"Perhaps," I said, "you would permit me to look at it."
"Would you, would you?" He was ready to wreathe himself about me in gratitude. "You say you have written for the theatre, yes? Music comedy, you said. Meaning a kind of operetta, yes? Well, why not in my little opera new things, very American? Ragtime, jazz. I hear and see very clearly a mixed quartet drinking cocktails and the music becoming more and more ubriaca."
"Drunk, yes. Why not?"
Don Carlo rumbled "Drunk," prolonging the vowel into a Milanese ah. "Not too drunk, fratello mio."
I said, ready to be knocked down again, "Art and morality have little to say to each other. We do not go to the play or the opera to be taught what is bad and what is good."
"That is not what the Church tells us. But you are English and do not belong to the Church."
"My family is a Catholic family. My mother is French. She converted my father."
"Nevertheless," Don Carlo said, "I do not think you belong to the Church." And that was that. We had arrived at the hotel and we entered its restaurant, trattoria really, and Don Carlo went in first, bowed at, leading the way to a table as though the meal were on him. The place was not full. There was an old man patiently feeding soup to a little girl. There was a party of flashy young men, already on the cheese course and loud with wine. Our tablecloth was clean but threadbare, the glasses cloudy, the forks bent. Black cold wine was brought in two terra-cotta pitchers. The waiter looked hard at me, though without malice. He knew. Don Carlo poured. "Let us drink," he said, "to the end of war."
"You mean all war?" I said. "Or just the one of which the armistice was signed yesterday?"
He drank deep and poured himself more. "There will always be wars. A war to end war, that is, to use your beloved word, a stupidity." This was hardly fair; I had not used that word at all. "My brother there," he said, "got himself out of it quickly. He gave himself no opportunity to learn certain things."
"Got yourself out of it how?" I asked Domenico. For blatant buggery in the trenches. I thumped that unworthy thought away.
"A nervous condition," Domenico said. "Before Caporetto." He said no more.
Don Carlo said, "I was a chaplain. I gave the comforts of the Church to the Austrians as well as to the Italians. It was an Italian anarchist who shot at me. There is humour for you." He did not smile.
"Shot at you? Wounded you?"
"In a fleshy part. It did no harm. Ah." The soup came in a large chipped bluestriped white tureen. It reeked of cabbage but, as Don Carlo was quick to show with a questing ladle, contained also bits of celery, potato (very expensive in Cagliari), broccoli, even stringy meat. He served himself and broke thick coarse grey bread into it. He spooned it noisily, sighed with content, pointed his dripping spoon at me, saying, "What I learned was less of the badness of war than of the goodness of men."
I had not, for some reason, expected this. I looked at Domenico to see if he agreed. He sipped soup delicately. "But," I said, "think of the thousands and millions dead or mutilated. The starvation, the atrocities, children shattered and their mothers raped."
"You say you were not in the war?" asked Domenico.
"Heart. As I said. No, not in it."
Don Carlo snorted over his raised spoonful of brewis. He said, "My brother was in the artillery. He knows what I say is true. The death of the body. Man is a living soul who must be tested in suffering and death. He too saw the goodness of men. Then he got himself out quickly."
"You too," I said. "You were not in at the end."
"I was called to Rome." Don Carlo glared at me as though it were not, which it was not, any of my business. "There were other things. There were plenty of other chaplains ready to be shot at."
"Some men were good," Domenico said with caution. "You can always find good men. In the war there were many men, so of course there were many good men." I chewed that over with a bit of cabbage. It seemed reasonable enough. Don Carlo took more soup, bread, wine. He said, "I fini e i mezzi. The war has been a means of bringing out men's goodness. Selfsacrifice, courage, love of comrades."
"So let us at once start another war?"
