Nogara bred money out of Italgas, which he bought from Rinaldo Panzarasa when his group of companies was foundering. Soon Italgas, with the Vatican as the controlling stockholder, was hissing and flaring in the buildings of thirty-six Italian cities. Including brothels. The Vatican swallowed La Societa Italiana della Viscosa, La Supertessile, La Societa Meridionale Industrie Tessili and La Cisaraion, and put them all, as CISA-Viscosa, under the control of another unholy man, Baron Francesco Maria Odesso. But Nogara was the brain, skilled at persuading the Duce, who knew nothing about economics nor, indeed, much about anything except gaseous oratory and the administration of murder (though he had written a novel at least as good as any of mine, The Cardinal's Mistress), that a Vatican-owned bank was really a kind of church, its transactions blessed by the Paraclete, and that it was one of the ecclesiastical corporations to which, under the provisions of Clauses 29, 30, and 31 of the Concordat, tax concessions must be granted. Nogara even, after the economic crash of late 1929, made Mussolini accept the transference of the much depreciated securities held by three banks in which the Vatican had invested lavishly--the Banco di Roma, the Banco dello Spirito Santo and the Sardinian Land Credit--into the government's holding company for dud enterprises, the Istituto di Ricostruzione Industriale, not at the current market rate but at the original worth of the holdings. The Vatican got $632,000,000 out of that, and the Italian treasury wrote off the loss.
But, in a way, Carlo was right. In 1935 Italy invaded Ethiopia and a munitions plant controlled by Nogara supplied arms to the invaders. Money could, after all, become dirty. Still, all in all, generally considered, not to put too fine a point on it, Carlo's initial concern about an impoverished Vatican that could not subsidise the propagation of The Word had been the match that had, after slow smouldering, ignited the great blaze of wealth. The speed with which the Vatican grew rich was positively obscene, as unnatural as a swiftmotion nature film showing a mustard seed turn into a tree, with birds dwelling in the branches thereof. He had wanted money to bring light to the heathen and, by God, he had got it. Not that he himself was now in charge of the mechanics or maintenance of the spread of the faith. Mussolini's words about wanting to see him packed off to America, though of no import within the Vatican, bore fruit perhaps merely because they were uttered. The Holy See had to dispatch ambassadors abroad, like any other independent state, and, though Carlo was not yet ready to head a legation, he would be, it was recognized, very useful as an aide in a country whose language he spoke, literally, as a mother tongue. So, in the early thirties, he was sent to Washington under an archbishop who spoke American like a street organ-grinder. (Carlo was, unkindly, sometimes to be called his monkey.)
For, while he was still in Italy, Carlo would not let Mussolini alone, and his enmity was not in accord with the amicability of the Vatican. Mussolini was called, by the more naif of the clergy, a man sent from God. His Holiness himself once spoke, when the guard was off his tongue, of the divine provenance of the Duce. Carlo, Monsignor Campanati as he still was and would still be for a long time, never missed an opportunity of abusing the pyknic atheist, as he termed him. The Lateran Treaty had been signed and could not be (nor would the Duce, now a saint, wish it to be) revoked. The Church was safe from the fascists, and Carlo was of the Church. He was untouchable, though he lodged with me a document to be opened in the event of his sudden death, in which, whether death was caused by double pneumonia or by overeating, the blackshirts were unequivocally to be blamed.
I was, on one of my visits to Rome to see my dentist, dining with him one evening at da Piperno, a Jewish restaurant next to the house of the Cenci, well known for its artichokes and a dessert called grandfather's ballocks. There were two middle-ranking fascists near our table, and they recognized Carlo. Da Piperno was much patronised by fascists. They had not yet been taught by Germany that the Jews ought to be persecuted. Indeed, there were fascists among the Jews. The Jews had killed Christ and made money, but they had been in Italy longer than the Christians. They tolerated the Pope as a Roman, but Christ was a kind of foreigner. Up on the Gianicolo the Jewish stallholders sold metal replicas of St. Peter's and Romulus and Remus and jawjutting pictures of the Duce. They were all right, and da Piperno was one of the best restaurants in Rome. One of the middle-ranking fascists snarled at Carlo and said, "You'd be wise to stop it."
"Have we been introduced?" Carlo put down the skeleton of a grilled sole he had been sucking the flesh off and turned to them very amiably.
"No nonsense. You know who we are and we know who you are. We know what you've been saying and we warn you to stop it."
"About the Duce and your stinking regime? Let me, as your father in God, warn you not to meddle in matters you are not well qualified to understand. You may know all about truncheons and castor oil--a very good aperient, incidentally, if taken in moderation--but you know nothing about theology. May I now proceed with my dinner?" And he got back to sucking sole bones. The one who had not spoken grasped Carlo rudely by the shoulder in order to make him turn round to listen to abuse. Carlo sighed, put down the skeleton, wiped his fingers on his napkin, then, with an athleticism surprising in one of his fatness, so twisted himself that he was freed from the fascist grasp. He then gripped the wrist of the grasper and held on to it till he produced a little yelp of pain. Then he let it go. He said to both of them: "I love Benito Mussolini probably more than you do. Indeed, you would cut his throat tomorrow if you could get a thousand lire out of it. I love him because he is a human soul, and I regret that his pure humanity, which issued from the hand of a God in whom he does not believe, has been so foully sullied by the devils of greed and power which have clearly taken possession of him. I would like to purge him of those devils, but, in his perversity, he is happy to be possessed."
"Devils," sneered the one who had spoken, an oilyhaired handsome man in early middle age. "Get back to your dusty books, priest, and leave the modern age alone. Devils, indeed. We're done with your superstitions." And the other, who had a wine stain on his black shirt, laughed sillily.
Carlo put on a shocked look. "Indeed? You call strict Catholic teaching superstitious? And you and your leader so anxious to get on the right side of the Church and hang crucifixes even in knockingshops? Perhaps, of course," he said more loudly, "you do not always agree with the Duce's enactments."
A man with a bib on halted the delivery of a forkful to look at the two fascists. The younger of the two, the shouldergrasper, said, "Mussolini ha sempre ragione." It was one of the comforting slogans of the regime. Carlo was delighted to hear it.
He said, "Right, for instance, in paying the wages of the priests of the Church so that they may perform their priestly duties? One of which duties, I may add, is the casting out of devils."
"Mussolini ha sempre ragione." The oilyhaired one clicked his fingers for the bill. "We want no more of your priest's nonsense."
"Untrained minds," Carlo said with pity. "Hiding behind party shibboleths that protect you from the human duty of thinking for yourselves. Your dirty regime is a disgrace to a great country, mother of art and intellect. Go on, find an answer to that. It isn't enough to say Mussolini is always right."
"Look," I said in English, "there's going to be trouble. Stop it, Carlo, enough."
The Italians never, under any regime, an aspect of a natural wisdom that big words like patriotism and duty have never altogether been able to expunge, seek more than a minimal amount of trouble. Carlo, of course, was not entirely Italian. So the oilyhaired one merely sneered again and said: "Perhaps you'd like the bolsheviks here. They'd soon stop your shitty talk about devils."
"Well," Carlo said, very reasonably, "there's more sense in Marx than in Mussolini. At least Marx got down to some solid thinking. And a dialectic process implies movement and progression to an ideal goal, which could, with charity, be interpreted as a kind of Christian thinking. Don't understand me, do you? Don't understand a word." The two were up now, having paid the bill, and their secu
lar black glowered down at Carlo's spiritual. Black, I thought: it doesn't show the dirt. "Well, of course, we're all supposed to rejoice in the imperial goal," Carlo said. "The revival of the Roman Empire, which means squeezing the juice out of a lot of poor innocent Africans. A travesty, like everything else dreamed up by that Godless hypocritical bullfrog of yours. Now get out and let me get on with my dinner."
"You'll hear more about this," the oilyhaired one growled.
"I do hope so," Carlo said. Then the other one, before leaving, jolted the table edge with his hip and made our second bottle of Acitrezza wobble. I thrust out to save it but it toppled and began to glug out onto the floor. The bottle had been nearly full; it was a good wine and not cheap.
I said, in my English way, "Oh, really--Rovinoso," I added, "e molto scortese."
"Non mi frega un cazzo." And they left with a lipfart apiece and an ironical salute. Carlo watched them go amiably and said:
"One moment." He got up.
"Don't do anything foolish," I warned.
"One moment." He was out. The tiny square that car-driving patrons used as a carpark was enclosed, apart from the restaurant, by the facade of the disgraced Cenci house and its deconsecrated chapel. I got out there to find the oilyhaired fascist doubled up from, I assumed, Carlo's kick in the testicles. At the other Carlo was lashing out vigorously with his fists. It was a soft little man whose courage was all in his shirt. When he saw another man coming, a lithe enough looking Englishman whose wine he had spilled, he went off down the sloping alleyway excreting naughty words. The doubled-up man made many groaning threats from what seemed to be a posture of devotion to Carlo's cloth. Then, still bowed, his hands a cage about his scrotum, he followed, cursing, his friend. "They will do nothing," Carlo said. "Nobody will believe they were attacked by a prelate. Or if they do it will be accounted a great disgrace." I could see Mussolini's point about protecting your testicles in a priestly presence. "Let us," Carlo said appropriately, "now go and eat grandfather's balls." This was a sweet dish: cream enclosed in light pastry and plunged briefly into hot fat, little orchidaceous gobbets served with plum jam. It was clear from this kind of behaviour that Carlo would be better off in America.
But we were all destined for America. Domenico, as I foretold, was to find his true metier in writing music for the talking films, and the talking films were to lure me as a scenarist. We were both minor artists, and here was minor art in excelsis or in mediocre. In 1929 Paris seemed full of alltalking allsinging alidancing American movies, advertised on posters showing stylized tophatted highkickers, cooled by the rare sorbet of heavily nasal straight drama (those early sonic techniques appeared to favor the nasal moan). But the straight drama always had to have a theme song, even if it were not possible to have words in it. Phonograph records were helpful promotion, and films were helpful to phonograph records, the symbiosis began early. Thus, there was J. M. Barne's Half an Hour turned into The Doctor's Secret with Ruth Chatterton ("I was the woman in question."--"Ah, mum's the word, dear lady"), and the song without words was called "Half an Hour." The singing film was recognized at that time as the primary form. Neither playwright nor novelist felt, as yet, challenged by a medium essentially frivolous.
On the Champs-Elysees in the autumn, just before the Wall Street crash, The Fox Movietone Follies of 1929 was playing almost next door to the Pathe film La Fille du Pendu, with Jean-Luc Carel and Claudine Pellegrin, directed by Georges Legras, music by Domenico Campanati. I remember almost nothing of it, but a residual image remains with me of the quality of the music-blurred, distorted in the tutti, too much (obligatory at the time) oleaginous saxophone. I had recommended Domenico for the job, and, after initial demurrals, he had delighted in the brutal exigencies that the cutter's craft imposed upon the score. Any measure had to be able to flow into any other measure: any musical sentence, however truncated by the scissors, had to make sense. You could have Stravinsky dissonance and you could have post-Puccini slush. Anything, really, went so long as it more or less fitted. The theme song of the film--a rather grim film about a girl blighted by her father's execution for murder--was something sung in a cabaret, and it kept recurring in contexts of irony. It was called "Il etait une fois," words by Roger Le Coq, and it made Domenico a lot of money.
I remember the American neighbor of this film rather well, at least the songs in it. "Breakaway," for example:
Write a little note
On your toes
Don't forget to dot the i
Look at what you wrote
Goodness knows
It's easy as pie
Let's do the Breakaway
Get hot and shake away...
And so on. What is the human memory playing at, that it can hold such inanities and forget great lines by Goethe?
I will say little of the Wall Street crash, which Carlo, when he had been playing the markets for the Church, using of his goodness some of the estate of poor Raffaele, had sharply foreseen. It was based on overconfidence, lack of prescience, stupidity. The American expatriates in Paris, sustained by American dividends, now had to scrape together enough to get home on. The light of literary experiment went dim, except for Jim Joyce, who toiled on at his mad work in progress. Whining Americans, cadging drinks in bars where they had once flashed generous dollars, became a bit of a bore. Franklin Dowd shot himself in a room in the Georges V for which he had not the money to pay. Silver-haired Hastin Newsom, who had sold his bank to live the life of Riley (whoever Riley was; he too probably crashed with Wall Street), threw himself from the top platform of the Eiffel Tower. Police were eventually installed up there to listen for American accents. Joe, my New York agent, was discovered, as I had suspected, to have parlayed the money of his clients and lost all in Radio mostly. He left his office at midday, typist still clacking, and went off to Nuevo Laredo in Mexico. Withdrawing, on Carlo's advice, my American earnings to Paris, I had forestalled my own segmental crash and lost only about fifteen thousand dollars. Harry Crosby, who had published my biblical pastiche in February under the title of Fall for Lovers, auctor ignotas, killed himself and his girl friend Josephine in a Boston hotel bedroom on December 10, thus, in identifying his own talentless gaudy extravagance with the age, achieving the work of art he knew was, despite all contrary evidence, in him. e.e. cummings wrote an elegy:
2 boston
Dolls; found
with
Holes in each other
's lullaby and
other lulla wise by UnBroken
LULLAlullabyBY
the She-in-him with
the He-in-her (&
both all hopped
up) prettily
then which did
lie
Down, honestly
now who go (BANG (BANG
Whatever else went bang bang, the talking films did not. Domenico wrote a very workmanlike score for Bourree Italienne, all mandolins and tenors and tarantellas, and impressed Wouk and Heilbutt of MGM, who caught the film in Montreal. There were to be a lot of desperately cheerful movies in the next few years, some of them set in sunny It, as Wouk termed it, always to be thought of as a desperately cheerful place. Domenico was put under contract, and his first two scores were for The Kid from Naples, which had a Roman setting, and Mamma Mia, which was about a poor family on Mulberry Street, New York, who won lottery money and went back to sunny It to show off. For my part, I stayed on in Paris which, lacking expatriate Americans, was duller than it used to be. Then I was summoned to Hollywood to write the screenplay for Singapore!, an adaptation of my novel about Sir Stamford Raffles. The Pacific and the Indian Ocean and the China Sea were regarded also as diverting locales, and a mint had been made out of Clive of India, with Ronald Colman.
CHAPTER 44
"It is." Carlo said, "a kind of blasphemy. I don't see why the Muslims allow it."
"There aren't any Muslims here," I said. "Only Jews."
"How would they like it to be called the Garden of Jehovah?"
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He meant the hotel where I was living on Sunset Boulevard. It had once been the residence of Alla Nazimova the film actress, as I explained to him, hence the name, the aitch being a legitimate addition for people who thought of Mohammed's God as an aspect of Oriental decor, like sherbet. "That swimming pool out there," Carlo said, "reminds me of something."
"It's the shape of the Black Sea. Alla Nazimova came from Yalta."
Carlo shook his head, rightly, at the madness of the place. It was a long way from Washington, whose madness, being political, was excusable. He lowered himself with care to a chair of moulded cane as though he thought it might be an illusion. The hotel was divided into bungalows, and the bungalows into apartments. In the apartment next to mine was a former New Yorker humorist who laughed bitterly most of the night. I was earning fifteen hundred dollars a week to write scripts as slowly as possible. They turned out films fast here, but off the set there was a great quality of indolence. Carlo opened his briefcase, which bore in stamped gold the keys and tiara of Vatican City, and pulled out what seemed at first Hollywood-conditioned sight to be the longest film script ever written. "No," I said. "It's not possible." And then I had it in my hands and I saw what it was.
"Don't read it now," Carlo said. "Wait till you have plenty of leisure. This is the result of many long years of work and discussion. It's finished in one sense, in another sense it's a mere draught of shameful simplicity. The thing to do is to sow the ideas widely. Then when the time comes for turning the ideas into action the world of the believer will be ready." I saw the title page: The True Reformation--A Blueprint for the Reorganisation of Institutional Christianity with Some Notes on Techniques of Affiliation with Related Faiths. "My own typing," Carlo said. "It could not be entrusted to any of our stenographers in Washington. They would blab, and there must be no blabbing. I must not be associated with it, nor must any of those who worked on it. It's highly secret."