Earthly Powers (89 page)

       "Who?" I said.

       "The lovely Laura." Bucolo grinned. "She has a short story writing group." John flushed charmingly. I liked that. He had inherited normality from somewhere. A Philippine houseboy in a white jacket, not, I presumed, from the Hanunoo tribe, smiled at Mrs Gloria Pargeter from the arch of the dining alcove. We were all begged to join the chow line. The girl Laura came rushing in as I was taking asperges en vinaigrette. She kissed John, who flushed again. Lovely, yes, I saw as she was introduced to me. Her long lovely American body wore an orange wool crpe dress with short sleeves, fitted bodice, full skirt. The hair was blueb lack and untortured to a style: it was parted in the middle, madonnalike, and swung heavily to her shoulders. Her eyes were iceblue but warm. There must be Irish blood there. She was delighted to meet me.

       She said, "Did you know you were the only living master of the short story? We were dissecting one of them tonight in your honour."

       So. That was possibly where mastership lay: in the things one threw off carelessly for quick dollars. "I'm honoured. Which one?"

       "The one about the nun in the convent who's trying to go to sleep and sex keeps getting in the way. Then she concentrates on the crucifixion and finds the hard muscular body of a centurion getting in the way. 'Children of Eve.'"

       I had forgotten it totally. "I'm honoured," I said again.

       "Could you come and talk to my group tomorrow?"

       "I should be honoured. So long as it's in the morning. I have a plane to catch after lunch."

       "It's in the morning. Johnny could pick you up. That's fine," she said. "Gosh, the kids will be delighted. Thanks a million, Mr Toomey."

       I felt very warmly toward them both. They seemed genuinely in love with each other. As they joined the line together, scooping food with young hunger, the wrists of their scooping hands kept touching, her fine full hip swung to collide with his bony one. The buffet was ennobled to the amorous and sacramental: the spiced beef stew smoked to heaven, the lamb was for the supper of the lamb, the summer syllabub ("Gloria's specialty," said Professor Bucolo) was richly fruitful. There was no reek of tomato ketchup on the night air. They would marry, I knew; they must be helped. Why should my money sit grossly accumulating to a sterile end? Laura kissed me wetly on the cheek when I left.

       Back in the president's guesthouse I found that the graduate student who lodged upstairs and had the job of attending to the minor needs of visiting lecturers had set out on the kitchen table a crock of milk, sugar, a Mickey Mouse mug, and a large jar of something called Malto: it had on its label a sleeping smiling crescent moon. There was also a typed note saying: "This will help you to sleep. You mix it with milk. You can drink it cold but it is better warm. There are matches next to the gas cooker. Prof. Wrigley came and left this envelope. I hope you sleep well. Yours cordially, Jed Bezwada." The envelope contained some photocopied sheets of what looked like verse. There was a title page saying The Love Songs of J. Christ. Oh my God, deranged, sometimes permanently. I saw: "Your lance was in me, not in my side." Oh my God. A scrawled note said: "We always have another chance. Let's see what you do this time. Val."

CHAPTER 63

"You are now," I said to Ralph, "in Africa." I nasalized the A campily, overstressing the syllable and introducing it with a comic Jamesian gasp. It was meant to reduce Africa to the tiny and absurd. "That big burning bright light bulb on the high blue ceiling is the Afric sun." We walked in sweat from the Air Maroc plane to the terminal of the Marrakesh airport.

       "It's not Africa. Not real Africa."

       "Meaning that you see none of your own colour. Nevertheless this is the continent you're always fantasising about. The great mother from whose breast the white man wrenched you yelling. With the assistance of greedy black entrepreneurs. It's a bloody big place, Ralph dear. Look, there, see, the Great Atlas range. Beyond it the heart of darkness starts its first tentative beats. But here we have Islam and an old empire which was built on slavery. Like every other damned empire. White men were slaves too. My fellow novelist Cervantes for instance." In the terminus there was a map of Africa which covered an entire wall. "Look at the size of the damned place." He saw.

       He said, "How do you get to Nairobi from here?"

       "Why Nairobi? The West Coast is your ancestral home."

       "I want to go to Nairobi."

       "The best way, Ralph, is to start from somewhere else. Rome, for instance. Of course, you could walk. No nasty big sea getting in the way. Desert, though, jungle, nasty little men with spears." Ralph, like a European, shuddered.

