Earthly Powers (99 page)

       "Why can't priests marry?"

       "There's no doctrinal reason why they shouldn't. But there's every possible commonsensical reason why they should remain celibate. The story is told of an Anglican minister and a Catholic priest sharing a friendly glass of beer in London at the time of the Battle of Britain. An air raid began. The Anglican said, 'I must get home to my wife and children.' The Catholic said, 'I must go and look after my flock.' The family of a minister of the faith is his congregation, and a special, more personal relationship would be an obstacle to his impartial love and devotion. As for sex, don't think that some of us have not known, and still don't know, the agonies of sexual frustration. Deprived of a wife, must a priest then go to a brothel? Sexual deprivation is a cross the priest must bear, And the Pope too. It is a fleshly sacrifice he offers daily, hourly, to God."

       "Why won't the Church permit birth control?" asked a woman with big blue granny glasses and an evident pregnancy.

       Ah, that question," Carlo smiled. "It will plague me to the end of my ministry. Human seed, containing as it does the mysterious potency of new life, must not be regarded as a mere by-product of the sexual spasm—sometimes kindly permitted to do its biological work, sometimes regarded as a deadly nuisance. If Mr and Mrs Shakespeare had indulged in birth control there might have been no William Shakespeare. And so for the parents of Saint Paul, Abraham Lincoln, President Eisenhower. And so, if I may say so, for my own parents, whoever they were—"

       "The ultimate celibacy," John said. "You wipe out the past as well as the future."

       "Quiet, Johnboy."

       "—What we have to think of is the immense potentiality of the human seed, the desperate turpitude of wasting it. Very well, very well, I can anticipate your objections to these words, which are not, remember, words I utter in uncaring callousness. They are the words of the Church I inherit, not of the Church that is still to be made. Tradition says that a woman's chief function is to produce new human souls to the glory of God. Our own age says that a woman has duties to her own soul, and that she must not be condemned to a life of labour pains. Well, the control of birth lies in the will of the man and woman alike the will to abstain from total sexual congress. This may be difficult, but it is also good, even holy. But remember"—he grew fierce, his chin jutted in a Duce manner, his nose trained itself on his audience like a dangerous weapon—"we must beware of accepting the deadly heresy that life is sacred only when it crosses the threshold of the womb—that, as yet unshaped, as yet unnamed, it is expendable. It is a short step then to condoning abortion, which is no more than a form of infanticide."

       There were angry shouts from these hard and emancipated women. Carlo's great voice rose like a lion's above them. "Love," he cried, "love is greater than animal coupling. The love of man and woman which is a figure of God's love for humanity. Are we to be no more than brute beasts howling in perpetual heat? Can we not learn that love of the spirit that transcends the lust of the flesh? Love, love, let us have love."

       The anger had to subside, because it seemed now to be directed against love. Carlo spoke more softly. He even smiled as he said, "Your Heavenly Father is not a personification of biology. He knows your problems. He weeps over the spectacle of a hungry world. Do not blame him for his own hunger, which is a hunger for human souls."

       "Baal," John said, "Moloch."

       "Johnboy."

       "Heaven is limitless. It is not confined as our earth is confined. Its crops do not fail, no famine oppresses it. And yet, says the Lord, this house must be filled. Filled with countless human souls, and each one revelling in its divine uniqueness."

       "Mongoloids?" someone shouted. "Thalidomide cases?"

       "Souls, souls, I speak of souls. And I speak, and will always speak, of love. Let me end on that note. God's love is great enough to condone our weak nesses. He asks us only to do what we can to fulfil his kingdom. He does not ask the impossible."

       "Switch him off," John said.

       "Yeah, switch him off," obeying. She sat down again and we looked at each other. She was a good housewife as well as, I gathered, a fine teacher and, I could see, a lovely girl. This little drawing room was conventionally enough furnished with its wedding-gift suite and rocking chair and coffee table with coffee-table Tiepolo album, but there were her own touches of greenery—fern and wandering jew—as well as a well-dusted disposition of knickknacks (John's jujus and totems, her own pieces of colonial glass and china) and flower paintings on the strawberry and cream wallslove in idleness, love in a mist, love lies bleeding. She was, I knew, a good American cook, expert at spareribs, pineapple-orange glazed ham, southern luncheon bake, frosty ribbon loaf, dad's denvers. Tears came to my eyes as I looked at her: what I had missed, what I had been predestined to miss. The tears welled and had to be sucked back as I looked fondly at them both. I saw them in bed naked together, intent on each other's joy, not engaged in the making of a new William Shakespeare, while Carlo frowned down from the ceiling.

