The Complete Enderby (73 page)

‘Yes, the character or homunculus in your play. Man
qua
man. Man in his humanity. Man as Thou not It. Man as a person not a thing. These are not very helpful expressions, but they supply a clue. What is being abolished is autonomous man, the inner man,
the
homunculus, the possessing demon, the man defended by the literatures of freedom and dignity.’

‘That’s it, you bastard,’ Enderby said, ‘you’ve summed it all up.’

‘His abolition has been long overdue. He has been constructed from our ignorance, and as our understanding increases, the very stuff of which he is composed vanishes. Science does not dehumanize man, it de-homunculizes him, and it must do so if it is to prevent the abolition of the human species. Hamlet, in the play I have already mentioned, by your fellow-playwright, Mr Summers, said of man ‘How like a god.’ Pavlov said ‘How like a dog.’ But that was a step forward. Man is much more than a dog, but like a dog he is within range of a scientific analysis.’

‘Look,’ shouted Enderby over the applause, ‘I won’t have it, see. We’re free and we’re free to take our punishment. Like Hopkins. I suppose you’d watch him doing it with your bloody neat little bowtie on and say how like a dog. Well, he’s been punished enough with this bloody film or movie as you’d call it, bloody childish. That’s his hell. He was gall, he was heartburn.’

‘He should have taken Windkill,’ Jake Summers said and got roars. Enderby was very nearly sidetracked.

‘Leave the commercials to me, Jake,’ Lansing said, delighted. ‘And talking about commercials it’s time we took another –’

‘Oh no it bloody well isn’t,’ Enderby shouted. ‘You can keep your bloody homunculus, for that’s all he is –’

‘Pardon me, it’s you who believe in the homunculus –’

‘Man was always violent and always sinful and always will be.’

‘And now he’s got to change.’

‘He won’t change, not unless he becomes something else. Can’t you see that that’s where the drama of life is, the high purple, the tragic –’

‘Oh my,’ Jake Summers sighed histrionically and was at once loudly rewarded. ‘No time for comedy,’ he added and then was not clearly understood.

‘The evolution of a culture,’ Professor Lookingglass said, ‘is a gigantic exercise in self-control. It is often said that a scientific view of man leads to wounded vanity, a sense of hopelessness, and nostalgia –’

‘Nostalgia means homesickness,’ Enderby cried. ‘And we’re all homesick. Homesick for sin and colour and drunkenness –’

‘Ah, so that’s what it is,’ Miss Elderley said. ‘You’re stoned.’

‘Homesick for the past.’ Enderby could feel himself ready to weep. But then fire possessed him just as Sperr Lansing said, ‘And now we let our sponsor get a word in –’ Enderby stood and declaimed:

‘For how to the heart’s cheering

The down-dugged ground-hugged grey

Hovers off, the jay-blue heavens appearing

Of pied and peeled May!’

‘Fellers,’ Sperr Lansing said, ‘do you ever feel, you know, not up to it?’ He held in his hands a product called, apparently, Mansex. ‘Well, just watch this.’ Then he turned on Enderby, as did everybody, including the sweating studio major-domos. The band, which appeared to have a whole Wagnerian brass section as well as innumerable saxophones and a drummer in charge sitting high on a throne, gave out very piercingly and thuddingly.

‘AND I’LL TELL
you another thing,’ said the man in the bar. ‘Your Queen of England. She owns half of Manhattan.’

‘That’s a lie,’ Enderby said. ‘Not that I give a bugger either way.’

It was a small dark and dirty bar not far from the television theatre whence Enderby had been not exactly ejected but as it were ushered with some measure of acrimony. The programme that had been recorded could not, it was felt, go out. The audience had been told too and had been angry until told that they were going to do it all over again but without Enderby.

‘What’s the matter with you then?’ this man asked. ‘You not patriotic?’ He had a face round and shiny as an apple but somehow unwholesome, as though a worm was burrowing within. ‘Your Winston Churchill was a great man, wasn’t he? He wanted to fight the commies.’

‘He was half American,’ Enderby said, then sipped at his sweetish whisky sour.

‘Ain’t nothing wrong with that. You trying to say there’s something wrong with that?’

