Earthly Powers (86 page)

       "What precisely," I said, "do you do at the house of Nat Fergana Junior? Does he dance for you or show you his old movies? Or is it good solid black agape?"

       "Not agape," Ralph said. "You look agape up in your dictionary sometime. Fu and games, old chap, nothing spiritual. But black, yes, aaaaall black. Spend a little time looking for that lost grand while I'm gone. And a fine black fart in the face of Nick Campanati." Who was coming to lunch with me. The telephone rang, meaning all the telephones. I was nearer to the nearest and answered. It was a young woman with some such name as Randy Reinhart, one of the staff of the book section of the Los Angeles Times, surprisingly at work, or at least thinking of work, on a Californian Sunday. She wanted an interview. Not today, natch, but sometime in the week. I was vague, watching Ralph leave with big gestures of servitude, putting out wrists joined as though manacled. Thursday, cocktail time, here? That would be just fine. Ralph went from our huge drawing room into the vestibule that abutted on my bedroom and then seemed all of twenty seconds getting from the vestibule into the corridor, door shutting over audibly, then oft.

       It was as I had thought it might possibly be. I found the bundle of hundred dollar bills bound with elastic on the dark floor of the clothes closet of my bedroom. I also heard my toilet cistern filling up. I could pin nothing on Ralph. Ralph was not like Heinz. I had met Heinz again a few years back working in a bar on the seafront of the little resort of Sitges. It was a bar run by an Englishman named Bill Gay, and it was called the SS, initials standing if need be for Sweet Sixteen or Stars and Stripes or whatever Gay's casual fancy suggested on enquiry. Gay had been an intelligence agent tortured, like the White Rabbit, by the Paris Gestapo. The swastika brassards and steel truncheons which decorated his bar had to be seen as trophies rather than symbols of perversion. One day while I and Ralph were there a drunken British customer shouted "Come here, Gay," and Gay replied campily, "Ich habe em Handel zu mein Name, have I got it right, Heinz ducky?" And then a blond young man, excessively bronzed, turned from the dart board where he had just said to a player "That were a bloody good un, Alf," and revealed himself as Heinz. He had been put to farm work in the North of England and now spoke fluent dialectal English. He and Ralph, I saw with a pang later, made a lovely pair. Kidlings bright and merry. Heinz seemed to have got over his racism. Ralph's was yet to begin.

CHAPTER 61

Nick, or Domenico, was sixty or so now and looked it. He was jowly and paunched and was still Italian enough not to give a damn. No cottage cheese and lettuce for him. From room service I ordered spaghetti and meatballs with a large steak to follow, pche Melba to follow that, a bottle of Valpolicella to wash all down. That was for Domenico. I had cottage cheese and lettuce. We sipped very dry martinis while waiting for our food. Domenico unrolled a magazine which he had been tapping on the glass-topped table like an irritable baton. "You see this?" he said. I took it. It was a copy of Life with a portrait of Carlo Campanati on the cover. He was got up as a cardinal and, his big back to the Duomo of Milan, he sardonically blessed the prospective reader. The legend was MIRACLES IN MILAN. This, I knew, did not refer to real miracles of that Chicago hospital order: it signified that Carlo was demonstrating the relevance of Christianity to truculent Milanese factory operatives. He had had much to do with the settling of strikes. The Church, he said, despite the evidence of past history, had been founded for the workers not the bosses. He had filled the Duomo with workers and taught them the Catholic message of Marxism.

       I said, "I'll get a copy in the shop downstairs."

       "Keep that, keep that, keep that. I don't want the goddam thing."

       "You're still bitter, Domenico. You still remember that arrested orgasm. You must have had many unarrested since to make up for it."

       "I've done with women. You know Sindy's gone off with that Mexican bastard?"

       Sindy was Cynthia, née Forkner, a starlet from North Carolina and Domenico's third wife. Perhaps she wanted children. "No, I didn't know. Should I say I'm sorry?"

       "The time's come," Domenico said, "for the parting of lots of ways. I've finished with Hollywood. I've finished with shovelling auditory shit on sound tracks. I want to write real music again." That again was not perhaps appropriate.

       I said, "You got an Oscar for that Dostoevsky film. You produce some of the best film music in the business. What do you want to do? A symphony?"

