The Complete Enderby

by Anthony Burgess

  ‘Gomez,’ said the mortician, ‘is an expert only on the involutions of his own rectum.’

  The man with the blackboard shakily wrote Comings in the Skull. The white-haired reader said, very seriously:

  ‘Now, this, I reckon, is not shit. Listen.’ And he read out:

  ‘Society of solitary children –

  Stilyagi, provo, beat, mafada,

  Nadaista, energumeno, mod and rocker –

  Attend to the slovos of your psychedelic guides –

  Swamis, yogins and yoginis,

  Amerindian peyote chiefs, Zen roshis.

  Proclaim inner space, jolting the soft machine

  Out of its hypnosis conditioned by

  The revealed intention of the Senders –’

  ‘But,’ said Enderby unwisely, dancing the bloody drink in his hand, smiling, ‘we don’t have mods and rockers any more.’ He had read his Daily Mirror, after all, to some purpose. ‘That’s the danger, you see, of trying to make poetry out of the ephemeral. If you’ll forgive me, that sounded to me very old-fashioned. Of course, it isn’t really clear whether it is actually poetry. Back to the old days,’ he smiled, ‘of vers libre. There were a lot of tricks played by people, you know. Seed catalogues set out in stanzas. Oh, a lot of the soi-distant avant-garde were taken in.’

  There were low growls of anger, including, it appeared, one from a man who was supposed to be in a trance. The white-haired reader seemed to calm himself through a technique of rhythmic shallow breathing. Then he said:

  ‘All right, buster. Let’s hear from you.’

  ‘How? Me? You mean –?’ They were all waiting.

  ‘You know the whole shitting works,’ went the mortician. ‘You’ve not quit talking since you came in. Who asked you to come in, anyway?’

  ‘It’s a bar, isn’t it?’ said Enderby. ‘Not private, I mean. Besides, there’s this matter of Gomez.’

  ‘The hell with Gomez. Crap out with your own.’

  The atmosphere was hostile. The owner air-dabbled from behind the bar, sneering. The pianist was playing something deliberately silly in six-eight time. Enderby said:

  ‘Well, I didn’t really come prepared. But I’m working on something in the form of an Horatian ode. I’ve not got very far, only a couple of stanzas or so. I don’t think you’d want to hear it.’ He felt doubt itching like piles. All that stuff about swamis and inner space. A sonnet, yet. Horatian ode, yet. He was not very modern, perhaps. A critic had once written: ‘Enderby’s addiction to the sonnet-form proclaims that the ’thirties are his true home.’ He did not like the young very much and he did not want to take drugs. He was supposed to have killed a quintessential voice of the new age. But that voice had not been above gabbling Enderby’s own work and getting a fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature for it. Enderby now recited stoutly:

  ‘The urgent temper of the laws,

  That clips proliferation’s claws,

  Shines from the eye that sees

  A growth is a disease.

  Only the infant will admire

  The vulgar opulence of fire

  To tyrannize the dumb

  Patient continuum

  And, while the buds burst, hug and hold

  A cancer that must be controlled

  And moulded till it fit

  These forms not made for it.’

  Out of a trance somebody farted. ‘That last couplet,’ Enderby said trembling, ‘needs a bit of going over, I see that, but I think you’ll get the general idea.’ In confusion he swigged his Bloody Mary and presented the flecked glass (splash of some small slaughtered animal on a wind-screen) for another. When Enderby had been a boy he had gone to sleep on the upper deck of the last tram of the night and had awakened in the tramshed. Leaving in shame he had noticed uniformed men looking at him in the quiet wonder which was the proper tribute to an act of an imbecile. He seemed to be getting that same look now. He said: ‘I stand for form and denseness. The seventeenth-century tradition modified. When is this man Gomez coming in?’ The mortician resumed snipping and gumming, shaking his head, grinning like a clown. The white-headed cropped man hid his own grin in a new slim volume. The entranced offered the loudest criticism, great farts cometing through inner space. ‘Well,’ said Enderby, growing angry, ‘what about that bloody act of plagiarism of bloody Yod Crewsy?’

