Earthly Powers (101 page)
I did not see the ballet mass put on in Chicago, with its priest in tights (Hortense's orchidelic bas-relief was, then, prophetic), but I was invited, in Iowa City, to a folk mass with loaves rushed hot from the oven and applejack served to the congregation as Christ's blood (was this really in defiance of the Council of Trent? Did the Council of Trent matter any more?). In Bowling Green, Ohio, or else Kalamazoo, Michigan, there was an open-air confession session with a priest in gaudy mufti and a tie that looked like two fried eggs sunny side up lolling on his crimsonshirted chest. These things can be believed as having taken place in America, where there is a tradition of religious razzmatazz. Were similar things happening in Mexico, Peru, Guatemala? A middle-aged priest in unfashionably rusty black told me, in a bar in Minneapolis, that he did not know where the hell he was.
"Like God," he said. "I used to have a pretty clear idea of God. Now we have these new theologians who say God's inside here not up there or he's an impersonal noosphere and the anthropomorphic image is out. Three unpersons in one ananthropomorphic noosphere. Our nada which art in nada, nada be thy nada."
"A clean well-lighted place," I said. "That's all he wants. What you're objecting to is the great opening up."
"To open up is to loosen. Holy Father, says the Archbishop of Boston, I've forgotten everything except my penny catechism. I've forgotten even that, says His Holiness. Let's forget everything except love, come to my arms little brother. That's not really inconsistent with this noosphere junk." He irritably indicated to the shortskirted bosomshowing waitress that he wanted another whisky sour straight up. A whisky priest. "We got nuns dressed like that now," he said. "We got sexy priests, God help us. Thank Jesus I'm not sexy."
"The Church," I said, "is coming to the people."
"The brothel," he said, "is coming to the clients."
This was going, I thought, too far. Christ spoke in the language of his hearers. Like the chaplain of Erie County Jail, New York, who gave out the Twenty-third Psalm as "The Boss is like my Probation Officer He makes me play it cool and feel good inside of me He shows me the right path so I'll have a good record and He'll have one too." I heard that. It went down well. God is like for real, man. Those kids didn't know what the hell a shepherd was. A Lord was something in old movies.
Carlo spoke to the blacks in Harlem. He didn't use their language but they understood him all right. He spoke in the thin spring sunlight on a street of ratgnawed tenements not far from 125th Street. "First," he said, "let me tell you what I am. I'm an Italian from Italy, not from Mulberry Street. Big Italy, not Little. I've nothing to do with the Mafia. I'm white, okay, and that goes against me. I can't help being white. That's a matter of luck, good or bad. Blame my parents, if you can find out who they were. I never knew them. I was an orphan very early in life and I got adopted. Now I'm the Pope, which means I'm head of the Christian Church. Now I don't want you to think that the Pope's always got to be a white man. He hasn't. Saint Peter was the first Pope, and he was a swarthy Jew, a fisherman without a dime for a cup of coffee when Jesus took him up. Jesus was pretty dark too, not black but sunburnt. It's not a white man's Church, and if a white man's at the head of it now, well, that's just an accident. Next time, who knows, we may have a black Pope. Or a yellow one. Colour doesn't matter much, after all, except the colour of your soul. And let's not talk about black souls and white souls. Let's talk instead of dirty slimy stinking souls and clean shining polished ones. Of dustcarts and Cadillacs, if you wish. If our souls get dirty, who do we blame? You know who. Now listen to me. The devil has his best chance among the ignorant, the deprived, the homeless, the jobless. That's why we can't have true religion till we've wiped out squalor and hunger and unemployment. I'm here in America for many things. But the big thing is to call for a change of heart. Your people have suffered from slavery. You, the children of slaves, suffer from the lack of justice. You have suffered too long. All this has to change. You're still in Egypt's land, whipped by Pharaoh. I stand here now and speak with the voice of Moses. I cry not Let my people go but Let my people live."