       "No. An opera, what else? Milan's got fucking Carlo. It's time Milan got me. And you do the libretto."

       I said nothing for the moment. I opened the door to the Latvian waiter, who wheeled in a table and a load of covered dishes. I said nothing while he laid it all out and brought chairs up to the board. I signed the bill and gave the waiter two dollars. "Enzhoy your launch, genlmen," he said and shambled out. DoIflenico at once began fiercely to tuck in. A dew of concentration appeared on his brown bald dome. "I did a libretto before," I said, picking with my fork, 41 and it turned out to be a great waste of my time. I take it you have in mind Some big opera seria, three acts, the works. Something of archiepiscopal magisteriality."

       "That was a gamble, we were both young then, now it'll be a sure thing. I saw Giulio Orecchia in New York at the Met six, seven weeks ago. He said yes and again yes, start yesterday. So what ideas do you have, I want a libretto by early fall at the latest."

       "In New York did you pay any family visits? See your growing grandchild, for instance?" A granddaughter called Eve, a pretty blond romp who called me tunkie for great-uncle.

       "Look, Ken, I married into three families and I kept away from them all. That's the only way to be."

       "This family's somewhat different, Domenico. It's your first. The Church would say it's your only. So you didn't visit Hortense?"

       "I didn't visit Hortense. I'm sorry about what happened to Hortense, but I didn't visit her. It's all over."

       "She still calls herself Mrs Campanati. It's under that name that she's finishing her own magisterial work of art for Milan. It was good of Carlo to fix the commission. She needed it, it stopped her moping."

       "What is this?" Domenico glared in fear and suspicion. His lips, indifferent, sucked in spaghetti ends. "What's been going on?"

       "It's a basso-relievo representing the career of Saint Ambrose, patron saint of Milan and Carlo's distinguished ancestor in office. She's working on it in a new big studio in the Village and it promises to be very impressive. You see the infant Ambrose with bees swarming round his lips, you see him as bishop excommunicating the emperor Theodosius, you see him trouncing the Arians. Ambrose, a great naked muscular figure—"

       "Naked?"

       "More or less naked. I seem to remember a mitre and a crosier as well as muscular nudity. It looks like being the best thing she's ever done. The name Campanati is going to be a great name in Milan. A great archbishop, a great sculptress, and then you. If you can do it."

       "It's my name before it's theirs. Christ, what are they all trying to do to me? When's this thing going to be ready? This damned blasphemous thing of that puuana who called herself my wife?"

       "How do you know it's blasphemous? And why should you, expert in serial polygamy, take up any moral attitude?"

       "She's living with this black bitch, isn't she? When's it supposed to be ready?"

       "The dedication's fixed for Saint Ambrose's feast day the year after next. December seven, I seem to remember, the day after the feast of Saint Nicholas. The thing has to be shipped and installed. Good God," I added, for I had just thought of the subject for a libretto. "What absurd idea do you have in mind, Dornenico? Do you propose trying to get in before your former wife, still your wife incidentally but let that pass, bursting in a blaze of music at the Scala while Saint Ambrose is still on the high seas pointing toward Genoa? You know how long it takes to set up an opera."

       "There are shortcuts. I'm taking back this boy Vern Clapp with me—"

       "Who?"

       "Vern Clapp."

       "Is that a real name?"

       "Vern stands for Vernon. He can help with the orchestration." Domenico was now on the peche Melba, spooning it in rapidly, time being awasting.

       "Taking back, you say. You're leaving America?"

       "Sure I'm leaving America. I've had out of America everything that America could give me, mainly money. I'm going to Menton or Nice or some place, work in peace. Now how's about that libretto?"

       "Saint Nicholas," I said.

       He stared at me for several seconds, chewing. "You mean an opera about a saint? You don't have operas about saints. Saints are for oratorios. Like Mendelssohn and Handel and all that shit." He swallowed a lump of ice cream as though it were something warm and sour. I explained. He listened.

       "You see," I said, "you could have the legend of the resurrection of the three young men in a pickle barrel done as a kind of highly stylized prologue. And then realism for the real story. The first of the adopted sons tries to turn Nicholas's house into a brothel, and Nicholas yields to the temptations of the flesh. After that, of course, he flagellates himself and gets himself holy and ready for the Council of Nicaea in order to denounce the Arian heresy."

