"I think we have had enough of that, my son."
"Yes, your eminence, I see we have. I am not good at censoring my own mind. I wonder you should so wish to honour me by – this proposal."
Cardinal Fabiani said nothing. He sat, hands folded, chewing crossly at some remnant of dinner that a hollow tooth had coyly cached and now yielded. "Do you think of God ever?" he asked at last. "Of the nature of God, of God's ultimate quiddity?"
Belli sat. "That, surely, is all laid down. The Church in its infinite wisdom instructs us as to the nature of divinity. As a Roman, of course, I have a somewhat undivine and non-eternal image of the eternal divine. What, may I ask, respect, respect and always respect, has this to do with censorship?"
"Everything," fiercely. "Everything. The terrible purity of God," more fiercely, "is what it is all about. Do you meditate ever on this terrible terrible purity?"
Belli nodded seriously and then thought for a minute before giving a verbal answer. "I have a clear enough image of God," he said, "but it is my own and perhaps heretical, perhaps too paganly platonic to be acceptable to my spiritual betters."
"Beware of Plato, my son. Aristotle is our rock."
"I think of a sonnet," Belli said.
"Mad, mad, are you mad?"
"Wait. Eminence. Respect, etcetera. The sonnet form must have existed in potentia from the beginning, but it was made flesh with such as Petrarch. Behind the thousands of sonnets in the world, in Tuscan, Roman, French, German, even English, shines the one ultimate perfect sonnet. It has fourteen lines that divide into an octave of a rhyme scheme ABBA ABBA and a sestet CDC DCD, really two tercets. One may vary the rhymes a little but the essential shape will remain. The wordless sonnet that still rhymes, that says nothing, having no words, but yet speaks. It says: I am this, but I am also this. In my eight lines X, in my six lines Y, but in my total fourteen ever the unity, the ultimate statement whose meaning its itself. What is this, your eminence, but the true image of God?"
"Heretical, yes, you were right when you said that. You talk of an abstraction, a ghost."
"I talk of an ultimate reality. And through the glimmering of it I have given you, a soul may speak to a soul. A Roman writes a sonnet on the divine beauty, and an Englishman writes a sonnet on an old tomcat, and neither understands the other's language, but in the recognition of the common form they meet." Shame suddenly washed him all over, like a sweat premonitory of crapulous vomiting. What devil made him do that, to tear up rudely a sick Englishman's homage? So, devil, was it? He would go and apologise, if he could find where he lived. Gulielmi knew, but Gulielmi had gone away. But tomorrow he might not feel like making apologies. It was, after all, a ribald and unworthy effusion wagging a beshitten tail. He had been right to suppress it, wrong to trust Gulielmi with it a whole day before its suppression. And yet the form in the mind of God did not reject it, any more than God himself rejected cazzi and fiche and the other dirty commodities of his creation. He might yet apologise, but it might be difficult to find out where the sick English poet lived. Or was dying. Cardinal Fabiani was saying something.
"- has always acknowledged, in its God-given wisdom, man's lower nature. The confessional is ever open for the discharge of the shameful ordures of humanity. But men must not wallow, they must be led, nay forced, to identification with their higher selves. Or, if you wish that in political terms, repressive government and occasional carnivals. Will you become our censor, in the service of a repression that is itself in the service of God's plan for the humanity he made in his own image and likeness?"
"Give me time to think of it. Time to come to terms with my own unworthiness."
EIGHT
"So, Severn, she said 'Voulez-vous profiter de ma caresse, monsieur?' and I, nothing loth, sneered up at the liveried tiger who sneered down, passing beneath him on my quick passage to the other door of her coach, and I was in there breathing the richness of her perfume, which was roses and violets and Eastern spices, Severn, and we galloped through the dirty streets not to the Villa Borghese but to the palazzo to which her husband the prince has banished her, Severn. He has banished her because she is too ready to summon any pretty man to her bed. Well, now it was I who was summoned and I was nothing loth. How shall I describe to you that long night caressing her long nakedness, holding in my arms the princess of love who is the sister of him who was like to be emperor of all the world? No prodigal outpouring of poesy's most opulent treasure could convey one whit of the ecstasies spent freely and as freely renewed.
"The bed itself, Severn, was in form of a gold trireme and the coverlet was of silk containing the down of innumerable eiderducks and cygnets. The sheets too were of silk that gave off crackles of electricity when we crawled thereon naked towards each other from opposed angles. She instructed me in all of the modes of physical possession out of her deep learning. Marry, I cannot remember the names of them all, but there was certes the pavonian touch, the Ledan straddle too, the chthonian ditch, the I think it was termed Ceutan flight and eke the Madrilenan interuberal. When, sweating and briefly weary of our sport, she rang for refreshment, the wine we drank we drank from heavy bronze cups with dove-feet, and there was fruit with, though this must seem impossible, dawn dew upon it though midnight had scarce struck. All this I tell you is true, Severn, in poetic truth it is all true.
"Guilt? Why should guilt touch me with its scaly wing? I have been faithful to the limit, have I not? Would it be just for me to be denied what his lordship takes with such aristocratic carelessness daily, nightly, matutinally, postmeridianly, serally? She should have yielded when I asked, Severn, but I well remember the afternoon when, her mother gone out visiting, we stood looking at each other's feet, unwilling to engage each other's eyes, our breasts heaving, and she said somewhat to the effect that this was the fate imposed upon us by a social order that chains neither the milord nor the stinking swinking I would say artisan but reserves its bondage for all who wear clean shirts and pressed muslin and chat with the rector after matins but have nothing in goldsmith's notes. Ah, the risk and the scandal. But I, Severn, have had a whole manhood of fleshly longing crammed into a boy's years, and Alma Venus or Queen Mab or l'ultima principessa could give in no wise to my fancy what she she she denied to my body.
"Then thousand curses and stinging blights light on it all and on her too who turned her desirable back on the prospect of a paradise pardieu for herself as much as for me, poor dogsbody, Severn. I wanted her so much, stripped of her demure muslin and her warm body snaking or lamiating in my warm arms, hers and hers only and to the inferno with Alma Venus. God or whoever's up there rain down stinking ordures on her who withheld so through fear of Mr Snigg and Mistress Sniff and the Reverend Snoggsbody and invoked an unjust propriety to leave me quenching my fire with cold water and tired lettuce leaves. Radishes and onions and eke turnips and potatoes are, e'en uncompanioned with gross bloody beef or fat lusty pork, promoters enow of lawless lechery. And Burton laughed, I swear his laugh broke an instant from the frontispiece woodcut of his wry costive countenance.
"Well, he was in the right of it, e'en so your worship. And all the poets dead and gone laughed too and laugh still. This afternoon I had a long colloquy with mad Will, who speaketh good Florentine I may say, though he was helped out on a word here and there by Master Florio, ever banging at his open dictionary as at the King's Bible. But in fair English he told me, the sounds sweetly Italianate, and after a while he laughed but little, that there is nothing after this, neither fire nor ice, for he has wandered like a ghost and longed to lap blood. There is nothing, saith he, like the red din of an aching tooth as it engageth good hot meat, nor the nutmeg and cinnamon in mulled ale thudding on the arch of the palate, nor the dove-soft touch of a young love's ripening breast.