"Kingdom, you say. Who will be king?"
"Whoever the kingmaker decides on. And do not ask me to name the kingmaker because he may be now a snotty boy peeing his breeches. I apologise, your eminence."
"You have this Roman coarseness in you, my son. So that is your picture of the Roman future, eh?"
"Not a future I greatly relish. I'm temperamentally incapable of thinking in terms of – big national unities. Italy to me is the name of a land leg and a land belly above belted with spiky mountains. I'm a Roman and it's enough to be a Roman. What's good enough for a Caesar is good enough for a Belli. Soon they'll be talking of a language called Italian which any good Italian patriot must speak and write, forgetting his Roman, and his Venetian or Milanese for that matter, disregarded dialects with literatures ignored by the big dottori. Bad as things are here and now, I prefer them to what's to come."
"Bad?"
"Oh, what I said – the stink of uncollected garbage, robbers in alleys, no street lamps, too many jacks-in-office."
"Of whom you are one."
"A very small jack, your eminence. Just big enough to stop me living off my wife."
"You could," Cardinal Fabiani said, "be a very big one." Belli said nothing. He looked into the golden firecave, waiting. "I reject your prophecy," his eminence said. Belli shrugged Romanly. "Things will not be as you say, at least not in our lifetime."
"You must, as ever speak for yourself, eminence."
The prelate ignored that. "Expect hotheads, a renewal of jacobinism, republican claptrap, inept pasquinades, inflammatory pamphlets, street-corner evocations of a Bonaparte who ceased to exist even before the turn of the century. Rome, however, will not yield one whit of its ancient and blessedly recovered divine authority. What do you say, my son, to a central bureau of censorship of which you shall be the head?"
"Censorship? More than already exists?"
"The theatres as well as the newspapers. The opera house. Poems and novels and cheapjack modernist metaphysics. The printed and spoken and enacted word. What do you say?"
Belli got up to kick back into confirmation of its place a log that had been proposing dislodgement for half an hour past. He remained standing, looking down on the meagre prelate who by our lifetime could mean no more than a meagre decade. He said: "There will be more police too, paid for with a heavier tax on salt and tobacco. With respect, your eminence, always with respect, I wonder how far you, a man of the Campagna, understand the Roman mind. Wait, with respect, and let me say my word, since it was for my word you asked me here to eat your fish and pullets. You can do anything to a Roman – indeed, you must do anything to a Roman, touching the very limit of oppression. A Roman expects nothing from his rulers except tyranny of one sort or another. Treat a Roman well and he will begin to think there is a catch somewhere and start brooding revolution. Probably they deserve to be so treated, the rats of this foul and beautiful sewer. They are probably all damned, and hell is a city much like Rome. They have no notion of morality, none of theology, none at all of history. Ignorant and damned. To many Romans, Rome is a tract only in space and not at all in time, so that the tyrannous Popes and Caesars share a kind of mythic contemporaneity. For that matter, Cain murdered Abel in an alley off the Piazza Navona, and Noah modelled his ark on the Porto de Ripetta ferry. That a bird impregnated our Blessed Mother none find it difficult to believe, since after all bird is another name for prick -"
"You are getting off your point, whatever your point is or was."
"The Roman tongue has more words for prick and balls and cunt than any language in the world. They believe in nothing but hardship and getting drunk and fucking. Oh, they accept Christian doctrine as they accept Romulus and Remus and the mother-wolf, and they think that Pontius Pilate delivered his judgment in St Peter's. It seems very reasonable to them that God should play a dirty trick with an apple and then say: Posterity, you're fucked. They are all fucked and in turn they fuck. What I suppose I am saying is this, your eminence – for God's sake, with respect, don't dream of a holy city which can be made even holier by cutting off the outside world from its denizens. They don't believe the outside world exists, most of them -"
"You speak," said Cardinal Fabiani, at last sitting down on a chair whose arms writhed with cherubim, "of the common people, and you, my son, have used very common language in speaking of them."
"Mea maxima culpa. Holiness in others brings out the worst in myself. I am a positive saint in the company of atheistical sneerers. Common people? A holy city surely talks of souls all equal in God's eyes. Anyway, even poets and intellectuals Roman-born have enough of the common Roman inside them. I myself have. I try to keep it down, not always with success, then I yield and beat my breast after. The language which is my language, and which Dante's Tuscan disdains, is made out of melons and flyblown meat and piss and shit and -"
"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.