Ralph brooded on that. "Just me, isn't it?" he said at last. "You're the discreet English gentleman, the quiet bugger, what what. Okay, you stay and I'll go."
"We're supposed to be together, dear Ralph. I believe in the ancient virtue of loyalty. I wanted to come back to Morocco to see how things were. Marrakesh seems a little dull and run-down. In Tangier there are expatriate writers like myself. There's a great deal of tolerance for, well, aberrations. Poverty, though, slavery even of a kind, thievery. My more precious possessions could be put in store somewhere, I have looked on them long enough. We could rent a little house and have smiling Moorish servants. A little garden, too. There are the charms of the souk. We could at least try it."
"No," Ralph said. "You brought me to this mock Africa. Now I want to see the real thing. I might even find something to do in black Africa."
"You mean revert? You heard what the former Archbishop of York said. The romantic Rousseau dream. Douanier and JeanJacques together. You're not talking sensibly."
"Okay. It was you who said that failure in art can only be compensated by a life in action."
"Did I say that? I think not. I probably said that people like Hitler and Goebbels and Mussolini got angry when their artistic drive was frustrated and could only find an outlet in revolutionary politics. You, dear Ralph, can't write but you can do other things. You played Mozart very nicely until you decided he was a white reactionary slave-owning fag. You can direct plays. For God's sake don't start believing that you have a place in any of these damned revolutionary movements that are fomenting in postcolonial Africa. Stay with me. Don't desire to move too far from the Atlantic or the Mediterranean. We'll start househunting in Tangier. The day after tomorrow, if you like."
Ralph sulked, and I could have torn his clothes off with anger. "Don't you start thinking of the two of us settling in Tangier. The time's come for you to settle, I can see that. With me its different."
"Ralph," I said, feeling my glottis constrict, "have you no love or loyalty? Does it all have to be on my side?"
"You pay me a salary. I'm kind of an employee. Those two things don't have to come into it."
"Yes," tears were starting, "and if it weren't for my own love and loyalty I'd say that you were a bloody bad employee."
"You mean I don't hold my ass at the right angle?"
"That's a cruel thing to say. I mean that you sent a letter to my British publisher saying Fuck off and signing it with a facsimile signature that was taken to be my own. I mean other things. I mean that my love for you, which cries out for a physical expression you tolerate brutishly, induces a cecity to your inefficiency and your bad behavior. I don't want to think of you as an employee. You are given all the money you require, and it is far more than I would give to an employee. I want to think of you as my loving friend."
"Oh Jesus." Ralph grinned. "Loving friends. Like that story of your about the other fucking Ralph. Let me take your pants off, darling."
"That too is cruel. If you were a real writer instead of a bungling amateur, you would know that the names of one's own fiction can take on a kind of magic, can achieve something like prophetic stain, I mean strain. I have to confess that, when my sister suggested you as a secretary and companion, your name was much in your favor. Now please let us try not to be unpleasant to each other. Perhaps you and I could arrange a little trip to East Africa. The British Council has frequently proposed that I exhibit myself on their African ah circuit."
"Ah shit," went Ralph, beautiful wretched boy. "You keep missing it, don't you? Uncle Tom colleges. I want to see where I come from."
"As I have said many times, your provenance is the West Coast, where a gentle artistic people allowed itself to be exploited by predators of many colors. YOU will see genuinely black Africans on the East Coast, as well as Arabs and Asians, but they will have nothing to say to you, nor will you have to them. This is the worst kind of uninformed romanticism."
Listen," Ralph hissed. "Blacks don't stand an ice cube in hell's chance in the States. What history meant by black slavery was equipping a whole continent in retaliation with the ideological and technical resources of the West to rise in power and authority and dignity to make the whole fucking West tremble. And you talk of the British fucking Council."
"You have been reading something," I said. "And I don't mean just that little book on the Oma people who can't count beyond two. You have been reading the windy rhetoric of some of the new African politicians. I don't like it, Ralph."
"Okay, you don't like it. But don't talk to me any more about seeing the tourist sights. Life's short. And I'm hungry."
"Hungry for what?"
