"For the propagation of the faith among the Hindus and Muslims and Taoists. And the black benighted Africans. Carlo, as you know better than any, is a very remarkable man. But he'll never get me back in the Church. Perhaps when We're both old men together. But not nel mezzo del cammin." I had just celebrated my thirty-fifth birthday. A little dinner at Fouquet's with Hortense and Domenico, Hortense's left cheek heavily made up to hide the purple of a slap, she and Domenico having had a blazing row about something.
"God make me pure," Concetta quoted, "but not yet. Saint Augustine, apostle to the Chicago Neapolitans." I could see now why she could be the sort of person whom Gaetano Salvemini might want to visit. And then, "May they all rot in hell." Very American, the sound very dark. "Bleeding statues and ignorance and superstition and violence and villainy. Scared of the thunder. The Catholic Church can accommodate anything." It was a passage of bitterness, but like something in an aria, the fulfilment of some obligatory form. I waited for it to pass. She said, with affection only slightly bitter, "Carlo believes that good always wins. In the long run. Well, that long run's just a little bit too long." It was a long long, American. "What I've heard called a desperate optimism." And then, somewhat defiantly, as if I might not wish to believe her, "I've read books, you know. I've tried to keep up with my two religious children. I go on reading books. I've read yours. I've even checked the Italian translations with the originals. They're not too good in Italian."
"They're not too good in English. But I go on trying to make them better."
She said, "There's a limit to the amount of improvement you can make in anything. Despite what Carlo believes. I think what Carlo believes may not be quite orthodox. But orthodoxy may be a matter of strength of will. Carlo thinks you can will anything. Oh, with a bit of grace and prayer as side dishes. You've evidently," in a teasing tone, "not willed yourself to be Shakespeare."
"Nor did Shakespeare," I said. "You've hit the root of the trouble as regards my faith. I should be going with you to Switzerland. Money breeds and watches tick, and it's nothing to do with free will. I was predestined to be Kenneth M. Toomey, indifferent and over-rewarded scribbler."
"And predestined to lose your faith?" She was smiling. "That's a little hard, I'd say. God willing you not to believe in him."
"Oh, I believe in him all right, whatever he is. The enigmatic Jehovah of the Old Testament. You don't know whether he's good or bad but he's there all right. Giving us a hard time when he bothers about us at all."
"To do with sex, isn't it?" and she gave me a straight gaze. "I read this novel of Aldous Huxley's. The best thing about it was the quotation on the--what's it called?"
"The epigraph?"
"That's the word. Created sick, commanded to be sound. Look, I don't mean you're sick. Poor Raffaele talked about sickness, though poor Carlo can't believe it really exists."
"It exists all right. If there's only one kind of soundness, then I suppose I'm sick. But I don't feel sick. This postwar world's learning to separate the act of sex from the act of generation. The Church says that's a sin. But it's deliber ately chosen, a healthy act of wicked free will. If it's a sin then I'm predisposed to sin. The Church and I can't agree on it. So I'm out of the Church. Very simple and very unfair."
"You've talked with Carlo about this?"
"He'd only bring up the sin of Sodom. Kaum nabi Lot." Then the tears came. I forced them back into their ducts.
"Carlo wrote about--No, I won't mention it. Love between men. He could see that all right. That's Malay or Arabic or something you were saying, isn't it? Yes, he wrote about that. Bereavement, bereavement. What a world it is. Do you want to take a siesta?" Forced back, the tears revolted and had their own way.
"Sorry. Sorry sorry sorry." So I shook and shook on the white iron chair, eyes in hands, feeling her hand tapping my shoulder in dry sympathy. After all, she needed sympathy too.
She said, "The agency in Milan was pretty quick getting somebody. Some big art professor from Philadelphia on what he called a sabbatical, meaning a Sunday one year long. A wife and seven children and he moves in at the end of the month. Then we don't know what. Sell the place? Italy's crammed with unsalable palazzi. Is there any odd picture you want to look after for me in Paris? I can't make up my mind about putting them up for auction. I suppose London would be the place, Christie's or somebody. I guess I must wait till Carlo gets back."
"Sorry sorry sorry."
"That's all right, you get it out of your system." I could tell my sorrow was a bore to her and she couldn't be blamed. "You take that siesta. I've some letters to write."
