Earthly Powers (93 page)

       So there I was, an avowed lifelong lover of male flesh, receiving telephone requests for interviews but saying no; I had already said all there was to say. I slept peacefully enough except for two brief dreams. One was of my brother Tom being wound up dripping from a deep well. The other was about Carlo thundering an unintelligible Latin or Tamil: it seemed, from his gestures, that he was deploring the lack of bristles on a sweeping brush.

       There I was again next morning, a bitter and foggy one and all flights delayed. I sat in the departure lounge at Heathrow and read about myself in The Times and Daily Telegraph. The Daily Mirror had dug up a photograph: I was in a flowerpatterned shirt and gesticulated with a flash of rings. I was sure that many in the lounge knew who I was. Look, Mildred, there he is, he's not ashamed of being called a poofter. It suddenly struck me that I was on my way to Carlo's city and Carlo would soon be learning of this declaration and not with pleasure. More, I had publicly defended evident blasphemy. Not that it really mattered to me. I had been out of touch with Carlo, except for a brief meeting in Rome on one of my dental visits and a couple of letters about poor Hortense and the sculptural commission which had not gone unopposed by Italian patriots (what can America do that the country of Michelangelo cannot?). Of course, I had not felt out of touch. If Carlo's elevation had placed him out of the reach of social and even familial intercourse, he was still of a high visibility and audibility. There was no question of my wondering what old Carlo was up to these days. He was up to defending strikes and making enemies of the Turin and Milan capitalists. He was up to sermonising on texts of Karl Marx. Pius XII was intermittently ill, and the non-Italian secular journals had no doubt who was to be his successor. The trouble was, and Carlo must surely know it, the voice of the popular press was not the voice of the Holy Ghost.

       I took a taxi from Linate airport to the Hotel Excelsior and, settled in with a glass of gin before me, telephoned La Scala to ensure that a ticket for the gallery was available for me and would be waiting at the box office. I preferred to take in modern opera from high up: often the real drama was proceeding in the orchestra pit, which was not visible from the stalls. Then I hesitated. Should I at least perform the courtesy of informing the cardinal archbishop that I was here? But I knew that I would be screened from him by auxiliary bishops and chaplains. Finally I decided to call Luigia Campanati, mother superior of the convent in Melzo. I got through to her with little difficulty. She did not at first remember who I was. It was an old sharp voice.

       "Kenneth. Kenneth Toomey. Sister of Hortense who married your brother Domenico." I spoke English.

       "Kenneth, yes. Ah yes, Kenneth. What are you doing here?"

       "Question of an opera. Opening tonight. A very happy and holy feast of Saint Nicholas to you and yours."

       "I pray every day for Domenico. He has broken all our hearts. I heard of this opera of Saint Nicholas. I trust it means that God's light is showing to him again. I shall not be there. We do not go to theatres."

       "How isÉ how is ah the cardinal?"

       "He does not go to theatres either. Will you see him?"

       "Is he difficult to see?"

       "Very difficult. Tomorrow is our great day."

       "Saint Ambrose, yes."

       "You will be at mass at the Basilica? You will see the dedication of the new statue?"

       "It's not a statue. It's a basso-relievo. It's the work of my sister Hortense. At last the Church acknowledges the artistic gifts of its daughters. God, if I may say so, be thanked."

       "No good will come of it. All change is change for the worse. There is always trouble. I come to bring not peace but a sword. We must prepare for great manifestations of evil. Tell Domenico I have no wish to see him."

       "Has he already made contact with you?"

       "He has not. Perhaps he is ashamed. Let us hope that that is so. Carlo said your sister is a saint. I have tried to see her in visions. Hard times, I say, are coming to us all. I am not well. I have pain. I must keep to my bed. God's will be done."

       "What's the trouble? With what are you not well? May I come to see you?"

       "It would do little good. Pray for me. Pray for Carlo. Pray for my dead mother and brother in purgatory. My father, I think, is past the help of prayer. Pray for the whole world." And then she put the receiver down.

       Cloistered virtue, which neither John Milton nor Jack Priestley loved. Its rewards old age and infirmity. Carlo had never approved of nunneries. He wanted women dedicated to God to face the world for which she asked me to pray, short-skirted, armed with skills, unafraid of rape. She had talked once of going to Africa but, after all, stayed where she was, erotic energy perverted to the hysteria of visions, sadistic authority, an impossible austerity, a wasted life. But who was I to talk?

