Earthly Powers (91 page)

       "What's he say?"

       "Re says," Domenico said, "that he's got to get back. He doesn't fancy using the bathroom here. Okay, who pays? You pay, Ken, right. It was lousy food anyway. Right, we do it your way and then see what the critics say. Always chop that bit off."

       "So long as you chop my name off the credits."

       "We'll see. Get the second act done first. Then think about it."

       "Ken's right," Vern Clapp said.

       "Devo andare. Subito." They went off in a petit taxi and left me to wander a while in the warm March air. An odorous old Moor tried first to sell me kif and then a boy. He had a goat too, he said, female if my tastes ran to American-style normality. I went back to the hotel and to Ralph. Ralph was in his room sobbing.

       "Ralph dear, angel, what in the name of...

       He stopped sobbing and got up from his bed showing a wet face. He wiped the tears off with his shirtsleeve. "Okay," he said. "Okay okay okay. I want to go home." The vowel of home threatened to prolong into a howl, but he bit it off, the more easily because tears had denasalized his speech.

       "Something bad happened? Where? What did they do?"

       "Home, where the white liberals are real nice to niggers so long as they don't claim their rights. Cokes and burgers and JellO. Home."

       "I want to know what happened."

       "Oh, what I might have expected. I went round some dark alleys and there was the sound of this woman wailing one of these Arab songs, and I went to the door which was open, I thought it was some kind of a Moorish nightspot, and then these four black guys jump me and I get rolled. Black, man, black guys. My watch, money, the lot."

       "A rich American, Ralph, that's all you are to them. Black? They must have been Berbers."

       "And then they try to get my pants down and stuff it up."

       "Oh no."

       "I want out of here. I want to go home."

       "Home is with me, Ralph. My only desire in life is to look after you. Oh my God, they did that."

       "They tried it. They didn't get far. A police car comes by and they run. And the police tell me in French and I say make it Spanish, they tell me in Spanish to keep out of these places, not for tourists, you go back to your rich hotel, sucker Americano. They don't even give me a ride there. Okay, that's Marrakesh. That's Morocco."

       "Tangier is very different, you'll see. Gang rape, oh my God."

       'Tuck Tangier. I want New York."

       "Come into my bed, Ralph. Cry yourself to sleep. I'll be watching over you every minute from now on. This sort of things happens to all of us."

       "A mockery, that's all. Humiliation, you know that big word?"

       "I practically invented it."

       "A fucking mockery."

CHAPTER 64

"Naughty," said the fat man in white, Lord Somebody, "not to put too fine a point on it."

       "He'll be for the chop all right."

       "How did they dare?"

       So goodbye to Barcelona with GaudI's Church of the Sagrada Familia, almost esculent, crisp burnt baguettes aspiring to heaven, and his Park GŸell, fairy decadence, the stalls in Las Ramblas and the winds of Tibidabo, the ten o'clock dinners of octopus in their own ink. To say that I spent the next decade and half of my life in Tangier would not be strictly true, since my sixties and seventies were as restless as the fifties and sixties of the century, and I jetted about the globe being a personality, spent six months in Australasia, a year in New York, two years traversing Latin America for a possible book, odd rags of time in European capitals. Nevertheless, Calle Mozart 21, not far from the Teatro Lope de Vega, became my official home until my flight to Malta. The house, built in the thirties, was of two stories, a box with little elegance though ample amenity, surrounded by a garden with a pair of cedars and walnut and orange and lemon trees, the garden surrounded by a thick high wall surmounted by broken-bottle chevaux-de-frise. While Ralph, moody but for a time chastened, was still with me, I managed to work well on a new long novel entitled Walter Dunnett, somewhat autobiographical save for the hero's heterosexuality. It would, from the technical angle, have seemed unremarkable when Arnold Bennett was a boy, what with its firm plot and stodgy dialogue, as also its inexplicit love scenes. I still had my audience, large if aging, but American scholastics were beginning to find in my work elements of irony and patterns of symbolism that were not, so far as I knew, really present. Meanwhile in France a new breed of writers was producing the nouveau roman, based on the rejection of plot and character and, indeed, everything I had always stood for. It was perhaps with unspoken relief that, admiring these, professors of fiction took my own works to bed and, enjoying them, had to rationalise their enjoyment in terms of my consciously, in a kind of revolt against postmodernism, ridiculous term, reverting to an earlier tradition. I was not, of course, reverting at all.