  A man came limping from behind the blackboard (which now had, very vulgar, My cuntry is the yoniverse scrawled on it) and said: ‘I’ll tell you about that, friend.’ He was totally bald but luxuriantly bearded and spoke in an accent Enderby had hitherto associated with cowboy films on television. ‘That was pure camp. Is, I guess. A new frame of awareness. It’s not the poems as such so much as how he looks at them. Like you get these good pictures with shitty Victoriana in them, a frame inside a frame. Man, it’s called the Process.’

  ‘I’d very much like to see –’ Enderby’s nausea was complicated. And if that sonnet-draft was in there, the Satan one. And, whether it was there or not, could he control himself, handling richly rewarded flagrant sneering theft?

  ‘You can learn any place,’ said the bald bearded man. ‘You’ll find it in the john library.’ He pointed beyond the curtain of many-coloured plastic strips with a finger that seemed half-eaten, a kindly man really. ‘And as for plagiarism, everything belongs to everybody. Man, that’s called the Lesson.’ He returned to behind the blackboard, limping. On the blackboard was now written Vinegar strokes through magnified sebacities. Enderby went, his heart fainting, towards the john. There was a dark passage, sibilant with the wind, and crunchy rubbish underfoot. In a kind of alcove a man lay on a camp-bed under a dull bulb, another man beside him with a notebook. The supine man, on a drugged trip, sent reports up from the unconscious. Down there ghostly scissors were at work on newspapers out of eternity. It was a lot of nonsense.

  The lavatory was small and dirty, but there was a red light of the kind used in electric log-fires. There were a lot of books, many of them eaten by mould. Enderby sat heavily on the hollow seat and disturbed the books with a paddling right hand, panting. That sinful volume was not far from the top. The title was Fixes; there was a bold leering portrait of the pseudo-author. The sixteenth impression, Enderby noted with gloom. He noted too that many of the poems were not his own; it was a case of multiple theft, perhaps, unless bloody Vesta or that Wittgenstein man had written some of them. Enderby found six unpublished poems by himself and, a small mercy in a world of filth, not one of them was that sonnet. There was, as Miss Kelly had said, a poem entitled ‘Sonnet’, but that had twelve bad unrhyming lines and might well be something that Yod Crewsy himself had composed at his secondary modern school. Enderby read it shuddering:

  My mum plonks them on the table for Susie and Dad and I

  Plonk plonk and dull clanks the sauce bottles

  And Susie reads their names to herself

  Her mouth is open but that is not for reading aloud

  The fact is that her nose is stopped up like those sauce bottles are

  Like OK and HP and AI and FU and CK and O

  I mean oh red red tomato

  And I dream while the frying goes on and Dad has his mouth open too at the TV

  How I would like catsup or ketchup splattering

  All over the walls and it would be shaken from these open mouths

  And it would be red enough but not taste of tomato

  ‘God,’ said Enderby to his shrinking bowels. ‘God God God.’ So they had come to this, had they? And his own finely wrought little works desecrated by contact. He dropped the book on the floor; it remained open, but a sharp draught from under the far from snugly fitting door pushed at the erect fan of its middle pages and disclosed a brief poem that Enderby, squinting in the dim red light, seemed thumped on the back into looking at. Something or somebody thumped him: an admonitory goblin that perhaps lived wetly in the lavatory cistern. He had not noticed this poem before, but, by God, he knew the poem. He felt a terrible exciteme
nt mounting. He grabbed the book with both hands.

  Then the door opened. Enderby looked, expecting to see the wind, but it was a man. Excited though he was, he began to deliver a standard protest against invasion of privacy. The man waved it away and said: ‘Gomez.’

  ‘The fact that the door isn’t locked is neither here nor there. All right then, I’ve finished anyway.’ Something in the spread sound of his words seemed to tell him that he was smiling. He felt his mouth, surprised. It was the excitement, it was the first rehearsal of triumph. Because, by God, he had them now. By the short hairs, as they said. But was he sure, could he be sure? Yes, surely he was sure. Or was it just a memory of having foreseen it in print? He could check, he was bound to be able to check, even in this bloody heathen place. There might be some really cultivated man here among the expatriate scribblers.

  ‘Gomez. Billy Gomez.’ He was a bit rodent-like and, so Enderby twitched at once, might be dangerous. But in what context? Gomez finned out his paws in a kind of cartoon-mouse self-depreciation. He had a dirty white barman’s jacket on but no tie. He seemed also to be wearing tennis-shoes.

