ABBA ABBA Read online

  Even the Romans had been listening from about halfway through the catalogue, openmouthed. One old man said "Bravo" at the end. Elton goggled at Keats, his face restored to handsomeness, very vacuous.

  "Why?" he said: "Why did you learn all that?"

  "I like it," John said. "Besides, it's a manner of warning. Not to fall in love."

  "But the whole drift is, as I see it, that love is strong and mighty and overcomes reason."

  "Yes yes, I see, I know. Shakespeare was shorter with his brow of Egypt. Alma Venus works through madness." He drank. The wine took fire from the lantern on its shelf on the roughcast wall beside them. "Sour. I used Burton's book once to a very practical end. I used advice he gives for the stemming of lust. It was difficult for me at that time, you see. I was sharing a house with a man, and he was sharing his bed with the Irish maidservant. I could hear them every night and sometimes in the afternoon. And there was I in love, and desirous, and not able – Burton advised the thinning out of the diet. I took no meat, no wine. I was a very Hindoo with my mess of greens. It subdued desire and I was able to concentrate on love. What kind of a world is it that denies the goddess to us? Alma Venus, indeed, ruling all. She does not rule the way we of the middle sort must love."

  Elton's face began unbecomingly to crack again. "It is not just any body, not just any breasts or buttocks or – It is hers under the muslin. Hers, hers only. Now Major Kettering will thrust in."

  "Is this the Harry she speaks of?"

  "I know him, I know the swine. We were at Rochester together. God curse, God damn -"

  "For God's sake think of it as mere madness. Something that must be cured."

  "Are you cured?"

  John thought about that. "Perhaps," he said at length, "if you ate a beefsteak."

  "Here? Beefsteaks here in this town? It's all veal. Their calves never reach bullockhood."

  "That's good, that's well put. Here, read this. It is a translation I have done from the holy Roman." And he drew the tailed sonnet from his bosom and handed it to Elton. Elton read it with gloom as though it were a move-order back to St Helena.

  "Coarse. I know all of these words for the member save that one – dumpendebat. That you made up."

  "It's a holy word from a holy hymn."

  "Major Kettering with his holy dumpendebat, thrusting it in. There were some of us after supper, pissing in the garden of the mess at Rochester, with the orchestra coming through very clear and the swish of the dancers, for it was our summer ball. Pissing under the stars and on the bole of the great elm that's there. One said, Captain Freebody I believe it was, there's an unholy great red rod you have on you, Harry. And Kettering says: made great with use. It all comes back to me now. God, God, surely that's where they met. And Augusta so demure in her spotted muslin ballgown, and her arms so tender and plump." Elton began to cry.

  "Stop that," John said sharply. "We all have cause for it. It's not a man's way."

  "Man's way." Elton stiffened. "Damn you, I'm a soldier," he cried, then drank off his wine, shuddered, poured himself all that was left in the fiasco and, before drinking again, called: "Hey grandma, more of this piss." The Romans heard that – thispis – with the respect due to an older and more authoritative tongue than their own, perhaps Greek, and tried it out (dispis) while the old woman, with a gummy garlic cackle, went to refill. "How did you get yours?" Elton asked.

  "My what?"

  "The thing we both have."

  "I was nursing my brother," John said. "Tom. A mere boy. I caught it from him."

  "And how did he catch it?"

  "I don't know. But it can be a very catching thing, God help us."

  "But not everybody catches it. The doctors don't seem to catch it. You know what I was told? I was told that all depends on the state of health of the mind of him who is exposed to it. And that if you are in love – if you are thwarted -"

  "Please. Try not to think of it." The wine came. "Grazie."

  "I put this as a general proposition, you understand, a general proposition." He took comfort from the words and quaffed like a soldier. "What was I saying then?"

  "You were, sir, enunciating a general proposition."

  "Good. The thwarting of desire, I said. His desire was thwarted. Yours also. And of course mine." He lowered his forehead almost as far as his wine-gripping hand and growled: "Desire."