       "Another whisky?" John said.

       "One for the road. A lionfrightener."

       "Condone our weaknesses," Laura said. "What did he mean?"

       "He meant, I think," I said, "that the seed containing a new Abraham Lincoln may flow but not be too upset if it meets obstacles. So long as it doesn't know in advance that it's going to meet obstacles. If it knows this, it had better not flow."

       "It didn't sound to me as if he meant that."

       "You wait. As his tour of the Americas continues he'll talk more of love and less of dogma. He'll shelve more and more of the hard questions. He'll talk of love because he wants to be loved himself. Gregory the Beloved."

       John gave me my nightcap. "Did you hope," he began. "I suppose I shouldn't ask. What I mean is—"

       "Did I hope that the new Church would condone my particular weakness? No, I didn't. Not that it applies any more, at least not to me. The fire has been doused. I'm an old man. I could go back to the Church tomorrow if I wished."

       "D0 you wish?" Laura asked.

       "I've got on well enough as a cynical rationalist."

       'Come on," she said. "What you write isn't like that at all."

       'Sentimentality," i said. "That's the other side of the coin." I drained my drink and got up stiffly, an old man as I'd said. "Can you pick me up?" I said to John.

       "Is ten too early?"

       "Fine."

       "Thank you again," Laura said, "a million times thanks." She got up to kiss me goodnight. And then, her lovely eyes full of it: "Africa!"

       The film was called Rukwa Reborn. John ran it for me himself on the sixteen-millimetre projector which belonged to his department. I recognised the voice of the commentary: Ralph's. Its vibrations struck my glands and gave the lie to my talk of the dousing of the fire. And there was Ralph himself onscreen, in hot-coloured robes, tigerskin shako, leather riding boots, mounted on a white Arab, leading a kind of detachment of native cavalry over a grassy plain. We saw oil rigs and earnest black technicians in hard silver hats poring over charts, a black finger pointing, a black head nodding. There was a black technical college with black students in snowy shirts and well-cut pants examining the gleaming maquette of a power station. Backward tribes were being gently taught, seated on grass on loinclothed haunches before a whiteboard and bespectacled black teacher, about the need for their assimilation into the new progressive state. A black audience laughed its head off at a black comedy film in colour. Here was the capital with its white-box commercial buildings, football stadium, the ten-story Mansanga Hotel. "They seem to be doing all right," John said. Ralph's commentary, more grandiloquent, said the same thing. It also said something about freedom of worship while a black muezzin called to the blue heavens and black schoolchildren, led by a black nun in white, trooped to a little church with one clanging bell. Ralph admitted that the state had problems: jealousy on its borders, no direct access to the Indian Ocean, heavy duties imposed at the port of Kilwa. But all problems could be solved with good will, the right Pan-African spirit. The author of Africa! appeared, smiling, muscular, a possible candidate for the Nobel Prize. And, finally, there was the great Mansanga himself, greeted by a loving people with excellent teeth, or getting a laugh in the council chamber, or inspecting troops from the saddle of a black Arab, while Ralph rode behind him on his white. Jaunty music, weak on melody but rich in polyrhythms, swelled on pipes and a multitude of drums. The film was over.

       "Yes," I said without conviction, "they seem to be doing all right. So long as the oil lasts."

       "Meanwhile," John said, "the tribes get corrupted and lose their gods to the god of uniformity." And then, "Dotty's brother seems to be doing all right too. The poet as man of action."

       "He was never much of a poet."

       "Give my love to Dotty. And, of course, to Mother."

       Dorothy was, I saw, far from well. She lay in bed limp, her once glorious hair greying and without life, the once sumptuous lushness of her skin now taking on the hue and texture of an elephant's hide, her fine eyes at the mercy of tearducts which never dried. I kissed her with affection and compassion; she put her bare thin arms lovingly about my neck. "How is it?" I asked.

       "It comes, it goes. We just had Hortense's brother-in-law on about offering pain up to God." At the bottom of the bed was a small television set, now off.1-lortense was seated on the bed, her arm about her friend, her one tired eye on me.

