The Complete Enderby

by Anthony Burgess

  ‘There’s a lot to see, isn’t there? And you’d better see it all just so you can confirm that it’s rubbishy.’

  ‘It is rubbishy, too.’ And Enderby, in after-lunch somnolence, thought particularly of that ghastly Arco di Costantino which was like a petrified and sempiternal page of the Daily Mirror, all cartoons and lapidary headlines. But a lake would be, especially in this cruel mounting heat, different altogether. Rome was really best taken in liquid form – wine, fountains and Aqua Sacra. Enderby approved of Aqua Sacra. Charged with a wide selection of windy chemicals, it brought the wind up lovely and contrived a civilized evacuation of the bowels. In these terms he recommended it seriously to Vesta.

  Enderby was surprised that this lake was to be visited by so many. Boarding the coach at the hotel, he had immediately prepared for sleep; almost at once they, and the jabbering polyglot others, had been told to get out. They were at some nameless piazza, sweltering and bone-dry, mocked by a fountain. There, their metal blistering in the sun, stood a fleet of coaches. Men with numbered placards stuck on sticks yelled for their squads, and obedient people, frowning and wrinkling in the huge light, marched on to markers. ‘We’re Number Six,’ said Vesta. They marched.

  Heat was intense in the coach; it had cooked to a turn in a slow oven. Even Vesta glowed. Enderby became a kind of fountain, his bursting sweat almost audible. And a worried man came on to the coach, calling, ‘Where is Dr Buchwald?’ in many languages, so that a kind of fidgety sense of responsibility for this missing one pervaded the coach and engendered scratchiness. In front of Enderby a Portuguese snored, his head on the shoulder of a Frenchman, a stranger; Americans camera-recorded everything, like the scene of a crime; there were two chortling Negroes; a large ham-pink German family spoke of Rome in serious and regretful cadences, churning the sights and sounds into long compound sausage-words. Enderby closed his eyes.

  Vaguely, through the haze of his doze, he was aware of comforting wind fanned in by the movement of the coach. ‘A very popular lake,’ he said sleepily to Vesta; ‘must be. All these people.’ The convoy was rolling south. Through the coach loudspeaker came the voice of the guide, in Italian, French, German and American, and the intermittent drone was finneganswaked by lightly sleeping Enderby into a parachronic lullaby chronicle, containing Constantine the grandgross and battlebottles fought by lakes which were full of lager. He awoke, laughing, to see villas and vineyards and burning country, then slept again, carrying into deeper sleep a coin-image of Vesta looking on him protectively with the protectiveness of a farmer’s wife carrying a pig to market.

  He was awakened, smacking dry lips, to a small town of great charm and cleanliness, napkin-carrying waiters waiting on a wide terrace full of tables. Stiff stretching coach-loads got out to drink. Here, Enderby understood, they were very near to Frascati, and that wine that was so shy of travel had travelled the least possible distance. White dust, heat, the shimmering flask on the table. Enderby felt suddenly well and happy. He smiled at Vesta and took her hand, saying:

  ‘Queer that we’re both renegade Catholics, isn’t it? You were right when you said that it’s a bit like coming home. What I mean is, we understand a country like this better than the Protestants. We belong to its traditions.’ He indicated, with a kind smile, a couple of hungry-eyed children at the foot of the terrace steps, the elder of the two solemnly nose-picking. ‘Even if you don’t believe any longer,’ said Enderby, ‘you’re bound to find England a bit strange, a bit inimical. I mean, take all the churches they stole from us. I mean, they can keep them for all I care, but they ought to be reminded occasionally that they’re really still ours.’ He looked round the full drinking terrace happily, soothed by the jabber of alien phonemes.

  Vesta smiled somewhat sourly and said: ‘I wish you wouldn’t talk in your sleep. Not in public, anyway.’

  ‘Why, what was I saying?’

  ‘You were saying, “Down with the Pope”, or words to that effect. It’s a good thing that not many people on this trip can understand English.’

  ‘That’s funny,’ said Enderby. ‘I wasn’t even thinking of the Pope. That’s very curious. Amazing what the subconscious mind can get up to, isn’t it?’

  ‘Perhaps you’d better stay awake on this leg of the journey,’ ordered Vesta. ‘It’s the last leg.’

  ‘I mean, it isn’t as though anybody mentioned the Pope, or anything, is it?’ puzzled Enderby. ‘Look, people are climbing aboard.’

