Earthly Powers

by Anthony Burgess

  "Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason," I said without conviction. Of course, they were right to be superstitious. "But who is going to spread it among the colonisers?"

  "I can taste that honey and rancid fat and sliced bull's pizzle thing. Home, home," speeding toward it as to a pocket of health and sanity, "home."

  CHAPTER 35

  Dawn and half-naked Yusof with bedside tea and a little bunch of pisang mas, tiny golden bananas like a cricket glove, he raising arms with no hair in the pits to bunch the mosquito net up onto its frame, smiling "Selamat pagi, twin." The tropical day as an allegory of life, starting in coolness and cleanliness and Edenic beauty and too soon continuing with sweat and the feel of grubbiness and the shirt and shorts already defiled. It was very brief, the innocent watching of the sun lift onto the lovely green land from the verandah with toast and more tea. And then a Berlioz orchestra of brassy heat and a humidity in which hostile spores rode and danced and the colonial work of vainly trying to turn a wilderness into a garden until the convalescence of evening. Philip and I were in his hospital or rumah sakit (house for the ill) by eight, and it felt already like noon. He nuzzled me with his stethoscope and took my pulse and then obliterated it with the pneumatic armlet of his sphygmomanometer. Then he went hmm.

  "Tachycardia," he at length said.

  "Yes, I've heard the word before. Overactivity of the thyroid gland or something. But it doesn't explain the passing out, does it?"

  "I don't think it's serious. You have to live with it. Just as you have to live with being a writer. The two probably have something to do with each other. You shouldn't smoke or drink or make love for that matter, but you will. This condition isn't going to kill you. If you avoid overexcitement you'll probably live to a very ripe old age."

  "Good," I said with indifference.

  "Now we're going to look at the yaws. You'd better wear one of those white coats. A visiting tuan doktor."

  The yaws cases were in a long bungalow building across a lawn. "I suppose it's a kind of moral question," Philip said as we walked over. "What I mean is you have a spirochete, just as in syphilis, but you don't have to brood guiltily at having been involved in dirty sex. The virus clings to dirt, true, but that's just dirty anything, walls, floors. Get an open wound, any kind of skin lesion, and you're away. Frambesia is the posh name. You'll see why."

  "Framboises? Raspberries?"

  "You'll see why. The local name is purru. That goes well too. Purulent. Only a coincidence, of course."

  Two tiny nurses, one Malay, the other Chinese, piquant in crisp white, greeted us at the ward entrance. "Titan Doktor Toomey," Philip said.

  "Oh my God."

  "Precisely. Or rather not precisely. How can you believe in a God, looking at this gang of innocents?"

  Innocent Malays mostly, mostly smiling with hand-to-breast gestures of courteous greeting. Tabek, tuan. A monstrous raspberry grew from a youth's ankle, glistening as it oozed, a primary chancre. A boy of six or seven was warted all over with secondary yaws. Tertiary ulceration on a forearm, crab yaws on a pair of Chinese feet. "The women," Philip said, "are behind that curtain thing."

  "Oh Jesus Christ."

  "Goundou. Tumours have eaten his eyes. The hard palate's gone too. Bone lesions. You can touch if you like. All that skin's healthy. It's just the deformity that puts you off. He can go out now, nothing more we can do. But nobody wants him, he's cursed, he has no eyes. Gangosa or ulcerous rhinopharyngitis. The smell was insupportable, but that's all over. God in his infinite mercy has done with him. No eyes, palate, nose. Otherwise he's all right."

  "I think I'll have to--"

  "Courage, sir, you're a writer, fearless recorder of God's creation. That one's not too bad, is it? Deformed phalanges, tibial periosteal nodes, dried-up ulcers. Nobody dies, you know. It's not like flu. That's Madura foot, white mycetoma. Shouldn't be in here really, but we haven't room for a separate fungus ward. Here's a nice long word for you--chromoblastomycosis. Like a boat covered with barnacles. But it doesn't touch the sole, look."

  "I really will have to--"

  "Can't blame you. Let's go and have some coffee. With a nip of Beehive if you like." Out on the lawn I retched emptily. "I suppose I shouldn't," Philip said. "It wasn't fair. But I couldn't have you going back burbling about paradise. Tell England, as they say."