He left Dulles Airport after animating Washington with sermons both radical and reactionary, according to milieu. The words, indeed, grew less and less important. He communed with his smile, fatherly arms, bulky earthy solidity. Of his goodness no one was ever in doubt. He moved to the oppressed states of Latin America to diffuse this goodness further. It was not a goodness that noticeably, at least not yet, seemed likely to change the world. The technological progress of that year of papal travel was unrelated to the motions of the heart. Pioneer IV went in orbit round the sun; the basic molecule of penicillin was isolated; the Rajendra bridge spanned the Ganges; Jodrell Bank bounced a message to the United States off the moon; Auckland Harbour bridge was opened; the Vickers Vanguard turboprop airliner flew two and a half thousand miles in five and a half hours; Russia fired Lunik III and photographed the moon's glorious behind; the atomic icebreaker Lenin cracked its way into the Baltic; the first nuclear merchant ship Savannah was launched by Mrs Eisenhower; CERN's proton synchotron went into operation in Geneva; the French Premier opened the four-hundred-mile Sahara pipeline; a U.S. Air Force pilot set a new world speed record of 1,520 m.p.h.
Nature was equally unresponsive to the message that love could conquer all human problems. The world's population, already 2,800 million, increased by another 45 million—the result of love or something like it; the South America to which Carlo flew suffered the greatest flood disaster of the century; a typhoon in West Japan killed five thousand and left a million homeless. Humanity in the mass, or through the abstract actions of politics, remained unregenerate. States of emergency were declared in Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland; the communist guerrillas in South Vietnam, soon to be known as the Vietcong, set up their National Liberation Front; there was an uprising in Lhasa against Chinese rule and the Dalai Lama fled to India; desperate riots tore townships in Durban; the Prime Minister of Ceylon was assassinated; Russia glowered at the West and the West glowered back; the East glowered at everybody. Technology and power politics conjoined in the setting up everywhere of nuclear installations which potentially outdid in terror mere floods and earthquakes. City streets began to be unsafe at night. A change of heart was, however, the answer to the growing world mess, a cultivation of the technique of love. Could anyone honestly say that this was really wrong? The Pope of Rome may not have been all that realistic, but he was more realistic than the secular statesmen.
Of course, it was a comfort to know that man was not really bad and that everything could be blamed on a kind of moral virus that had landed in Eden in a spaceship. If the sophisticated could not hear of the diabolic power without a smile, the young were very ready to believe in him. There were many cases of juvenile crime, including actes gratuits of rape, torture and murder, which were laid by the defendants at the devil's door. The devil became as tangible a reality as Christ for Kids or the Big Black Jesus: his horns and eyes decorated many a bass drum of rock groups; he was invoked in drug sessions and was a blazon on T-shirts. If Carlo had convinced a section of the Christian population that there was a palpable malevolence at large which had nothing to do with original sin, then he had partly succeeded in his mission.
Anyway, he was there. It is still hard for me to accept that the little greedy cleric I had given lunch to in Sardinia at the end of the war to end war had become father of the faithful and a potent myth. It would have been proper for the man who had once been his brother to celebrate this elevation in some Berliozian Te Deum scored for quadruple woodwind, ten horns, six trumpets, the same of trombones, three tubas, massive kitchen department, a hundred strings, organ, and voices voices voices. Te Deum would, of course, have had to be vernacularized. But Domenico, having made his drunken plea for marital reinstatement and, so far, been rejected, settled with his whisky and Moog synthesiser in Menton, one who had fathered neither children nor great music, and brooded on his loneliness. I was lonely too, and so was Hortense after she had fed poor Dorothy her hemlock. This record, I see, has now to become not merely a chronicle of loneliness but of death, but that is in order for a chronicler who is dying himself. Yet the message of lonely Carlo, due for death five years after his crowning, was really life.
CHAPTER 72
Laura Campion sent me, as a gesture of thanks for my gift of her trip to East Africa, almost daily letters and postcards. The pictures on the postcards showed sunny main streets not much different from those of the American South, except for public statues of great anonymous blacks. "I'd thought," she wrote in a letter, "that it would be plunging into the Heart of Darkness, but of course we're only nibbling at a coastline where Arabs and Syrians seem to be running things, hardly black Africa at all. As for Johnboy's anthropological researches, that's a business of consulting other anthropologists—I'm amazed how many there are, it's as though everybody's trying to grab what they can of primitive or tribal Africa before big modern Africa takes over. Not that it's possible to get any idea of Africa Africa, I mean the lot, the totality, the whole continentthat doesn't exist, it's much too big, the mind can't take it. Anyway, tomorrow we start journeying inland, that's by train from DaresSalaam to Dodoma, then by road to Rungwe—from then on I don't yet know. Johnboy's found out, at second hand, but that seems to be the only way, that there is a relation between linguistic structures and familial constellations, and that when anything like incest creeps in language does go haywire so it seems that his theory that the thing's universal will hold water. I think it's gorgeous so far, what I've seen, and what I've eaten too—roast birds I can't give a name to, and big hairy fruits that are smoothly delicious inside, and fermented coconut milk that smells like burning paper but gets you nicely not nastily high."
