Earthly Powers (95 page)

       "This brings us to the youngest son, whose association with that same cinema screen began in the first days of the talking films and only recently came to an end with an ill-advised incursion into a field of art somewhat beyond even the most ambitious exertion of his talents. A composer of film music and a denizen of the film capital of the world, he succumbed to the immoral ambience of a culture dedicated to money and pleasure, blatantly forsook the faith of his fathers, and immersed himself in the Mussulman joys of the serial polygamy which the American divorce laws countenance. He had, be it noted, contracted a Catholic marriage to a member of a British family but, suspecting, with justice as it later transpired, that the two children f the marriage were not his own, he effected a separation to be shortly transmuted \into a civil divorce.

       "He had married into the Toomey family, and the most distinguished member of this family is Kennet [sic] Toomey, the novelist and playwright, whose works are well known in Italy as the kind of superficial diversion which, acceptable in its own terms, is not to be confused with genuine literature. Kennet [sic] Toomey recently announced in the British press, with temerity rather than courage, that he is of the homosexual persuasion. His sister, in an interview which appeared in the American press somewhat before Kennet [sic] Toomey's declaration, admitted on questioning that she was living in an undisguised relationship of lesbic pseudomatrimony with a Negress. Both Kennet [sic] Toomey and his sister, who still fulfils the nominative regulations of Catholic marriage by terming herself Mrs Campanati, swam into the Milanese orbit recently with what they both no doubt considered as contributions to Italian culture. Mrs Campanati's sculptural comic strip of the career of Milan's own patron saint was solemnly installed in the Duomo. One may legitimately enquire into the motivations which prompted His Eminence the Cardinal to commission this work, paying, against lay and clerical opposition which his authority easily overrode, several million lire out of the archdiocesan funds. The work is certainly incompetent, if not blasphemous, and it insults the genuine, and genuinely devout, Italian art which glorifies the Duomo. His Eminence has defended the work of his sister-in-law as high and holy, and even spoke of the sanctity of life of this alleged artist. This is a somewhat unorthodox interpretation of a lesbic ménage. The incompetence of the piece of sculpture could be perhaps excused in terms of the disadvantages of monocular vision, since the lady was transformed, in circumstances somewhat unclear but perhaps sufficiently romantic, into a female Cyclops.

       "Kennet [sic] Toomey's contribution to the art of Milan was the libretto of the opera Una Leggenda su San Nicola, which had its premiere at La Scala on December 6 last but was withdrawn after fewer than the number of its scheduled performances. This, loosely based (without, it has transpired, the permission of the copyright holders) on a story by Anatole France, employs a travestied version of a legend of the great saint to hammer home, in gross words and grosser music, the interesting thesis that God is evil, and that even divine miracles may be employed as devices for propagating evil in the world. It is true that there was no consultation, on the part of either the homosexual librettist or the renegade much divorced composer, of the highest religious authority in the city as to the legitimacy of the project, and the great prelate himself has washed his hands, in good Pilatian fashion, of responsibility for the secular activities of his archdiocese, but it might be supposed that the long announced title of the work would excite interest in His Eminence, especially as its composer was his own brother and its librettist his friend.

       "The friendship between Kennet [sic] Toomey and the cleric who began as Don Carlo, became monsignore, and, if his admirers can overcome the workings of the Holy Spirit, may yet be a genuine candidate for Saint Peter's throne, is of long standing. It reached a practical fulfilment in a strange collaborative act which, at the time of its perpetration, caused little stir. Kennet [sic] Toomey mysteriously presents himself in a book entitled in Italian Cerchiamo Iddio and published by Einaudi as the secular voice of many religious voices, meaning that he has taken it upon himself to present in a popular even diverting style the deliberations of a number of progressive theologians and pastors on the future which evangelical Christianity ought, in their collective view, to take. Some of the proposals are startling. The great term is ecumenical. The final vision seems to be of a unified Deism, in which traditionally firm Christian dogmas are modified to a convenient vagueness when not liquidated entirely. The vagueness is peculiarly helpful to the kind of disordered intelligence which can reconcile Christianity with Marxist materialism. Attentive listeners to His Eminence's sermons in the Duomo, as well as to his frequent weekend homilies on Radiotelevisione Italiana, attentive readers of His Eminence's pastoral epistles will already have found promulgated, in admittedly a form more rhetorical than rational, some of the bizarre new doctrines of which Kennet [sic] Toomey consented to be the nominal promoter. It will be noted, strangely enough, that the book makes no provision for the reconciliation of homosexual practices with the teaching of even the laxist oneiric Church envisioned in a work which, whoever the other anonymous collaborators may be, bears the strong personal stamp of His not yet achieved Eminence.