       A certain gloom on me, I dined lightly and went to the great historic theatre in good time. In Prima Mondiale, the posters and programs said. The names: Campanati, Bevilacqua, Lanuzza, Cechetti, Focchi, Perlini, Nascimbeni, Sudasassi, Sancristoforo, Castelli, Castaldi, Giuffrida, Mangano, Pautasso, Ronfana, Kristeva, Verdiglione and the rest, with Toomey a lone exotic. Lone too standing about in the lower ridotto, while smart Milan showed off its jewels and paunches. I was not known here. I drank a champagne cocktail in the bar. Alone, grim, praying for the whole world. The bellgand I climbed to my galleria seat. My companion was a slim structural pillar. Behind me a woman with streaky hair was already humming generic arias. We were thirty-five minutes late starting, but that was, by Italian standards, early. The house was near full and still filling as the lights dimmed. Domenico, a lime spot on his baldness, in tails with a loose collar for comfort, entered and toddled to the rostrum, baton gripped tight like a weapon of offence. He was clapped but not cheered. He surveyed his orchestra, which had a swollen percussion section, including vibraphone and bongo drums; the sonorità di Hollywood a man near me quipped unkindly. The floats glowed. The desklamps glowed. Domenico raised his baton. Pianissimo chords on muted horns and trombones and a slack roll on the deepest kettledrum. Debussyish consecutive fourths on oboes and clarinets. The curtain rose.

       Verdiglione, producer and stage designer, had done his work well. The set, depicting the interior of an ancient tavern, was remote from realism: we were into fable. With steps near balletic three robed and cowled figures entered. They were greeted in gesture by a rotund innkeeper whom the orchestral brass designated as evil. They sat at table, a flat with trenchers painted on it, unforeshortened as in a primitive canvas that had not yet discovered perspective. In stylized motion the three were smitten down, bags of presumed silver abstracted by the innkeeper's wife. Not a word sung. A pickletub flat was wheeled on. The three corpses, which palpably assisted the dragger, were dragged and placed behind the flats. Domenico's music tried to depict the acid action of the pickling liquor. There was some amusement in the audience: this was not opera; this was Mickey Mouse. The lights went briefly down on the three pickled, cowled, heads bent, hands crossed on breast. A knock, threefold, on Chinese block was turned by the woodwind into a leitmotif. Lights came up on the entrance of Nicholas, dressed in travelling clothes but carrying a crosier. It was Mario Cechetti: he was applauded while the orchestra held a fermata. Singing began. Nicholas would have meat. Chicken? No. Beef? No. Veal? No. He would have the meat in a pickletub which he was sure lay behind that curtain. He drew the curtain back. He made the motions of blessing as the three cowled corpses were revealed. The innkeeper and his wife sank to their fearful knees. Hidden choirs in antiphony sang alleluia as the miracle of resuscitation was performed. Male voice trio: Nicholas and the two outer resuscitated. The middle one, of course, was the coloratura Julia Kristeva, known as the most voluptuous Salome in the business. The time for the revelation of her sex and mission was not yet.

       Not till the first act proper, which followed without break on the prologue. The set was changed in the view of the audience: it became, with the frank raising and lowering of flats, the interior of Nicholas's palace. The music became greyish and devout. Nicholas and the three resurrected had not moved from their former positions. Now there was an aria from Nicholas as he spoke his intentions, and the three inspected, like sniffing cats, their new home. They were bidden stand at three lecterns to start studying Scripture. Nicholas came downstage to a prie-dieu. His back to the trio, he knelt and gave thanks to God for the miracle and prayed that the adopted sons—Fra Marco, Fra Matteo, Fra Giovanni—would prove worthy of it. Meanwhile the three indicated their diabolic provenance by making fire flash from a Septuagint. Marco and Giovanni grinned devilishly at Matteo and then quietly left. Turning, Nicholas saw that Matteo was ripping off his habit, to be revealed as a woman of terrible allure, scantily clad: Venere herself. The music began to swell as if accompanying cinematic sunrise over the desert. No no no, Domenico did not have it in him. The woman behind me began to hum the theme as if she, which in a sense she did, knew it already. Julia Kristeva from the Dalmatian coast loosed aphrodisiacal syrup that stirred even my scrotum. The temptation of the senses of Nicholas began: it owed something to Flaubert's Tentation de Saint Antoine and involved phantasmagoric images of wine, food and copulation. Nicholas desperately invoked the figure of the suffering Christ. Christ appeared, only to reveal himself as the naked god Pan. Ballet of hetaerae and houris, choreography by Italo Castaldi. Nicholas fell. Great love or sex duet between himself and Venere. The music mimed coitus. Some woman to my right tutted loudly. The coitus was interrupted in mid-chord. Was this Domenico recalling that terrible event of the Hollywood party all those years back? In an updated TannhŠuser downward glissade of strings the scene of riot vanished, leaving a half-naked Nicholas to repent, lash himself with sauna birchtwigs. The three, demure in monk's robes, resumed their former stances at their lecterns, singing a holy trio, Venere or Fra Matteo's part well below the stave. Nicholas bewildered. Had it happened in truth, or had it been but an unholy dream? God God, what is happening to me?