  "What did you mean," I asked, back in his office, "about it not touching the soul?"

  "The? Oh, I see what you mean. We can't grind our spiritual essence into the ground, but we do the next best thing. We shove it as low down as we can, walk on it."

  "Oh, I see what you mean." And I gulped at the syrupy Chinese coffee a Malay peon had brought. There was a private enterprise coffee stall just within the hospital gates. Curry puffs, pao, Rough Rider cigarettes. Such simple amenities were everywhere--in school playgrounds, outside mosques, probably in prisons. "Have I seen the worst?"

  "There are less spectacular things. Dysentery, hookworm, malaria and its painful consequence the quinine abscess, trypanosomiasis, ulcerating granuloma of the pudenda--that's pretty spectacular, put you off the act of love forever."

  "Has it," I asked, "done that to you?"

  "I'll tell you," he said, somewhat fiercely, "I haven't been with a woman since I was a student in Manchester. Of course, it's the big thing for medicals to be screaming womanisers, big and tough, bonechoppers, assault the staff nurse when matron's not looking, dances at Shorrocks's and a quick ram in a dark entry. I did my share. But then I saw the sexual act as a snare, a hairy net. A confidence trick, sort of. I've grown scared of the body. Oh, not as a dysfunctioning organism to be cured, if it can be, but as a bloody trap. I'm not explaining myself well."

  "Well enough. What you mean is you have been put off the act of love. Ulcerating whateveritis of the pudenda."

  "When the urge strikes, and it doesn't often, I go and take a look at Asma binte Ismail's pudenda, with her little sister there waving a paper kipas to keep the flying ants off. I can do without it and I have to do without it. The whole bloody East is caught in the trap. Breeding kids so they can have yaws, inedible raspberries. Leprosy. This," he said, as the door opened and a white-coated Chinese entered, "is Dr. Lim. Mr. Toomey the English writer disguised as a doctor. You can take that off now, Ken."

  Dr. Lim and I shook hands. "My cousin," he said, "is also Ken, though he prefers the full name Kenneth. I am John, which was not a good idea, because all Chinese are John to white men and it is a kind of insult. But Englishmen are John Bull, so I do not see the insult." He said to Philip, "We have a case of meningitis just admitted. A Malay girl."

  "Oh God, that means the whole damned family. Crammed together in an attap hut. I'd better--What do you want to do, Ken? Have you seen enough?"

  "If I can pick tip a trishaw I think I'll go home."

  "Home?" He seemed startled. "Oh, you mean back to the rumah. I mean, I'm flattered you should think it such. I can send you back there in the ambulance, but that might scare the wits out of Yusof. Plenty of trishaws out there, if you don't really mind poor man's transport."

  So a pair of brown muscular Malay legs pedalled me back, for fifty cents, to the house on Bukit Chandan. The amah, Mas, was sweeping out my bedroom with broom in one hand, the Malay manner, a girl with various kinds of blood in her, about four foot ten, charming, probably proud of her gold incisor. "Soon ready," she said in English. "Must make clean."

  "How well you speak."

  "Little bit here, little bit there. Malaya many language."

  How badly I wrote. I took the completed page out of my typewriter two hours later, read it with disgust, and then caught an image of all the badly written pages of the world since the burning of the library of Alexandria, all the bad and useless books cramming the shelves of the world, diseased books, books with yaws and suppurating pudenda being born to clutter and to trap, offering an unreal reality, lies. There was a better and simpler reality in the mere act of sitting here, cool
under the ceiling fan in a bare swept room, the windows open to sun and green and birds without song, knowing that Philip would be home soon for tiffin and that home was the finest word in the world, no trap or confidence trick, the ultimate unanalysable, basic as the scent of an English flower.

  "Tuan mafin minum?" Yusof in sports shirt and sarong was there.