  ‘Ah.’ That other structure of urgency was suddenly re-illuminated. Heavy as an ivied tower, it crashed the blackness, decollated, to the sound of brass, like something in son et lumière. ‘Sí Enderby said. ‘Su hermano. In London, that is. Mi amigo. Or colleague, shall I say. Has he sent anything for me?’ That sonnet by Wordsworth, on the sonnet. Key becomes lute becomes trumpet. This book he now thrust into his side pocket. Load of filthy treachery becomes, quite improbably, sharp weapon of revenge.

  ‘You come.’ He led Enderby out of the lavatory down a passage that took them to stacked crates of empties and then to a garlicky kind of still-room, brightly lighted with one bare bulb. Enderby now saw Gomez very clearly. He had red hair. Could he possibly be the true brother of swarthy John? Gomez was a Goth or perhaps even a Visigoth: they had had them in Spain quite a lot, finishing off the Iberian part of the Roman Empire: they had had a bishop who translated bits of the Bible, but that was much later: coarse people but very vigorous and with a language quite as complicated as Latin: they were perhaps not less trustworthy than, say, the Moors. Still, Enderby was determined to be very careful.

  In this still-room a small brown boy in a striped nightshirt was cutting bread. Gomez cuffed him without malice, then he took a piece of this bread, went over to a stove maculate with burnt fat, sloshed the bread in a pan of what looked like sardine-oil, folded it into a sandwich, and, drippingly, ate. He took in many aspects of Enderby with darting pale eyes. The boy, still cutting bread, as it were clicked his eyes into twin slots that held them blazing on to Enderby’s left ear. Enderby, embarrassed, changed his position. The eyes stayed where they were. Drugs or something. Gomez said to Enderby:

  ‘You say your name.’ Enderby told him what he had been called in his regenerate, barman’s capacity, but only in the Spanish version. Enderby said:

  ‘He said he’d send a letter through you. Una carta. He promised. Have you got it?’ Gomez nodded. ‘Well,’ said Enderby, ‘how about handing it over, then, eh? Very urgent information.’

  ‘Not here,’ dripmunched Gomez. ‘You say where you stay. I come with letter.’

  ‘Ah,’ Enderby said, with something like satisfaction. ‘I see your little game.’ He smiled, it seemed to him, and to his astonishment, brilliantly: it was that triumph pushing up. ‘Perhaps it would be more convenient if we could go to your place and pick up the letter there. It would be quicker, wouldn’t it?’

  Gomez, who had eaten all his oiled bread and licked some fingers, now took an onion from a small sack. He looked at the boy, who still cut bread but whose eyes had now clicked back down to the operation, and seemed to relent of cuffing him, however unmaliciously. He stroked the boy’s griskin, grinning. Spanish poetry, thought Enderby. This man was supposed to know all about it. Was a knowledge of poetry, even a nominal one, a sort of visa for entry into the small world of Enderby-betrayal? Gomez topped and tailed the onion with his teeth (tunthus, Enderby suddenly remembered for some reason, was the Gothic for tooth, but this man would know nothing of his ancestral language), then, having spat the tufts on to the floor, he tore off the onion’s scarfskin and some of the subcutaneous flesh and started to crunch what was pearlily revealed. There was a faint spray of zest. It smelt delicious. Enderby knew he had to get out. Fast. Gomez said:

  ‘Tonight I work. You say you where you live.’

  The boy left off bread-cutting (who the hell would want all that bread, anyway?) and ran the knife-blade across his brown thumb. Enderby said:

  ‘It doesn’t matter, after all. Thanks for your help. Or not help, as the case may be. Muchas gracias, anyway.’ And he got out of the room, clanking loose bottles on the floor of the dark corridor. Gomez called after him something ending with hombre. Enderby passed the man on the couch and in the next world and the amanuensis who sat by him. Then he breasted the plastic strips and blinked into the bar. There was a new man there, a Scot apparently, for he talked of ‘a wee bit fixie’. The man at the blackboard had just finished writing Hot kitchens of his ass. Salami, Enderby thought in his confusion, salami was made of donkeys. The whitecropped man was reciting:

  ‘Archangels blasting from inner space,

  Pertofran, Tryptizol, Majeptil,

  Parstelin and Librium.