       "I know why they dare. They want to make a case of it. About time too."

       I was drinking sherry with Ralph in Al-Djenina, a bar not far from the Hotel Rif, and a number of expatriate writers, each with his Tangerine young man in smart suit with briefcase, were discussing The Love Songs of J. Christ by Valentine Wrigley. This had recently been published in London by Macduff and Tannenbaum "The case is already about to begin," I said.

       "You've read it, Toomey?" This was a man in middle age best known for his loving biography of Lord Alfred Douglas.

       "I read it in typescript," I said, "in the States. And I have just received a request from the publishers' solicitors to present myself as an expert witness when the time comes. The time is coming. The Director of Public Prosecutions has been compelled to take action."

       "Will you go?" asked the lord, a viscount to be exact, a young and muscular man dabbling on a family remittance in the worst kind of Moorish pederastic dirt.

       "I think I shall have to. Thank God the law forbids my delivering an aesthetic judgment on this book." The courtyard of the bar was full of tame birds, gaudy but songless, that were beginning, with chirruping and irritable preening, to settle on their perches for the night.

       "It'll be magistrate's court," said the Alfred Douglas man, who looked ascetic, even High Anglican clerical. "Marlborough Street. I remember the Well of Loneliness case. I was there. Terribly ill-written book. But one had to speak out, you know, as much as one could. Never cared much for lesbians, perhaps unreasonable of me. Never cared for Tiggy Hall."

       "Is that what she was called? I thought it was Boopsy or something." This was a twitching man who managed to live out here on two novels a year, a sale of three thousand for each. No tax, cheapish cigars. He was chewing one.

       "I was made to feel guilty," I said, "for not putting in a word there." It seemed that my brother Tom, silly eventually faithless Estella peeping over his shoulder, was looking at me in sad retrospective reproach. This is the way the brain works. "I suppose I'm really making amends."

       "Not really a trial at that stage," the Bosie man said. "The magistrate regards Marie Corelli as a daring authoress and Hall Caine as a pornographer and they have a counsel who just asks polite questions. They're trying to find out if there's a possible defence, really. That sort of thing. Court of enquiry."

       "The point is, I think," I said, "that Macduff and Tannenbaum want to make a sort of bargain with the law. They paid big money for this big novel by Ralph's compatriot—"

       "Dear Ralph," said a small man called Pissy who seemed to have no other name, twinkling and drawing his upper body together in a gesture meant to be seductive.

       "That would be Foulds," the two—novel—a—year man said with bitter envy.

       "The Cry of the Clouds. A very dirty book. Long as well. Like War and Peace.

       There was an American woman in the Miramar with a copy. Anything gets through in the States."

       "You see the situation," I said. "This volume of Val Wrigley's gets banned, they're not going to follow right away with another prosecution. If they say, as they may do, this is only a book of pseudopoems with a limited audience, let it go, then there's a great victory for free speech and so on. They practically threw it at the DPP."

       "Black, isn't he?" the viscount said. "Saw a photograph of him somewhere."

       "Yeah, he's black," Ralph drawled, "all black, man. You any objection to him being black?"

       "How touchy you chaps are," said the Bosie man. "We love your rippling black velvet bodies and you know it."

       "But not our rippling black velvet minds."

       "All right, Ralph," I said and drained my Amontillado. "Don't start anything."

       "F'oulds shows up you bastard little litterateurs," Ralph said. "A big book, right. And big money. But he took the money home, right?"

