I did not attend the dedication of this work (for which Hortense was paid five thousand dollars) on December 7. Instead, after writing a letter to Domenico deploring the alterations to my libretto, especially the blasphemous truncation, and demanding that my name be withdrawn from the programs and posters, I flew back, via Rome and Madrid, to Tangier. I was angry, but my anger was a little appeased by the notices in the Italian newspapers. The critic in the Corriere della Sera said that the opera was an affront to the cardinal, the saint, and all true believers, but its perversion of the hagiographic truth could have been swallowed had there been copious draughts of music with, if not originality, at least character to wash it down. La Stampa of Turin called it a Broadway musical without tunes and hinted at a vendetta within the Campanati family. Il Messaggero said that the true blasphemy was not the cynical twisting of a sacred legend but the pollution of a noble temple of art by a confection which was pure Hollywood. The communist papers on the other hand praised the work as a slap in the face for the forces of reaction, though they ignored the music.
When I got back to the house on Calle Mozart I found that Ralph was still away in Rabat. Ali said, with all the deference in the world, that I had neglected to pay the wages due at the end of November: much on the senor's mind, no doubt, a trivial matter like wages easily forgotten, but if the senor would be so good--I apologized and went round to my branch of the Banque du Maroc on the rue Spinoza: I was quite cashless after my trip. I made out a check and the clerk took it away. He returned puzzled and apologetic. He said that, except for a few dirhams, I had drawn out the entire balance of my current account on December 5. Impossible, I was away in London on that date. He brought the check. The sum drawn was one million four thousand two hundred and fifty dirhams; the date was as he said; the signature was mine. The signature was not mine; it was Ralph's facsimile of mine; he had shown that minor talent before, in abusive letters to publishers and others purporting to come from me. "Mon secretaire?" I said. "Le monsieur americain?"
"Oui, le monsieur negre."
He'd brought checks signed by me before for encashment, though never before for a sum so large. I kept calm before these bank menials with their large wondering brown eyes. I even smiled. I gently cursed to them my absentmindedness. I would cable Geneva and arrange for a transfer of funds. Meanwhile I needed cash. "Bien sur, monsieur."
I went home, paid Ali his wage and gave him money for marketing. Then I looked at Ralph's room. Everything was gone, but there was no farewell message. There is no need to transcribe my feelings. Indeed, feelings are always a most difficult thing to convey. I rage I melt I burn and so on, like Polifemo in Acis and Galatea. And yet it had always been to be expected, it had always been in the nature of the relationship and every relationship of that order. The foreknowledge had been part of the furniture. Still, I felt excoriated, flayed, dreadfully abused. All over, good riddance, forget him, yet I could not forget him. The musky exhalations of his skin were printed on my epithelium; I saw his fingers walking on the harpsichord keyboard, his teeth stained with fig juice; I heard the resonances of a voice hued like his body.
I watched the mail, I watched it for a month, hoping for a letter whining that he was stranded in Mombasa or on Aldabra Island, disabused, desperate, begging to be taken back. I had no doubt that it was to East Africa he had gone, thinking he was homing. I am here in Mogadishu, and it's hell, man. Dearest Ken, please fly to Arusha and bring me back, I've learned my lesson. And then, in February, when I had experienced the first sweet pangs of awareness that I could adjust myself to his absence, I received a letter, the address typed, the stamp the gaudy assertive one of a new African state, with the name RUKWA crowning a black Mussolinian profile, gaudy jungle flora behind. "Dear Ken," I read,
"I know you regarded the taking of the money as the least of my crimes. One of the good things about you was not caring too much about money. If you want the money you can have it, though there will have to be some fiddling because there's a severe limitation just been put through on the amount you can legally export from Rukwa. As you see from the letterhead I'm working in the Information Department. The official language is English at present and English will be the second language when Rukwayi has been properly modernized and established, which will be a long job. I knew I was right to come to Africa. Randy Foulds is here with the official title of Minister of Education but he spends most of his time on a new book which he says will be the first real African novel. The big job is total Africanization. You don't want to hear about making omelettes and having to break eggs, but some Asian hearts have to be broken. All the commerce in Tukinga, which is being built up into a modern capital city, has been in the hands of the Asians for as far back as you can go, but now there has to be expropriation and enforced repatriation and the rest of it. That goes too for the whites including the missionaries who run the hospitals and the technicians who were brought in under the late unlamented Hossan Zambolu. Peaceful unification is another of our slogans, which means working on the tribal mind, as the boss calls it, and instilling the idea of a bigger patriotism. No violence, no police state methods. My knowledge of a little Oma surprised the boss and showed him I was serious. I've a hell of a lot to do. But I'm happy, very happy. For the first time. You might not recognize me now in my red handwoven robe. I sign myself as always but I have to think of myself as Kasam Ekuri. Believe it or not, but the name Kentumi exists here. I tell them there's only one Ken Toomey."