‘After six years of fighting the bloody Germans,’ Enderby said, ‘we were supposed to spend another six or sixty years fighting the bloody Russians. And he always had these big cigars when the rest of us couldn’t get a single solitary fag.’

‘What’s that about fags?’

‘Cigarettes,’ Enderby explained. ‘While you’ve a lucifer to light your fag, smile, boys, that’s the style.’

‘My mother was German. That makes me half German. You trying to say there’s something wrong with that?’ And then: ‘You one of these religious guys? What’s that you was saying about Lucifer?’

‘The light-bringer. Hence a match. For lighting a fag.’

‘I’d set a light to them. I’d burn the bastards. It’s fags that pretends the downfall. The Sin of Sodom. You ever read that book?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Jack,’ this man called to the bartender, ‘do you have that book?’

‘Gave it back to Shorty.’

‘There,’ the man said. ‘But there’s plenty around. Where you going now?’

‘No more money,’ Enderby said. ‘Just one subway token.’

‘Right. And your Queen of England owns half the real estate in Queens. That’s why they call it Queens, I guess.’

Enderby walked slowly, not too displeased, towards the Times Square subway hellmouth. He had told the bastards anyway. Not apparently as many as he had expected to tell, but these matters could not always be approached quantitatively. He passed a great lighted pancake house and hungered as he did. No, watch diet, live. A whining vast black came out at him and whined for a coin. Enderby was able sincerely to say that he had no money, only a subway token. Well gimme that mane. I kin sell that for thirty cents. But how do I get home? That ain’t ma problem mane. Enderby shook his head compassionately. Two other blacks and a white man, dispossessed or alienated, had made a little street band for their own apparent pleasure: guitar, flageolet, tambourine. Music of the people. Was that a possible approach?

An ole Sain Gus he said yo born in sin

Cos when Eve ate de apple she let de serpent in

He shook his head sadly and went down below, wondering not for the first time whether it was really necessary to be so punctilious about setting the turnstile working with a token in the slot, since so many black and brown youths merely used, without official protest, the exit gate as an entrance. There were a lot of noisy ethnic people, as they were stupidly called, around, but Enderby did not fear. Nor was it just a matter of his being illegally armed. It was a matter of being
integer vitae
and also of having committed himself to a world in which pure and simple aggression was to be accepted as part of the human fabric. Die with Beethoven’s Ninth howling and crashing away or live in a safe world of silly clockwork music?

He got into a train, thinking, and then realized his mistake. This was not the uptown express to 96th Street but the uptown local. Never mind. He was interested to see that, among the few passengers, all harmless, there was a nun. She was a nun of a kind not to be seen in backward Europe or North Africa, since she wore the new reformed habit, fruit of ill-thought-out Catholic liberalism. There had been a nun in a class he had taught the previous semester, though it had been a long time before he realized it, since she wore a striped sailor sweater and bell-bottomed trousers. When he discovered her name was Sister Agnes, he had wondered if she were part of some religious mission to seawomen. But then she left the class, being apparently put off by Enderby’s occasional blasphemies. This nun on the train was dressed in a short skirt that revealed veal-to-the-heel legs in what looked like lisle stockings, a modest tippet, a rather heavy pectoral cross, and the wimple of her order. She had a round shining Irish face with a dab of lipstick. Of the world and yet not of it. She had a Bloomingdale’s shopping-bag on her lap. She smiled at some small inner vision, perhaps of the kettle on the hob singing peace into her breast, a doorstep spiced veal sandwich waiting for her supper. Enderby looked kindly at her.

The two brown louts who got on, quickening Enderby’s heart, spoke not Spanish but Portuguese. Brazilians, a new spice for the ethnic stew, plenty of Indian blood there. Enderby at once feared for the nun, but she seemed protected either by her reformed uniform or their own superstition. They leered instead towards a blonde lay girl reading some thick college tome, probably on what was called sociology, further up the car. C
RISTO
99. J
ISM
292. They wore long flared pants with goldish studs stretching on the outer seams from waist to instep. Their jackets were of a bolero type, blazoned with symbols of destruction and death: thunderbolt, rawhead, fasces, union-jack, swastika. One of them wore a
Gott Mit Uns
belt. They stood, two brown left hands gently frotting the metal monkey-pole. They spoke to each other. Enderby hungrily hearkened.

