Anthony Burgess

The mere sensuous impact of trumpet or saxophone, whatever it happened to be playing, was an echo, even though a faint echo, of that excitement and abandon. He wanted to taste, smell, hear: his senses were terribly alive. Sullenly they paid what was asked, sullenly left, Hamzah feigning a kick at the glass showcase filled with loaves and Chinese cakes.

"Still, he looks very distinguished and venerable in his robes." "Oh Christ, is he an autocephalic archbishop?" It was the left eye that had gone. She wore over the hollow a pad that matched her suit and also a melleous wig with a tress flowing down to her cheek. ‘This,’ the colonel said […] ‘is a lampshade. It looks like an ordinary lampshade. It was taken from the bedside lamp of Frau Koch. It’s genuine human skin.’ It sounded more gruesome spoken in his diphthongal southern manner—skee-ern. Nicholas agreed but, to bring the proceedings to an end and enable him to perform his salvatory mission, he swung into a cabaletta which summed up the argument against Anus and then, fired, struck the heresiarch a knockdown blow. […] Tom’s cough was revealed as clearly unvolitional […] Stertile thunder tonitruated terribly. ‘Oh Lord forgive us our bloody sins.’ Rain now pelted. It was hard work finding a taxi. The bellydancer oozed towards our table, her cuplike navel apout. Soon the Germans would see me on their screens and hear me barking. There was also plenty of work for me in Hollywood. The Food of the Gods was never to achieve filmhood, nor was the projected musical on Shakespeare's life called Will! Christ appeared, only to reveal himself as the naked god Pan. Ballet of hetaerae and houris, choreography by Italo Castaldi. The audience was made up almost entirely of international youth, bearded and jeaned and unwashed. She was a very lovely woman in her late thirties, in a silk dress of screaming scarlet that would have etiolated a white woman to bled veal. Lamprecht knew very well how the war was going and was perfunctory in his rounding up of Jews and cenobites. He opened and let out a hogo of medicinal rum and beer. The bad tooth was a premolar. It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me. Nick, or Domenico, was sixty or so now and looked it. He was jowly and paunched and was still Italian enough not to give a damn. All were armed with pistols, and there was a small armoury of rifles against a wall. “Guns,” I said with fearful jocularity, “in a holy place?” What was in my mind as I waited for sleep and the engines thundered their ineffectual berceuse was the chapter, a brief one, about the Jews. What a good lot of people they all were, I was betrayed by their applause and too many pink gins into thinking, the red-jowled sustainers of a great empire and their ladies, quaffers and yarners and players of deck games. Socrates, played by the ugly snub-nosed Athenian Pericles Anthropophagoi or something like it, began the film as a brave soldier, saving the life of Alcibiades at Potidaea and then very explicitly pedicating him. Nevertheless, I wrote a long commiseratory letter to Carlo, who was sent for a rest to a nursing home run by nuns at Bellagio on the Lake of Como. This opera was mainly in the style of late Puccini, with acerbities stolen from Stravinsky. Up on the Gianicolo the Jewish stallholders sold metal replicas of St. Peter’s and Romulus and Remus and jawjutting pictures of the Duce. The zombie son brought him in the phantom car: we heard objurgatory Tamil and metallic slaps before it sped off, too fast to be possible. The middle one, of course, was the coloratura Julia Kristeva, known as the most voluptuous Salome in the business. […] I read in the Bulletin about some mad joker breaking into the little kangaroo and koala zoo in the suburbs and slaughtering seven adult leapers and three joeys. We got up and Don Carlo looked critically at the money I had left on the table. ‘That is too much. A mancia of two lire. The waiter will be dissatisfied with those who leave a smaller but more rational mancia.’ ‘You disapprove of generosity? Perhaps they will call me Don Quixote della mancia.’ Neither of them thought that funny. At seven Val knocked – three shorts and one long, out of the scherzo of Beethoven’s Fifth – and I rushed to open. I used to have a pretty clear idea of God. Now we have these new theologians who say God’s inside here not up there or he’s an impersonal noosphere and the anthropomorphic image is out. Three unpersons in one anthropomorphic noosphere. Well, no, we are all septentrional here, all a bit cool. What is mother? Genova and the Alto Adige. Coolest of them all. Spray and then slogging knouts of water hit the windows or lights like snarling disaffected at a mansion of the rich and frivolous. But, though I liked Morgan well enough, I did not greatly care for his smell, which, incredibly, considering his agnosticism, was not unlike that of stale water in a church stoup. Hated by the archons of Athens for his fearless condemnation of municipal graft, he was hypocritically arraigned on a charge of corrupting Athenian youth. The residence of the British Council representative was in a quieter and perhaps more patrician part of Lija than my own. Geoffrey, sitting tied and jacketed next to Ali, who was driving, pointed this out […] There was this Estella, a real drab, being given syph and gon and gleet by Augustus John, and Tommy has her living with him in that place of his in Earl’s Court and going to a doctor, nothing wrong with her actually but there might well have been, and he never touches her, you know. The voice was harder than I had known, and not only in stony reaction to long floods of wholly just selfpity, also roughened with gin and smoke, perhaps also assimilated to New York induration, the hardness of culture as well as of pain. She wolfwhistled at Dorothy’s evening frock of deep purple. In my cool room with the shutters shut and the thin shives of air and light coming through the slats, I cried myself to sleep in an overloud selfpitying transport. On the coast tree ferns and pandanus palms. Inland termite menhirs seventeen feet high. The driver waited courtly by the open doors of the saloon.

Una nox dormienda means that one final night that has to be slept through after a few score years of pain and its palliations, of pleasure and disgust after pleasure.