       She said, "You're old, Ken."

       "I don't deny it. Old and lonely." She herself did not look old, save for a crepiness about her neck. She was in blue linen, bell-shaped skirt, boat-shaped neckline, bow tie, short jacket with welt pockets, bronze stockings. She had kicked off her high fine stiletto heels. Her eye patch was a frank accessory, attractive in itself: a cluster of miniature blue roses on a green ground. Her hair kept, though cunning cosmesis, its schoolgirl colour: the blue roses peeped through a flow of its honey.

       "Stay with us," Dorothy said. "For good, I mean." And then her eyes brimmed. "No, not fair to you. You don't want to seeoh hell." Hortense hugged her.

       Hortense said to me, "Before I forget, your agent called. Something about somebody filming one of your books. He thought you'd be here earlier. He's gone to Martha's Vineyard, you won't get him now till Monday."

       "Which book?"

       "The one you wrote while I was still at school. About Socrates. I'd forgotten it. Then his mentioning it brought it all back."

       "Socrates on the screen. Well, things are looking up."

       "I had another call too. From one of the Campanati brothers."

       "What, His Holiness actually deigned?"

       "No, it was the other one."

       "For God's sake, bloody Domenico."

       "I just love that bloody," Dorothy tried to smile. There were teeth missing. "Real breath of Oldy England."

       "Where was he, is he?"

       "Menton or somewhere. He must have remembered a happy day we spent there together. All those years ago. He wants to come back to me. He says he's failed in everything. Couldn't we, what's Mr Eliot's phrase, make a fresh start? He sounded drunk. Maudlin tears over the transatlantic cable. Too late, I told him, saddest words in the language." She hugged Dorothy more tightly.

       'Poor Domenico," I said. "Last I heard he'd taken the way out of all hopeless musicians. Noises. A Moog synthesiser. Birdsong played backwards."

       "Oh Christ," Dorothy suddenly went. "Sorry sorry sorry. It's the not expecting it that—Oh Jesus." The sweat of pain was frightful in its copiousness. Hortense tenderly wiped her with one of a number of towels that lay in crum pled disarray on the table by the bed. A double bed, the one I took it they still shared. "You go, Ken," Dorothy gasped, "you don't want to—Christ, it's not—" Dignified, she meant; she was right. Then the spasm passed. She lay very spent and said, "Hemlock," smiling weakly. "Cigu. You remember that Socrate of Satie? They say there's going to be a recording of it."

       "I'll watch out for it," I said, "and send it."

       "I didn't mean that, honey," smiling twistedly at Hortense. "It's just the sharp jabs when I don't expect ... it's the surprise." I caught, with a sharp jab, that day in the Chicago hospital thirty years before. Carlo was now, I knew, being pelted with paper as he drove blessing along cheering Fifth Avenue; paper like palm fronds was under his holy wheels. I had had taxi difficulty getting here, streets closed to traffic, honking jams. De Pope, the driver had explained through his wet chomped stogie. Please come and perform another miracle. The friend and lover of the woman you said was a saint. No, one didn't beg favours any more. The power, I had been shown, fell where it would, indifferent as grace, wild like goodness. No favours to friends, no friends.

       "I'll be back before bedtime," I said. "I promised to spend the evening with my niece. And—should it be grandniece or great-niece? I've never really known. Both seem to be preposterous titles."

       "A preposterous girl," Hortense said.

       "Oh honey, she's okay. She's just like the rest of them."

       "Yeah," Hortense said echt Americanly, or really (gea) edit Alfred the Great. "One of the inheritors."

       "It should really, I think, be inheritrices," I said.

       "Dear Ken. Dear bloody Ken. You write as badly as hell and yet you're pedantic as hell. I must do a bust of you." I did not see the connection.

CHAPTER 71

My niece Ann cooked a dish called New England Boiled Dinner, which tasted of little except sponges and salty water. It was followed by a Sara Lee banana cake, insufficiently defrosted, and caffeineless coffee: none in that household could tolerate caffeine. When I started to light up a Romeo and Juliet Ann said: "Please don't smoke, Uncle Ken. Eve's allergic to it." Eve said, "Gimme one more slice of that, Mom, and then Tune can smoke all he wants. Bob's taking me to the movies."