‘E conta o que ele fez com ela e tem fotografia e tudo.’

‘Um velho lélé da cuca.’

They were apparently talking about literature. At the next stop they grinned at everybody, leered at the girl with the tome, mock-genuflected at the nun, then got off. ‘
Boa noite
,’ Enderby said, having once had a regular drunk from Oporto in his Tangier bar, one much given in his cups to protesting the deuterocaroline dowry. Now there was a kind of quiet general exhalation. At the next stop but one three nice WASP boys, as Enderby took them to be, got on. In the eyes of two of them was the very green of the ocean between Plymouth and Plymouth Rock. The other had warm tea-hued pupils. They were chubby-faced and wore toggled dufflejackets. Their hair belonged to some middle crinal zone between aseptic nord and latinindian jetwalled lousehouse. Without words and almost with the seriousness of asylum nurses they at once set upon an unsavoury-looking matron who began to cry out Mediterranean vocables of distress. Staggering but laughing, they had her staggering upright, held from the back by the tea-eyed one, while her skirt was yanked up to disclose sensible thick navy blue knickers. One drew nail-scissors and began delicately to slice at them. Oh my God, Enderby prayed. Gerontal violation. The nun, who had lapsed back into her dream of supper, was quicker than Enderby. She staggered on to them, the train jolting much, hitting with her Bloomingdale’s bag. Delighted, the nail-scissored one turned on her, while the knicker-ripping was completed by hand by the others. Enderby was, in the desperate resigned second before his own intervention, interested to see the reading girl go on reading and even turn a page, while an old man slept uneasily and two black boys chewed and watched as if this were television. Enderby tottered to the train’s rocking, was now there with his stick. How much better to be out of it, the kettle on the hob, a spiced veal sandwich. Delighted, the nail-scissored one turned on him, dropping his nun to the deck to pray or something. And yet God has not said a word, nor they either. Yet noises were coming out, even out of Enderby, such as yaaark and grerrr and gheee.

‘Scrot,’ one of them said. ‘Balzac.’ Educated then. You did not educate people out of aggression, great liberal fallacy that. The one with scissors was trying to stab at Enderby’s crotch. The other two had left the matron to moan and stagger and were grinning at the
prospect
of doing in an old man. Enderby lunged out at random with his stick and, as he had expected, it was at once grasped by, strangely, two left hands Enderby pulled back. The sword emerged, half then wholly naked. They had not expected this. It flashed Elizabethanly in the swaying train, hard to keep upright, they all had legs bowed to it like sailors. Whitelady looked down amazed at Enderby from an
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BONNY SWEET ROBIN
1601. Enderby at once pinked one of them in the throat and red spurted. ‘Glory be to God,’ the nun prayed, getting up from the deck. Spot-of-blood-and-foam dapple Bloom lights the orchard apple. Enderby tried a more ambitious thrust in some belly or other. It hit a belt. He tried underarm pricking on one who raised a fist wrapped round an object dull and hard. He drew out a sword-tip on which red rode and danced. And thicket and thorp are merry With silver-surfèd cherry. The train danced clumsily to its next stop. There was a lot of loud language now: fuckabastardyafuckingpiggetyafuckingballs. One of the boys, the throat-pinked one who now gave out blood like a pelican, led the way out. Enderby thrust towards his backside and then felt pity. Enough was enough. He lunged half-heartedly instead at the one who had not yet received gladial attention. Ow ouch. Nothing really: plenty of flesh there: a fleshy-bottomed race. They were all out now, the oxterpierced one bleeding quite nastily, all crying bitterly and fiercely fuckfuckassbastardcuntingfuckbastard-fucking pig and so on. The door closed and their faces were execrating holes out there on the platform. The human condition. No art without aggression. Then they were execrating briefly out of the past into the future. Enderby, winded and dangerously palpitant, picked up his hollow stick from the deck, not without falling on his face first. He found his seat and, with great difficulty, threaded the trembling bloody metal back in. The matron sat very still, handbag on lap, blue at the lips, seeing visions that made her cry out. The reading girl turned another page. The old man slept uneasily. The two black boys, seated tailorwise, made fencing gestures wow sssh zheeeph and so on at each other. The nun, still standing, said: