Earthly Powers (98 page)

       "Hell is an emanation of God's justice. But we believe that his love is greater than his justice. Hell has to exist—it's a logical proposition—but there may be nobody in it. Remember, man and woman were made perfect because they were made by God. But they're made evil, which means blind to virtue, by a force which God also made and which he can't unmake."

       "Can't?" croaked a man with a piebald beard and a turquoise pullover (turquoise? Am I inventing that, or was I watching, in 1959, a colour set?). "Can't? When God according to Christian teaching is omnipotent?"

       "Oh yes," Carlo said. "There are certain things that God can't do. He can't not be God, for instance. As a Creator he has no power of destruction. He can't even destroy a human soul. He can only make it suffer eternally. He created the angel who created evil, and he can't uncreate him."

       "But," the turquoise man (I distinctly see turquoise) said, "he must have known that there'd be evil. He knows everything, right? If he knew, why did he let it happen?"

       "Here's a great and awful mystery," Carlo beamed. "God gave his creatures the most tremendous endowment, the thing most like his own essence—I mean freedom of choice. If he knows in advance what his creatures are going to do, then he's denying them freedom. So he deliberately blacks out foreknowledge. God could know if he wished, but out of respect and love for his creatures he refuses to know. Can you imagine any more awesome gift than this—God denying himself out of sheer love?"

       This was on the NBC network. More awesome than Carlo's avowal of God's love is my memory of commercial interruptions. Not so many as normally: one every thirty minutes. I am fairly certain I now saw ungreasy fried chicken proclaimed by a radiant black family, Italian tomato paste, a cough mixture called Nyquil. Carlo would not be outraged by the intrusion of consumerism into elementary apologetics: time for a swig of cognac from the flask carried by his batman or familiar. When he came back on again somebody was asking okay God, but why Jesus Christ? Are the Jews wrong and the Indians and the yeah Chinese and the Japs?

       "Let all who believe in God," Carlo said urgently, "unite in the brotherhood 0f that belief. But within that brotherhood is another fraternity—those who accept that God became man at a certain place and at a certain time, in a word, entered human history. I mean the Christian fraternity. Inside that, until recently, it was assumed that the fraternity of which the Bishop of Rome is the head was sealed off, arrogant in its claim to sole legitimacy, the only begetter of Christian authority. I think that view is dying now. I think that I and my brothers are helping to kill it. So I say that Christianity is the tin Baptist chapel in Arkansas as well as Saint Peter's in Rome. But to return to your question: why Jesus Christ? The answer lies in many places. It lies, before history brought about the Incarnation, in logic. We have talked of an omnipotent God. An omnipotent God who loves man. What more logical than that he should show himself among men? We have talked of sin. That man does not properly understand the nature of sin, thanks to the blinding power of the devil, in no way mitigates the horror of the impact of sin on the pure radiance of God. The sin that man commits must be paid for. Not by damnation but by sacrifice. No purely human sacrifice could wipe out the horror of sin. Hence the divine sacrifice."

       "Okay," a housewife in beads said, "but why did Rome ever think it had the right to set itself up as the only ah ah religious authority? I mean, you're the Pope, right?"

       "Right," the Pope said, rightly.

       "I mean, why should Luther be wrong and ah ah Calvin and Henry the Seventh no Eighth and ah ah Billy Graham and the Holy Rollers and William Penn and ah ah right?"

       "The Church of Rome represents the primal historical authority," Carlo said. "There's an unbroken line of succession from Saint Peter, crucified in Rome in the place where the Vatican now stands, to myself who am, as you accurately remark, Pope. No sensible Catholic now denies that, in the sixteenth century and after, reform was needed in his Church. He regrets that such reform took the shape of new foundations of protest. But the important thing today is the whole Christian fraternity. Of that I may claim to be not the head but the coordinating minister. Such a claim is reasonable, being based on a historical tradition. Rome is the symbol of Christian unity, no more. We must talk no more of Catholics and Protestants—only of Christians."

       I switched off. I had had enough. I knew all the arguments, which could have been as confidently entrusted to a wet-eared seminarian. But if the President of the United States could be expected to submit to the democracy of the small screen, why not the Father of All the Faithful? If you want the dope, go to the bossman. The bossman had been seated in the parlours of millions of Americans, dealing out the Christian truth, straight from the horse's. Dope was, Perhaps, the word. Tidings of comfort.