He rolled his head in good humour. "No. The devil has his work to do. God permits him to do his work. But of course you will not believe in the devil." The waiter brought fish in one hand and tried to take the tureen away with the other. Don Carlo put out burly arms and grasped it by its rim: there was still half a plateful there. The fish was a kind of mackerel cooked with head and tail on, swimming in oil, adorned with lemon slices. Don Carlo took his soup fast, so as not to be cheated of his fair share of the fish. Taking more than his fair share, but he was welcome to it, he had leisure to say, "It is all in your English Bible. In Genesis. The fallen Lucifer was permitted to implant the spirit of evil in the souls of men. Where is evil? Not in God's creation. There is a great mystery but the mystery sometimes becomes less of a mystery. For the devil brings war, and out of the war comes goodness. You must believe in the goodness of men, Mr. Mr.--"
"Tuuuumi," his brother said. And then, "He is like me. He has no time for theology. We leave all that to you, Carlo. We work at our art." I could not resist giving him a smile of excessive intimacy. He smiled back. Don Carlo seemed pleased to be granted a temporary manumission from instructing the heathen. He finished his fish, soaking up the oil with bread, and asked for more bread when the main course came. This was a mixed roast of kid, chicken and what was possibly veal. There was a big boiled oiled cauliflower which Don Carlo at once, as though performing a sacrifice, chopped into three unequal portions. Also a whole grey loaf cut in thick wedges. Don Carlo ate with strong crushing teeth. My father would admire those. My poor father, ignorant of my sins as my womenfolk were not. I had hardly written. I was traveling abroad, I had said, and would be incommunicado for some time. Now I must start thinking of arranging a little holiday in the warm south for my sister Hortense, perhaps also for my brother Tom when he should be demobbed. I had no desire to go home again, but I could import temporary fractions of my home to wherever I was, warm and monied. The musical stupidity was doing well, that I knew. I had a mind to spend the winter in Nice. Sardinia could, so I had heard, be, though blue, bleak from December to March.
Domenico agreed: bleakish. He had been here for quiet, in the house of Guglielmi between Cagliari and Mandas. Guglielmi was in Naples now, fiddling. I had never heard of Guglielmi. "I must," Domenico said, "be in Catania for Natale, Christmas that is. There is to be a concert in the Opera House. They are to play my little partita for string orchestra. I had thought of trying to finish my opera in Pasi's house, outside Taormina. He has a Steinway." We musicians and writers, always on the move. "Finish," he said, his large black eyes melting like jammed fruit as he looked at me, "or start again? You said you would look at the libretto."
"I'm no da Ponte," I said. "I can only work in English."
"Why not?" he said, his eyes reflecting a new vista. "I had not thought of that. Why not in English?"
"Free men," Don Carlo said. "Free to say yes or no or go where you wish to go. I, who may say neither yes nor no, must go back to Milan."
"The boy?" asked Domenico.
"The boy will be all right. The devils are cast out."
"What's this," I said, "about devils?"
For reply Don Carlo worked away at the nibbled-looking chunk of pecorino sardo, the strong cheese which comes, among all Mediterranean cheeses, closest in flavor to an English cheese. A new crock of cold black wine was put on the table. I wondered whether to raise the theological issue of gluttony, but I knew what the answer would be. Eating your fill was not gluttony; it was a good, nay a necessity. As for eating beyond your fill, that was the devil's work and it contrived a kind of purgation along with the temporary agony, both salutary things. "Milan, but for a brief stay only. I must get my French ready for Paris. L'Institut Catholique on the rue d'Assas. La Catho, they call it. The History of the Church," Don Carlo said, pointing his bulky nose at me like a weapon. "
I will teach that."
CHAPTER 21
The libretto, as far as I could tell with my small Italian, was wordy but sound. There are very few plots available to the librettist--or to the novelist for that matter--and Ricciardelli's was the one that found its best expression in Romeo and Juliet. The title was Pirandello-like: I Poveri Ricchi. The Corvi are rich and the Gufi are poor. Gianni Gufo loves Rosalba Corvo. The Corvi forbid marriage. Old Man Corvo loses his money, and Old Man Gufo is left a fortune by a forgotten uncle in America. Now the Gufi forbid marriage. Old Man Corvo nevertheless gets drunk with Old Man Gufo and the two become friendly. Corvo offers to invest Gufo's fortune for him, and Gufo says yes. Corvo's scheme fails, and both families are now poor. The boy and girl may marry with everybody's half-hearted blessing. But Gianni and Rosalba are now so accustomed to clandestine trysts that they lose interest in each other when they are free to kiss in the open. So the two families (and this was stolen from Rostand) pretend a great enmity which they no longer feel and the lovers love each other again. Telegrams arrive speaking of restored fortunes for both families. Embraces, bells, wine, curtain. This story had to be put across in seventy minutes, with the terrace of the Corvo house overlooking a piazza full of choral market stallholders. Ricciardelli's lyrics and recitative were far too wordy and overbrimmed with poetic color: leave color to the music. Domenico needed a greater variety of forms--trios, quartets, quintets as well as duets--and he needed the pithiness which an admirer of D'Annunzio could not easily provide. Indeed, he needed what I was not--a new da Ponte.
