"Michelangelo," John said, "does seem somewhat to breathe all the available air. But I am, believe me, grateful for this opportunity to see his masterpieces. They are a terrible warning "
Un ammonimento spaventoso," Gulielmi tranlated. Belli nodded his great eyes full of candles, and beat his breast thrice to the loud bassoon of the Judgment.
FIVE
Belli had spoken French but now, for some reason, clung to Italian, Tuscan mostly but sometimes Roman. He spoke the Roman in a strange mixed tone of shame and defiance. He said something about Dante and Gulielmi translated.
"Michelangelo knew Dante by heart. Any good Italian poet knows Dante by heart. Any good poet anywhere knows some Dante by heart. Do you know any of Dante by heart?"
"The opening lines of the Inferno."
"Let us, he says, hear them from your English mouth."
John recited, with near-Elizabethan vowels:
"Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
Che la diritta via era smarrita."
Llanos, who was at supper with them, gave John a bravo; Belli merely grunted. Then he recited, roughly and defiantly:
"A mitaa strada de quell gran viacc
Che femm a vun la voeulta al mondo da la
Me sont trovata in d'on bosch scur scur affacc,
Senza on sentee da pode seguita."
"What language is that?" John asked.
"Italian. Another kind of Italian. The dialect of Milan. And that is Carlo Porta's translation of those lines of Dante into the tongue of the common people of Milan." Belli added a sort of growl of challenge.
John did not truly know what response was expected of him. He cut his tough veal and chewed. They were in a tavern in a low street off the Corso. A meat meal and to the temporary devil with Dr Clark's bloodless diet. And the wine they had now was red and ferrous as ink, all the way from Piedmont. John had eaten an obedient small portion of fish that afternoon in Gulielmi's house and spent two hours trying to explain certain passages in his Odes, which Gulielmi wished to translate into Italian, meaning Tuscan. Then he had rested and tried not to think of the agonies already springing like warts from the long poem he had to write. Yet he knew that something must go down on paper soon. It was a matter of choosing between two thick fluids.
Belli said something and Gulielmi translated.
"You would call yourselves in England a unified people with a unified people's unified language?"
"A matter of being a kingdom and what is known as the King's English, though our kings are German. All printed books are in that English. Save for the few poets who write in Scotch."
"Your King is the head of your church?"
"He is the head of the Church of England, yes."
"If you have a Church of England then you have a God of England. Your so-called Reformation cut you off from the family of Europe. Like the other snorting and hawking peoples of the North." Gulielmi said: "The words are stronger in Roman. Snorting and hawking will do, though. I apologise," he added.
"You mean the God of Italy?" John said. "Cut us off from that, him? You say the North, but till Bonaparte brought God back to France France lived for some few happy years with a naked Goddess of Reason." John felt uncomfortable talking of God, more uncomfortable hearing his words about God put into Italian while Belli listened with gravity. Was it true gravity or an enacted one? Was Belli drunk? The thin sharp Roman wine had micturated round freely before his Piedmontese ink had begun its slower inscriptions. Who or what was this Belli, besides some vague official of the papacy? If a poet, what kind of poet? A writer of hymns?
"Inni?" Belli had a harsh laugh at that. And then he grew too swiftly grave again. "In a sense perhaps. Hymns to beauty, to love, to the Platonic essences. Little holy hymns we leave to Fra Sperandio."
"Who?"
"Fra Sperandio," Llanos said. "Brother Trustgod, Godtrust."
"God trussed up in glib poetaster pieties. I see. I know nothing of God or faith or churches," John said. "I believe in the holiness of the human imagination, the brotherhood of all elements of the cosmos, the creation of the human soul through suffering and love, the divine revelations of poetry."
That sounded imposing in Tuscan. Belli spat something small on to the floor. "The goodness of man? Man's innate goodness?"
"If man is not good, it is because he has not yet learned to be good. He can learn, however. Perhaps he is learning already."
"So man is born good?"
"He is born neither good nor bad." And then: "I am not even sure what the words mean. So many of our troubles spring from Nature, not from the actions of men. Or women." He almost put an urgent hand on Gulielmi's arm, to stem his translating. This translating of everything made everything seem like something sworn on oath, or printed, given to the Edinburgh Review, to sneer at. Llanos, bored rightly, was telling the host of the tavern how veal was cooked in Madrid and district, Gulielmi had turned into a mere translation engine, Belli was John's only audience; still, commit words even to the empty air and you were committing your soul to some ultimate judgment, Apollonian perhaps, nothing to do with the Michelangelesque nightmare. Poetry was different; poetry was not judged in terms of sense and nonsense, except by the Edinburgh Review. Belli seemed to carry with him the disturbing listening emptiness of a hypothetical futurity. John began to sweat. He sweated more when he saw something in the undoored kitchen at the room's end: a slattern, wiping her red hands after washing trenchers, seized eagerly by the waiting-lout and fumbled: a bare bosom flashed, strawberry-nippled, and was pawed. She ran, giggling, he ran after. John sweated.
The host, fat, though with a greyish face scored by deep and dusty runnels, kept saying "Sí, sí, sí" to indulge Llanos, unconvincible as to the virtue of the Madrid way. But then he said something rapid and coarse, full of Roman noises. Llanos laughed. "What was that?" John asked. "What makes you laugh so?"
Belli was saying in a sort of horrified fascinated trance: "… Cuesti cqui sso rreliquioni – ma ar mi' paese…"
"Why, yes," Llanos said, surprised. "Those very words. It must be some old Roman saying about Spaniards. 'Here in Rome we have Adam's balls.' – 'Ah, but we in Spain have Adam's – ' "
"Cazzo," John said, too loudly. Eaters turned unamused, to hear a foreigner use a dirty word, a Roman's privilege.
Belli had heard John on Nature, through Gulielmi, as well as the coarse host. He was a listening man, so much was evident: he made use of his two ears. He spoke long and bitterly. Gulielmi said: "He says that you free-thinking Protestant English poets have forgotten how to think, freely or otherwise. Excuse me – this is his view, not, as you know, necessarily mine. Free thinking, he says, is anyway no thinking. You have substituted something called Nature for God, and with Nature there is nothing but Truth and Beauty and Goodness till you fall sick, and then Nature becomes lying and ugly and malevolent. You make Nature both God and devil, but it is the one or the other only according to your moods."