Earthly Powers (18 page)

       "Would your name be a famous name?" his brother asked.

       "I think not," I said, "outside London theatrical and literary circles. It is," I said humbly, "Kenneth Toomey."

       They both tried out that name: tuuuumi. They liked it, though they did not know it. It fitted an Italian mouth very nicely. The layman said, "I am Domenico Campanati, a composer of music." He waited with small hope. No, I hadn't heard of him. "My brother is Don Carlo Campanati." It was not expected that I, or anyone, should have heard of him.

       I said, "I have not yet seen my latest work for the stage. You say you are a composer of music. I should think you would despise the music of this work, which is a musical comedy. I have not, of course, heard the music," I added. I looked at Don Carlo and waited.

       "If the music is good, why should he despise it? If you have not heard the music, then how can you know that it is not good?"

       I was beginning to enjoy this in a bad-tooth-biting way. I said, "The story of this musical comedy is excessively stupid." Don Carlo shook his head amiably, as at a student slow but worth the teacher's perseverance. "It is the story of a young man," I began, "who cannot say I love you." And I blurted it all out. They listened with attention, Domenico Campanati smiling, Don Carlo with Stagyrite seriousness. At the end Domenico gave a happy little gurgle apt for such a nugacity, but Don Carlo said: "There is nothing stupid there. There is a profound truth embedded in a play of words. For love is great, and the professing of love is not to be done lightly."

       I bowed my head. I said, "I should be honoured if you would have lunch with me. At the ristorante of my albergo." I invited them a microsecond or so before knowing why. It was Domenico, of course, handsome, simpatico, an artist. My glands were sniffing around. The brothers looked at each other and Don Carlo was the first to say they would be honoured. He also said, as I drained my coffee and then my cognac: "I presume you will take your luncheon backwards. You will end, after the soup, with a glass of wormwood." We got up and Don Carlo looked critically at the money I had left on the table. "That is too much. A mancia of two lire. The waiter will be dissatisfied with those who leave a smaller but more rational mancia."

       "You disapprove of generosity? Perhaps they will call me Don Quixote della mancia." Neither of them thought that funny. I have frequently used that quip with Italians, but it has never been considered funny. We set off through the noon crowd toward the Largo Carlo-Felice. The weather was mild still, but Don Carlo wore a heavy black cloak. With my manuscript flapping under my arm in the breeze, I peered warily about for girls who would laugh and point the finger at me. But none did.

       Don Carlo said, "Your eyes are busy. You are not a married man?" His own sharp black eyes missed nothing. He turned them to me, along with a nose that was a complicated structure of wide hairy nostrils, great firm wings, a number of hillocks on the shallow slopes, a zigzagging nose gristle. I smiled guiltily and shook my head. He was fat and came up to my chin; about five years my senior, I thought. His brother was younger than I and almost as tall. He had what I took to be the family eyes, black and wideset, but without sharpness: he was a dreamer, one of my own breed. His black oiled hair was long, as a musician's was expected to be in those days. He wore a suit from a good Milanese tailor, sober dark blue but the lapels assertive as his ears, ready to catch whatever sounds were going. I divined that there was money in the family. I guessed that his music was being subsidised by family money.

       I said, as we walked, "What music are you composing?"

       "An opera in one act. La Scala needs such things. Why should Cavalleria Rusticana always have to go with I Pagliacci?"

       "Yes. Cavnpag we say in London."

       "Why should the whole of Puccini's Trittico have to be done when they wish only to do Gianni Schicchi?"

       "You have a good libretto?"

       He raised his shoulders to bury his neck, dug his elbows into his ribs, fanned out his fingers. "It is by Ruggero Ricciardelli. You know him? No. A young poet who worships D'Annunzio. There are too many words. There is not enough happening. There is too much standing around and doing nothing. You understand me?"

       "Perhaps," I said, "you would permit me to look at it."

       "Would you, would you?" He was ready to wreathe himself about me in gratitude. "You say you have written for the theatre, yes? Music comedy, you said. Meaning a kind of operetta, yes? Well, why not in my little opera new things, very American? Ragtime, jazz. I hear and see very clearly a mixed quartet drinking cocktails and the music becoming more and more ubriaca."

       "Drunk, yes. Why not?"