  "Minta stengah, Yusof." Minus meaning I would be grateful for, be so good as to give me, I beg you to do me the favor of kindly granting me the pleasure of. And then: received with love. A cool whisky and water and a cigarette. The page I had written was tolerable, and the readers of the world asked no more. They would not be pleased with exactness of language: mort meaning the note sounded by the horn to announce the death of the deer; mortmain meaning ownership of land in perpetuity; morphalaxis and morphosis and morula and the morris chair. A Chinese came into the room, and that was enough, slant eyes and bilious complexion. They did not want the exact and only Chinese with gangosa or a Madura foot. We do not wish to frighten our neighbors with exactness. We do not wish to drive them from home.

  "A hard morning?" We sat at the dining table under the gentle fan. Canned tomato soup and cold local chicken and a potato salad, sliced papaya to follow. Beer, bitter coffee.

  "Like all the rest. The Malay kid with meningitis was in the spotted fever stage, and the focal bomoh or pawang said the body was writing its own special languag, all red dots, saying it was nothing to worry about. She'll be dead in a week. Blind, deaf and then dead. It won't matter much. The mother's six months pregnant and it may be a boy next time. Praise be to Allah."

  "You don't like God much, do you?"

  "When I use the name I mean the other bastard. He didn't fall, he rose. Our theology has been written upside down. Have some more of this papaya. Not that it has much taste."

  "But it's delicious. Could I perhaps have a little sherry on it?"

  "Of course." He reached for the bottle of Amontillado on the sideboard and laughed. "The man before me, O'Toole, he had a Chinese kuki. Drank like a fish, brandy mostly, O'Toole had to keep his bottles locked up. Except the sherry, which he kept in the icebox. Well, he found the level of the sherry going down a little day by day, so O'Toole thought he'd have some sport with his kuki, so he peed in the bottle day by day, just enough to restore the loss. But the loss continued so eventually he tackled his kuki and accused him of getting at the bottle. The kuki denied it, said he didn't like sherry, too weak, not like good old brandy. Well, asked O'Toole, what's been happening to it then? Oh, said the kuki, every day I put just a little in the soup." Before I could fabricate a hearty laugh, he said, "Do you think we ought to have Mahalingam here for dinner?"

  I was touched. It was already we. "I have a feeling that you ought not to let Mahalingam past your door. Why not invite him to a Chinese restaurant or something?"

  "That wouldn't be at all the same. That would be evading the duty of reciprocal hospitality. We'll have to have him, but not yet. Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely. I have an operation this afternoon, an appendectomy. Perhaps you'd like to see it? Very crude, of course. Old John Lim with the chloroform pad and me with the knives and forks and the needle and thread."

  "Thanks, but I think I'll write. I can write here. I think you'll have quite a job getting rid of me."

  "Stay as long as you like. It's nice having someone to come back to."

  "It's nice having someone coming back. Well, someone isn't quite the exact pronoun, is it?"

  "No, it isn't. What would you like to do tonight? I have my munshi coming just after dinner, twice a week, laid down in the rules, the government pays. But that's only for an hour. We could go to the Royal Electric Cinema."

  "What's a munshi?"

  "A guru, a teacher. Syed Osman has me translating the Hikayat Abdullah into English, then back into Malay, then we compare. It's the exams, you see. We have to take these exams, and if we fail they invoke the efficiency bar. That means no increase in salary. I'm afraid I cheat with the old Hikayat. There's a translation of the whole thing in The Journal of South East Asian Studies. I pinched the appropriate number from the club library. Put it back of course when I'm done, if I ever am."

  "What is it?" I recognized myself, somewhat sadly, as being a bookish man, ears pricking at the mention of a book unknown in an unknown language, any book, any language. Novelfodder, playfodder.

  "It's this munshi that Sir Stamford Raffles had. He wrote his life story, but most of it's about Raffles. A white empire builder seen from the viewpoint of one of the natives." Novelfodder. I felt stirring a known excitement. "He thought the world of old Raffles, and quite right too. He built Singapore with his bare hands."

  "May I see? The translation, I mean."

  "Of course."

