The Laughter of Carthage - [Between The Wars 02]

by Michael Moorcock

  I shall dismiss the past. It is no longer of use. Its hands snare my rigging. I go now to live in the future with my destined bride, my Esmé, my sister and my rose. I shall bear her back from the East to the ultimate city of the West, to dwell in eternal harmony with our peers, within that noblest of all dreams: der Heim. A golden city of hope, purified and restored: my own inviolable Hollywood.

  Ven vet men umkern mayn kindhayt?

  Wie lange wir es dauern?

  TEN

  THE ETERNAL CITY had seduced us both. Hand in hand we walked everywhere, entranced. Amidst the casual accumulation of three millennia, the conventional symbols of an antique greatness, her ruins, her churches and her modern monuments, Rome’s citizens conducted a routine life reminiscent of my own salad days in Odessa. Romans struck matches against Caligula’s columns and strung washing from balconies where Michelangelo or Raphael might have leaned to improve their view of St Peter’s. Motor-cars, trams, buses and trains buzzed and crashed around the Colosseum and the Circus Maximus, cheerfully unimpressed by this weighty glory. The natives were if anything amused by foreign pilgrims who piously gasped at their pagan and their papal shrines. Rome herself was looking forward, was more consciously a modern city than ever before.

  In the little bars, dance halls and night clubs around the Via Catalana we would soon find convivial company. Here intellectuals and bohemians gathered; futurists clashed swords with socialists, d’Annunzio was toasted and Giolitti, the Prime Minister, slandered. Plans were made to build a new Empire whose legions would advance by rail and in tanks, pausing to establish factories rather than forts wherever they went. Yellow sandstone and pink marble walls were covered with every persuasion of political poster, indiscriminately mixed with advertisements for sports cars, air races, cinema films; all these equally of consuming interest to the Romans.

  They were attracted to the romance of technology, by the thrill of the great, simple deed. They were simply entertained or irritated by the petty bickerings of corrupt liberals and apoplectic anarchists. In this tolerant humanity they were again like Odessans. They lived in warm, friendly sunshine, in their cafés; in their restaurants they ate and drank with gusto; in the streets they laughed and danced to the music of little brass bands and accordions; they even dressed with the gay flamboyance of pre-war Odessa. If they expressed admiration for Bolsheviks it was both dismissive and ironic, acknowledging the Reds as successful criminals, not with a pursing of the lips but with a sardonic laugh. Lenin was ‘that noble successor to Ivan the Terrible’ or ‘the greatest Byzantine monarch since Julian the Apostate’, while Trotski was either Joshua or Attila. Artists of Mayakovski’s bent were ‘the glorious children of Marinetti’ whose canvases were whole cities, whose materials were dynamite, gunpowder and ruptured flesh: Poets of a New Apocalypse opposed to all that was old, devoted to everything that was new, born into a world where electricity, the internal combustion engine and powered flight were commonplace, ‘to use, not to examine’.

  We had arrived on the morning of a mass march through central Rome. Traffic crawled. Men in overalls waved mysterious banners and women in red shawls shook their fists and shouted, stepping in time to the music of rough-and-ready bands which played loudly and in conflict. When I came to ring the service bell in our room I found that it was the manager’s wife who answered it. She apologised. The restaurant waiters had gone on strike and the hotel staff had joined them. She said she could bring us sandwiches and mineral water, that she was hoping to prepare a meal of some kind in the evening. She advised us, however, to look for family-owned restaurants which would still, with luck, be open. Strikes were so frequent that people took them for granted. Normally I would have been furious at the inconvenience, but I was deeply glad to be in a Western city. I found myself shrugging and smiling, whereupon she began to cackle and made several jokes in Italian which I could not follow but at which I laughed anyway.

  Thus Esmé and I spent our first day in Rome looking for somewhere to eat. That was how we discovered Via Catalana where many restaurants did, in fact, remain open. We were delighted with the novelty of everything and would probably not have noticed if we were starving. We marvelled at the sights and sounds of that civilised, ancient city; even the political rhetoric, so alarming in Russia, was here merely part of the vibrant air. Esmé breathed it in and became more wonderfully alive than ever. Rome in the summer of her most chaotic year, with workers occupying factories and ultimately D’Annunzio being expelled from Fiume, was a haven of sanity and order compared to what we had put behind us. For this was, if nothing else, the capital of a free nation. The debate was not whether one should live to see the next morning, or how one might escape the brutality of self-appointed militiamen, or what movements had arisen overnight radically to change our fate, but what kind of elected government could best rule. The old artistic and intellectual vitality of St Petersburg, before Kerenski ruined everything, was here reproduced in even more vivid colours. People discussed ideas with an easy gaiety which suggested all politics was fantasy, worthless unless it was outrageous enough to entertain the population for at least one Roman evening.

  Esmé, when we went to bed that night, was astonishingly passionate, making sexual demands on me which I found at first surprising, for I had no idea she harboured such secret desires. Nonetheless I flung myself into this new experience with a will and all but exhausted our remaining cocaine in the process. Next morning, aching but utterly relaxed, having slept hardly at all, I told her we would start having to make friends rapidly, if I was to discover fresh supplies of our drug. She pinched my cheeks and told me that I was too prone to ‘stewing’: everything was bound to turn out for the best. She lived for the moment, my Esmé. She was the eternal present and that was possibly the reason I loved her so much.

  I have always been a man of many worlds, able to move easily from one social ambience to another. Remembering the bohemian character of the district near the Tiber’s left bank more or less between the Capitol and Isola Tiberina, a stone’s throw from the Orsini Palace, I returned there with Esmé that same afternoon. We were in such a pleasant state of euphoria we soon selected a café, sitting outside under its red and white awning, swatting at mosquitoes, and drinking citrons presses from trumpet-shaped glasses. Half an hour later we were in conversation with a dark and attractively ugly little man who mistook us at first for English. Learning we were Russians, he became extravagantly delighted. He hardly needed to tell us he was an artist, with his wide-brimmed slouch hat and his scarlet silky cloak. He introduced himself as Fiorello da Bazzanno, painter. His monstrously wide mouth, full of yellow uneven teeth, made him grotesque; half-man half-horse in the head alone. His puny, underfed body, which twitched perpetually, completely contradicted the animalistic, pagan quality of his face. Yet the combination was magnetic. Moreover he revealed a facility for language which matched my own. To us he spoke a bizarre patois of Russian, German, Italian, French and English. He had been born in Trieste where most of those cultures meet. He insisted we drink a bottle of Tuscan wine with him. After an hour or so he had revealed he had been a petty thief, a street arab. Then in the trenches he had met his hero, the Futurist Umberto Boccioni, and discovered broader horizons. I told him of my own life in Petersburg, my engineering achievements, my flying exploits. He was quick to see similarities in our lives. Drawing a great, gold watch from within his rather dirty white shirt he told us we were to be his guests for supper. He paid the bill at the café and led us down the street towards Mendoza’s Café in the Via Catalana, which was distinguished by its black and yellow striped umbrellas, and thus known locally as ‘The Wasp’.

  ‘You’ll have the fried artichoke to begin.’ Fiorello was grave for a moment, ‘It’s Mendoza’s speciality and creates more spiritual uplift than a dozen Papal audiences.’

  A woman was waiting for him at one of the outside tables. She was dressed entirely in black and was almost twice his size. She had dark bobbed hair, a black smock, black s
tockings, black shoes. The only contrast was in her rather pale skin and the scarlet cord tied around her waist. This was Laura Fischetti. She wrote, said Fiorello almost apologetically, for the socialist press. We shook hands. A plump, motherly, good-humoured woman, she was forever picking and patting at her tiny lover. While he talked she leaned back from him, her hand on his chair, and smiled at us, the proud parent of a spoiled but clever child. Occasionally she would bend her head towards Esmé and ask her a question. My Esmé opened up to Laura, telling her the version of her life story I had said would be most acceptable in Europe; how she had been orphaned, raised by Turks, was about to be sold to a Syrian merchant when I found her, recognising her as my long-lost cousin. If Laura found the story fantastic, she was too well mannered to pursue it. Instead she confined herself to enquiring about life in Constantinople where her father had been attached to the consulate before the war, but which she had never visited.

  The artichoke was as delicious as Fiorello had promised but the various pastas and meats which followed were better still. During the course of this wonderful meal, various friends arrived and seated themselves around us. When the table proved too small, they drew up another and placed it at an angle to the first until half the area belonged to one large group, all of them talking, drinking, eating and gesticulating with such energy and pleasure I should not have cared a second if I understood a word of what they said. Two or three of them had visited Russia before the war. They said they were poets. I suspected them of anarchist affiliations. It was Italians who so affected Petersburg’s bohemians on every political and artistic level. I did not mind. They were not the savage, primitive anarchists I knew. To them anarchism was the logical persuasion for an artist, any artist, and particularly Italian artists. The Italians are the great individualists of Europe and anarchy is merely a formal description of the country’s fundamental attitudes. (That was why so few people properly understood Benito Mussolini, his philosophy and his specific problems.) Meanwhile a tone-deaf guitarist wandered in and out of the restaurant singing popular sentimental songs for an indulgent lira or two while Fiorello remembered another item on the menu we must try and ordered innumerable bottles of wine. It was heavenly for me, to sit there eating grilled fish and macaroni and enjoying the fabulous luxury of unchecked conversation. It was Laura, that night, who found us good cocaine (‘the drug of all true Futurists’) and Fiorello who insisted on paying for it (‘pay me when your first aerial liner sails for Buenos Aires’).

  Their friends were equally generous. For the first week of our stay in Rome virtually our only expense was the hotel. We went every day to the Via Catalana and from there would be taken on to restaurants, night clubs, private parties. The Roman bohemians were eager to hear my tales of the Civil War, of the Turkish nationalists and life in Constantinople. With these stories, sometimes just a little embroidered, I paid for our suppers and wine. If I had too much to drink, I might also draw on Mrs Cornelius’s first-hand knowledge of the leading Bolsheviks. I continued to borrow her name, since it was on our forged British passports. I did not wish to risk confusing the authorities and I still could not be sure, in that company, who might be a police spy. There was always bound to be at least one in any group.

  Our new companions, for all their apparent carelessness, did not take the fate of their country lightly; they could become furious, near hysterical, aggressive, violent with one another over the most obscure points. Every shade of anarchism, monarchism, socialism and nationalism was represented. Few Romans were fascists. Fascist! in those days meant merely ‘a bundle’ or ‘a bunch of flowers’; that is to say it was slang for a group. It was left to the Bolshevik press to give the word its sinister connotation. Many of Fiorello da Bazzanno’s friends, like Kolya, possessed an obsession with the future which mirrored my own; they gave words and pictures to my ideas. My scientific rationalism and their poetry formed a perfectly balanced combination.

  Fiorello insisted, one warm evening beneath burning strings of coloured electric bulbs on Mendoza’s terrace, that the old warring families, the Borgia and the Orsini, had their contemporary equivalents in the makers of motor-cars. ‘Soon it might be necessary to declare one’s loyalties, my dear Max, and if necessary fight for them.’ He jumped up, pushing his hat away from his thin, dark hair, striking a pose with his cane. ‘Avanti! I am Count Fiorello da Bazzanno, henchman to the Ferrari!’ This amused him so much that, his lips curling back over his yellow teeth as he laughed helplessly, he had to sit down again.

  ‘And who will be the next Pope?’ Laura patted his back. She spoke in her usual quietly sardonic tone. ‘A Lancia? A Fiat?’

  Fiorello gasped at this, shaking his head violently, controlling himself long enough to get to his feet and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘He could be a foreigner. There’s already a movement in the Vatican to elect a Ford. But the French support the Peugeot Cardinal.’ He leaned forward in mock-seriousness. ‘For my part I’m behind the dark horse. The Infant Cardinal.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ We all bent our heads towards him.

  ‘Why? None other than the Baby Rolls-Royce, my friends. Mark my words, you’ll hear more of him in a year or two. He has stolen your plans, Max. He means to lift St Peter’s closer to heaven. The whole papal city is to be seated on a massive dirigible, floating free of the Earth, no longer bound by temporal ties, removed from all petty politics. And when the Pope flushes his toilet, his piss will fall on Catholic and Protestant alike!’

  ‘And Turks,’ I begged. ‘Let it fall on Turks as well.’

  He was generous. ‘They shall have the entire Vatican sewer. And with their land covered in such holy shit, they’ll perforce grow nothing but Christian food. Thus they’ll be converted, as our own ancestors were converted, through their bellies.’

  When she was drunk, Laura was inclined to become a little sombre. ‘I think Ford and Austin are already sufficiently powerful to do as they please.’ She also tended, in this condition, to take a disapproving view of Fiorello’s flights of fancy. ‘It’s cash in the end which impresses people. Buy their oil and so give them enough money to buy our cars.’

  ‘The triumph of trade!’ I, too, responded perhaps more earnestly than was necessary. ‘Trade makes all men friends. A wealthy world is a peaceful world.’

  Laura began to scowl. ‘But who’ll have the greatest share?’

  ‘That issue’s being decided in Russia at the moment.’ The little man did not want to be brought down to earth. ‘When the result is announced, we’ll all know how to proceed. What a sublime clarifier is Lenin. Perhaps we should ask him to be Pope? Then everyone will feel much easier about him.’

  I, too, became anxious to counter Laura’s socialistic pieties. ‘We’ll simply move the flying Vatican City to Moscow!’

  ‘But what about the Patriarch of Constantinople?’ asked one of their friends from over Fiorello’s shoulder. ‘Where will the poor old fellow go?’

  Fiorello raised his cane. ‘I have the answer. A triumvirate: Pope Henry Ford, Patriarch of the Greeks and Romans Vladimir Lenin, and Dictator D’Annunzio. Ist es gut so? All shades of authoritarianism represented. A holy compromise.’

  Esmé was utterly fascinated by his strange little face, his animated movements. From time to time she would burst into giggles at completely inappropriate moments; or she would sit staring at him, her face a combination of uncertain expressions, her eyes wide, like a child at the play. She loved his comic poses, his melodramatic gestures, his trilling eloquence; applauding his braggadocio for its own sake. I felt no jealousy. He was a natural clown and I wanted nothing more than for Esmé to be happy. This company and its attendant ambience had consolidated her good health, I knew, and I was grateful. I prayed we would find similar friends in Paris and London, for this was my natural habitat and, ideally, Esmé’s as well. Here ideas and money, politics and art, science and poetry all mingled. Amongst such people I must inevitably find those who would appreciate my inventions and help me make them reali
ty, just as Kolya would have done if he had been allowed more time in government. (This is why I am convinced Lenin was personally responsible for my frustration and misery, because Kolya fell when Kerenski was overthrown.) Now, however, in Rome and elsewhere I foresaw a future where these young men could truly build Utopia. They would plead with me to be its architect. Fiorello’s rhetoric further inspired me. He spoke of ‘the violence which powers the engine’. Society would have to accept violence if it wanted progress. ‘Can a train run without the flaming energy in the boiler of the locomotive? Can steel be forged without a furnace? Can the aeroplane fly without consuming oil? Ich glaube es nicht! And, by the same reasoning, a nation cannot be hammered into perfection without blood and bayonets. Out of violence comes forth order! That wonderful tranquillity which falls on us after the battle. My Russian friends, I give you “Peace Through War!” and “Order Through Struggle!’”

  As we cheered his histrionics we could not know he was the genuine herald of a vigorous and realistic new age. That glorious reawakening of Italy’s pride would be marked only two years later by Mussolini’s March on Rome. ‘You must stay with us, my dear Cornelius!’ With one hand Fiorello lifted his wine bottle, with the other his hat. ‘Stay with us and help us create -’ He fell back again, giggling. ’Excusez-moi, Der Motor ist uberhitz!’ And he put his head into Laura’s tolerant lap, falling into sleep with a series of immense snores. Delighted as I was, I did not really take him seriously, yet his poetic vision was to prove splendidly accurate. Under the guiding hand of her remarkable Duce Italy began her glorious celebration of all that was vital, noble and modern. Mussolini’s only failing was his willingness to believe in the worth of turncoat friends. I would eventually identify with him even more than with D’Annunzio. The engineer of a brilliantly reborn nation, his dream was uncannily close to mine. I am the first to criticise the excesses of Hitlerism. The tragic injustice was that Benito Mussolini came to be tarred with the same brush. Sometimes the blackjack and the bottle of castor oil must be displayed, as a dog is shown the stick. He was martyred because he could not see the evil in his allies, in men who called him Master while plotting his downfall. It heartens me in England today when many people at last begin to realise the virtues of those leaders. Even the thankless defender of his nation’s pride, Sir Oswald Mosley, is finally accepted for the honourable patriot he always was: a man whose intellectual powers and imaginative instincts rivalled my own. But he must feel horribly bitter, sitting out his lonely exile in that rural French chateau, seeing all he warned against coming to pass. I was able to shake his hand only once, at a dinner given for Pan-Europeans in the late forties. It struck me then that a simple physical factor might have turned his destiny. As he thanked me for my support there were tears in his eyes; but what I noticed most, to my eternal discredit, was his hideously bad breath. I wondered if anyone had ever pointed it out to him. I spoke to his loyal lieutenant, Jeffrey Hamm, suggesting that an ordinary commercial mouthwash, if used daily, might seriously enhance his leader’s fortunes, I was misinterpreted. Hamm ordered me thrown from the room. He told me if I ever returned he would see me beaten black and blue. So much for good intentions. Together, Mosley and myself might have saved Britain from her steady slide into socialistic fantasy. Mussolini did not have a breath problem, or if he did I did not notice it, since the heavy use of garlic and olive oil in the Italian cuisine (not to mention tomato paste and so forth) makes everyone smell the same. Hamm’s anger did not stop me voting for Mosley in 1959 when he stood for this district as Member of Parliament, but by then the rot had set in. The negro vote won the day.