       End of scene but not of act. Audience murmurs during interlude of ecclesiastical counterpoint on brass. It came to me for the first time that I had not consulted the executors of the estate of Anatole François Thibault, or Anatole France, as to the availability of permission to adapt his story to the stage. I felt the shiver of impending danger from that quarter. Not that there was really anything of the story left. When the curtain rose the decor had changed to classical pillars, a vista of palms, and chairs and thrones for the assembling bishops of the first ecumenical council of Nicaea. Gianni Pellicani, a deep Roman bass, was Athanasius; Anus the heretic, historically an old man, was played by the young sexy tenor Tito Sudasassi. Nicholas in full episcopal robes. In the background, a humble carrier of documents, Fra Marco. Sudasassi sexily proclaimed his heresy. The Son was not coeternal with the Father. The Son was a created being, though far surpassing all others. Tell the world that Father and Son possessed the same substance and you would be encouraging it to believe in two Gods. Homoousis homoousis, chanted the bishops, onesubstance onesubstance. Too many male ensembles, I thought, eyrybody would think. One needed the clear yellow light of female voices. Doienico must have thought so too, for now a chorus of sailors' wives and sweethearts broke into the assembly, imploring Nicholas, as a kind of Christian Poseidon, to still the turbulent waves of the Mediterranean: they had seen the homeward-bound ship manned by their men tossing and bucking in the distance, impelled toward the dreaded Machen rock. Out out, women, cried the bishops: we are at holy and important work; we are quelling a heresy that will destroy more than a mere rock will. Nicholas agreed but, to bring the proceedings to an end and enable him to perform his salvatory mission, he swung into a cabaletta which summed up the argument against Anus and then, fired, struck the heresiarch a knockdown blow. Consternation, condemnation of unbishoply conduct. Fra Marco now, with his shrill tenor, dominated the conclave. Nicholas was the true heresiarch: here were documents to prove it. He had proclaimed that the one true divinity was Venus, in a sexual transport he had proclaimed it. Nicholas could not utter a word of denial. He choked, gurgled, sank to his knees. Episcopal fingers shaking in horror pointed. Athanasius's voice led all the rest. Anus, recovering from the blow, rose to add his sexy tenor to the ensemble. The sailors' women appeared again, this time as a mourning chorus: too late, too late, the ship was wrecked, Nicholas had let everybody down. Curtain. End of first act. Lengthy intermission.

       Well, there was something of myself in that turbulent scene, but far more of Bevilacqua. Let Bevilacqua take the knocks, if any, from the Anatole France executors. Dramatically none of it was bad, but the music was of the kind that gets a man an Oscar. I met Vern Clapp in the upper bar. "Well," he said, and knocked back pure Bosford's gin. "It ain't," he said, "Wagner. Or Puccini. Or Alban Berg."

       "I note that my libretto has been rewritten in many places. It's just like Hollywood."

       "You'll find," he said, "even more rewriting in the second act. That Bevilacqua's quite a boy. You should have been around. To protect your property."

       "I've had various things to do."

       "Yeah, I read about one of them. In today's Daily American. You got quite a write-up. The day of justice for deviants is dawning. Say, that would set well to music." I heard what I took to be a music critic behind me uttering terms like banality. I heard a female voice crying bestemmia.

       "I don't," I said, "find the Voice of God in the program."

       "Done by a male chorus," Vern Clapp said vaguely. The bell rang.