In my cool room with the shutters shut and the thin shives of air and light coming through the slats, I cried myself to sleep in an overloud selfpitying transport. I heard briefly a couple of servant voices in the corridor muttering about it, not displeased probably with, at last, some noisy manifestation of grief, the vedova Campanati having been unnaturally quiet through two bereavements and those close together. I dreamed the dream I ought to have expected: a fusion of Raftaele and Philip devoured by something in the Australian wastes. Waking in terror I was aghast to find myself grotesquely engorged and pumping out seed onto the white top sheet. I saw, in the forewaking instant, the metal lettering of the King's Cross hotel on its white facade, and heard a voice saying O ye of little faith. And then the flood of semen.
There were just the two of us at dinner. Zuppa di verdura, veal fillets, a zabaglione, a very cold spumante to drink. She said, "That one, for instance," meaning the Tommaso Rodari above the sideboard (had it been there last time? I thought not) of Lot and his daughters. Nabi Lot, having fled the incinerated Sodomites, ready now to be made drunk and incestuous. Was there a delicate malice here? I thought not, judging from her eyes, serious but not sad. "Or something else, take your choice."
"Too great a responsibility," I said. "Thanks all the same. Won't your sabbatical professor expect to be surrounded by Great Italian Art, no extra charge?" Then, aghast again, I found a fresh engorgement beginning, hidden for now by the white damask: what the hell was going on? I said quickly, "October the seventeenth. Domenico's concerto, a great event. Will you be coming to Paris? You could stay at my place, plenty of room."
"That concerto," she said, her slight venerean strabismus glinting, as her daughter-in-law's so often did, in faint mockery. "He put all that scribble between himself and his own father's funeral. Rubbing things out and pencilling things in and bitting out at poor Hortense, the great artist not to be diverted from his great art even by a death in the family. Is it good, this concerto?"
"I've only heard fragments. Besides, I'm no judge. Will you come?" A dangerous question with this throbbing engorgement under the tablecloth. But then old Rosetta, who had not so far entered the dining room, came in with coffee and a harsh look for me, my incontinence of the siesta perhaps already discovered. The engorgement, embarrassed, receded.
"All right, I'll be there. Though I'm no judge either. There's no music on either side of the family. Well, that's not altogether true. His father was a great frequenter of the backstage of La Scala. When there was an opera with a ballet in it. He never cared much for Puccini or Wagner, not enough legs." I couldn't help smiling at this tartness: she acted neither the widow nor the mother in the right Mediterranean tradition. "Raffaele," she said firmly, "my husband that is, not my son, developed paralysis out of a condition of syphilis."
"Good God, I'd no idea." I even spilled my coffee.
"No reflection on the belle ballerine of La Scala. Good clean girls, many of them. But Milan has other girls, not so good, not so clean, not to mention the other cities where a businessman goes on business. Raffaele was considerate enough to develop his condition fairly late in life, when he could do no real harm at home. He went to mass every Sunday, of course. He'd committed no sin. He'd merely done what a good son of the Church was expected to do. Perhaps you wonder why I'm telling you this."
"I can see," I said, aware of a total flaccidity
now, "that you'd want to tell it some day to somebody."
"Domenico has a lot of his father's temperament. But I think he has shown more, what's the word, prudence." She smiled, quite without bitterness. "Prudenza. That, incidentally, was the name of one of Raffaele's longer lasting mistresses. My husband, I mean, of course. Domenico at least has not begotten bastardini in the neighboring villages. So far as we know. Your dear sister," she drank her coffee unshakily, "has taken on something of a handful. But I'm glad about the twins. The twins are adorable. Domenico doesn't seem to think so. He thinks Hortense should regulate their crying and screaming more efficiently. They get in the way of his composing concerti and so on. The twins," she said, "have a lot of their mother in them, but not much of their father. To look at, I mean. I think," she said, and she gazed at me directly, "Hortense is a very good girl, but not too good a girl."
"I don't," I said, "think I know altogether what you mean."