       "But the great prelate is not yet demented enough to sponsor sexual perversion. It was left to Kennet [sic] Toomey to combine on an all too public occasion, namely in the course of a criminal prosecution against one of his own friends, a notorious British homosexual poet, a declaration of his own sexual position with a spirited defence of a book, published by that same poet, in which Our Blessed Lord and Redeemer is presented as a pervert of his own stamp. Words are inadequate to express the shock, horror and literally physical nausea which even the most general articulation of such a blasphemous concept inevitably occasions even in the soul of a nonbeliever. The true believer will hardly find it credible that such a filthy farrago as the volume represents should reach the public, however low a view he may have of the capabilities of a Protestant culture. That the book was suppressed only after long debate, and that the decision of one court of justice may well be set aside by another, sufficiently indicates the perilous condition of that culture.

       "The cardinal archbishop has strange friends. He has also a strange family. He has strange notions of Christian doctrine. He proclaimed many years ago his abhorrence of the most fundamental dogma of the faith—that doctrine of original sin which, long before the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, presupposed the necessity of divine redemption. Man is God's creation, His Eminence preaches, and hence is good. Evil is wholly external, entirely a diabolic monopoly. Evil is exorcizable. In spite of the evidence of human depravity, the wretched years of a shameful history through which we have all recently lived, the hardly credible enormities which men have suffered but, in the terrible human paradox, also willed, he holds fast to a misguided belief in a spiritual immaculacy which, as Holy Church teaches, was vouchsafed by God to one human creature only, God's own mother.

       "In the secular sphere His Eminence hibits a cognate eccentricity. The spirit of man in our age, according to him, is most nobly manifested in the proletariat. The aspirations of this proletariat, as voiced by the syndicates, are, in his view, totally reconcilable with the Augustinian vision of the City of God. What Marx wanted, God wants also. In his obscure logic, His Eminence locates the secular equivalent of theological evil only in capitalism and cannot find a trace of the morally reprehensible in even the most irresponsible acts of syndicalism. If we place the template of his perverted theology on the scheme of his anarchical philosophy, we shall find the Father of Lies snugly located in the citadels of capitalist endeavour.

       "I have said enough for the moment, but I speak with only the authority of decency, reason and orthodoxy. Can there be any doubt of the necessity of the raising of voices in which a stronger, I might say a Petrine, authority vibrates? The Vatican remains silent on the subject of the vagaries of one of its princes. It is a silence, one presumes, of prolonged and pathological shock rather than of complicity. Let us now hope to hear the thunderings of the Pilot of the Galilean Lake and the rattle of the omnipotent keys."

       So. "Ii tintinnio delle chiavi onnipotenti." That tifltiflflio was a bit inept, sounding like the tinkle of car keys. The rest was resonant enough. Actionable? I doubted it. I had, in my career as a novelist, learned something of the law of libel. Nastiness in itself was no tort. This journalist, whose name was unfamiliar to me, had taken care to get his facts right. Behind him were foreign press bureaus. Behind him, more particularly, was money. It was capital, far more than faith, that Carlo had outraged. I dreamed for a while of commissioning one of the mercenaries of the Casbah to get over to Milan and assassinate this Massimo Fioroni on behalf of Hortense and her children. But surely it was up to Carlo to shrivel up the pusillanimous wretch with roars more terrible than tenpenny daggers.