  And a serenace for all his tangled strings.’

  Romantic, thought Enderby distractedly, better than that other stuff. Remembering that he had stolen a book from their john, he clapped his hand in his pocket. A dithery young man in dark glasses recoiled, pushing out his palms against the expected gunshot. Enderby smiled at everybody, thinking that he had ample cause to smile, even when carted off. But not yet, not just yet. He yearned towards solitary confinement like a lavatory, but duty, like an engaged sign, clicked its message. The mortician did not smile back. The dithering young man had recovered: all a joke, his manic leer seemed to say. Enderby held that book in, as if it might leap out. Out, out. Into the windy Moroccan night.

  It was a slow and panting climb, and Enderby had to keep stopping suddenly, holding himself in shadow against whatever wall offered, listening and watching to find out if he was being followed. It was hard to tell. There were plenty of little Moorish boys about, any one of whom could be that bread-cutting lad, but none seemed furtive: indeed, one pissed frankly in the gutter (but that might be his cunning) and another hailed a smartly dressed elderly Moor who was going downhill, running after him then, crying unheeded certain complicated wrongs. Enderby passed dirty coffee-shops and then came to a hotly arguing group of what seemed beggars at a street-corner. They had thin though strong bare legs under swaddling bands and ragged European jackets, and all were turbaned. Enderby stood with them a space, peering as best he could between their powerful gestures. Things seemed to be all right; there was nobody following; he had given that treacherous Gomez the slip. Two treacherous Gomezes. That bloody John in London was, after all, the rotten bastard Enderby had always known him to be. Enderby, filling his lungs first like a dog running to the door in order to bark, turned left for a steeper hill. Halfway up was a very loud cinema with what he took from posters to be an Egyptian film showing (an insincerely smiling hero like Colonel Nasser). He felt somehow protected by all that row, which was mostly the audience. A tooth-picking dark-suited young man by the pay-desk looked at Enderby. The manager probably. ‘Alors, ça marche, hein?’ Enderby panted. If anybody asked that man if he had seen an Englishman going that way he would say no, only a Frenchman. Now he said nothing, merely looked, tooth-picking. Enderby climbed on.

  When, dying and very wet, he came to the Rue El Greco, he realized he was not too sure what would be the right back wall. Fowls, stunted trees: they all probably had them round here. He should have chalked a sign: he was new to this business. He would have to risk going in the front way. After all, there would be a lot of customers at this hour and fat Napo would be too busy hitting the
rotten ancient coffee-machine to notice. Enderby caught a sudden image of El Greco himself, transformed into his own Salvador, peering down in astigmatic woe at the deplorable street that bore his name. There were some very nasty-looking places called snack-bars, as well as upper windows from which small boys thrust their bottoms, either in invitation or contempt. You could also hear very raucous female laughter – wrong, wrong; should not Islam’s daughters be demure? – from down dark passageways. An old man sat by deserted and boarded-up premises. Inside, Enderby saw with poetic insight, would be rats and the memories of foul practices, the last fleshly evidence of outrage being gnawed, gnawed; the man cried his wares of tiny toy camels with here and there a dromedary.

  Enderby gave his sweated spectacles a good wipe with his tie before approaching El Snack Bar Albricias. By conceiving an image of fat Napo waiting for him on the doorstep, as a tyrannical father his precocious debauched son, he was able to forestall any such reality. Indeed, scratched Cairo music was coming out very loud, but not so loud as the noise of customers. Enderby peered before entering and was satisfied to see Napo fighting the coffee-machine before a thick and applauding bar-audience. ‘Pardon,’ said a bulky fezzed would-be entrant to Enderby, Enderby being in the way. ‘Avec plaisir,’ Enderby said, and was happy to use this man as a shield for his own ingress. To be on the safe side, he tried to make himself look Moorish, flattening his feet, imagining his nose bigger, widening his eyes behind their glasses. There were girls, giggling, yashmaks up like beavers, drinking the local bottled beer with real Moorish men. Enderby tut-tutted like one in whom the faith burned hot. Then he noticed something he had not seen before – little verse couplets hanging on the wall behind the bar. He had time to read one only before going to the lavatory before going upstairs. It said: