Nothing Like the Sun by Anthony Burgess

  'I am,' he said to her, 'a little unwell. I am not,' he smiled, 'so young as I have been.'

  She was all cool soothing solicitude. 'It is a pain? Where is de pain? See, I have dis -- dis ubat here.' Ubat was 'medicine' in her language. 'I can make better most every pain.'

  'No pain,' he told her. 'I am something tired, no more.'

  'An dou art tired come now to bed.'

  'I cannot stay long. There is the new play. I am expected for rehearsal.' She pouted at that. And then he was aware of the promise of a strange slight heaviness in the glands of his groin. He frowned and she saw him frown as she lay, half-naked for expected love, on the bed. She also saw his hand move incontinently to the site of this small hidden drama and she became solicitous again. She came over to him, saying:

  'Let me see.'

  'It is nothing. I had best be going now. I but called -- We shall meet tomorrow.'

  'I will see,' she insisted. And she probed at him, unresisting, and she saw. What he saw first was the shocked widening of her eyes and then, in this context of her presence and desirability, that the embossed red coin was more than something to be given and quickly spent in love's trafficking. It came back to him -- the time of his writing Romeo and Juliet and his smirk at the irony of Girolamo Fracastoro's being a physician of Verona. What had been the name of that shepherd in Fracastoro's poem? A Greek name, he thought, meaning 'swine-lover' or some such thing. But the subtitle: '... sive Morbus Gallicus'.

  They looked at each other. Instinctively she drew round her the loose night-gown that had lain open; her tawny nakedness was packed away, like everything else of summer at summer's close. He had a confused accession of images -- sacked and burned cities, a roaring rabble of soldiers, a mob swarming across the Thames to hack down the Globe. And then, with almost the bright tones of actuality, he saw himself as a happy child in Stratford ('76? '77?) reading a book from his father's scant shelf: A Breviarie of Health, by Andrew Boorde. 'In English Morbus Gallicus is call'd the French pocks, and when that I was young they were named the Spanish pocks.' He had asked his father: 'What then are these pocks?' His father had replied: 'Oh, it is some ailment that they have and their bodies are all eaten and they go mad with it.'

  They looked at each other still, and then she backed away to the farthest corner of the chamber as though what had been drawn there was not a flaccid two ounces of sad flesh but a sword. He had the sensation of being pulled on, as from this late August day, to the slow unravelling of his last instalment of destiny. He waited for rage to well up in his throat as he looked at her brownness, the colour of a dirty river, but he knew only this compassion, itself perhaps a disease.

  'I will go now,' he said. 'There is work to do.'

  'Yes, yes, go den.'

  'If you need money----'

  'I have dat.'

  'I will be back,' he said, 'in a day or two. When I am feeling less unwell.'

  'Yes, yes.'

  As he made his way to the Globe in sunlight he had the somehow joyous sensation of his having become, in mad contrariety, filled with seed, though not by her: she was but an agent of the unseen and unknown. What he must, in the fullness of gestation, give birth to could hardly be human or mortal. He saw with a kind of terrible clarity that gods and goddesses did not, after all, descend; they were immanent but rarely willing to emerge, they made themselves blind that they might not find a door too easily. But when they did find a door they might burn up the globe.

  The flag slept, furled. It would break in the sun with trumpets that afternoon -- Hercules with the globe on his shoulders. WS felt his own shoulders ache in anticipation of a burden not so easily limned though, he was sure, no lighter. As he approached the playhouse entrance he had to stand aside an instant to let a bowing smiling wraith come out -- sweet Master Shakespeare.

  EPILOGUE

  i.

  I AM near the end of the wine, sweet lords and lovely ladies, but out there the big wine is being poured -- thin, slow, grey. Never more shall I taste the oncoming of this particular darkness. But I shall not be sorry to go. I am not seduced to this life by the dainty lusts, clothed in cold green and clean linen, of an English spring. If you plunge into that dark there you will emerge at length into a raging sun and all the fabled islands of my East. And that is what I shall be doing tonight, off like a bird. I see you have your pennies ready, ladies. Twitch not, hop not about nor writhe so: I shall not be long now.