       Whatever response Carlo intended was never delivered. Getting up into the pulpit of his own cathedral on the second Sunday in Lent, he emitted a sudden bellow like that of a bull that feels the shears of the gelder and then collapsed. The hand of God had struck him, some said; others, the hoof of the devil. A cardiac arrest, the more rational presumed. As he lay still on his back he let out a row of Falstaffian snores. They would have made shudder, like a thirty-twofoot organ pipe, a sacred edifice less massive. It took six servitors to carry him off.

CHAPTER 67

I had my own affairs to attend to. Nevertheless, I wrote a long commiseratory letter to Carlo, who was sent for a rest to a nursing home run by nuns at Bellagio on the Lake of Como. I received no reply. I travelled, an aging man who, though the whole world knew him to be homosexual, had been restored to his habitual loneliness. Early in October 1958 Carlo, back on much reduced duty, sent me a cable. I was ordered to spend a weekday with him at the Hotel de Paris, Monte Himself. His secretary had made all arrangements. I was prepared to disobey the order, having already been invited by His Majesty of Morocco to attend a banquet and reception for the U.S. Secretary of State in Rabat. But curiosity, shame and even affection prevailed. I flew to Barcelona and thence to Nice. I rode in a taxi along the Corniche. The sea was calm, the sky was clear, the air was mild. At the hotel I was informed that His Eminence had already arrived. I was shown to my room and then to his suite.

       Carlo was seventy-odd, nobly fat, wonderfully ugly, apparently recovered. He was dressed in the total red of his rank. He had come, I gathered, alone. He offered me whisky, the rare brand Old Mortality. He said, "They told me the Casino was reserved for some visiting oil sheikhs. I was not having that. Would you put the infidel before a prince of your own Church? They then telephoned through to say that His Highness Hussain ibn Al-Haji Yusof or somebody would be honoured if I joined the party. So. We play first. Dine after. Does that suit you?"

       "How many years is it now since we did that? Forty?"

       "Forty. There were three of us then."

       "Yes, three of us." I sensed that there was a taboo on mentioning the third by name. "How are you, Carlo?"

       "Well enough. You realise that the moment of truth is coming?"

       "You mean a certain death is imminent in Rome?"

       "Yes yes yes. You remember before the war, in Moneta, we discussed Greek tragedy. I cannot remember whether the term hubris came up."

       "I don't think it did."

       "Have some more whisky." He appraised me from his plush armchair. "Help yourself. You're thin. You look old. How old are you now?"

       "Sixty-eight."

       "Old, and you haven't yet come through to what I said." All this talk was very cryptic. "The revelation has not occurred."

       "Revelations of human turpitude. Plenty of those."

       "Human turpentine," he said in sudden jocularity. "Serpentine turpitude. You know why I was sick?"

       "I assumed—"

       "So did many. In fact it was the exhaustion of the hardest struggle of my entire career." His English accent was more British than I remembered: it came fairly close, in vocalic length and intonation, to that of the quondam Archbishop of York, but there was no fluting, the resonance rose from the belly still. "There was a child in a poor family in Novara, bored through like a cheese with infernal presences. Quell or quench one, whatever the word is, and another would take its place. The usual silly little names—Popo and Cazzo and Stronzetto. The usual silly little blasphemies. Then one day there was silence from all these, as though they were waiting for a tyrannical schoolmaster and could hear his footsteps in the corridor. I waited too, and then came the authentic tonalities of the master. Well-read in many languages, courteous. He quoted that damnable article with great accuracy. He performed little conjuring tricks in a bored manner. He made the electricity go oft and come on again, projected a kind of film of my early life onto the ceiling, produced vile odours for which he apologised and which he replaced with the scents of our garden at Gorgonzola. He recited the ordinary of the mass very devoutly, but at the same time he devoured the body of the child, on whose face was set a kind of comic grin."

       "Devoured?"

       "The limbs visibly wasted but the belly grew like a balloon and I knew it was going to burst like that of a poisoned dog. I felt I was powerless. He knew the Rituale Romanum far better than I. The stress wore me down very badly, especially as I was fasting. Many days of it, and only a few hours of rest. I did not use the prescribed order of exorcism. I prayed and prayed and I failed. He said vale sancte pater and broke the child's neck. Broke it as you would break the neck of a rabbit. It was all over and I had failed. It is no wonder I became sick."