       "Oh Jesus."

       "Jesus, Father and Holy Ghost to be exact. The denial of the doctrine of the Trinity. Anus said the Son wasn't coeternal with the Father."

       "You can't put that in an opera. Where did you get all this crap anyway?"

       "The basic idea's in a story by Anatole France. The second adopted son forges documents to prove that Nicholas is a bigger heretic than Anus, and the act ends with a big choral denunciation. Nicholas begins the third act in sackcloth and ashes, you know, in enforced repentance. He gets his bishopric back, but the third adopted son has become a military leader and is going to slaughter women and children in the name of God. The enemy are the Arians and Nicholas is supposed to be all for exterminating them, but at the end the ravaged corpse of a child is brought in. With the child in his arms he raises his eyes to the invisible God and says: What is all this about? What's going on? Why did you let me bring these bastards back to life if you knew what they were going to do? And then curtain. Or, to be on the safe side, an epilogue, stylized like the prologue, in which God says, one could do this in the manner of Blake's Book of Job illustrations, all this was the temptation appropriate to a man destined to be a saint, and Nicholas came through without cursing God and he's passed the test. Apotheosis."

       "What's that word?"

       "He goes up to heaven. This is only a rough outline, naturally. What do you think?" Domenico poured both of us coffee from the big pewter pot and leaned back in his chair the better to caress his belly. I could tell he was thinking musically, in terms of sonic lumps rather than plot and psychology and the boring realities you left to the mere wordman. "No big soprano part," he pronounced.

       "But a bloody big tenor one."

       "Too many men all round."

       "You've got whores and wailing mothers. Angels too if you like."

       "Why can't one of those three be a woman? She's been disguised as a man and the other two could be monks running away from a monastery and taking her with them running away from a convent. Nicholas only discovers this in the first act after the prologue thing. She could be a real bitch. She could even be a black bitch."

       "You have the heart of the matter in you, Domenico. What do you say, then?"

       "Try it. Get me a draught done."

       "Who pays?"

       "Ah Jesus. You know all about show business. It's the public pays. Not too many words, remember. Numbers. Solos, quartets, choruses. Get down to it now."

       "You can get down to the prologue now. No words. Like a little ballet suite. You could have that played in the Hollywood Bowl in a week or so. Cool and pre-Raphaelite like early Debussy. I can hear it." Domenico wiped his mouth and then face and finally head with his napkin. He got up as though really ready to start.

       He said, "What do we call it?"

       "The Miracle of the Holy Saint Nicholas."

       "That sounds like what they're not going to get."

       "It's meant to be ironic."

       "Get started, Ken. Thanks for the lunch."

       "Thank my employers."

       That afternoon I read the long article on Carlo in Life. It was written by somebody who sounded like a mafi oso, Turiddu Genovese, and it was full of the quoted Wit and Wisdom of the Archbishop of Milan. I had a feeling that Carlo would not now, to use his own expression, make Pope. Life was making him into a world personality before his status warranted it; after all, he was only a provincial prelate. He would be dead as news when the next papal election arrived; his newsworthiness was being spent, in terms of that, most prematurely. Nor would his fellow cardinals much care for this stellar elevation. If he was being celebrated in Life, Stern and Paris-Match and Hoshi and Kochav must also be ready to put that fat ugly blessing mug on their covers, if they had not done so already. Although the early part of the article made much of the part Carlo had played in 1929 when the Vatican had been turned into a great instrument of capitalism, the living capitalists of Turin and Milan would not be taking kindly to his siding with the workers in industrial disputes. Here was Carlo on Carlo Marx: "Most people who call themselves Marxists have never read the works of that remarkable reformer. I have devoted much time to his books in the original German and find none of that atheistical materialism which has so stupidly been lauded. Marx has been misrepresented by the political leaders of the Soviet Union, especially Josef Stalin. Here was a man who, taking his wife and children home to Soho after a picnic on Hampstead Heath, would recite canto after canto of the divine Dante, finding in him the ultimate truth which feeds men's souls, while economic reforms and social revolutions merely benefit their bodies. Marx knew that man does not live by bread alone.