  Let's swell a space on the irony of a poet's desperately wringing out the last of his sweetness while the corrosives closed in. It was she, though, the goddess, unseen as yet but stirring and kicking like a foetus, that dictated the titles, for this was indeed much ado and that what they willed and the other as they liked it. Meanwhile that bud I carried opened like a pomegranate, the roseate macules and papules blossomed and later grew to a tint of delectable copper -- coins over my body, the hint of a leopard's (not a tiger's) hide. When it left, it left a stain as of dirty eaters. All my parts must be hoarse parts (thou wilt make a ghost yet, see if thou wilt not, that is a very graveyard voice). Had I had the clown's gift I could have ambled about the stage to great laughter, drawing out teeth with little pain, blinking from gummy eyes, breaking off bits of finger-nail.

  -- Here, look you, is demonstrated the frangibility of the body.

  -- Bless thee, thou art by no manner of means immaculate. I'll tan thy pelt to Dalmatian leather to make outlandish shoes withal.

  -- We will have astrologians pore over thee like a very map of the heavens.

  -- Scratch, sirrah, scratch.

  And the fever, the delirium. It was like wandering through mist, wondering whence came that music, all thin piping and lutes, the distant voices of buried ancestors (Do you not know us? Do you not remember?), the dream-poems which contained time's secret and dissolved on my waking to fix them on my tablets. Rhythms cranked through, of remote but terrible meaning:

  And odds affriculous their fancies break

  But to give ear to none. Soft then, thy might,

  Lest Titan burst the tenor of his eyes

  And grant the owl for waxing ...

  It was at nightfall the fevers were most intense; then kings came down on ropes and Gilbert had many faces, all of which frothed, and the heroes creaked by, all mounted on the periphery of a fiery wheel, each crying 'Ooooooooh' from the square lips of a Grecian mask as he touched my pillow and revealed himself made of candlewax.

  All this could be borne by myself, but I wept at the injustice done to my poor body. A hundred ulcers pitched their tents on my skin during the night and were, in the winter morning, a neat and well-ordered camp. Oh oh oh, I cried and tried to kneel to my body to beg forgiveness, though I must first beg forgiveness for making my body kneel with me. In sleep I could step out and look down on it and drip my compassion. If I had done wrong my body had not, and yet my body must bear the punishment. I saw my paper as the body I once had, I longed towards it. I was fearful, though, of disfiguring it with blots and scratches; I must limn always on this smooth whiteness words of fair and even shape. Take breath, I told myself each morning, and then create your improbable Edens all remote from this after-fall state of a dishonoured body crusted and oozing and swimming in a fever that is like fingers of mist. Undress these creatures of Arden and you will find them sans holes sans rods sans even the most minuscule pimple. They are pure and know nothing of the Seven Deadly Sins.

  And still, with my flesh all caked and swollen tender bladders at my groin and in my oxters, I could not myself see sin. Some say that the very act of love, when not sanctified, is a way into hell, but, for all my guilt, I could not see it as more than wrong. Right and wrong were the mild engines that drove the pretty poems and plays of Sweet Master S; evil was yet to be born. I could best see love unsanctified as mere clownishness when the burden of seed was dropped. Ben, I remember, Englished Petronius:

  Doing a filthy pleasure is, and short;

  And, done, we soon repent us of the sport.


  Well, there was mountainous belching Ben, a great hod of bricks falling on some poor croshabell, growling and grunting in his ponderous frotting, what time she cried, 'Oo, th'art a ton weight, ow, hast knocked all wind out on me.' And yet Ben's destiny was far removed from my own, blessed as he has been to be able to take the world skin-deep -- humours and manners -- and to know that the world takes itself skin-deep, though not with Ben's laws and systems. To some it falls to suffer the fateful lesion and to have that seed enter which fertilises the egg which will hatch the truth about the world.

  I rode to Bath for the waters when the apothecaries and herbalists afforded no help. Riding, I thought of her, trying to pump up bitterness. What she had given me she had to be herself first given. There was no one to blame; we all choose what we will have, but it is unfair that the choice must so often be made in the dark. God is a sort of roaring clown full of bone-cracking japes. It is as though Will Kemp had been monopolist of the Globe.

