardonic name since there was no roast beef on the menu. Bevilacqua, who was pale and shivery, dug away at a mound of plain rice with lemon juice squeezed onto it. The rest of us had a bland couscous which we enfired with harissa. Domenico had now reached the stage of hearing voices in his skull. "Mazzotta," he said, "for Nick. Gregoretti for Venere." We had decided that one of the three unpickled and revivified by the saint should be not only a woman but a personification of the goddess of love and that Act One, Scene One should be a kind of Venusberg.

       "Gregoretti looks it," Vern Clapp said, "but she's weak in the high register. Is that rice holding?" he asked Bevilacqua.

       "Better. I think it will stay."

       "Controllo muscolare," Domenico said, " quello ii segreto." And to me, "I think we're going to finish like I said. The kid dead in his arms. Hiroshima. The death camps."

       "Morocco," Vern Clapp said. "The Bronx. Any darned place you like."

       "While we're talking of muscular control," I said, "don't ever think of letting art relax itself into propaganda."

       "It's not propaganda," Domenico said. "It's the way things are. God doesn't give a fuck about men and women and kids."

       "You can't write this opera that way."

       "Ken's right, like I said," Vern Clapp said. "Let's finish with that heavenly choir."

       "The point is," I said, "that the responsibility for the music is yours. The words are mine. And his," I added, nodding toward grimly rice-stuffing Bevilacqua. "Let's have some more of this local wine."

       "It tastes like catarrh," Vern Clapp said.

       "Don't put Renato off his rice," Domenico said. And to me, "It's the music that speaks and always did in opera. The words are only a kind of, what's the,' word "Excuse? Pretext? Subterfuge? I'm not having that."

       "You hand the words over to me," Domenico said. "And then I do with them what I have to do."

       "That," Vern Clapp said justly, "is because you've been taking orders too long. Give us a sound meaning that Cary Grant has indigestion. Give us a tune that sounds like what Lauren Bacall looks like. You're overreacting, Nick boy. Ken's right. It's his story not yours."

       "Maybe you don't want any music at all," Domenico said, hot as harissa.

       "Maybe you want a nice little play about God shits on you but he's still the big good God. That would please the big good cardinal."

       "You're bringing family matters into it," I said. "Don't, Domenico. Art, art, art. Composite art. Wagner didn't put the music first."

       "That's because he wrote the words too," Domenico said.

       "Well, you try it," I said. "You write the words. Then you'll get what you want. Do you want me to withdraw my libretto?"

       "When I've done the first scene and am halfway through the second? You must be crazy. And that's a nasty thing to say, Ken. That's prima donna stuff."

       Bevilacqua said, "Devo per lorza tornare a casa, non mi fido dei gab inetti di qua."