Of the State of Rukwa she wrote: "This is a very small republic which all began with a settlement round Lake Rukwa and expanded as far south as Lake Nyasa. It's very progressive but a bit dictatorial. There are elements of dissent which make for terrorism, which explains the strong police force and what are termed Emergency Regulations, and border incidents which may or may not be provoked by the Big Boys to the north. Oil is the wealth here, oil, oil, but the white prospectors are strictly out and the technical knowhow is all black. There are a number of black American technicians who are not well liked by the natives—they call them uruwe yanki or Yankee pigs, or sometimes tumbo cocacola. Your old friend and the brother of poor Dorothy is aide to the boss, who as you might expect is big and forceful and charismatic and very far from being unintelligent. I do honestly believe he means well for his people, unusual in African leaders, American for that matter. Kasam Ekuri who used to be Ralph worked up the Department of Information and then handed over to a North Carolina black who was Jack Anderson and is now Garapa Mubu, now Ralph's big title is colonel of the gaysh hisan. These horse soldiers we saw on that film, they're more ornamental than anything, but they look very nice riding along the plain in the sun, flash flash. The Oma people, whom Jimmy Bucolo knows a bit about, are all now in what's called a kijijipya or new village near the northern border. They're peaceful and kind of feeble—too much inbreeding?—and used to be preyed on by the Kwanga till a protective garrison was brought in. The Kwanga are over the state border, but they don't know what national frontiers are, any more than American Indians knew what the 49th Parallel was. The Oma people were Christianized by Jesuits, but there are no white missionaries any more. I'm loving it all and can't say thankyou thankyou often enough...
I had to go to Cannes as a member of the jury for the annual film festival, so Laura's cards and letters dropped for some weeks into the slot of a deaf house. The festival organisation paid for my room and table d'hôte at the Carlton, but I paid my own supplement for a suite and chose from the a la carte. My fellow jurors were Rayne Waters, the embodiment and I mean no cliché of stupid glamour; the Italian director Gabriele Bottiglieri; the Israeli singing actor Alon Schemen; Kiyoshi Araii, the Tokyo epigone of Federico Fellini; the Spanish hidalgo actor Carlos Corces, devil for young girls; fat old Sonya Lazurkina, there only to vote for the Soviet entry; a number of dim French cinematic journalists who pronounced genial on nearly every bad experimental film we were shown. It was an arduous viewing schedule—two main movies a day and a number of shorts, with a tall sunburnt blonde of great elegance and ugliness taking our names at every session. Rayne Waters breathed patchouli on me one evening and said, "Love, I've got to spend the day on An's yacht tomorrow, you sign me in honeybnnch, okay?"
The tall blonde said, "Mais non. No dice, bébé."
If you missed a morning projection, you had to put on tenue de soirée and fight gendarmes, photographers and general public in order to see it in the evening. The preliminary voting sessions were irritable and chauvinistic. The Soviet film was a three-hour war epic with stereophonic effects, landmines going off under one's seat, bombing planes crescendoing from projection room to screen, and its aim was apparently to demonstrate that the Russians beat the Germans singlehanded. "Propaganda," I said, "not art. I vote that it be eliminated as ineligible for serious consideration."
"Mais," Comrade Lazurkina said, 'Vest évidemment le meilleur film, on ne peut pas douter sa supériorité aux autres," meaning that she would be sent to the saitmines unless she reported victory.
"Art tells the truth," I said, "and this does not. The Americans were in that war too, and also the British. We suffered, you know, London was nearly destroyed not just Leningrad, we faced Hitler alone—"