       I went to bed wit a paperback copy of the novel called Africa! by Ran doiph Foulds, alias Ngolo Basatu. Seven hundred and fifty pages. Six million copies sold in the hardcover edition. Soon to be a major motion picture. I had bought it down below in the little gift shop of the Holiday Inn. I had not read The Cry of the Clouds, but I gathered it was rather like this: black sex and violence. It had sold well in Britain, where, despite cries for its suppression, the law had not pounced. The law had chewed up The Love Songs of I. Christ and was temporarily satisfied. I read a few pages of the later opus but found it tough going. The whole of Africa seemed to be turned into a bed on which a massive muscle-bound character named Bmuti thrust his fiery rod into everybody. Bmuti stood for the new prevalent black. He could have been the ebony Pantagruel or the Los of the Niger, but he lacked humour and poetry. He was a media robot with three or four computerised facial expressions. On page 23 he seemed to be polishing his weapon for insertion into a character named Bowana, whose model might well have been Ralph—a cultivated American black who didn't know the best way to become Africanized. I fuck you man but good. Dat de best way.

CHAPTER 70

"Next year," my nephew John said, "Africa!"

       I seemed to hear it in italic with an exclamation point after. "You and Professor Bucolo?" I was back at Wisbech College in Indiana. Val Wrigley was no longer there to taunt me with frivolity and irresponsibility: nor would he now have had cause to. Val Wrigley, I gathered, was now in Christopher Isherwood country, Santa Monica or somewhere. I had given a lecture entitled "What Now in the Novel?" I had been fed and drenched by a students' committee. I was in John and Laura's campus house, taking a forebed whisky. They had been married about eighteen months, their wedding a solid old-fashioned Catholic one in Laura's hometown of St. Louis. John had gained a doctorate for a thesis on the matriarchal culture of a Mexican Indian settlement near Zacatecas. He had a full professorship with tenure. Wisbech College was notable for the close working relationship that existed between its Department of Anthropology and its Department of Linguistics. John was now working on analogues of familial structure in the structure of language.

       "Yes, Jimmy Bucolo. He got us the grant. A pretty stingy one but it will have to do. One of these charter flights to Marseilles. Then a run-down steamer to port Said. Then a Hawaa Masir trip to Jibuti. Then the Erinmore Line takes us through the Gulf of Aden. And then—As you can see, too much time spent on travel. Of course, if we could both have a sabbatical four months' vacation doesn't give us much chance to see—"

       "What do you expect to see?"

       "Well—" A big handsome dedicated scholar with so much of his mother in his looks, he sat on the edge of the chunky russet sofa and clasped his hands as in prayer. "I've been gathering a lot of material from this side of the Atlantic on a particular marital custom. Among the Akanyi, the Ptotuni, the Zoloar tribe near Tegucigalpa—the names won't mean much to you—"

       "Not a thing."

       "Well, what happens when a girl marries is a kind of ritual incest without impregnation. It's the girl's uncle or even greatuncle that spends a week with her—sexual initiation partly, partly a sort of reminiscence of endogamy. Sometimes it's a week, sometimes more, less—more than two days, anyway. What happens to the language as spoken by the whole group during that period is of huge interest. Sentences get inverted, and if anybody forgets to invert there are punishments—not severe ones, more like comic humiliation. About a dozen words in the lexis—sometimes more, sometimes fewer: 9.05 on average so far—come under taboo. All the words belong to the same semantic area—I mean, they all have something to do with covering things up—loincloth, lid, including eyelid, palm of the hand, darkness, the skin of an animal—you get the general idea. The words can't be used except under penalty. The substitute words are sort of complementary to the taboo ones—you can talk about the covered but not the covering—you can even use the word for genitals, which is normally taboo in a lot of the groups I studied. But only during this period."

       "Fascinating."