"Oh come now. A girl of fire and spirit and perhaps talent. I understand she has taken to art, sculpture I think. She will not he browbeaten by Domenico the great musician. I should think she hits back. All this is very good for Domenico. Shall we go and walk in the garden a little? There's a fine moon and we may hear a nightingale." Her intonation on that last word had the faint mockery she had given to concerto: something showoff and male and sexual and lacking in fundamental substance of a nutritious character. Gilt and ginger, not bread. The talk about Hortense had, not shamefully for this was clearly a pathological condition, brought the engorgement back. I thought of iced water and felt a sufficient slackening. I was able to get up from the table.
The moon was like a round of Breton butter with fromatical veins and a nightingale gushed ridiculous cadenzas. The fig trees proffered limp mittens and the oleanders were rich with heartless daisies. "You'll be sorry to leave this?" I said.
She did not answer that. She said, "Hortense cried when she spoke of her mother. She cried more when she spoke of her father. She talked of betrayal, a silly thing to do I think. You can't be loyal to the dead."
"It was the speed of it that upset her. Or ere those shoes were cold. Funeral baked meats and so on. He's really the dead one, I suppose. I telephoned him from New York. He seemed quite the stranger. There was nothing to say. He sounded disappointed because I wasn't a potential patient. Parenthood is probably a lot of nonsense."
"Unless," she said, always ready like Carlo with some little shock of truth, "it's a willed relationship. I'm glad to have Hortense as a daughter. There's nothing stupider than that in-law thing that's tacked on. Very cold, like somebody forced onto you by the state. The Italian's better--nuora. And you, of course, ought to be a son since you're her brother. But I don't think you need anybody."
"I need somebody," I said fiercely, and then, "Forget that. It will give you the wrong kind of image." And then, "Female Friend. That has a fine Augustan ring. It sounds like a better than family, better than sexual relationship. You remember Cyrano--just before he dies, what he says to Roxane. I can't remember the French. I've had one friend in a silken gown in my life." And then, "Do, if you wish, consider my place in Paris as another home. There's room enough there. And," I added, "you won't find little naked Thorvaldsen shepherd boys disporting themselves, whatever that means. Heterosexuals aren't always expected to be in action, why we others?" She smiled as we strolled under the moonwashed querco, or it may have been a cypress. I said, fiercely as before, "I need somebody. I found somebody. I lost somebody. We're the same as the ones blessed by Church and biology. Do you see that? Do you?" And in mockery the devil at the base of my belly began to rear.
"Carlo," she said, "told me all about Malaya. You expected him to work a miracle, he said."
"Did he tell you everything?"
"His letters are like preparatory notes for letters. He said something about God making the decisions. He mentioned an unknown child in that Chicago hospital. I," she said, "don't believe in miracles. I shall have leisure now to decide what precisely I do believe in. But I shall keep the facade up. I have two very holy children." She turned back toward the house so I did too. "I'll take you up on that kind offer," she said. "Thank you. Chiasso may turn out to be just that little bit dull."
I swathed my ithyphallus in hand towels that night, noting that the sheets had been, ostentatiously, tucked in in hospital style at the corners, changed. I woke six times to find seed pumping out, no less lavishly at the sixth than at the first. Shaken, but not notably weaker, I went to see a doctor in Milan, Ennio Einaudi, a first cousin of my Italian publisher. I may say here that I had not come to this region solely to see the widow Campanati. With the fascist restriction on the exportation of the lira I had to collect my royalties in cash and spend the cash within the borders of the Italian homeland, the new empire not having yet been built. It was from this period that I began to make use of the services of a Roman dentist, except, of course, during the war that was still fourteen years off. Dr. Einaudi, a bearded man in his fifties, said that I was suffering from spermatorrhea, an ailment pretty rare in Italy, associable, according to the textbooks anyway, with guilt, overwork, depression and, if I understood him aright, loneliness. When the sexual urge came, he said, I must take advantage of it. He himself, to judge from the loud and many voices of children wafting in with the cheesy scent of riso al burro when the door opened from his living quarters, was a man who had always taken advantage of it. I said nothing of my homosexuality but, following his prescription, picked up a ready dark thin Sicilian immigrant in the shadow of the Duomo and was led by him to a complaisant filthy albergo for the afternoon. So there I was back again with bugs, sweat, open vowels and brutal shoving. I was visited with no reproving vision of Carlo or Raffaele the younger or poor well-loved Philip, though my mother peered in briefly at the window without seeming to recognize me. It was a therapeutic act performed in far from aseptic surroundings. The condition began to ease and eased further in Paris, relieved with Algerians or chilled out with memories of them, some of them. I evaded the expected breakdown.
