Earthly Powers

by Anthony Burgess

  I am temporarily sick of my own voice. I will now hand over to Howard Tucker, author of one of the first books about Carlo. I have his permission to reproduce the following chapter. A fee has been agreed and will be paid.

  CHAPTER 55

  On April 26 the town of Verona, long and romantically associated with Romeo and Juliet, fell to the Americans. There was nothing romantic about it at this time: many of its historic buildings had been destroyed by allied bombing, and the Germans compounded the chaos by blowing up all of the seven bridges over the Adige before the Americans could reach it. What pictorial records we have of the sorry state of this beautiful town we owe to the intrepid camerawork of Corporal Johnny Campanati and his colleagues. Unfortunately they could not be in Genoa on April 27 to record the triumphant American occupation of the great and ancient port, an occupation prepared for by the heroic Italian partisans, who had already seized control of a large part of the city. Nor were they in time to witness and film for posterity the ignominious end of Benito Mussolini. The jeep of the cinematographic unit, driven by stolid gumchewing Frank Schlitz of Brooklyn, manned by cranking Johnny, Lieutenant Mayer (of the film family, final segment of MGM), and Sergeant McCreery (no relation of the dour and vigorous commander of the Eighth Army), was advancing along with the armour of the Fifth Army on the Via Emilia toward the taking of Piacenza midway between Parma and Milan.

  Mussolini had been arrested at Lecco, in the rugged hills above Como, while trying to make his getaway into Switzerland. The day after his arrest the form Duce, along with twelve members of his fascist cabinet, was executed summarily by Italian partigiani, and the bodies were speedily conveyed to Milan just before the Fifth Army entered the great industrial city, with its justly famed Duomo, on April 29. The bodies of Mussolini and his mistress were slung up from the heels like poultry, some decent-minded citizen first having so secured the skirt of the hapless mistress that public modesty would not be outraged. This was in a piazza where fifteen partisans had been shot the previous year. Johnny Campanati, plying his machine among the jubilant Milanese, may have thought with a boyish grin that this was a special moment of triumph for his reverend uncle, Monsignor Carlo Campanati, Bishop of Moneta. But the supposition would have been wrong and the grin out of place, for Carlo Campanati had never taken pleasure in the unrepentant deaths of the enemies of the faith. Nothing would have pleased him better than the vision of a Benito Mussolini, forgiven by those he had harmed, sincerely sorry for his transgressions, restored to the bosom of the Church, dying in a bed in tranquil old age with the prospect of heaven before him. To Carlo there was only one enemy--the enemy of mankind and of mankind's Creator. To Carlo man was essentially good because he was essentially God's creature: evil was a property imposed by the forces of the fallen angels. I have said this before and I will say it again, but I cannot say it too often.

  The allied armies continued to roll north, the cameras of the cinematographic units rolling with them. Troops of the 56th (London) Division entered Venice on April 29, while a fair sunset was gilding the historic lagoons and the pigeons of the piazza of San Marco, all unaware of the momentous events about them, flocked to their rest. The advance swept swiftly across the northern plains, and Bergamo, Brescia, Vicenza and Padua rang their bells to welcome the liberators. The Fifth and Eighth Armies thrust through the enemy's massively fortified Adige line, forcing the hard-pressed Germans back to the eastern side of the Brerita. The Brazilian expeditionary force compelled the surrender of a whole German infantry division. By the end of April the liberation of the whole of Italy was near its fulfilment. The German forces were broken and disorganized. Twenty-five divisions, the best in the whole German army, had been torn and rent and were beyond resistance. And this devastating destruction had been the work of weeks, not months. The Eighth Army had accomplished its mission in twenty days, the Fifth in only fifteen. Johnny in his jeep was fast approaching the northern limits of the peninsula: he was coming to a Moneta already liberated by tough partisans under the inspiration of his uncle. Nephew and uncle were soon to meet under the clanging of the triumphant bells of the ancient cathedral.

  Who and what was this young man, just twenty in this year of victory, to outward appearances a friendly, courageous, well setup American noncom but little more? He was the son of Domenico Campanati, younger brother of Carlo and a famous musical composer. The whole world knew Domenico's music, though it did not always know who had composed it. The great film-going public pays little attention to screen credits. Many a great movie had been ennobled by a Campanati score, and Domenico was, a few years after the war, to receive the supreme accolade of an Oscar for his music to Otto Preminger's The Brothers Karamazov, which brought a famed Dostoevsky novel to the screen. In the fifties Domenico was to return to his first love, opera, and fulfil a youthful ambition, that of seeing and hearing a work of his performed at the great La Scala, Milan. The mother of Johnny was the noted sculptress Hortense Campanati, a woman of great beauty unhappily disfigured in an accident, unfortunately separated from Domenico in Johnny's boyhood but living a busy and productive life in New York. Mrs. Campanati was the sister of Kenneth Marchal Toomey, the distinguished British novelist. Young Johnny had swirling in his blood the corpuscles of three nations, for the Toomeys are half-French, and this blood was illustrious on both the male and the distaff sides. That he had inherited his mother's looks was generally acknowledged. In 1944 the direction of his talent was still unsure. He had had a war to fight and could not yet think clearly of the future.

  Johnny had been educated at a distinguished private school on Park Avenue, Manhattan, and subsequently at the famous Choate School in Connecticut. He had volunteered for military service shortly after Pearl Harbour, had spent a year in infantry training, during which he had shown no great aptitude for the taking of orders and a certain clumsiness in the handling of weapons, and had been one of the first to transfer to a cinematographic unit when the need for recording the progress of the war on film had been recognized at the highest level of command. He had been brought up in the movie capital of the world, and his father's career in the film industry was irrelevantly taken as a qualification for the son. And so he followed the Fifth Army on its triumphant career, undergoing the normal privation and danger of a frontline soldier, fixing on film for posterity the horrors and triumphs, and the eventual victory, of the Italian campaign. In a sense the experience brought him home, back to his Northern Latin inheritance, and without doubt the highlight for him of the great days of Italian liberation was the meeting, for the first time in his adult life, with the great prelate who was destined to become the most remarkable sovereign pontiff of our time.

  The uncle met the nephew in the., hade of the cathedral in glorious spring weather. Johnny's own sergeant recorded the event on film, and I have watched with emotion a projection of the grainy black and white sequence--the rotund powerful bishop in muscular middle age embracing the husky blond six-footer. What film was not able to record, and what is not fully recoverable from the official archives, is the astonishing career under Nazi occupation of the man of God who feared only God, to whom last-ditch fascist and German intruder alike were poor erring souls who had permitted themselves to fall into the power of the Father of Lies.

  Carlo Campanati was never willing to talk much about the ambiguous role that Pope Pius XII played during the Second World War. Here was a pontifex who, in December 1939, denounced "premeditated aggression" and "contempt for freedom and human life from which originate acts which cry to God for vengeance." Pius endeavoured to use all his papal authority and personal gifts of persuasion to prevent Mussolini from dragging Italy into the European conflict. And yet the Vatican record with regard to the persecution of the Jews by the Nazi regime remains a shameful one. Pius appeared not merely not to help but actively to condone the hellish treatment meted out to the sons and daughters of Israel. Carlo's career in this connection was altogether different and quite heroic. He was responsible for organising t
hat lifeline which led Italian Jews to the safety of Switzerland, by which at least three hundred made their escape from the northern industrial region, and for protecting the lives of such Jews as remained through the use of the sanctuaries of the Franciscan monastery near Borimo and the Convent of the Discalced Carmelites at Sondrio. The crypt of the cathedral of Moneta was, for a time, used as a partisan armoury. The Nazi authorities in the town suspected that Carlo was actively engaged in subversion. His Sunday sermons provided, in the form of easily understood biblical parallels, news of the progress of the war from the untainted allied sources which the Nazis tried to hide from the people. At the time when the partisan leader Gianfranco de Bosio was whisked out of the Gestapo cellar of the Prefettura on the Via de Guicciardi with the help of partisan grenades, it was he who was roughly summoned for interrogation. We may, with no help from Carlo Campanati himself, who was always reluctant to speak of it, reconstruct the agony of the event. And also the triumph.

  A brightly lighted cellar, whitewashed, very cold, smelling of the damp earth. The day, of all the good days in the year, Christmas Day. The Bishop of Moneta, unable to sing high mass and deliver his seasonal sermon of hope and love, seated in a plain chair. Opposite him an oldfashioned dentist's chair. Dental drills and forceps lying ready on a bloodstained butcher's bench. The interrogator, dressed warmly in purloined furs. A burly operator in shirtsleeves who did not seem to feel the cold. The interrogator spoke guttural but fluent Italian.

  "De Bosio is back with the Fedele group?"

  "I know nothing about it."

  "Where is Location B5?"

  "I don't know."

  "Look, Monsignore, we have our own sources of information. What we require from you is a simple confirmation that will save your people a great deal of trouble and pain."

  "If I knew you might drag the information from me. There is even in me the habit of long training--not to lie, to give the truth when asked. I am keeping nothing from you. I honestly do not know."

  "You've a fine set of teeth, Monsignore."

  "Ah, I see. You intend to extract them without anaesthetic. To make me talk. I don't like pain, especially useless pain. Extract or commence extracting and I will tell you to stop and give you what place name first comes into my head. You will waste time checking on this and then the wearisome business will have to begin again. This technique of yours is, of course, brutal. It is also very oldfashioned and slow and unproductive."

  "Not your teeth, Monsignore." The interrogator nodded at the shirtsleeved operator. This one went to the door and opened it and admitted a colleague who pushed before him a weeping terrified girl. Carlo knew the girl--Annamaria Garzanti, fourteenyear-old daughter of a baker on the Via Leopardi. She screamed as she was forced to the dental chair. There were greasy leather straps attached to it and with these the two operators commenced to secure the body and arms of the wretched innocent.

  Carlo said, "Very well. Location B5 is in the hills above Olivone."

  "This is ridiculous, Monsignore, and you know it."

  "You're right. The truth, then. The group is reforming at Cevio. Enquire there for an electrician named Belluomo."

  The interrogator sighed wearily and indicated to the operators that they start their work. The girl's mouth was opened and a wooden wedge, one that, from its bloodiness, had evidently been used before for this purpose, was thrust into it. The shirtsleeved operator grasped the dental drill. It was operated with a pedal. On this he placed his clumsy boot and began treadling. The drill whirred. "Wait," Carlo Campanati said. They waited. "Annamaria," he said. "You must understand what is happening. These people want information from me. I do not have this information. Therefore you have to suffer. The suffering will be terrible but it will not kill you. Offer the suffering to God. Remember that Christ suffered and your suffering will make you closer to him. I'm sorry I can do nothing to help except pray that the devil may depart from these poor men. Feel sorry for them if you can. You're luckier than they are."

  "What," the interrogator asked, "did you call us?"

  "Poor men," Carlo said. "Arme Leute. You're set upon by forces of evil. This must be evident to you. Consider what would make men wish to inflict torture on an innocent child. Love of Fatherland? Of an abstraction called Adolf Hitler? No. The devil has entered your entire nation. This must be so."

  "Start drilling," the interrogator ortTred. The operator obeyed. The drill slipped and drew blood from the girl's lip. Then it engaged the tooth and burrowed toward the nerve. It caught the nerve. The girl screamed.

  Carlo prayed aloud, but not for her. "O merciful God, enlighten your three servants here, slaves to a diabolic faith. Drive out the evil from them, reinstate their lost humanity. Forgive them, they know not what they do."

  "Stop," the interrogator said. The drill grumbled down the scale and ceased its ghastly melody. The girl wept and whimpered. "Now speak," he said to Carlo. "It is you who have the devil in you. It is you who are the real instrument of this girl's pain."

  "Listen," Carlo said. "I say again that I have nothing to say. To say that you will be wasting your time when you resume your torture would not altogether be true. You are bound to be committed to brutality as an end in itself, though you may rationalise it as a technique of interrogation or an expression of the frustration of an occupying power that cannot fail to meet opposition from the children of light. Brutality for its own sake is the mark of the devil. This poor child's screams will be the screams of tortured nerves. Her soul, however, is intact. I say again that she is better off than you are."

  "Take the forceps," the interrogator said. "Pull a tooth out. One of the incisors."