       Don Carlo rumbled "Drunk," prolonging the vowel into a Milanese ah. "Not too drunk, fratello mio."

       I said, ready to be knocked down again, "Art and morality have little to say to each other. We do not go to the play or the opera to be taught what is bad and what is good."

       "That is not what the Church tells us. But you are English and do not belong to the Church."

       "My family is a Catholic family. My mother is French. She converted my father."

       "Nevertheless," Don Carlo said, "I do not think you belong to the Church." And that was that. We had arrived at the hotel and we entered its restaurant, trattoria really, and Don Carlo went in first, bowed at, leading the way to a table as though the meal were on him. The place was not full. There was an old man patiently feeding soup to a little girl. There was a party of flashy young men, already on the cheese course and loud with wine. Our tablecloth was clean but threadbare, the glasses cloudy, the forks bent. Black cold wine was brought in two terra-cotta pitchers. The waiter looked hard at me, though without malice. He knew. Don Carlo poured. "Let us drink," he said, "to the end of war."

       "You mean all war?" I said. "Or just the one of which the armistice was signed yesterday?"

       He drank deep and poured himself more. "There will always be wars. A war to end war, that is, to use your beloved word, a stupidity." This was hardly fair; I had not used that word at all. "My brother there," he said, "got himself out of it quickly. He gave himself no opportunity to learn certain things."

       "Got yourself out of it how?" I asked Domenico. For blatant buggery in the trenches. I thumped that unworthy thought away.

       "A nervous condition," Domenico said. "Before Caporetto." He said no more.

       Don Carlo said, "I was a chaplain. I gave the comforts of the Church to the Austrians as well as to the Italians. It was an Italian anarchist who shot at me. There is humour for you." He did not smile.

       "Shot at you? Wounded you?"

       "In a fleshy part. It did no harm. Ah." The soup came in a large chipped bluestriped white tureen. It reeked of cabbage but, as Don Carlo was quick to show with a questing ladle, contained also bits of celery, potato (very expensive in Cagliari), broccoli, even stringy meat. He served himself and broke thick coarse grey bread into it. He spooned it noisily, sighed with content, pointed his dripping spoon at me, saying, "What I learned was less of the badness of war than of the goodness of men."

       I had not, for some reason, expected this. I looked at Domenico to see if he agreed. He sipped soup delicately. "But," I said, "think of the thousands and millions dead or mutilated. The starvation, the atrocities, children shattered and their mothers raped."

       "You say you were not in the war?" asked Domenico.

       "Heart. As I said. No, not in it."

       Don Carlo snorted over his raised spoonful of brewis. He said, "My brother was in the artillery. He knows what I say is true. The death of the body. Man is a living soul who must be tested in suffering and death. He too saw the goodness of men. Then he got himself out quickly."

       "You too," I said. "You were not in at the end."

       "I was called to Rome." Don Carlo glared at me as though it were not, which it was not, any of my business. "There were other things. There were plenty of other chaplains ready to be shot at."

       "Some men were good," Domenico said with caution. "You can always find good men. In the war there were many men, so of course there were many good men." I chewed that over with a bit of cabbage. It seemed reasonable enough. Don Carlo took more soup, bread, wine. He said, "I fini e i mezzi. The war has been a means of bringing out men's goodness. Selfsacrifice, courage, love of comrades."

       "So let us at once start another war?"

       He rolled his head in good humour. "No. The devil has his work to do. God permits him to do his work. But of course you will not believe in the devil." The waiter brought fish in one hand and tried to take the tureen away with the other. Don Carlo put out burly arms and grasped it by its rim: there was still half a plateful there. The fish was a kind of mackerel cooked with head and tail on, swimming in oil, adorned with lemon slices. Don Carlo took his soup fast, so as not to be cheated of his fair share of the fish. Taking more than his fair share, but he was welcome to it, he had leisure to say, "It is all in your English Bible. In Genesis. The fallen Lucifer was permitted to implant the spirit of evil in the souls of men. Where is evil? Not in God's creation. There is a great mystery but the mystery sometimes becomes less of a mystery. For the devil brings war, and out of the war comes goodness. You must believe in the goodness of men, Mr Mr—"