October the seventeenth, the Salle Gareau. A fair audience, mostly there to hear Albert Poupon, but Hortense and myself and Concetta Campanati were joined by Antheil and Pound and, for some reason, the Misses Stein and Tokias, for the calming and encouragement of sweating Domenico. The Conservatoire Orchestra under Gabriel Pjerne (best remembered now for his little piece about little fauns) began with two of Debussy's Nocturnes--Nuages and Fetes, Sirenes requiring a female chorus that was always a nuisance to rehearse and, anyway, put up the cost--and then Poupon waddled on to applause extravagantly acknowledged. He was like a prosperous provincial grocer whose pastime was dancing, bald with an old-time walrus moustache, a carnation nodding in his buttonhole. He spent an excruciating two minutes adjusting his piano seat, cracked all his fingers in a manner that suggested he was counting the tempo for Pierne, then smashed out the opening solo two measures. The orchestra, wind machine and sizzle cymbal and xylophone and all, clonked and squealed and shouted five simultaneous themes in five different keys, each of them, considered separately, as banal as the others. So there it was, Domenico's piano concerto, first movement, allegro con anima, polytonally up to date and yet strangely old-fashioned with its corny jazz riffs on wa-wa trumpets and glissading trombones. Domenico watched and listened with a kind of incredulous awe: God, what a genius he unexpectedly had. The second subject on solo piano with accompanying muted divided strings playing chords like a representation of brave suffering was a kind of blues tune with flattened third and seventh: I was sure that Domenico could never have sold it to Tin Pan Alley. The development section was brief because Domenico did not know how to develop, and the coda, when it came at last, bore an embarrassing resemblance to "Onward Christian Soldiers," though well peppered and vinegared with discords. The slow movement seemed to be made up of some of the Puccinian themes of I Poveri Rjcchi but was notable for its left-hand arabesques, grotesquely mocking, Domenico clearly being ashamed of an outmod
ed romantic lyrical gift which was really all he possessed. The concluding moto perpetuo was tricks and fireworks, farts and shrieks, and a fugato which Domenico was insufficiently skilled in counterpoint to make into more than a tasteless joke on someone insufficiently skilled in counterpoint. Thuds, bellows, a tune like 'Some of These Days," a sidedrum crescendo, contrary glissades on black and white keys, highheld dissonance on trumpets and horns tremolando, the chromatic scale played synchronically fortissimo, and it was all over. Acclamation (C'est de la musique moderne, mon pote), Poupon graciously pointing to Domenico in the audience, making him stand, bow, sweat, look modest, smirk, then sit. We all clapped hard except Domenico's mother, who tapped gently three left-hand fingers on right palm. Interval. The second half was to consist of Beethoven's Seventh. Domenico's friends, not wishing to see their loyalty impaired, did not propose staying for that. I must say again what I have already represented myself as saying, namely that I was, am, no judge of music. On the other hand, I was convinced that Domenico had a musical future, but it was not yet possible to suggest in what direction it might lie, this being only 1925.
"So," I said to Concetta as we took a nightcap of brandy and soda under my rosy floorlamps' blessing, "that was it. Domenico's triumph. You too must be very proud."
"Don't mock." She was elegant in Worth black wool with pearls. "Leave the mockery to Domenico. Did he tell you about his next proposal?"
"He told me nothing."
"The money that Raffaele left him. He says he's going to use some of it to buy time to write a Requiem. In memoriam his caro fratello. Negro spirituals for some reason. A Dies Irae with police whistles and Chicago typewriters as they're called."
"Did he say that?"
"He said it must combine the extravagantly modern and the austerely traditional. Large orchestra with saxophones. Double chorus and little boys in the organ loft. For heaven's sake try to put him off doing it."
"Carlo's the man for that. He combines in one person all the needful kinds of authority--spiritual, familial, artistic. He also has a very thick fist. But I don't think we need worry. Domenico's no Verdi. The energy of that work tonight seemed to me factitious. More noise than drive."
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