  They followed the chatter, smiling faintly at their fellow-passengers as they moved down the aisle of the coach. There had been some changing-round of seats, but that didn’t matter: at the very furthest, you could not be more than one seat away from the window. A paunched small cocky Frenchman, however, linen-suited and with panama as though resident in a colony, hurled and fluted sharp words at a German who, he alleged, had taken his seat. The German barked and sobbed indignant denial. A tipsy lean Portuguese, thus encouraged by a fellow-Latin, started on an innocent red cheese of a Dutchman: a claim had, at the outset, been staked to that seat nearest the driver and renewed at this stop for refreshment – see, your fat Dutch arse is sitting on it, my map of Rome and environs. Europe now warred with itself, so that a keen-eyed Texan called, ‘Aw, pipe down.’ The guide came aboard and spoke French, saying that as a little infant at school he had been taught to keep to the first seat allotted to him. Enderby nodded; in French that sounded reasonable and civilized. The guide translated into American, saying, ‘Like you were in school, stick to your own seat and don’t try and grab somebody else’s. Okay?’

  Enderby felt himself growing instantly red and mad. He cried: ‘Who the hell do you think you are – the Pope?’ It was an Englishman’s never-never-never protest against foreign overbearingness. Vesta said, ‘Why don’t you keep your big mouth –’ The words of Enderby were translated swiftly into many tongues, and faces turned to look at Enderby, some wondering, others doubtful, yet others fearful. But one elderly man, a grey and dapper raisonneur-type, stood to say, in English. ‘We are rebuked. He reminds us of the purpose of our journey. Catholic Europe must not be divided.’ He sat down, and people began to look more warmly on Enderby, one wizened brownish woman offering him a piece of Belgian chocolate. ‘What did he mean by that?’ asked Enderby of Vesta. ‘The purpose of our journey, he said. We’re going to see this lake, aren’t we? What’s a lake got to do with Catholic Europe?’ ‘You’ll see,’ soothed Vesta, and then, ‘I think, after all, it might be better if you did have a little sleep.’

  But Enderby could not now doze. The countryside slid past, brilliant distant townships on high sunlit plateaux, olive, vine, and cypress, villas, browned fields, endless blue sky. And at length came the lake, a wide white sheet of waters in laky air, the heat of the day mitigated by it, and the little inn close by. The guide, who had sulked and been silent since Enderby’s blast of brash Britishry in rebuke, now stood up to say, ‘We stay here two hours. The coach will be parked in the parking-place for coaches.’ He indicated, with a sketchy squizzle of his Roman fingers, roughly where that might be. He frowned at the Enderbys as they came down the coach-aisle, a blue-jawed lean Roman’s frown despite Enderby’s ‘No hard feelings? Eh?’ He was even stonier when Enderby said, ‘Ma é vero che Lei ha parlato un poco pontificalmente.’ ‘Come on,’ said Vesta.

  The wide silver water breathed coolness. But, to Enderby’s fresh surprise, nobody seemed anxious to savour it. Crowds were leaving coaches and toiling up a hill towards what seemed to be a walled township. Coach after coach came up, disgorging unfestive people, grave, some pious with rosaries. There were carved Africans, a gaggle of Chinese, a piscatorium of Finns, a rotary chew of Americans, Frenchmen haussing their épaules, rare blond Vikings and their goddesses, all going up the hill. ‘We,’ said Vesta, ‘are also going up there.’

  ‘What,’ asked Enderby carefully, ‘lies up yonder hill?’

  ‘Come on.’ Vesta took his arm. ‘A little poetic curiosity, please. Come and find out.’r />
  Enderby now half-knew what lay at the top of the hill-street they now began to ascend, dodging new squealing arriving coaches, but he suffered himself to be led, passing smiling sellers of fruit and holy pictures. Enderby paused for a moment aghast, seeing a playing-card-sized portrait repeated more than fifty-two times: it seemed at first to be his stepmother in the guise of a holy man blessing his portrait-painter. And then it was not she.

  Panting, he was led up to massy gates and a courtyard already thronged and electric. Behind himself and Vesta crowds still moved purposefully up. A trap, a trap: he would not be able to get out. But now there was a holy roar, tremendous, hill-shaking, and an amplified voice began to speak very fast Italian. The voice had no owner: the open ecstatic mouths drank the air, their black eyes searching for the voice above the high stucco buff walls, the window-shutters thrown open for the heat, trees and sky. Joy suffused their stubbled faces at the loud indistinct words. The cry started – ‘Viva, viva, viva!’ – and was caught up. ‘So,’ said Enderby to Vesta, ‘it’s him, is it?’ She nodded. And now the French became excited, ear-cocking, lips parted in joy, as the voice seemed to announce fantastic departures by air: Toulon, Marseilles, Bordeaux, Avignon. ‘Bravo!’ The vales redoubled to the hills, and they to heaven. ‘Bravo, bravo!’ Enderby was terrified, bewildered. ‘What exactly is going on?’ he cried. Now the voice began to speak American, welcoming contingents of pilgrims from Illinois, Ohio, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Delaware. And Enderby felt chill hands clasp his hot body all over as he saw the rhythmical signals of a cheer-leader, a young man in a new jersey with a large blue-woven P.