"Hungry for food. Jesus, come down off it. What they gave us for lunch on that Sopwith Camel was like a snack for a canary. Let's go out and eat someplace."
"We're meeting the ah operatic contingent in an hour or so. We eat then."
"Listen, I'm not eating with Nick Campanati. You call him and cancel it."
"We have work to discuss, dear Ralph. I came here primarily in connection with work."
"Give me money then. You brought me to what you call Africa, okay, I'll go and see what it has to offer. Money money."
"I gave you money."
"I spent it on those shirts at the airport. Money, give."
I sighed and sighed. "In my inside pocket there you will find a supply of what they call dirhams. Take what you wish but leave me enough to pay for dinner."
A very ungracious boy. I dined with Domenico and his in situ colleagues not at the Maimunia, where we only drank, but at a dark and oily garlicky restaurant more Neapolitan than Moroccan, though its name was the Shiwa, a sardonic name since there was no roast beef on the menu. Bevilacqua, who was pale and shivery, dug away at a mound of plain rice with lemon juice squeezed onto it. The rest of us had a bland couscous which we enfired with harissa. Domenico had now reached the stage of hearing voices in his skull. "Mazzotta," he said, "for Nick. Gregoretti for Venere." We had decided that one of the three unpickled and revivified by the saint should be not only a woman but a personification of the goddess of love and that Act One, Scene One should be a kind of Venusberg.
"Gregoretti looks it," Vern Clapp said, "but she's weak in the high register. Is that rice holding?" he asked Bevilacqua.
"Better. I think it will stay."
"Controllo muscolare," Domenico said, " e quello ii segreto." And to me, "I think we're going to finish like I said. The kid dead in his arms. Hiroshima. The death camps."
"Morocco," Vern Clapp said. "The Bronx. Any darned place you like."
"While we're talking of muscular control," I said, "don't ever think of letting art relax itself into propaganda."
"It's not propaganda," Domenico said. "It's the way things are. God doesn't give a fuck about men and women and kids."
"You can't write this opera that way."
"Ken's right, like I said," Vern Clapp said. "Let's finish with that heavenly choir."
"The point is," I said, "that the responsibility for the music is yours. The words are mine. And his," I added, nodding toward grimly rice-stuffing Bevilacqua. "Let's have some more of this local wine."
"It tastes like catarrh," Vern Clapp said.
"Don't put Renato off his rice," Domenico said. And to me, "It's the music that speaks and always did in opera. The words are only a kind of, what's the,' word "Excuse? Pretext? Subterfuge? I'm not having that."
"You hand the words over to me," Domenico said. "And then I do with them what I have to do."
"That," Vern Clapp said justly, "is because you've been taking orders too long. Give us a sound meaning that Cary Grant has indigestion. Give us a tune that sounds like what Lauren Bacall looks like. You're overreacting, Nick boy. Ken's right. It's his story not yours."
"Maybe you don't want any music at all," Domenico said, hot as harissa. "Maybe you want a nice little play about God shits on you but he's still the big good God. That would please the big good cardinal."
; "You're bringing family matters into it," I said. "Don't, Domenico. Art, art, art. Composite art. Wagner didn't put the music first."
"That's because he wrote the words too," Domenico said.
"Well, you try it," I said. "You write the words. Then you'll get what you want. Do you want me to withdraw my libretto?"
"When I've done the first scene and am halfway through the second? You must be crazy. And that's a nasty thing to say, Ken. That's prima donna stuff."
Bevilacqua said, "Devo per lorza tornare a casa, non mi fido dei gabinetti di qua."
"What's he say?"
"He says," Domenico said, "that he's got to get back. He doesn't fancy using the bathroom here. Okay, who pays? You pay, Ken, right. It was lousy food anyway. Right, we do it your way and then see what the critics say. Always chop that bit off."
"So long as you chop my name off the credits."
"We'll see. Get the second act done first. Then think about it."
"Ken's right," Vern Clapp said.
"Devo andare. Subito." They went off in a petit taxi and left me to wander a while in the warm March air. An odorous old Moor tried first to sell me kif and then a boy. He had a goat too, he said, female if my tastes ran to American-style normality. I went back to the hotel and to Ralph. Ralph was in his room sobbing.