  "You speak better than you know," John said. "There was a fool, his name was Wells, not that it matters. No, it does. Wells of stupidity, of malice, wells of the rank stinking water of inhumanity. He convinced poor Tom that a foreign lady was madly in love with him. She did not, I may say, exist. But Tom in his fever cried out for her. I should have thrashed Wells before I left England."

  "I had a corporal named Wells. He was a corrupt man and a drinker. No, his name was Willis. But it is near enough. I'll thrash this Wells for you when I reach home." Erect again, he nodded at John casually, as though he had offered to deliver a parcel. Then: "I have a confession to make."

  "Make no confession to me. There's that chewing nodding priest at Trinity Church we see on the Steps. He hears confessions."

  "Now you joke again and laugh at me. No, no, this is a confession that concerns only you. I lied to you, you see. I was never at St Helena. It was my cousin Jenkins that was there."

  "You were very convincing."

  "A lie, yes. But you lie, do you not? Is it not all lying with you? Is not your poetry a kind of lying?"

  "A very Platonic way of looking at it. Fictions, yes, the making up of things, but with no intent to deceive. Coleridge says something about the willing suspension of disbelief. Your lie was charming and harmed no one. It was a kind of poetry. That was good, I thought, old Bony shouting Voltaire at you from his cabbage patch."

  "Yes, I thought so too. It could have happened, could it not? I could have been posted to St Helena. In the army you are liable to be posted anywhere."

  "Where were you in fact posted? When, according to your fiction, you were posted to St Helena."

  "Oh, I was in Chatham. And now, naturally, you are fully within your rights not to believe that either."

  "I believe. Credo. I believe any man who tells me he was at Chatham."

  "Well, we must drink to it, we must sink a bumper."

  "With all my heart."

  Elton looked at John with a cunning kind of frowning. "You do not take me in, you know. You pretend things, but you are laughing at me all the while."

  "I assure you I am not."

  "To what is it that I just now proposed we drink then?"

  "To Chatham, to St Helena, to the mendacious arts, to your recovery. We have forgotten your good news. You're no longer a sick man."

  "Oh, I am very sick." Elton bitterly bit off the word several times to the interest of the Romans. "Seck," one of them ventured. "Aye, sick," cried Elton. "What do you common labouring louts know of the soul's sickness? I have given her everything and now she raises her petticoat for the pleasure of Major Kettering. He will pleasure her, aye." A gnarled wall-eyed huge-shouldered Roman nodded with Elton, also saying ai. "I will not have your mockery," Elton cried, "I have been mocked enough." He started to rise. John tried to hold him down, saying:

  "No, man, sit. This wine is stronger than you think. Do not let the wine talk for you."

  "My sword shall talk for me, damn you."

  "You're wearing no sword."

  "Am I not?" Elton, in surprise that seemed to contain no displeasure, tapped his swordside and looked down on it, then sat. "I must have forgotten to put it on," he said, smiling.

  "But you're not in uniform, are you? You are dressed as I am."

  "I am better dressed than you are, sir." Elton sped to becoming haughty and truculent drunk.

  "You are a gentleman, sir, an officer, sir, and I am but a poor poet, sir."

  "And a liar, sir, remember that, sir."

  "It is you who are the liar, sir, and on your own admission, sir."

  Elton drunk-thund
ered: "No man calls me a liar, sir." And then he sillily smiled. "Let us have all that again, about foul fustilugs and she is like a cow in the waist and her feet stink and so on." And then, in fine truculence, "It is a foul libel on the sex, sir."

  "All of it?"

  Elton simpered. "Some of it. What was all that about gubber-somethinged and a sharp fox-nose?"

  "I am too weary to do it all again."

