Earthly Powers

by Anthony Burgess

  Christmas, the dark, and postman's knock!

  I returned the book to the shelf and took down Who's Who, nearly staggering under its weight. I humped it over to what I called my Directory escritory and laid it on the blotting pad. There he was: Wignall, Percival Dawson--not yet OM, but tinkling with other awards. His list of literary achievements was exiguous enough, spare output being the mark of a gentleman writer, but the autobiographical epic called Lying in Grass was probably the dehydrated equivalent of ten of my watery novels. I turned to my own entry and gloomed proudly over a whole column of overproduction. Wignall was also Harrow and Trinity College; I was the Thomas More Memorial School and nothing. Ali knocked and I called adelante. While he placed the tea tray on the coffee table I heaved Who's Who back, shouldered rather. The aroma was of Twining's Breakfast Tea, which I took at all times except breakfast; at breakfast I drank Blue Mountain. Ali stood waiting as I poured.

  "?Si?"

  He was troubled about something but found difficulty in expressing it. Something metaphysical then, not wages or women or living conditions. At length he said, "Allah."

  "Allah, Ali?"

  "Este pais," he said, "es catolico, pero se dice Allah."

  "Yes, Ali." The cakes were Kunzel, imported in dainty packets of six. It was a comfort to be on a sort of British soil again. "Their word for God is evidently the same as yours, but it means the Christian version of the Almighty, not the Muslim one."

  This clearly troubled him. He said excitedly that there was no God but Allah, but Allah was not worshiped in churches, only in mosques, and that Allah was certainly not, so to speak, administered by arzobispos. In Tangier, he said, the whole situation had been perfectly understandable. The Christians had spoken of Dios. He understood that in their churches they had spoken of Deus--the same name almost. Here, however, in their churches--the arzobispo had told him in the bar there, while he drank deep in the manner of Christians--they referred to God as Allah. He did not understand. Not, of course, as I well knew, that he was what one might term a religious man. But the situation here struck him as strange. He had been taught as a boy that there was no God but Allah, and the Tangerine Christians had said there was no God but Dios or Deus. But these Maltese Christians said, just like Muslims, that there was no God but Allah. In churches. It was a strange situation. More, it was what might be termed a bad situation. That I should properly understand this, Ali gave me all available ways of putting it: mala - malvada - maligna - aciaga.

  I had now eaten my third Kunzel cake, enough. I said: "Once, Ali, in Catholic churches all over the world, they used the Latin name Deus. But now they have what is called the vernacular, since very few ordinary people know Latin. In mosques all over the world they say Allah, but in Catholic churches all over the world they use the vernacular. In Serbo-Croat Bog, in Finnish Jumala, I think, and in Swahili, I know, Mungu. Now here in Malta their language is a kind of Arabic, though it uses the alphabet of the Romans. And in Arabic and Maltese the word for God is the same--Allah. Is that moderately clear?"

  It was clear, he said, but it seemed somehow bad. Still, presumably the big men--arzobispos and so on--knew what they were doing, but nevertheless it did not seem right for Catholics in their churches to be calling on Allah. Then he changed the subject by taking from his white jacket pocket a small parcel and shyly handing it to me. It was a little regalo, he said, today being my cumpleanos. I checked the emotional lability by wondering why he had not made the presentation earlier. Perhaps because he knew that Geoffrey would say something sneering about it and this was the first time today he had found me alone. "Thank you, Ali, very very much," unwrapping it. It was pretty horrible, of course, by the standards of the sneerers of the world: a cigarette lighter of cheap metal encrusted with a Maltese cross. "Beautiful," I said. Ali waited. I struck it and it worked. Ali waited. I got myself a cigarette and lighted it. "Wonderful," I said, having drawn deeply. "It imparts a special taste to the tobacco." This was the kind of manifestly insincere response that Al's culture required. Satisfied, he nodded and went out, saying something with Allah in it, perhaps appropriate to a birthday. So. It looked as if it were not going to be easy to get away from His late Holiness Pope Gregory XVII today, meaning fat little Don Carlo Campanati. His reforms were upsetting even Ali.