"Ralph dear, angel, what in the name of...
He stopped sobbing and got up from his bed showing a wet face. He wiped the tears off with his shirtsleeve. "Okay," he said. "Okay okay okay. I want to go home." The vowel of home threatened to prolong into a howl, but he bit it off, the more easily because tears had denasalized his speech.
"Something bad happened? Where? What did they do?"
"Home, where the white liberals are real nice to niggers so long as they don't claim their rights. Cokes and burgers and Jell-O. Home."
"I want to know what happened."
"Oh, what I might have expected. I went round some dark alleys and there was the sound of this woman wailing one of these Arab songs, and I went to the door which was open, I thought it was some kind of a Moorish nightspot, and then these four black guys jump me and I get rolled. Black, man, black guys. My watch, money, the lot."
"A rich American, Ralph, that's all you are to them. Black? They must have been Berbers."
"And then they try to get my pants down and stuff it up."
"Oh no."
"I want out of here. I want to go home."
"Home is with me, Ralph. My only desire in life is to look after you. Oh my God, they did that."
"They tried it. They didn't get far. A police car comes by and they run. And the police tell me in French and I say make it Spanish, they tell me in Spanish to keep out of these places, not for tourists, you go back to your rich hotel, sucker Americano. They don't even give me a ride there. Okay, that's Marrakesh. That's Morocco."
"Tangier is very different, you'll see. Gang rape, oh my God."
'Fuck Tangier. I want New York."
"Come into my bed, Ralph. Cry yourself to sleep. I'll be watching over you every minute from now on. This sort of things happens to all of us."
"A mockery, that's all. Humiliation, you know that big word?"
"I practically invented it."
"A fucking mockery."
CHAPTER 64
"Naughty," said the fat man in white, Lord Somebody, "not to put too fine a point on it."
"He'll be for the chop all right."
"How did they dare?"
So goodbye to Barcelona with Gaudi's Church of the Sagrada Familia, almost esculent, crisp burnt baguettes aspiring to heaven, and his Park Guell, fairy decadence, the stalls in Las Ramblas and the winds of Tibidabo, the ten o'clock dinners of octopus in their own ink. To say that I spent the next decade and half of my life in Tangier would not be strictly true, since my sixties and seventies were as restless as the fifties and sixties of the century, and I jetted about the globe being a personality, spent six months in Australasia, a year in New York, two years traversing Latin America for a possible book, odd rags of time in European capitals. Nevertheless, Calle Mozart 21, not far from the Teatro Lope de Vega, became my official home until my flight to Malta. The house, built in the thirties, was of two stories, a box with little elegance though ample amenity, surrounded by a garden with a pair of cedars and walnut and orange and lemon trees, the garden surrounded by a thick high wall surmounted by broken-bottle chevaux-de-frise. While Ralph, moody but for a time chastened, was still with me, I managed to work well on a new long novel entitled Walter Dunnett, somewhat autobiographical save for the hero's heterosexuality. It would, from the technical angle, have seemed unremarkable when Arnold Bennett was a boy, what with its firm plot and stodgy dialogue, as also its inexplicit love scenes. I still had my audience, large if aging, but American scholastics were beginning to find in my work elements of irony and patterns of symbolism that were not, so far as I knew, really present. Meanwhile in France a new breed of writers was producing the nouveau roman, based on the rejection of plot and character and, indeed, everything I had always stood for. It was perhaps with unspoken relief that, admiring these, professors of fiction took my own works to bed and, enjoying them, had to rationalize their enjoyment in terms of my consciously, in a kind of revolt against postmodernism, ridiculous term, reverting to an earlier tradition. I was not, of course, reverting at all.
"I know why they dare. They want to make a case of it. About time too."
I was drinking sherry with Ralph in Al-Djenina, a bar not far from the Hotel Rif, and a number of expatriate writers, each with his Tangerine young man in smart suit with briefcase, were discussing The Love Songs of J. Christ by Valentine Wrigley. This had recently been published in London by Macduff and Tannenbaum "The case is already about to begin," I said.