  What properties those Bath waters had I cannot say, but I was purged to wraith's thinness. More, my eyes cleared and I could see the world in very sharp colours: its paint seemed hardly dry. More, it was as if length and breadth and height had been but newly created. I wondered what these creatures were that laughed and plotted and chambered. I savoured the word 'man' over and over as it were the name of some new animal brought back by sea-adventurers. I was creating man afresh, planting him in a garden with clean white body and the innocent eyes of a deer. But he would not stay there: he must needs leap out to his plotting and blood-letting and sniggering nastiness. Will was knotted within him but it was will towards something that I, as God, could not have made. Therefore there was an opposite to God. This I could see but I still could not feel it. The time was not yet.

  For the present it was enough to ride back to London and castigate the filthy world which I had rendered more filthy. Limping about Bread Street and Milk Street, inhaling Fleet Ditch, I was drawn to searching out my fellows in disease, gloating on a nose-sore like a raspberry, a lip glistening soft, wet, huge, coal-shiny, a naked arm that was yellow streaks and rose pustules, a stone eye mined by worms. Then I reeled with my discovery of what I should have long known -- that the fistulas and imposthumes, bent bones, swellings, corrupt sores, fetor were of no different order from the venality and treachery and injustice and cold laughing murder of the Court. And yet none of these leprous and stinking wretches had willed their rottenness. The foul wrong lay then beyond a man's own purposing; there was somewhere, outside time's very beginning, an infinite well of putridity from which body and mind alike were driven, by some force unseen and uncontrollable, to drink.

  Was there not somewhere a clean world? Theocritan shepherds piped -- Damon, Lycidas, Syphilus (that was the name; that was from Fracastor) -- but I saw them too eaten, their sheep with foot-rot, the southern torrents crunching their mean shelters like apples. I turned to the tales of Greek and Trojan and expected to find again what I had known as a boy -- war all smiling postures of the dance, a game of buffeting with reed spears. But, of course, they were like ourselves. They were braggarts, cowards, traducers, whores. So I started a play on Troilus and Cressida in disgust that man should be born in baseness and nastiness and my sickness found me a new language for its expression -- jerking harsh words, a delirium of coinages and grotesque fusions. I made Ariadne and Arachne one, a fair heroine become a spider by virtue or vice of her labyrinthine weaving. Ariachne. Some cold man some day, reading, will cure that name.

  Here, then, was the end of all sweetness. But I wept to see the end of the honey days, winced to turn Cressida into a whore of the Court. Dust hath closed Helen's eye. But disease had closed it long before -- a swollen ring of corruption. Die in dust but live in filth. Well, if we are to live with it we must somehow ennoble it.

  ii.

  WORMS feed on Hector brave. And on proud sulking Achilles. An atomy dreaming of the subversion of order he erupted -- Essex, Felix, Bolingbroke -- and was a sore on the white body of the commonwealth. There he was with his mob, advancing on the Capitol. You are all there with your bills and cudgels -- Prindable, Lillington, Liddell, Alabaster, Anguish, Edgecumbe, Gildersleeves, Lympe, Pogue, Shackles. Briefly to this end: we are all diseased; and with our surfeiting and wanton hours have brought ourselves into a burning fever. So then the horror was immanent; Essex (Chapman's own Achilles in the dedication to his Homer) but broke the skin to let it gush in foulness. In my delirium the City was mine own body -- fighting broke out in ulcers on left thigh, both armpits, in the spongy and corrupt groin. And then came the end of Essex -- a fair head rolling, an heroic head -- and near the end of Harry. But Harry was but sent to the Tower.

  My most utter shame that year was to stand at my father's graveside shaking with my disease, eyes curiously on my head-patches naked of hair and the ulcer on my mouth. He is truly a great gentleman now; he hath, see, the aristocrat of diseases. All I could see in Anne was the memory of old orgies and that particular orgy I had interrupted that day of my sudden homecoming. Let me keep away; I will lodge this night not in my own house but at the inn. Tell my daughters it is nothing, but a slight distemper, no more.