I worked not in Nice but in Monaco, in the Condamine on the rue Grimaldi. I had a bare and airy top-floor apartment rented, on a six months' lease, from a M. Guizot, who was visiting Valparaiso. When I had finished the first draught I telegraphed Domenico in, or just outside, Taormina. He came. I hired a piano, a tinny Gaveau. He stayed. We ended with two versions of the libretto, one in Tuscan, the other in a kind of American with the title The Richer the Poorer. I learned a lot of Italian. He learned something about English prosody. He began to dream of doing something popular for the New York stage. He had no strongly individual musical style but could imitate anybody. This opera was mainly in the style of late Puccini, with acerbities stolen from Stravinsky. It had a ragtime sequence and a drunken duet. A drunken quartet would not fit into the narrative pattern, but the finale was loud and vinous.
While Domenico warbled and struck chords on the wretched Gaveau in the long bare salon, I worked on my novel two rooms away. This was The Wounded, about the legless man coming back from the war (poor Rodney) and nobly trying to make his betrothed marry another, a whole man. But his betrothed is blinded in a car accident and the whole man who has fancied her no longer does so. So the two maimed marry and live happily and beget limbed and sighted children. This sounds worse than it really is, though, pace Don Carlo Campanati, it is still pretty stupid. What I was trying to do at that time was, in a sense, Shakespearean. I was taking a story that could not fail to be popular, especially when adapted to the screen, as The Wounded was in 1925, and attempting to elevate it through wit, allusion and irony to something like art.
And all during this time I lived a loveless life. Domenico, without my telling him, divined quickly what and how I was and regretted that he could not help. He took the train to Ventimiglia once a week, sometimes twice, and came back looking rested. I for my part bitterly masturbated, sometimes seeing, as I approached climax, the figure of Don Carlo spooning in soup and shaking his head sadly. I tried to purge some of the rage of my loneliness in housework and cooking, though Domenico was a better cook than I and an old woman came in to clean three times a week. Friends, we were friends, he said, as well as brothers in art, but--ah, that kind of love seemed to him, if I would forgive his saying so, an abomination.
When Don Carlo came from Paris to stay with us for two days, I looked guiltily at him, as though his image had been a real presence. He had come, he said, when he had done panting from the long climb to the top story, to play roulette.
"Is that," I asked, getting him a whisky with a little water, "permitted? To a priest, that is?"
"The first shareholders of the Casino," he said, "were the bishop of Monaco and Cardinal Pecci. And you know what Cardinal Pecci became."
"Pope Leo the Thirteenth," Domenico said.
"We must exorcise the puritan in you," Don Carlo said, roguishly wagging his whisky at me without spilling a drop. "You think there is something irreligious about gambling. But it is only the opposing of one free will to another--"
"Talking of exorcism," I said. "Domenico promised that you would tell me the whole story. About this boy in Sardinia possessed by devils or whatever they were--"
"Domenico has no right to promise anything on my behalf. It's of no interest to you, who would not believe it anyway."
"What right have you to say what I believe and what I do not?" I asked, and that made him grunt as at a light blow struck at an ailing liver.
He said, "It is a thing I do. Indeed, any priest. But some do it better than others. Some take a chance."
"What do you mean--a chance?"
"You bring me back to what I was trying to say. One free will against another--that of the player, that of the little white ball on the big wheel--"
"You mean that figuratively? You mean an inanimate object can really have free will? What do you mean?"
"I am rebuked. You must soften the rebuke with more whisky." I took his empty glass. "I mean," he said, while I poured, "that what cannot be predicted looks very much like free will. I meant no more than that. I need," he said to his brother, "a necktie. I must go in as one of the laity. I must not scandalise the faithful. It is bad enough," chuckling, "to scandalise the faithless."
"Me? You mean me?" I said, giving him his fresh whisky.
"Why not you? You are not of the Church. You are not one of the faithful. Ergo you are one of the faithless. Does that annoy you?"
"I would," I said sadly, "be one of the faithful if I could. If the faith itself were more reasonable. I was in the faith, I know all about it."
"Nobody knows all about it," Don Carlo said.
"It's easy for you," I said, somewhat loudly. "You've put off the needs of the flesh. You've been gelded for the love of God."
"Gelded? A rare word, I think."
"Castrated, deballocked, deprived of the use of your coglioni."
"Not deprived," he said in no gelding's voice. "Not not deprived. We choose what we wish, but nobody may choose deprivation. I will take a bath now."
He took a very loud splashing bath, singing what sounded like highly secular songs in a coarse dialect. He shouted, in the same dialect, what sounded like a complaint about the lack of a bath towel. "I'll take it," I said to Domenico, who was scoring what looked like a semiquaver run for the strings at the round centre table. I got a towel from the corridor cupboard and took it to Don Carlo. He stood in the swimming bathroom, squeezing a blackhead on his chin. His eyes flashed from the mirror at my entrance. He was naked, of course, big-bellied but also big-ballocked, with roadworker's arms and shoulders, very hairy everywhere. He took the towel without thanks, began to dry himself, balls and belly first, and said: "If all goes well, it will be dinner at the Hotel de Paris. But some light nourishment is called for before we go. Bread. Salami. Cheese. Wine."
"Certainly, Father."
"What is your father?" he asked sternly.
"A dentist."
"In England?"
"In the town of Battle in East Sussex. The name celebrates the disaster of Senlac, when the Anglo-Saxons lost to the invading Normans."
He dried his shoulders, exposing his balls and what the Romans called dumpennente without shame. "And when are you going home?"
"I have no intention of going home. Not yet."
"It is not now the invading Normans," he said. "It is what some call the intangible visitation. You have read the newspapers?"
"You mean influenza?"
"The Ang
lo-Saxons are being invaded worse than most. It is a cold country. February is a cold month there. A long war ends and a long winter follows. Paris suffers too. I lost three students this week. I hope you do not have to go home."
I shivered, as though the influenza were being conjured here in mild safe Monaco by this naked priest. "Why did you mention my father?" I said. "Have you some occult vision of his succumbing to the--?"
"Occult," he bawled. "Do not use that word to me." And he pushed me out of the bathroom.
"Occult," I bawled back through the shut door. "It only means hidden. It only means concealed." But he was singing again.
I was sulky and vaguely fearful as we walked together up the road which separated the Condamine from the Casino. But I was maliciously glad too that Don Carlo was puffing and wheezing from the steep climb. Also the February sea wind was stiff, and he had to hold on hard, grumbling, to his black trilby, while Domenico and I wore sporty caps that could not be buffeted off. We were in country day wear, though of course with stiff collars, while Don Carlo was in wrinkled alpaca and an overtight shirt of his brother's, the tie rich but not modest. He looked like a cynical undertaker. He was panting hard when we reached the Casino, while Domenico and I, with breath to spare for the crescendo, were singing a chorus from our opera:
"Money isn't everything,
It's only board and bed,
The only thing distinguishing
Being living, being dead
(So I've heard said)."
Domenico liked those ings and had stressed them in the orchestration with triangle and glockenspiel.
But there was no grumbling when Don Carlo began to play. Domenico and I staked our few francs at roulette and promptly lost them, but Don Carlo was rapt in the miracle of winning. We were, of course, in the "kitchen," not one of the salles privees for the rich and distinguished. It was the depressed postwar time and there were not many playing. We had heard that the Societe des Bains de Mer was being saved from bankruptcy only by the pumping in by Sir Basil Zaharoff of thousands out of his armament millions. We had seen him and his Spanish mistress, the Duquesa de Marquena y Villafranca, getting out of a huge polished car outside the Hotel de Paris. He wanted to take over the principality and instal himself as its ruler; his fat mistress longed to be elevated to princess. He never came into the gaming rooms; he did not believe in gambling.