       Outside the terminal, its lower walls striated with Berber piss marks, the powerful reek of wild mint struck. Tizra and palmetto leaves acknowledged the tired gesture of a breeze from the west. A Moorish taxidriver in a filthy shirt said, "Where you go, Charlie?"

       "To the Hotel Moghrab."

       "You Merican, Charlie?"

       "Ce monsieur," I said. "Cent per cent. Moi, je suis ce que je suis. On y va."

       Our bags were put in the trunk. In the taxi Ralph sniffed with apprehension the effluvia of its driver: stewy sweat, sweetish kif (from the Arabic kayf meaning pleasure), rank goatish urine. A laden donkey got into our path. The driver turned; the hard light beamed from his eyeballs: "You want boy, Charlie? I find you plenty boy."

       "One thing at a time." Ralph got out at the French-run hotel with our bags. "Now," I said, "take me to the Villa el Filfil. Near the Djemaa el Fna." Soon we were coasting about the periphery of the great market. Snakecharmers and storytellers were at their trades. A small boy went bouncing heavenwards from a trampoline. A sort of shawm skirled and drums were languidly spanked. Aimless pocked brown dirtyrobed Moors spat dryly and sauntered. My driver could not find the Villa el Filfil, so named from the pepperbushes in its garden. I thought I heard the crash of a piano chord muffled by leaves of cedar, fig and apricot. "There," I said. "Here." I gave him too many dirhams and then walked through the open gateway through overgrown greenery live with lizards and entered the full noise of Domenico's piano.

       Domenico had come here from Menton, fancying dry heat. His assistant, Vern Clapp, a kif cigarette in his mouthcorner, stood at a high desk ruling bar lines on scoring paper. "Hi," he said. At his hired grand piano Domenico sat, singing my words: "You whom the fisher folk of Myra believe To have power over the sea Acknowledge a power as old as Eve       The sea's goddess, Venus, me!"

       And then, necessarily adding notes, Bevilacqua's translation: "O tu che a Mira ogni pescatore Venera pel potere che hai sul mare Conoscer devi la potenza arcana Di Vener, dea del mar, me, sovrumana."

       "The English is better," I said. It was a big empty room, shuttered against the sun but open to the luminous gloom of the rear of the garden. It was pared to function—tables, piano, desk, music paper. There was no pederasty here: rather there was a faint odour of fairly recently departed Moorish woman.

       "Finished?" Domenico said. He looked very slummy Italian, unshaven, hairy belly pulsing, shirt unbuttoned, feet sandaled. "You want a drink?"

       "Whisky and Vittel. Ice."

       Domenico went himself toward a dark space beyond an arch. "No boy," he said. "Goddam thieves, all of them."

       "Is Bevilacqua here?" I asked Vern Clapp.

       "In bed with the squitters. Eating unwashed fruit." He was pencilling notes in now, frowning down at Domenico's short score.

       "Yes," I said, as Domenico handed me a dirty brimming clinking tumbler, "all finished. Including the epilogue. Apotheosis of holy much-tried Nick."

       "We're not having that," this other Nick said. "We're going to finish with him holding the dead kid in his arms, cursing God for an unfeeling bastard."

       "You can't."

       "It's the only way. War going on outside and he yells at God over the noise and the curtain comes down while he's still yelling. A riot."

       "There'll be a riot all right. You'll be proclaiming in your own brother's archdiocese that God is an unfeeling bastard."

       "Just what I said. Anyway, he is an unfeeling bastard."

       I sighed profoundly. "Remember, Nicholas is a saint. This is an opera about a holy man, not one who ends up screaming that God is an unfeeling bastard."

       "Which he is, like I said. All those dead Jews and the atom bomb. This last act says it all if you've written it right."

       "The epilogue," I said, "should last about ten minutes. It needn't be a separate scene. The noises of war recede and there's unearthly music and an angelic chorus. A subtle lighting change, the amplified voice of God is heard, basso profundo, Nicholas is haloed in light, he kneels. Angelic voices in crescendo. Chord of C major. Curtain."

       "And how's about this dead kid he's holding?"

       "He puts it down somewhere. Angelic hands take it away. No, he still holds it. But the child's no longer dead. Nicholas, patron saint of children. Light floods them both."

       "And," Vern Clapp said, "the orchestra plays 'Jingle Bells.'

       "It won't do," Domenico said.

       "Oh, it will," Vern Clapp said through kif smoke. "Ken here's right. Of course, you could have alternative endings. One for Moscow, the other for Milan."

       "We'll think about it." Domenico scowled. "You want to hear the whole of the first scene?"

       "With you singing all the parts?"

       "You'll get the general idea."

       "No," I said, "thanks all the same. I'm just delivering the goods. Such as they are." I took from their slim Gucci case the few sheets that would feed an hour of Domenico's music and placed them in the dust of the upturned piano lid. "I must go to the hotel and make sure that Ralph is not abducted by Moghrabi traders. Perhaps we could have dinner together somewhere."

       "That black bastard's still with you?" Domenico scowled deeper. "Too much of a fucking pattern, isn't it? Hortense was in some magazine some place. Hacking away at the bishop with his balls on show. That black bitch cut what they call an album."

       "What talents we all have," I said. "Except for Ralph. No talent at all, poor boy, and he resents it. Shall we say the bar of the Maimunia, sevenish?"

       "That the place with Winston Churchill's pictures all over the walls?" Vern Clapp asked.

       "The place where he and your late president," I said, "decided to send the Cossacks to their death. Or was that Yalta?"

       "Okay," Domenico said. "Bevilacqua needs to get out of his bed and have some semola or rice or something stuffed into his guts. Eating apricots straight from the garden, fucking idiot. We'll drag him along."

       "Solo oboe here?" Vern Clapp asked. "Or is it with flute an octave higher?" Domenico padded over to see. I left. I picked up a petit taxi near a stall that sold warm-looking yellowish drinks and went to the hotel. In the bar of the hotel I found Ralph at a little table nursing a Pernod. At another table sat an old man who looked like Frederick Delius, blindness and all. He was in an opennecked silk shirt and a white suit. This was the quondam Archbishop of York, now retired, or abdicated, or whatever episcopal dignitaries did when their health failed.

       "Toomey," I said, taking the long thin cold now ringless hand.

       "Ah, Toomey, you here? I was just telling this young American how badly his race treats the Negroes."

       Blind, batblind. "He prefers to be called black."

       "Whatever he prefers to be called, he and his kind treat the Negro population shamefully. So, you here too, Toomey. Can't see you, I'm afraid. Have to rely on the inner light now. Glaucoma, you know. Everything all right, then? I had a visit from dear Carlo. Such a comfort. His robust health continues. I could feel its radiations."

       "Here?"

       "In Rome, in Rome, cradle of the faith. No, not that really when you come to think of it. Jerusalem? Mecca? There is only one God, Toomey."

       "I never doubted it."

       "Have you ever considered that our Muslim friends have come closer to a reasonable nomination of the deity than either the Christians or the Jews? God is Allah, but the root is the single consonant L. A mysterious sound, Toomey, a kind of song. It floods through the African morning from the minarets, very thrilling. Gibbon said, you know, that if the Muslims had pushed just a little further, from the Loire to the Thames, the ah, let me see if I can remember the exact, let me see. Yes, 'perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.' Very elegantly put, Toomey. This gentleman," he said to Ralph, "is Mr Toomey, the noted British author. We are old friends. Toomey, at my age, and with all this enforced leisure, I find myself in an interesting situation. I have given my life to the Church of England, and I have given much thought necessarily clandestine, as you must know, to dear Carlo's dream of a reunited Christendom. And now, having spent six months within hailing or Allahing distance of the mosque of Sidi Bel Abbas, I find myself drawn to the scimitarlike simplicity of Christendom's ancient enemy. I think there must be in every Englishman a touch of the Islamic tarbrush. Doughty, Burton, Lawrence are but a few of the names we think of in this connection. Think of it, Toomey—the one God and the faceless prophet, the cleanly diet, the five prayers daily, the genuine Lent of Ramadan."

       Ralph took from his fawn moygashel jacket pocket the little book on the Oma people and their language which I had passed on to him. He dissociated himself from the two old white fags and recited primitive words under his breath. "So," I said to the retired prelate, "the final road is to Mecca."