  That afternoon I read the brief autobiography, lying on the bed under the gentle fan. I tingled cautiously. A novel about Raffles, an East India Company clerk who got Java out of the hands of the French during the Napoleonic wars, ruled it like an angel, then grabbed Sumatra, then negotiated the purchase of a lump of swampy land called Singapore. And what did he get out of it? Nothing except fever, shipwreck and an early death. The story to be told by this hypochondriac Muslim Abdullah. I could see my novel done, printed, bound, about a hundred thousand words, displayed in bookshops, rapturously praised or jealously attacked. King of the Lion City, by Kenneth M. Toomey. No, Man of the Eastern Seas. I held my novel in the fingers of my imagination, flicking, reading; "The fever bit badly tonight. The candles flapped in the first warning gust of the monsoon. His hand shook as he sanded the last page of his report to the EIC in London. A house lizard scuttled up the wall cheeping." My God, what a genius I had then, was about to have then. And, of course, besides, I clearly saw, the writing of a novel about that old Malaya necessitated staying here and staying put. Odd trips to museums somewhere, Penang, Malacca, but the writing done here, in this bare room, tuan mahu minum, a queer case of propro this morning at the rumah sakit, home. You could write short stories anywhere, a novel required a base. No, Flames in the Eastern Sky. No, He Built an Island. "I, who am called Abdullah and am by trade a munshi or teacher of language, sit here pen in hand remembering. The ink dries on my penpoint but tears remoisten it. I am remembering my old master, an orang puteh or white man from a far cold island, one who was father and mother to me but has abandoned me to a loneliness which only memory can sweeten." By God, I would do it. Novel in the morning, short stories in the afternoon. I must go halves with the rent and the provisions. Lion City, that was it. I saw the jacket illustration: a handsome weary man in Regency costume brooding over a plan with a Chinese overseer, a background of coolies hacking at the mangroves. By God, the book was ready except for the writing of it. I deserved a light sleep till Philip's return and teatime.

  CHAPTER 36

  "The point is," the District Officer said, "that people are talking." He stood in the corner by the magazine table, which had been pushed right to the wall to make more room for the dancers. The ceiling fan just above, whirring at top speed, was leafing rapidly through an old Tatler. The gramophone was playing a waltz:

  What'll I do

  When you

  Are far away

  And I am blue

  What'll I do?

  There were a lot of unplayable records: the heat had turned those unprotected by the icebox into shallow soup plates. The club secretary had been heartily blamed for this and had resigned. He said orders had been given to Ah Wong, number one boy, but these had been ignored or ill understood. Still, there was a tango, "La Paloma," and a couple of one-steps, including "Felix," and some Irving Berlin waltzes. And Greene the planter could bash out the odd tune on the tropicalized piano. All the wives were here tonight, uniformly shingled by the town hairdresser Fook Onn, wearing new flowery frocks from Whiteaway's in Ipoh. They spun in the arms of black-tied sweating men, one of whom was Dr. Philip Shawcross, neat, spare and grave. He grinned gravely as he passed and the District Offic
er frowned. The District Officer was not a dancing man but he drank enough to slake a dancer's thirst: his tenth or so unwatered pink gin had just been handed to him by Boo Eng.

  "Who," I asked, "is talking, and what precisely is being talked about?"

  "It's unusual to say the least. You shouldn't be here by rights. Kuala Kangsar is a place for visitors to, well, visit. I didn't want to have you into the office about this. You're not a colonial officer, you're outside my jurisdiction. Still, you're sharing government accommodation with the District MO, and that sort of drags you into the, sort of, a bit. When I say people are talking I mean they're making sort of sly remarks about two men living together."

  "There are plenty of them, aren't there? Syines and Warrington in the Malay College, those two in Drains and Irrit Irrigation. Bachelors sharing, there's a lot of it."

  "Well, if you want me to come out straight with it, there's the matter of your reputation--"

  "Literary reputation?" I said, swallowing.

  "Well, look, I don't know much about the kind of world you live in back home except that it's a bit, you know, well, we're pretty conventional here, have to be. They say you're a well-known author, must be true, found your name in Who's Who and so on, afraid I don't know your stuff, don't have much time for reading, but, well, this man passing through, whatsisname, the MP--"

  "Cohn Garside?"

  "That's the one, he said something, look, this is rather embarrassing--"

  "You started it. What do you have to say?" The DO, Porson, was a man of fifty, wholly uncharming, with only one mobile eye, the other perhaps glass, crooked brown incisors that fanged his lower lip even when his mouth was shut, and dandruff on his collar.