  I lay on the couch shortening my life and clutching Ali's gift like some token of faith--not inappositely, considering the Maltese cross. I thought of my brother Tom, who had smoked three cigarettes in his entire career and yet had died of lung cancer at forty-four. Tommy Toomey. With a name like that he had been destined to set up as a professional comedian, and he had done well enough, especially on the British radio in the 1930s. But the cough had become increasingly a hindrance to his sharp bright somewhat high-pitched delivery. Comedians of the old demotic school, like George Formby, Sr., had been able to make comic capital out of audibly dying ("Coughing better today, lads" and so on), but Tom's way had been one of rapid wit. His specialty had been the surrealist reshaping of English history, and this had presupposed an audience of some education. Such an audience was ceasing to exist when Tom's onstage or in-studio coughing began to be uncontrollable. He had had the best of his time when he came to die, and he knew it. He died in the faith in a hospital near Hendon, having tried to joke some few hours before about a special niche in Purgatory for British Catholic comedians. He died clutching something--rosary beads, probably. I put Ali's gift in my trouser pocket. I supposed that Tom might find it easier to get out of Purgatory--if the now much impaired eschatology of fat Carlo's Church still admitted its existence if he had a saint more or less in the family, or should I say more precisely had a saint as brother to his sister's husband. Then, having doused my life-shortener, I savored an old man's doze.

  CHAPTER 5

  The residence of the British Council representative was in a quieter and perhaps more patrician part of Lija than my own. Geoffrey, sitting tied and jacketed next to Ali, who was driving, pointed this out, adding however that the whole bloody island was bloody terrible and he bloody hated it. Having arrived, we told Ali to come back in two hours, and then Geoffrey rang the doorbell, composing his sullen face, now unadorned by twin mirrors, to a twinkling vacuity. The British Council representative appeared, together with his wife. Mrs. Ovington was a big fair woman in a long candy-striped dress, her face bronzed and wrinkled. The bronze and, to some extent, the wrinkles were a badge of long service in the sunnier and duller stations of the world. They had had Warsaw for a couple of years, and there had once been talk of their being sent to Paris, but it had usually been places like Beirut and Baghdad. The wrinkles could also be accounted for by the long professional habit of insincere smiling. Ovington, who had a sun-and-tobacco-bleached stallion forelock falling onto his forehead, was also a smiler, but only with his teeth, which were of various shapes and colors and usually, as now, had a hearty Dunhill pipe stuck between them. They greeted me with laughs and shouts of "Got here, then?" and "Jolly good" but no happy returns. They were no strangers to me. They had presided over the Writers' Week that I had been asked to inaugurate, all of twelve years back, in Sydney. Sydney was regarded as a great British Council plum, but Ovington had not got on with the Aussies. They had also come to see me when I had been settling in here in Malta, with "Jolly good" and a jar of homemade cognac-flavored orange and lemon marmalade. It was good marmalade and I had not yet quite finished it. They were good people.

  Ann Ovington dramatically stopped wrinkling and dragged me out into the forecourt. "Rather unfortunate," she said rapidly. "But you'll understand, and he won't. Sciberras, the Maltese poet, I mean. We had to have him along to meet Dawson, and he took the wrong turning out of the loo and barged into the kitchen, and there he saw the damned cake. Then he said how thoughtful and kind and the rest of it. Apparently it's his birthday today as well as yours, and he doesn't know it's yours, happy birthday by the way, and--well, you see the awkwardness of it. I've already primed everybody else--well, not your Ge
offrey yet of course, but I will, no good leaving it to Ralph, he'd take all night explaining anyway. I know you'll see it as, well, you know, humorous. Short story stuff."

  "Indeed," I said. With sadness I saw it as (indeed) short story stuff. If these had still been my writing days I would have itched to go off with that little seed of fiction, abandoning the party, knowing that what I was to invent would be far more entertaining and, in a sense, truer than the impending reality. "Does this Mr. er--"

  "Sciberras."

  "Does he know me? My work, I mean."

  "I don't think so. You know what these people are like."

  "A job for the British Council."

  "How right you are. No lady guests, by the way. Except John's girl friend. I hope that's in order."

  "Why what how--"

  "Your Geoffrey said something about giants of literature meeting and no damned nonsense about sexual symmetry."

  "But this is absurd. Also insolent. I would never make such a stipulation. This you know."