  "Poor men," Carlo moaned. "Poor, poor men.O God, work on them. Drive out the evil." He saw the forceps grip the milkwhite tooth of the girl whose rich raven hair was already matted with the sweat of suffering. "You will have to bear it, Annaniaria," he said. "I cannot tell them what they wish to know. Be courageous as Christ was." He could hear the scrape of the tooth in its socket as the forceps twisted it for the girl had fainted and there was now mercifully no noise of agony. The tooth was yanked out in a spurt of blood and cast to the stone paving where it tinily, dully clicked, rolled once, then lay still. To the man with forceps, Carlo said, "What's your name, my son?" The man looked at the interrogator, who minimally shrugged.

  The man said, "Lenbach."

  "No no, what does your mother call you?"

  "Hans."

  Carlo Campanati raised his eyes to the damp discolored ceiling and prayed: 'O God, look down on your servant Hans with pity. He's a good man led astray by the wickedness of the enemy. He hates what he does. He sees that this innocent child might be his own daughter. He cannot see how the suffering he inflicts can help the cause of his country. Have mercy on him, O God, cleanse his soul and bring him back to the fraternity of humankind."

  The interrogator said, "Get a bucket of cold water. Wake this girl up." Hans Lenbach said: "Es ist genug."

  The interrogator could not believe his ears. He said, "What was that? What did you say then?"

  "I've had enough of it. I don't see what this has to do with fighting a war." And he dropped the bloody forceps onto the butcher's block. His fellow-operator stared at him, his jaw dropped. "Like the priest here says, this poor girl here's done nothing wrong. I've had enough of it."

  "Do you understand what you're saying, Lenbach?"

  "Yes. Enough, I understand enough. Do you understand it? I don't think you do. Get somebody else to do the job." And he lumbered out. As the door opened Carlo could see a helmeted soldier in a long grey greatcoat carrying a rifle stamping on the stones of the corridor, steaming out breath like smoke. The door slammed shut. The interrogator did not call for Lenbach's arrest. Instead he looked murderously at Carlo.

  He said, "You realize what we can do to you?"

  "Oh yes," Carlo said. "Torture me, kill me, nail me to the cathedral door like Luther's ninety-two theses. Get on with it. The devil can't win. Lu
ther knew that, schismatic though he was. But you arme Leute have forgotten Luther as you've forgotten Goethe and Schiller and Johann Sebastian Bach and the rest of the real Germans. God, man, what have you left? What in God's name are you fighting for?" This, I believe, if spoken at all, must have been spoken in good vigorous German. The girl came to from her swoon, looked about with the wide eyes of bewilderment, then fear, then spat blood and screamed. Carlo got up and went over to comfort her, unstrapping her from the chair, burlily elbowing aside the thug who had bound her.

  "Stimmt," the interrogator said. "We say genug until afternoon. We'll give you, Monsignore, time to think and remember."

  "Miuagessen now," Carlo said. "A special meal for the Herrenvolk, today being the Feast of the Nativity of a notorious and subversive Jew. You have to admit that Adolf is a pretty poor substitute for Jesus. God help you, God in his infinite mercy restore you to the community of the living." He hugged the shivering whimpering girl in his arms.

  "You see," the interrogator said to her, "what your holy bishop has done to you. You can blame Jesus Christ and his holy bishop for the pain you've had and the pain you're still going to have. By the time we've done with you you'll be as toothless as your grandmother."

  "I know both her grandmothers," Carlo said, "and they can both gnaw bones down to the marrow." He grunted at the thug operator to open up for him, holding the girl to his warmth that the chill of the cellar had failed to impair. Then he turned to the interrogator and grinned. To Annamaria he said, "Say that you forgive him for what he's done and for what he's going to do. Go on, say it, child." And the girl, as well as she could through a torn gum and a swollen lip said, remembering some scripture lesson, I vostri peccati vi saranno perdonati. It would be good to conclude the incident with the thug's bursting into gross Teutonic tears and the Gestapo interrogator throwing in his job. But all we know is that the sweet voice of a child with a butchered mouth spoke forgiveness in a freezing Nazi torture chamber on Christmas Day. This must be considered a triumph.