  "It is true, though," pouted Elton, his eyes stern. "The nose, I mean. I had always wondered what her nose reminded me of, and it was of a fox's. Vixen's, rather. A very small vixen, though, and her nose was always very cold. A sign of health, they say." He felt his own nose. "A sign of good health, so they have always said." He started to laugh. "Blow thy nose in her bosom," he laughed. "The old rogue, whoever he was."

  "You are emerging from the dark wood of sadness."

  "Oh, but I'm sick, very sick. I love you, madam, but I have taken a severe cold. Permit me to blow my nose in your bosom." He laughed hard and then began to cough. He looked alarmed, coughing and not able to stop. John clapped his back, soft, hard, harder. Elton choked. He searched for his handkerchief and found it at last in his left sleeve. He spat heavily into it. He peered in the lamplight at the gob and said, "Oh no." He moaned.

  "It may be the wine," John said, his heart stirred to pity and referred fear. But of course the wine was white, urine.

  Elton sternly stowed the wrapped sputum in his right sleeve. "Tell no one," he ordered. "Don't tell that fool Clark."

  "You must see Clark. At once."

  "What will he do, the fool? Cup me, bleed me, bring in the leeches. I can rid myself of my own blood, thank you and him. I go home tomorrow, I will say nothing of it."

  "You go home to winter weather. It will be a stormy cold voyage."

  "I go home to Christmas, sir. To the bosom of my family and the house decked with ivy and holly. Perhaps my -"

  "No snivelling, damn you." He saw with disgust and a kind of relief to be anatomised later the sickly vignettes: his last Christmas, the cosseting of wet-eyed brave parents, death at the time of the daffodils, daffodils in the sick room, the military funeral, weeping Augusta at the grave with her fox-nose red, red-yarded Major Whoeveritwas saluting. Here lies Isaac Marmaduke.

  FOUR

  John awoke to the bright December morning coldnosed and well, and he knew why. He had strapped on to a soldierly back the burden of dying for love. This was not war, this was not epidemic. Death did not like to be laughed at. Its multiplication was not funny, but its duplication was sidesplitting. For himself and Elton to be spitting arterial blood together would be the most comical thing in the world. One deals a red ace, the other trumps it. Elton could attend to his own death first; his, John Keats's, could follow at an uncomic interval. Death would endeavour, in its glum way, to keep things serious. He went into Severn's room. Severn was working on sketches for a painting to be called The Death of Alcibiades. John said:

  "You know what I said I would write?"

  "A poem on the river Severn you said." Severn smiled up with shy pleasure.

  "Yes, full of sweet Severn and gently flowing Severn and mighty Severn and Severn well-loved. Your name eternised in verse and you to glory in adventitious fluminous attributes."

  "I did not say that. I did not think that. I am pleased that you think of working again. I should, of course, be pleased also with a dedication."

  "To Severn this poem on the Severn. That would never do. I could of course write instead on the Tiber. The syllables are the same, both names trochaic. The fluminous properties differ little, though the history of what each river has borne upon its back – well, no: men are men, battles battles, bridges bridges. I see little difference. Tiber has rhymes, at least I can think of one rhyme – fibre. A useful rhyme?"

  "You must decide what is useful. You must decide whether to rhyme or no."

  "Is that Alcibiades? He looks a little like Wordsworth."

  "You mock, John."

  "Seriously, I am here in Rome and I dream of English themes. Is that right?"

  "You must decide."

  "Let us imagine that William Shakespeare is brought here by his patron and friend the Earl of Southampton. It's possible, of course, that he was, and to Venice and Verona and Padua besides. What would he write?"

  "The Rape of Lucrece?"

  There was a knock at the apartment door, and John went to answer it. A sturdy young curled Roman, very ragged, his feet bare, smiled, pulled at a curl in humble greeting, held out a parcel roughly wrapped in newspaper, French for some reason, an old copy of the Gazette de Francfort. The lad said: "Misiter Kettis?"

  "Approssimativamente."

  "Is lettera, misiter."

  There was indeed. A note from Elton. With a book, a very big one. Queen Anna's New World of Words. The author John Florio. John's heart prepared to leap. He smiled at the boy and said: "So you speak some English?"

  "Misiter Eliton a little a teach."

  "And your name? Come ti chiami?"

  "Mario." One of the surname-lacking poor. John felt in his pocket for a small coin. Mario thrust out his palms against the gift in horror, as again proffered violence. "Misiter Eliton he say a no. He say a Misiter Kettis molto povero."

  "So it shows." John sighed. "Very poor, yes. Take this just the same." And then he had a remarkable vision. He saw this Mario as Marius, living by the Tiber while Rome was building, living through the growth and fall of the empire, always the same with his wine and bread and garlic, through two thousand years of the city's life. He gaped at the boy in awe. The boy said grazie, pulled a curl, ran. John leaned against the doorpost, trying to get breath back. The huge old book in his hands nearly slipped from them. Severn came out.

  "Who was it? What is that? Are you well? You're pale. Is it bad news?"

  "Not bad news, Severn. A present from Elton, that's all. Two presents from Elton, I think. I will lie down."

  "Have you drunk your milk?"

  "Some of it. I will drink the rest now. Lying down."

  "But you're so pale."

  "Not from weariness, Severn. Not that." And he went to lie down.

  One thing at a time. He pushed from his head the vision of eternal Marius-Mario. He read Elton's note. "I take coach today. I woke well enough, though tired. No further you know what. I have taken much pleasure in our walks and talks together. Here is a farewell gift, a dictionary which I will no longer need since I am leaving Italy and am unlikely to return. It is very old, my great-grandfather had it. It is perhaps too old to be of use, but have it just the same. I will long remember the foul fustilugs and the business of the nose blowing, they will aid me when I am sad. A foul libel on the sex, sir, and the sex deserves it. Sincere good wishes from I. M. Elton, Lieut RE."

  The book was intolerably heavy in his hands. He brought up his knees and made a lectern of them. LONDON, Printed by Melch. Bradwood, for Edw. Blount and William Barret. ANNO 1611.

  Year of the King James Bible. Shakespeare was how old? Forty-seven. With five years of life yet to run, he might have held this book, this very copy, in his hands, also finding it heavy. John's lectern-knees became Shakespeare's. John Florio had been Shakespeare's friend. At least he had been secretary to Shakespeare's noble dearmylove and patron.

  Cazzo, a man's priuie member. Also as Cazzica.

  Cazzolata, a ladle-full. Also a musical instrument without strings.

  Cazzo marino, a Pintle-fish.

  Cazzo ritto, a stiffe standing pricke.

  Cazzuto, a man that hath a pricke.

  And a man that hath not? Incazzuto, perhaps. This is my dear friend, Signor Incazzuto. Apt for some play of Ben Jonson's, English humours in an Italian setting. Those worlds had been very close: the Italian realms and Elizabeth's own, or James's. No, with James they had begun to drift apart. Elizabeth or Elisabetta. She speaketh the Tuscan to perfection, my lord. Rightly is she named La Fiorentina.

  He could not now, a minute after opening the book, recall w
hether he had opened at random or not. Cazzica, an Interjection of admiration, what! gods me! god forbid, tush. Tush, not to be superstitious, it was as though there might have been a sly Elizabethan guiding of his finger to cazzo and the rest that approval might in a manner thus be expressed from the shades of his translating that prick-naming sonnet. An interjection of admiration. He turned now to the back of the book, where Florio gave instructions as to the pronunciation of Italian:

  For so much as the Italians have two very different sounds for the two vowels E and O which for distinctions sake, they name the one close and the other open… The close E… is pronounced as the English E or Ea, as in these words, Bell, Beane, Den, Deane, Fell, Flea, Meade, Quell, Sell, Tell amp;c and the open E… is ever pronounced as Ai in English, as in these words Baile, Baine, Daine, Faile, Flaile, Maide, Quaile, Saile, Taile, amp;c…