There was more, but not much more. My heart sank further with every line I read. The innocence of the boy, the political ignorance, the damnable optimism. He made it easy for me to put him out of my mind. Ralph didn't exist any more. There was a black functionary in a new state that would soon learn to be repressive. He wore a red robe and was named Kasam Ekuri. I did not know the man.
On the very day I received this letter that terrible issue of La Domenica Ambrosiana appeared which, under the title Peccati Cardinali and the by-line Massimo Fioroni, devoted many pages to the denunciation of that other innocent, Carlo Campanati. I did not see a copy until a fortnight after its publication. I was taking a gloomy cocktail in the bar of the Rif and saw an Italian tourist yawning over the magazine. There was Carlo on the cover, caught by a camera in an unfortunate posture--raising a glass of what could have been blood, Tuscan cigar in mouth, cigar smoke billowing as amply as steam at night from a Manhattan street grating. I asked if I could borrow. The man said I could keep, he had done with it. But, with reference to the picture on the cover, he showed fine vicious teeth and made a thumb-down gesture. That was a fair precis of the article. I read: "I membri del regno si possono riconoscere sempre: dai loro frutti..." I read:
"Those who belong to the kingdom are easy to recognize: by their fruits shall ye know them. We may ask: which kingdom? We may also add to fruits circumcrescent greenery. With the failing health of the Holy Father the question of his successor inevitably arises, and among the number of the papabili the name of Carlo Campanati, Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, has been glowing, especially in the gutter press, with a proleptic nimbus of election. It is time to consider not merely the fruits of his reign in the archdiocese of Milan but also the odors of his associations." I regret that this does not always sound like English. Pompous Italian journalism translates ill. "The Campanati stock offers much of bizarre fascination to the student of family backgrounds in the Italian prelacy. Its commercial side began humbly enough with the production and national retailing of one of the more famous, and certainly most redolent, of our cheeses. Later it branched out and grew an American affiliation. The father of the present Cardinal Archbishop of Milan married an American lady of mixed Northern Italian origins and begot three Italo-American sons and one Italo. American daughter before fading out of both commerce and society to await the lethal outcome of a disease whose dire nature may be surmised if not, in the considerations of decency, named. The daughter became a sister of the contemplative order of Saint John the Divine and reached the
venerable eminence of mother superior. The youngest son became a musician of mediocre talent who found his vocation in the composition of mediocre music for mediocre Hollywood films. The eldest son emigrated to Chicago as the director of an organization dedicated to the importation into the United States of Italian foodstuffs. We know what the third son became.
"Before we examine this son's career let us consider what happened to those members of the family which remained in the secular world. The mother courageously allied herself to the cause of persecuted Jewry during the time of the Nazi regime, contracted a deadly disease, and sought a way out of her own suffering by an action which might technically be considered suicidal but which the more charitable could construe as a self-elected martyrdom. Attempting to assassinate Heinrich Himmler outside a Berlin cinema, she was deflected from success by the prompt action of a companion of the Reichsfuhrer and herself met a prompt end at the hands of gunmen of the SS. The eldest son had, some time earlier, been drawn into conflict with Chicago gangsters. Apparently ill-equipped to fight Al Capone and his myrmidons with the right moral and legal weapons, and certainly quite unequipped to oppose him with a more telling armament, he met mutilation and death in the sordid circumstances inseparable from a Chicago gang warfare which most of my readers will be acquainted with only from its glamorous exploitation on the cinema screen.