       "You think so? You really think so? Now in the Americas the possibility of cultural transmission can't be left out of account, but Jimmy feels sure the same sort of thing goes on in Africa. You remember the Oma people? He gave you that offprint, didn't he? He couldn't understand why the word for eye was oro and the word for eyelid the same. He must, he thinks, have been in touch with somebody who'd gone into the mission hospital while a taboo of that kind was operating. And this guy was stroking the hospital cat and he called its fur its kidneys, which is the generic word for the insides of an animal—"

       "Fascinating."

       "So it may be there's something built into what we laughingly call the primitive mind—you see what I mean?"

       "Is Laura going with you?"

       'You kidding? On a grant that size?"

       John," I said, "I've told you before that you must not be afraid to ask rue for money. The money I have has been earned through the purveying of a kind of trash—"

       "Don't call it that. A lot of it's very good."

       "On the strength of my reputation as a purveyor of this trash I've been paid two thousand dollars for a single lecture at your own college. How much will you need to get the three of you to East Africa in moderate comfort and at reasonable speed? And back, of course. Ten thousand? Would that help?"

       "Uncle Ken, you're too good."

       "No, I'm making amends for a wasted life. I'm proud to be contributing to scholarship."

       "Well, you know, I don't know what to say. Except thanks."

       "I'll make out a check in the morning. My checkbook's in my luggage in the president's guesthouse."

       "Thanks and thanks again. When do you leave and where for?"

       "I lecture at the University of Oklahoma on Monday. I'm spending tomorrow night in New York. There's a flight after lunch."

       "Fine. Tomorrow morning you can see the film that Dotty's brother sent. Of course, you know him, I'd forgotten. The glories of Rukwa, rather a nice bit of propaganda. They want black American skills. The building of a modern African state. At least I know what the place looks like."

       "It's there that you're going? I hadn't thought."

       "There seem to be a fair number of unassimilated tribes on the borders. Including the Oma people." And then, "Dotty's far from well."

       "I heard that. The great twentieth-century slayer. Evil made flesh. Not flesh, rather antiflesh. Ah." for Laura had just come in from a visit to a neighbour, Professor Szasz's wife, immobilised with a slipped disk. So lovely a girl, spilling over with health, those startling warm iceblue eyes framed in well-brushed lustrous blueblack, the neat pliant body in a shift dress of cinnamon wool.

       She said, "How's my favourite writer?"

       "Laura dear, your job is to improve literary taste not debase it. You must really stop feeling such enthusiasm for my work."

       "Okay, the short stories are great, the novels are lousy, will that do?" And she dimpled with a flash of serried snowgems.

       "Laura, you're going to Africa. Uncle Ken's putting up the money."

       "Say that again."

       "Africa. Not just Jimmy and me. You too. And not on banana boats either."

       "Oh gosh," she said, sitting with grace in the second of the chunky russet armchairs, myself being in the other. "You mean that? Hemingway country. Oh gosh."

       "Not Hemingway country," John said. "Not safariland. A bit rough, some of it, but I'll keep you away from the more harmful fauna. You'd better get that cinecamera mended."

       4 "Dear Uncle Ken," she said, and she came over and sat in my lap and kissed me. Then she sprang up very lithe and switched on the television set. "There's your other uncle on, Johnboy. I want to hear what he has to say about birth control. Sorry, Uncle Ken, I have to know, we both do. But thanks and thanks and thanks. I can hardly believe it."

       John said, eyes narrowed, as she turned the dial and got the NBC channel and a fat splotch of blessing papal white, "He's not my uncle. Everybody's father and brother but nobody's uncle. We all let him down. He's disowned all of us."

       "Oh, come off it, Johnboy. Listen."

       We listened. Carlo was quite at his ease among a mob of militant women. The venue seemed to be a press conference room, the women, from their hard smartness, journalists. "Ordained priests," one of them was saying.

       Carlo replied, "Once you grant men the power to bear children your sex will have a powerful claim to the right to ordination. Not before. Remember, all women are, in fact or potency, vessels of the mystery of birth. Kindly, ladies, permit a few men to enact the mysteries of the priestly craft. Another thing, the priest is the inheritor of the mission of Jesus Christ. God in his mysterious wisdom incarnated himself as a human creature of the male sex. He granted, as God the Son, the right to spread the Gospel to male missionaries, not to their wives. Things may change, things will change. But not while I sit in Saint Peter's chair."