"We're all split. Meat is disgusting, some Englishman said, but it's also delicious. The act of love is bestial but also ecstatic."
"Stability saved through scurrility. Subversion the prop of social order."
"It's the literature that counts. You embrace a kind of martyrdom to write what you have to write. Have you considered what you have to write?"
"Stuff for tavern recitation with the doors closed. Totally unpublishable."
"But what?"
"Time, time, I must be given time. I'm not ready."
The furnishings of the study expressed the contradictions in the man – a plain deal kitchen table, a tavern chair and a chair of French provenance, very fine, an old prie-dieu with stuffed satin well knee-worn, a lectern with an open Jerome, a Jacobin etching showing a generic pope as a feeder of children to a greybeard cannibal God, Lotto's Annunciation (a bad copy) with its cat running scared from Gabriel. On the table was John Keats's cat sonnet, with a literal translation by Gulielmi.
"That boy there," Gulielmi said, "spoke to me of a great long poem about Rome – changing Rome and the unchanging Roman. My heart ached with pity when he told me. I knew it was not for him."
"Changing Rome, indeed. Rome doesn't change, Rome must not be viewed temporally. No work for an outsider. But he's on the right lines in another way. I'm sorry I sneered at this cat sonnet of his."
"Whatever you do, Belli, for God's sake don't take that poem as typical. He's not that kind of poet at all. He's a poet of nature, romance, fairyland, heartache, the classical world as seen in a rainy English garden. That cat sonnet's a mere joke."
"Joke or not, he's on the right lines there. The sonnet form can be dragged low, must be dragged low. The time has come to reject its Petrarchal coronation. You see, God is in cabbage patches and beer-stains on a tavern table. Do you follow me?"
"No."
"I was so bitterly ashamed of that cazzo sonnet – you remember it?"
"Can I ever forget?"
"One must trust one's instinct more. I was really proclaiming the glory of God. Do you follow me?"
"No."
"Never mind. I have some Madeira here. A present from – Never mind. Do you like Madeira?"
"With a biscuit. Do you have a biscuit?"
Belli opened his battered escritoire and disclosed bits of old food – cheese, stale bread, a hunk of salami tough as pemmican. "I sometimes," he said apologetically, "need a little something when working late. Here are English biscuits. That Spanish fellow gave them to me. Pianos?"
"Llanos. Hm, still eatable." Belli poured sweet golden wine. "Hm, not bad really."
"Perhaps," Belli said, having sipped, "I should not say the glory of God. Perhaps, as ever, I go too far." Gulielmi waited, having expected this. "You see, I will end with some – You see, only the other day I heard a Roman workman saying how much he hated work. He said it was hypocritical of priests, who do nothing anyway, extolling the virtues of toil, when the final virtue is to do nothing. In heaven, this man said, the male saints do nothing all day except play with their balls while the female saints merely scratch their cunts." Gulielmi laughed until he choked on biscuit crumbs. Belli remained grave. "I see that," he said, "as a perfect sonnet. I even heard the rhymes lining themselves up. It has to be set down, aromatic Roman speech haloed by a sonnet. How can I talk about doing it to the glory of God?" He seemed genuinely distressed.
"The glory of man," Gulielmi said, after coughing. "But never mind. And now let me tell you what your task is. This boy Keats – whom I must go to visit, and soon, before it is too late – Keats, I say, dreamed that his big Roman poem could be all in sonnets. He was, even if he were to live, the wrong man for it. The work is reserved to you. You depict unchanging Rome through its many voices. You write two thousand, three thousand sonnets. All about dirty cynical suffering rejoicing Rome, and all in Roman voices. Not your voice, not that. Their voices. Why should that make you feel guilty?"
"I'm tempted," Belli said. "Sorely tempted, God help me." He raised his fist to his breast as though to beat it, then opened his fist to grasp his Madeira glass. He sketched, before drinking, a shy gesture of toasting the project.
TEN
"I have conversed with some men who rejoiced in the death or calamity of others, and accounted it as a judgment upon them for being on the other side, and against them in the contention: but within the revolution of a few months, the same man met with a more uneasy and unhandsome death: which, when I saw, I wept, and was afraid; for I knew that it must be so with all men; for we also shall die, and end our quarrels and contentions by passing to a final sentence."
He read no more Jeremy Taylor. He read no more of anything. Wells and the Edinburgh Review would be judged in God's good time, whoever or whatever God was. He was to die without the consolation granted to the horniest-handed ploughman. He was content. It was enough to be born to the morning sun and the morning milk and account this waking a sort of triumph.
He was too weary to try to separate out the imagined, the dreamt and the quotidian real. Breathing became a craft to be practised with painful attention. If he slept the craft might be removed from him.
Many stood or sat by his bed. Llanos said he would go to England and speak to those left. Gulielmi said that Belli could not visit him, having now much on his mind, but he apologised for his brutal want of courtesy that evening so far back and wished to express admiration for such of a fellow-poet's work as he could, with Gulielmi's help, be brought to understand. The Princess Borghese, Pauline Bonaparte, came looking for the handsome Elton. Elton himself obligingly appeared, on his way to Switzerland, and coupled with her on John's bed, John obligingly tucking his feet up to make room. His own dear girl came in black and said that mourning altogether forbade even the most mildly wanton loveplay.
So that was acceptable and all was, in a word, well.
He had one dream or vision that shocked him at first with a sense of blasphemy, though it must be a sense borrowed from Severn, since he who did not believe could not well blaspheme. Christ pendebat from his cross and cried ABBA ABBA. Now John knew that this was the Aramaic for father father, but he knew better that it was the rhyme scheme of a Petrarchan sonnet octave. It came to him thus that the sonnet form might subsist above language, but he did not see how this was possible. Language itself was perhaps only a ghost of the things in the outer world to which it adhered, and a ghost of a ghost was a notion untenable totally. And yet it seemed that two men, of language mutually unintelligible, might in a sense achieve communication through recognition of what a sonnet was. Belli and himself, for instance. Then breathing became a craft to be craftily learnt again, a matter of catching the gods of unbreathing off their guard.
St Valentine's Day came, and with it Valentino Llanos to announce he would go to England soon. Then a week passed and two more days, and John knew his dying day had come, yet to achieve death might be a day's hard labour. Severn held him, as it were carrying him to the gate, but he could not bear Severn's laboured breathing, for it struck like ice. To put off the world outside – the children's cries, snatches of song, a cheeping sparrow, the walls and the wallpaper and the chairs that thought they would outlast him but would not, the sunlight streaking the door – was not over-difficult. A bigger problem was to separate himself from his body – the hand worn to nothing, the lock of hair that fell into his eye, even the brain that scurried with thoughts and words and images. It took long hours to die.