"This brings us to the youngest son, whose association with that same cinema screen began in the first days of the talking films and only recently came to an end with an ill-advised incursion into a field of art somewhat beyond even the most ambitious exertion of his talents. A composer of film music and a denizen of the film capital of the world, he succumbed to the immoral ambience of a culture dedicated to money and pleasure, blatantly forsook the faith of his fathers, and immersed himself in the Mussulman joys of the serial polygamy which the American divorce laws countenance. He had, be it noted, contracted a Catholic marriage to a member of a British family but, suspecting, with justice as it later transpired, that the two children f the marriage were not his own, he effected a separation to be shortly transmuted into a civil divorce.
"He had married into the Toomey family, and the most distinguished member of this family is Kennet [sic] Toomey, the novelist and playwright, whose works are well known in Italy as the kind of superficial diversion which, acceptable in its own terms, is not to be confused with genuine literature. Kennet [sic] Toomey recently announced in the British press, with temerity rather than courage, that he is of the homosexual persuasion. His sister, in an interview which appeared in the American press somewhat before Kennet [sic] Toomey's declaration, admitted on questioning that she was living in an undisguised relationship of lesbic pseudomatrimony with a Negress. Both Kennet [sic] Toomey and his sister, who still fulfils the nominative regulations of Catholic marriage by terming herself Mrs. Campanati, swam into the Milanese orbit recently with what they both no doubt considered as contributions to Italian culture. Mrs. Campanati's sculptural comic strip of the career of Milan's own patron saint was solemnly installed in the Duomo. One may legitimately enquire into the motivations which prompted His Eminence the Cardinal to commission this work, paying, against lay and clerical opposition which his authority easily overrode, several million lire out of the archdiocesan funds. The work is certainly incompetent, if not blasphemous, and it insults the genuine, and genuinely devout, Italian art which glorifies the Duomo. His Eminence has defended the work of his sister-in-law as high and holy, and even spoke of the sanctity of life of this alleged artist. This is a somewhat unorthodox interpretation of a lesbic menage. The incompetence of the piece of sculpture could be perhaps excused in terms of the disadvantages of monocular vision, since the lady was transformed, in circumstances somewhat unclear but perhaps sufficiently romantic, into a female Cyclops.
"Kennet [sic] Toomey's contribution to the art of Milan was the libretto of the opera Una Leggenda su San Nicola, which had its premiere at La Scala on December 6 last but was withdrawn after fewer than the number of its scheduled performances. This, loosely based (without, it has transpired, the permission of the copyright holders) on a story by Anatole France, employs a travestied version of a legend of the great saint to hammer home, in gross words and grosser music, the interesting thesis that God is evil, and that even divine miracles may be employed as devices for propagating evil in the world. It is true that there was no consultation, on the part of either the homosexual librettist or the renegade much divorced composer, of the highest religious authority in the city as to the legitimacy of the project, and the great prelate himself has washed his hands, in good Pilatian fashion, of responsibility for the secular activities of his archdiocese, but it might be supposed that the long announced title of the work would excite interest in His Eminence, especially as its composer was his own brother and its librettist his friend.
"The friendship between Kennet [sic] Toomey and the cleric who began as Don Carlo, became monsignore, and, if his admirers can overcome the workings of the Holy Spirit, may yet be a genuine candidate for Saint Peter's throne, is of long standing. It reached a practical fulfillment in a strange collaborative act which, at the time of its perpetration, caused little stir. Kennet [sic] Toomey mysteriously presents himself in a book entitled in Italian Cerchiamo Iddio and published by Einaudi as the secular voice of many religious voices, meaning that he has taken it upon himself to present in a popular even diverting style the deliberations of a number of progressive theologians and pastors on the future which evangelical Christianity ought, in their collective view, to take. Some of the proposals are startling. The great term is ecumenical. The final vision seems to be of a unified Deism, in which traditionally firm Christian dogmas are modified to a convenient vagueness when not liquidated entirely. The vagueness is peculiarly helpful to the kind of disordered intelligence which can reconcile Christianity with Marxist materialism. Attentive listeners to His Eminence's sermons in the Duomo, as well as to his frequent weekend homilies on Radiotelevisione Italiana, attentive readers of His Eminence's pastoral epistles will already have found promulgated, in admittedly a form more rhetorical than rational, some of the bizarre new doctrines of which Kennet [sic] Toomey consented to be the nominal promoter. It will be noted, strangely enough, that the book makes no provision for the reconciliation of homosexual practices with the teaching of even the laxist oneiric Church envisioned in a work which, whoever the other anonymous collaborators may be, bears the strong personal stamp of His not yet achieved Eminence.
"But the great prelate is not yet demented enough to sponsor sexual perversion. It was left to Kennet [sic] Toomey to combine on an all too public occasion, namely in the course of a criminal prosecution against one of his own friends, a notorious British homosexual poet, a declaration of his own sexual position with a spirited defense of a book, published by that same poet, in which Our Blessed Lord and Redeemer is presented as a pervert of his own stamp. Words are inadequate to express the shock, horror and literally physical nausea which even the most general articulation of such a blasphemous concept inevitably occasions even in the soul of a nonbeliever. The true believer will hardly find it credible that such a filthy farrago as the volume represents should reach the public, however low a view he may have of the capabilities of a Protestant culture. That the book was suppressed only after long debate, and that the decision of one court of justice may well be set aside by another, sufficiently indicates the perilous condition of that culture.
"The cardinal archbishop has strange friends. He has also a strange family. He has strange notions of Christian doctrine. He proclaimed many years ago his abhorrence of the most fundamental dogma of the faith--that doctrine of original sin which, long before the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, presupposed the necessity of divine redemption. Man is God's creation, His Eminence preaches, and hence is good. Evil is wholly external, entirely a diabolic monopoly. Evil is exorcisable. In spite of the evidence of human depravity, the wretched years of a shameful history th
rough which we have all recently lived, the hardly credible enormities which men have suffered but, in the terrible human paradox, also willed, he holds fast to a misguided belief in a spiritual immaculacy which, as Holy Church teaches, was vouchsafed by God to one human creature only, God's own mother.
"In the secular sphere His Eminence exhibits a cognate eccentricity. The spirit of man in our age, according to him, is most nobly manifested in the proletariat. The aspirations of this proletariat, as voiced by the syndicates, are, in his view, totally reconcilable with the Augustinian vision of the City of God. What Marx wanted, God wants also. In his obscure logic, His Eminence locates the secular equivalent of theological evil only in capitalism and cannot find a trace of the morally reprehensible in even the most irresponsible acts of syndicalism. If we place the template of his perverted theology on the scheme of his anarchical philosophy, we shall find the Father of Lies snugly located in the citadels of capitalist endeavor.
"I have said enough for the moment, but I speak with only the authority of decency, reason and orthodoxy. Can there be any doubt of the necessity of the raising of voices in which a stronger, I might say a Petrine, authority vibrates? The Vatican remains silent on the subject of the vagaries of one of its princes. It is a silence, one presumes, of prolonged and pathological shock rather than of complicity. Let us now hope to hear the thunderings of the Pilot of the Galilean Lake and the rattle of the omnipotent keys."
So. "Il tintinnio delle chiavi onnipotenti." That tintinnio was a bit inept, sounding like the tinkle of car keys. The rest was resonant enough. Actionable? I doubted it. I had, in my career as a novelist, learned something of the law of libel. Nastiness in itself was no tort. This journalist, whose name was unfamiliar to me, had taken care to get his facts right. Behind him were foreign press bureaus. Behind him, more particularly, was money. It was capital, far more than faith, that Carlo had outraged. I dreamed for a while of commissioning one of the mercenaries of the Casbah to get over to Milan and assassinate this Massimo Fioroni on behalf of Hortense and her children. But surely it was up to Carlo to shrivel up the pusillanimous wretch with roars more terrible than tenpenny daggers.