  "I'm inclined to agree with your Geoffrey. All you bachelors. I discovered there was a Mrs. Sciberras, but it's the poet's mother. She speaks only Maltese and prefers to watch television anyway. So that's all right."

  "I'll have a word with that damned Geoffrey."

  "Oh, don't spoil your evening." She wrinkled and took my arm and urged me in. In the mould-smelling downstairs salon the two other writers were on their feet, drinking. Dawson Wignall O. M. decided we had met before, which we hadn't, and came for me with a hand out at shoulder level, the other hand tremoloing an iced whisky like a little bell (I tintinnabulate for you/A birthday wish that's warm and true).

  "What?" he laughed. "Eh?" Question tags, not questions: British upper-class greetings often sound like confirmations of something. I gave him hearty congratulations without specifying on what, and he said, with mock-embarrassed mock seriousness, "Well--you know." Then he was all laughter again, a round duck-down-headed hamster-toothed children's book illustration of a benign humanoid who held the office John Dryden had once held. Sciberras, the Maltese poet, was introduced to me, or it may have been the other way round. I was given a sturdy gin and tonic in a rummer almost too heavy for me to hold. I got in first at Sciberras with many happy returns and he must forgive my not knowing his work, I hadn't had time yet to start trying to learn Maltese.

  "Ah, but I write in Italian too," he shouted conversationally. "You must start to learn Italian."

  "Then," the Poet Laureate said, with a tartness that made me want to like him, "he could read Dante as well as you."

  "I know some Italian," I said. "Indeed, we once had Italians in the family."

  "I know," Dawson Wignall said somewhat irritably. "Of course I know." Meaning that we great public men had no secrets from each other.

  "I was saying that to him," I said. "Mr. Scribble er ass here."

  "And I was saying what I said to him too," Dawson Wignall said.

  "Yes yes," I said. "I understand--a 'mot'." Sciberras looked from one to the other of us, sipping a cold drink as if it were a hot one. "A 'mot'," I repeated, straight at him. "The French word for a word. But perhaps you write also in French."

  "In Maltese and in Italian," Sciberras said more loudly, as if I had not clearly understood him the first time. "Only good night in Malta do we say in French. The French were not here long. The Maltese people made the French to go."

  "Yes," I said. "So your archbishop told me. The Maltese people got rid of the French. One of my mother's ancestors just missed being one of the French that the Maltese got rid of, by the way. He was got rid of very nastily by the Mamelukes. In Egypt. The same expedition." I saw Geoffrey down a whisky mac in one draught and then give me an exaggerated wink. I stared coldly back. God knew how much tanking up he had done before leaving home. No ladies, indeed.

  "But you are British," Sciberras said.

  "My mother was French."

  "The Maltese people got rid of the French," Sciberras shouted.

  "When you got rid of them," Wignall said, "did you perhaps arrange that they were got rid of at night? So you could say bon soir to them?" I was beginning to find Wignall tolerable.

  "It is bonne nuit we say. And in the daytime it is buon giorno. That is Italian."

  "Go to bed French," Wignall said, "and wake up Italian. The best of both worlds. And in the middle you're Maltese. Jolly good."

  Ann Ovington stood by us, benign, wrinkling away. Literary giants meeting. Then she said, "Well, must see how things are getting on."

  "I look forward to my cake," Sciberras shouted roguishly, as though he already knew that he would not much care for the preceding courses.

  "Jolly good," she said, wrinkling at him, leaving.

  "He's looking forward to his cake," said Wignall very seriously. "Talking of your family, by the way. Mrs. Campanati sends her love."

  "It is not pronounced like that," declared Sciberras. "It is not neighty but nahty. I know the name. It is an Italian name."

  "And so you should know the name," Wignall said. "But in America it rhymes with weighty."

  "Hortense?" I said. "You met Hortense?" I pronounced the name in the French way our mother had always insisted on.

  "They call her Hortense over there," rhyming with pence. "There used to be a song about my sweet Hortense, as I remember. Got no money and got no sense. Not true of yours, of course. She looked very well. I thought you might like to know. I'd say she looked very modern, very smart and slim and so on. She sends fond regards and so on."

  "What were you doing in Bronxville?"

  "Reading poems, some of them mine. At Sarah Lawrence. She was at the little party afterwards. Not so little, really. Long, anyway. She seemed to me to be very well." But he nodded somewhat sadly.

  "Not," I said in old man's candor, "knocking it back? Not getting stoned or blind or anything?"

  "Very fit, I thought. A few, yes. Not too many. She seemed to me to be very well. I told her I'd be going to Malta. She said to say happy birthday and so on. When the time comes, that is." Wignall raised his glass at me and drank. Wignall, I decided, was a very tolerable person. Poet, that was a different matter, but who was I after all really to say?

  Geoffrey was talking with Ovington, just by the drinks table, already on his third whisky mac. "She's probably written," I said. "We haven't had time to go over the mail lately, have we, Geoffrey?" He made a vulgar gesture of staggering against the ropes. I introduced him. Wignall said jolly good and Sciberras shouted something cordial and unidiomatic. Wignall said, slowly and clearly, to Sciberras: "Mr. Toomey, besides being perhaps the most distinguished living writer in the British Commonwealth, was also related by marriage to His late Holiness Pope Gregory the Seventeenth."

  It was little fat Carlo's day all right. "That I did not know," Sciberras said. Most people were awed on the revelation, but Sciberras kept whatever feelings he had well in check. "I wrote a sonetto about him. It is a strange story, also wonderful. He came to me in a dream and said to write it. So I wrote it." He started to shout it out:

  "Sempre ch'io veda nel bel cielo azzurro

  levarsi bianca vetta scintillante

  quel radioso di Sua bonta gigante

  al cuore mi rammenta in pio sussurro..."

  Both Wignall and I listened in embarrassment, our eyes surveying the icescapes of our drinks. Wignall was not going to let him get away with the whole thing: he was, after all, Poet Laureate. He said, "Very profound. It needs to be looked at, I can tell, and really pored over. Pity to waste it just by blurting it out. Jolly good sonnet, I can tell, though."

  "There is also," cried Sciberras, "the wonder of the visit in the dream."

  "Yes, I see that. Remarkable, when you come to think of it."

  The Ovington boy and his girl friend had not greeted us. She wore a dirty Mother Hubbard and had neglected damp straw hair about her shoulders. John Ovington's hair was not neglected: it was contained in a headband glistening with bits of colored glass. He wore
what I can only think of as a Natty Bumppo outfit, though his long soiled feet disdained moccasins. Home for the holidays, both, I presumed. The two young people sat tailorwise in the far corner on the floor, sharing a hand-rolled cigarette that stank of autumn twitchfires. Geoffrey kept leering at the boy, but the boy was not interested. Geoffrey was saying to Ralph Ovington: "Don't know how you stand the bloody place. Bloody place gives me the bloody creeps." He could be more himself without lady guests.

  "There are worse." Ovington smiled, his pipe pluming away as if dinner were over. "You can put up with any place if you have to be in it. If you have to be there you look for the good side. It's being too free that's the trouble perhaps." He swiveled his smiling head toward the boy and girl, who whispered together, shackled in the conformism of the young. "If you're free you're never satisfied. I've never been free."

  "Oh, bloody Christ. The call of duty and all that balls."

  The word duty made my eyes prick, just like faith and its derivatives. There was a line of Walt Whitman that--"There's a line of Walt Whitman," I said to Wignall, "that always brings tears to my eyes. Something about 'all intrepid captains and mates, and those who went down doing their duty.'" And there, to prove it, were the tears in my eyes.

  "Stock response," said Wignall. "The Cambridge School invented the phrase, but only to sneer at. It's a useful phrase. And you can't make literature without the stock response."

  Geoffrey was sniggering at me. "Those who went down," he sniggered. "Dear old Walt knew all about going down."

  "Shut up, Geoffrey," I found myself saying with prep schoolmaster's sharpness. "Do you hear me? Shut up."

  "Sorry, dear. But you must admit it's a bit comic, going down, doing his duty. Nurse Walt. A whale of a time in the war."

  "It is not to be laughed at," cried Sciberras. "We did our duty. We did not go down. Except to the air-raid shelter."

  "Yes yes yes," said the Poet Laureate, somewhat unhappy, but not half as unhappy as I. "We're all very proud of you, yes yes. The George Cross and all that. Jolly brave people, you Maltese."