       "Tuuuumi," his brother said. And then, "He is like me. He has no time for theology. We leave all that to you, Carlo. We work at our art." I could not resist giving him a smile of excessive intimacy. He smiled back. Don Carlo seemed pleased to be granted a temporary manumission from instructing the heathen. He finished his fish, soaking up the oil with bread, and asked for more bread when the main course came. This was a mixed roast of kid, chicken and what was possibly veal. There was a big boiled oiled cauliflower which Don Carlo at once, as though performing a sacrifice, chopped into three unequal portions. Also a whole grey loaf cut in thick wedges. Don Carlo ate with strong crushing teeth. My father would admire those. My poor father, ignorant of my sins as my womenfolk were not. I had hardly written. I was travelling abroad, I had said, and would be incommunicado for some time. Now I must start thinking of arranging a little holiday in the warm south for my sister Hortense, perhaps also for my brother Tom when he should be demobbed. I had no desire to go home again, but I could import temporary fractions of my home to wherever I was, warm and monied. The musical stupidity was doing well, that I knew. I had a mind to spend the winter in Nice. Sardinia could, so I had heard, be, though blue, bleak from December to March.

       Domenico agreed: bleakish. He had been here for quiet, in the house of Guglielmi between Cagliari and Mandas. Guglielmi was in Naples now, fiddling. I had never heard of Guglielmi. "I must," Domenico said, "be in Catania for Natale, Christmas that is. There is to be a concert in the Opera House. They are to play my little partita for string orchestra. I had thought of trying to finish my opera in Pasi's house, outside Taormina. He has a Steinway." We musicians and writers, always on the move. "Finish," he said, his large black eyes melting like jammed fruit as he looked at me, "or start again? You said you would look at the libretto."

       "I'm no da Ponte," I said. "I can only work in English."

       "Why not?" he said, his eyes reflecting a new vista. "I had not thought of that. Why not in English?"

       "Free men," Don Carlo said. "Free to say yes or no or go where you wish to go. I, who may say neither yes nor no, must go back to Milan."

       "The boy?" asked Domenico.

       "The boy will be all right. The devils are cast out."

       "What's this," I said, "about devils?"

       For reply Don Carlo worked away at the nibbled-looking chunk of pecorino sardo, the strong cheese which comes, among all Mediterranean cheeses, closest in flavour to an English cheese. A new crock of cold black wine was put on the table. I wondered whether to raise the theological issue of gluttony, but I knew what the answer would be. Eating your fill was not gluttony; it was a good, nay a necessity. As for eating beyond your fill, that was the devil's work and it contrived a kind of purgation along with the temporary agony, both salutary things. "Milan, but for a brief stay only. I must get my French ready for Paris. L'Institut Catholique on the rue d'Assas. La Catho, they call it. The History of the Church," Don Carlo said, pointing his bulky nose at me like a weapon. "I will teach that."

CHAPTER 21

The libretto, as far as I could tell with my small Italian, was wordy but sound. There are very few plots available to the librettist—or to the novelist for that matter—and Ricciardelli's was the one that found its best expression in Romeo and Juliet. The title was Pirandello-like: I Poveri Ricchi. The Corvi are rich and the Gufi are poor. Gianni Gufo loves Rosalba Corvo. The Corvi forbid marriage. Old Man Corvo loses his money, and Old Man Gufo is left a fortune by a forgotten uncle in America. Now the Gufi forbid marriage. Old Man Corvo nevertheless gets drunk with Old Man Gufo and the two become friendly. Corvo offers to invest Gufo's fortune for him, and Gufo says yes. Corvo's scheme fails, and both families are now poor. The boy and girl may marry with everybody's half-hearted blessing. But Gianni and Rosalba are now so accustomed to clandestine trysts that they lose interest in each other when they are free to kiss in the open. So the two families (and this was stolen from Rostand) pretend a great enmity which they no longer feel and the lovers love each other again. Telegrams arrive speaking of restored fortunes for both families. Embraces, bells, wine, curtain. This story had to be put across in seventy minutes, with the terrace of the Corvo house overlooking a piazza full of choral market stallholders. Ricciardelli's lyrics and recitative were far too wordy and overbrimmed with poetic colour: leave colour to the music. Domenico needed a greater variety of forms—trios, quartets, quintets as well as duets—and he needed the pithiness which an admirer of D'Annunzio could not easily provide. Indeed, he needed what I was not—a new da Ponte.