  I could tell the time was coming when I should know the great revelation. Meantime I could only cling to my image of order, the smooth white body of a hardly imaginable Eternal City. I dreamed of myself as Caesar, old and with Gilbert's falling sickness, and Brutus was, for some reason, Ben, chider, mocker, an opposing spirit. The image of the falling city, prefigured in the prodigies of a night, was drawn from my own body -- the bloody holes, the burning hand. The fall of the commonwealth is so terrible because it is the fall of the body. It is no sweeping away of things abstract but the tearing of sensible nerve and the wrenching of tissue to draw blood.

  iii.

  I AWOKE in the middle of the night -- the bellman calling that it was four and fine -- to find her there at last, the goddess. It was without formality, unannounced by trumpets or prodigious harbingers. She was in the likeness of F, gold-skinned, naked. I could meet the terror of her eyes with calm. In her hands she held a small vial wrought of some stone like porphyry. This she placed by my bed and then, without smiling or utterance of any word of love, bore down on me, caressing my scabby and pocked flesh. I was her unwilling succubus. The moment of total possession was marked in me by a sense of something breaking, the rupturing of a hymen unknown to anatomists. She, at this moment, unstoppered her porphyry vial and released----

  She released unbelievable effluvia. It seemed not possible. The hopelessness of man's condition was revealed in odours that came direct, in a kind of innocent Eden freshness, from that prime and original well. The rest of my life, such as it might be, must be spent in making those effluvia real to all. For the first time it was made clear to me that language was no vehicle of soothing prettiness to warm cold castles that waited for spring, no ornament for ladies or great lords, chiming, beguiling, but a potency of sharp knives and brutal hammers. I understood what she herself was -- no angel of evil but an uncovenanted power. But, so desperate was the enemy, she had been drawn by an irresistible force to become, if not herself evil, yet contracted to be the articulatrix of evil.

  She did not so much leave my chamber as disintegrate into particles which settled themselves, as in a permanent home, into the orifices of my body -- disturbing the hairs in my nostrils, the labyrinth of my ears, the sore lower entrances. What was now most palpable was what, before, might have seemed only a transitory vision of the nature of the world, a sick man's fancy. But of the primacy of what there was no single word to describe (save the word no, perhaps) I was aware as of something physical.

  Oh, the cruelty of the joke and the shameful weakness of the forces of good. Why had no poet seen it before? No poet had seen it before because only these times were reserved for the first seeing of it. My disease was a modern disease; it was the same disease as that which cracked order in State and Church and the institutions of both. We have had the best of our
time.

  iv.

  THERE he is, John Hall, the quality's own physician, my son-in-law. He surveys me frowning, pursing his lips, stroking his beard. Little time to go now, he thinks; perhaps in tomorrow's early hours. He will record nothing of his father-in-law's disease in his notebooks. He is one for purging and letting, most of his patients -- Sir This, Lady That, my lord Such-and-such -- suffering from surfeits of pigeon-flesh and cream. His father-in-law's disease was one only to be whispered about: he saw what the world was and he wrote it down to the dictation of a goddess.

  -- Plays? He wrote plays?

  -- Aye, plays. His plays were first all flowers and love and sweet laughter or else the stirring true record of England's progress towards order. Then he brooded on what he called evil, aye.

  -- Evil? Wrongs, that is?

  -- Nay, not wrongs, for wrongs, he said, were man-made and might be redressed. But he thought that the great white body of the world was set upon by an illness from beyond, gratuitous and incurable. And that even the name Love was, far from being the best invocation against it, often the very conjuration that summoned the mining and ulcerating hordes. We are, he seemed to say, poisoned at source.

  -- How showed he it?

  -- Oh, he created these great men powerless against evil. There were good men drawn into its web or weak men who beat their fists vainly at it. Or there were men who themselves embodied the disease, the breakers and corrupters of the State. Though it was not always the State; sometimes it was marriage.

  -- He has been happily married?