  ‘Rhode Island,’ said the voice. ‘Kentucky, Texas.’

  ‘Rah, rah, rah!’ came the cheers. ‘The Pope, the Pope, the Pope!’

  ‘Oh God, no,’ moaned Enderby. ‘For Christ’s sake let me get out of here.’ He tried to push, with feeble excuse-mes, but the crowd behind was dense, the eyes up to the hills, and he trod on a little French girl’s foot and made her cry. ‘Harry,’ said Vesta sharply, ‘you just stay where you are.’

  ‘Mississippi, California, Oklahoma.’ It was like something from a sort of holy Walt Whitman.

  ‘Rah, rah, rah! The Pope, the Pope, the Pope!’

  ‘Oh Christ,’ sobbed Enderby, ‘please let me get out, please. I’m not well, I’m ill, I’ve got to get to a lavatory.’

  ‘The Church Militant is here,’ said Vesta nastily, ‘and all you want is a lavatory.’

  ‘I do, I do.’ Enderby, his eyes full of tears, was now grappling with a redolent Spaniard who would not let him pass. The French child still cried, pointing up at Enderby. Suddenly there was a sort of exordium to prayer and everybody began to kneel in the dust of the courtyard. Enderby became a kind of raging schoolmaster in a sea of stunted children. She too knelt; Vesta knelt; she got down on her knees with the rest of them. ‘Get up!’ bawled Enderby, and, like a sergeant, ‘Get off your bloody knees!’

  ‘Kneel down,’ she ordered, her eyes like powerful green poisons. ‘Kneel down. Everybody’s looking at you.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ wept Enderby, praying against the current, and he began to try to get out again, lifting his legs as though striding through treacle. He trod on knees, skirts, even shoulders, and was cursed roundly even by some who prayed with frightening sincerity, their eyes dewy with prayer. Stumbling, himself cursing, goose-stepping clumsily, laying episcopal palms on heads, he cut through the vast cake of kneelers and reached, almost vomiting, blind with sweat, the gate and the hill-road. As he staggered down the hill, past the smiling vendors, he muttered to himself, ‘I was a bloody fool to come.’ From the top of the hill came the sound of a great Amen.

  3

  ‘Cefil Uensdi,’ said the man. ‘Totnam Otispar. Cardiff Siti.’ He had a surprised lion-face, though hairless, with a few wavy filaments crawling over his otherwise bare scalp. Staring all the time at Enderby as though convinced Enderby wished to mesmerize him and too polite (a) to object that he did not wish to be mesmerized and (b) to announce that the mesmerism was ineffectual, he ever and anon brought, with a bold arm gesture, a cigarette-end to his lips, drawing on this with a desperate groan as if it were a sole source of oxygen and he dying.

  ‘Tutti buoni,’ nodded Enderby over his wine. ‘All football very good.’

  The man gripped Enderby’s left forearm and gave a mirthless grin of deep deep blood-brotherhood’s understanding. They were sitting at rough trestle-tables in the open air. Here Frascati had reached its last gasp of cheapness – golden gallons for a few bits of tinkly metal. ‘Ues Bromic,’ the man went on in his litany. ‘Mancesita lunaiti. Uolveramiton Uanarar.’ This, though more heartening than the geographical manifests up the hill, was beginning to weary Enderby. He wondered vaguely if perhaps that was what Etruscan had sounded like. Up on the main road, beyond the dark and nameless trees that were a wall to this sky-roofed tavern, the pilgrims could be heard coming back to their buses, walking slowly and with dignity now after the comic freewheeling down the hill. If Vesta had any sense at all she would know where to find him. Not that, in his present mood, he cared much whether she found him or not. Next to the lion-faced man with the football litany lolled a patriot who did not believe that Mussolini was really dead: like King Arthur he would rise with unsheathed sword to avenge his country’s new wrongs. This man said that the English had always been the friends of Mussolini; Italian and Briton together had fought to expel the foul Tedesco. He bunched one side of his face often at Enderby, raising his thumb like an emperor at the games, winking in complicity. There were other drinkers on the periphery, some with bad unsouthern teeth, one carrying on his shoulder an ill-kempt parrot that squawked part of a Bellini aria. There was also a very buxom girl, a country beauty called Bice, who brought round the wine. Enderby did not, would not, lack company. He only wished his Italian were better. But ‘Blackburn Rovers’ he fed to the litanist and ‘Newcastle United’; to the patriot ‘Addis Ababa’ and ‘La Fanciulla del Golden West’. Meanwhile thunder flapped with extreme gentleness on the other side of the lake. ‘Garibaldi,’ he said. ‘Long live Italian Africa!’

  When Vesta at last arrived the pleasant dirty drinking-yard at once was disinfected into a background for a Vogue fashion pose. She looked tired, but her calm and elegance fluttered all present, making even the roughest drinkers consider removing their caps. Some, remembering that they were Italian, said dutifully, ‘Molto bella’ and made poulterer’s pinching gestures to the air. Without preamble she said to Enderby, ‘I knew I’d find you in some such place as this. I’m fed up. I’m sick to death. You seem to be doing your utmost to make a farce out of our honeymoon and a fool out of me.’

  ‘Sit down,’ invited Enderby. ‘Do sit down. Have some of this nice Frascati.’ He bowed her towards a dry and fairly clean part of the bench on which he had been sitting. The litanist, grasping that she was Inglese, assuming a passion for football in her accordingly, said, ingratiatingly, ‘Arse an all,’ meaning a football team. Vesta would not sit. She said:

  ‘No. You’re to come with me and look for this coach. What I have to say to you must wait till we get back to Rome. I don’t want to risk breaking down in public.’

  ‘Peace,’ mocked Enderby. ‘Peace and order. You played a very mean trick on me, and I shan’t forget it in a hurry. A really dirty trick.’

  ‘Come on. Some of the coaches are going already. Leave that wine and come on.’ Enderby saw that there still remained a half-litre of this precious golden urine. He filled his glass and said, ‘Salute.’ His swallow excited cries of ‘Bravo’, as enthusiastic as those heard up the sacred hill, though not then for Enderby. ‘Right,’ said Enderby, waving farewell. ‘We’re late,’ said Vesta. ‘Late for that coach. We wouldn’t have been late if I hadn’t had to come looking for you.’

  ‘It was a mean trick,’ repeated Enderby. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that we were being taken to the Vatican?’

  ‘Oh, don’t be so stupid. That’s not the Vatican; that’
s his summer residence. Now where on earth is this coach?’

  There was a bewildering number of coaches, all looking alike. The pilgrims had nestled snugly and smugly in them; some of them were impatiently roaring off. Coaches had settled everywhere – by the roadside, down small hilly streets – like big bugs in bed-crevices. Vesta and Enderby began to examine coaches swiftly but intently, as though they proposed to buy them, passengers and all. None looked familiar, and Vesta made noises of distress. Listening through his thick curtain of wine, Enderby thought he heard the veneers and inlays of Received English stripped roughly off, so that something like raw Lallans became audible, as spicy as home-pickled onions with its gutturals and glottal stops. She was really worried. Enderby said:

  ‘Damn it all, if they do leave us behind there’s no great harm done. There must be a bus service or trains or taxis or something. It’s not as though we’re lost in the jungle or anything.’

  ‘You insulted him,’ complained Vesta. ‘It was blasphemous, too. These people take their religion very seriously, you know.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Enderby. Stealthily the sky had, above their searching heads, been clouding over. There was a greenish look in the atmosphere as though the atmosphere proposed, sooner or later, to be sick. From beyond the lake came renewed gentle drummings, as of finger-tips on timpani. ‘It’s going to rain,’ wailed Vesta. ‘Och, we’ll be caught in it. We’ll be drenched.’ But Enderby, in impermeable of wine, said not to worry, they would catch that blasted bus.

  But they did not catch it. As soon as they approached a coach, the coach skittishly started up, its gears grinding a derisive expletive all for Enderby. Faces looked down, grinning pilgrims, and some hands waved. It was as though Vesta and Enderby were host and hostess after some huge party, seeing off loads of quite unappreciative guests. ‘He’s done it deliberately,’ cried Vesta. ‘He’s getting his own back. Oh, you are a nuisance.’ They hurried towards another coach and, like a kitten in chase-me play, it at once began to move off. There were very few left now, but Enderby was fairly sure that, from one of these few, a Roman face, the ignoble face of a Roman guide, leered and Roman fingers made a complicated gesture of mean triumph.