"You've read it, Toomey?" This was a man in middle age best known for his loving biography of Lord Alfred Douglas.
"I read it in typescript," I said, "in the States. And I have just received a request from the publishers' solicitors to present myself as an expert witness when the time comes. The time is coming. The Director of Public Prosecutions has been compelled to take action."
"Will you go?" asked the lord, a viscount to be exact, a young and muscular man dabbling on a family remittance in the worst kind of Moorish pederastic dirt.
"I think I shall have to. Thank God the law forbids my delivering an aesthetic judgment on this book." The courtyard of the bar was full of tame birds, gaudy but songless, that were beginning, with chirruping and irritable preening, to settle on their perches for the night.
"It'll be magistrate's court," said the Alfred Douglas man, who looked ascetic, even High Anglican clerical. "Marlborough Street. I remember the Well of Loneliness case. I was there. Terribly ill-written book. But one had to speak out, you know, as much as one could. Never cared much for lesbians, perhaps unreasonable of me. Never cared for Tiggy Hall."
"Is that what she was called? I thought it was Boopsy or something." This was a twitching man who managed to live out here on two novels a year, a sale of three thousand for each. No tax, cheapish cigars. He was chewing one.
"I was made to feel guilty," I said, "for not putting in a word there." It seemed that my brother Tom, silly eventually faithless Estella peeping over his shoulder, was looking at me in sad retrospective reproach. This is the way the brain works. "I suppose I'm really making amends."
"Not really a trial at that stage," the Bosie man said. "The magistrate regards Marie Corelli as a daring authoress and Hall Caine as a pornographer and they have a counsel who just asks polite questions. They're trying to find out if there's a possible defense, really. That sort of thing. Court of enquiry."
"The point is, I think," I said, "that Macduff and Tannenbaum want to make a sort of bargain with the law. They paid big money for this big novel by Ralph's compatriot--"
"Dear Ralph," said a small man called Pissy who seemed to have no other name, twinkling and drawing his upper body together in a gesture meant t
o be seductive.
"That would be Foulds," the two--novel--a--year man said with bitter envy.
"The Cry of the Clouds. A very dirty book. Long as well. Like War and Peace. There was an American woman in the Miramar with a copy. Anything gets through in the States."
"You see the situation," I said. "This volume of Val Wrigley's gets banned, they're not going to follow right away with another prosecution. If they say, as they may do, this is only a book of pseudopoems with a limited audience, let it go, then there's a great victory for free speech and so on. They practically threw it at the DPP."
"Black, isn't he?" the viscount said. "Saw a photograph of him somewhere."
"Yeah, he's black," Ralph drawled, "all black, man. You any objection to him being black?"
"How touchy you chaps are," said the Bosie man. "We love your rippling black velvet bodies and you know it."
"But not our rippling black velvet minds."
"All right, Ralph," I said and drained my Amontillado. "Don't start anything."
"Foulds shows up you bastard little litterateurs," Ralph said. "A big book, right. And big money. But he took the money home, right?"
"East Africa is not his home," I said, "any more than it's yours, dear Ralph. You and I will now go to real home. Ali gets upset if we're late for dinner." The marine sky was all plum and apple and honey touched with a little greengage. There were old-fashioned farewells from the others, who did not seem to propose going home, not till their Moorish boys carried them thither. "Tutti frutti," and "Be good, you old whore" and so on. Ralph and I walked home, myself panting little more than he as we engaged the brief hill. Ali, whom you have already met, smiled that we were not late. He served us avocado followed by coq au yin, cheese and a shop-bought apricot flan to finish. We ate in a room bare except for its monastic dining furniture and Moorish rugs on parquet floor and walls. After dinner Ralph got down to some serious practice on his harpsichord: there was talk of his playing Mozart at a little concert that Gus Jameson, an expatriate Scottish composer, was arranging for late December. I went to my study and, sighing, numbered a new sheet of foolscap (140), recalled some of my characters from their brief sleep and set them talking. They started talking, to my surprise, about the novel which contained them, rather like one of those cartoon films in which anthropomorphic animals get out of the frame and start abusing their creator.
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