       "East Africa is not his home," I said, "any more than it's yours, dear Ralph. You and I will now go to real home. Ali gets upset if we're late for dinner." The marine sky was all plum and apple and honey touched with a little greengage. There were old-fashioned farewells from the others, who did not seem to propose going home, not till their Moorish boys carried them thither. "Tutti frutti," and "Be good, you old whore" and so on. Ralph and I walked home, myself panting little more than he as we engaged the brief hill. Ali, whom you have already met, smiled that we were not late. He served us avocado followed by coq au yin, cheese and a shop-bought apricot flan to finish. We ate in a room bare except for its monastic dining furniture and Moorish rugs on parquet floor and walls. After dinner Ralph got down to some serious practice on his harpsichord: there was talk of his playing Mozart at a little concert that Gus Jameson, an expatriate Scottish composer, was arranging for late December. I went to my study and, sighing, numbered a new sheet of foolscap (140), recalled some of my characters from their brief sleep and set them talking. They started talking, to my surprise, about the novel which contained them, rather like one of those cartoon films in which anthropomorphic animals get out of the frame and start abusing their creator.

       "A novelist friend of mine," Diana Cartwright said, "affirmed that a satisfactory novel should be a self-evident sham to which the reader could regulate at will the degree of his credulity."

       "A sham, eh?" Walter Dunnett said. "Even when there are verifiable historical personages in it? Like Havelock Ellis and Percy Wyndham Lewis and Jimmy Joyce?"

       "They're not the same as what they would be in real life. The whole thing's a fake. We're fakes too. We're saying what he wants us to say. You see that Degas over there—he could turn it into a Monet at a stroke of the pen. He could reduce the number of oranges in that bowl from eight to three. He could make me die now with a heart attack." I nearly wrote: She died at once of cardiac arrest.

       This would not do at all. I got up and walked round my study. For the first time I was being made to realise how tenuous my art, such as it was, was. This was the impact of the age, in which the suspension of disbelief was slowly being abandoned. The young, certainly, were done with art. I sat shakily down at the little table where Ralph, when he felt like working, typed my letters and sometimes my manuscripts. To the left of his typewriter was a low pile of magazines, including five or six successive weekly issues of the new Nywele, an international periodical dedicated to what was called the International Black Movement and published in Kampala. As was appropriate to life, though not to fiction, the copy I picked up opened at an article, in English, on the black novelist Randolph Foulds, complete with brooding thick-necked photograph. He had made several million dollars out of The Cry of the Clouds and he had invested it in the strengthening of the military regime of Abubakar Mansanga, who was building a modern state in Rukwa and converting a tribal congeries into a totalitarian unity. It was to be a model African state in which neither the imported white technological experts nor the Asian men of commerce would much longer be allowed to dilute the echt negritude of a territory whose boundaries were, as yet, unfixed. Here the African Future was already being proclaimed. I heard Ralph repeating and repeating an elegant rococo right-hand run on his harpsichord, and I shuddered. I went back to my novel, crumpled the sheet I had started, and forced the characters back into total servitude to my will. Slaves, sort of, with only the illusion of freedom. Like all of us. The novel form was no sham.

       The letter I received from Lightbody and Creek of Essex Court, Strand, informed me that the hearing would begin at Marlborough Street on December 5, and I was requested to render myself available at 9:00 A.M. on that date. This was a nuisance. The opera (ma Leggenda su San Nicola was to have its premiere at La Scala on the feast day of its protagonist, December 6, and I wished to be present at the dress rehearsal. Those readers knowledgeable in the operatic calendar of Milan will be aware that the season does not normally begin until the following day, the feast of Saint Ambrose (this is a solidly holy segment of the Milan winter, with the feast of the Immaculate Conception coming on December 8), but an adjustment had, after several committee meetings, been made out of a reluctant sense of celebratory fitness. Well then, everything was coming together, as in a well or mechanically plotted novel, since I had heard from Hortense in New York (who would not be in Milan) that the basso-relievo had arrived at Genoa on the Michelangelo as early as November 11.

       I said to Ralph, "Ralph, I must fly to London on the fourth. For the trial of J. Christ. Do you propose coming with me?"

       "I'll be okay here."

       "Are you sure you'll be ah okay here? Are you quite sure you won't get into mischief in the Casbah or somewhere?"