The Complete Enderby [1963, 1964, 1974, 1984][2002, 2012] by Anthony Burgess

Author:Anthony Burgess [Burgess, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Viintage / Random House
Published: 2002-12-05T05:00:00+00:00

2

1

‘HEART. HE LET himself get upset about something. Blowing his top. Ranting and raving. Carrying too much weight, of course. That’s what comes of building up rugger-muscle in youth.’

‘Where’s he been sent?’

‘That place of Otto Langsam’s. Out in the wilds. Cut off from the great world. Not even a daily newspaper.’

‘They say he was going on about some piece of poetry. Abusive. Lines written in a public lavatory. Obviously needed a rest. Good job they got him in time.’

‘Oh, very good job. Look, emshi emshi or whatever it is. All right, take this. Now bugger off and buy yourself a shave.’

‘Allah.’

President of the moon’s waning. Enderby was not too cold at night. He slept uncertainly, however, in the lee provided by the suntrap arena of El Acantilado Verde, a sandyard for torso-bronzing with a couple of umbrella-topped tables. The seaward-looking gate as easily climbed over. Crouched in an angle, he would see at first light two walls made of bathers’ changing-cubicles, a corner of the kitchen, the back door of the bar-restaurant. Mercifully, so far, there had been no night rain. Rawcliffe could bring the rain with him if he wished. Nobody seemed to be sleeping on the premises, and Enderby moved away at dawn. Dawn brought the diamond weather of a fine autumn. Skirring his fast-growing grey face-bristles with a tanned hand, Enderby would gum-suck his way to a small dirty shop off the esplanade, sticking out the other hand for alms (‘Allah’) if any untimely European were about, and then take breakfast of coffee-in-a-glass and a fatty Moorish pastry. He feigned mostly dumb, except for the holy name. A holy man perhaps, above dirt and toothlessness, once granted a vision of the ultimate garden (houris, nectar-sherbet, a crystal stream) and then struck speechless except for the author’s signature.

Up the cobbled street tottered the saint-eyed donkeys, most cruelly panniered, driven by bare-legged Moors in clouts, ponchos, and immense straw sombreros. Biblical women with ancient hard eyes and no yashmaks carried hashish-dreaming fowls in upside-down bundles, scaly legs faggoted together. They climbed, in a whirl of wind-blown feathers, up to the dirty small hotels for long haggling on the pavement outside, then the leisurely halal slaughter, blood sluggishly rolling downhill, the chickens dying on a psychedelic vision. And just along there was that treacherous White Doggy Wog place. Were its denizens right? Was it right that art should mirror chaos? What kind of art would it be proper for him to produce in his coming cell?

His brain, aloof from his begging hand, worked away at one poem or another. Was it perhaps a kind of holiness that gathered the disparate arbitrarily together, assuming that God or Allah – at the bottom of the mind’s well, a toad with truth’s jewel in its brow – could take care of the unifying pattern, that it was blasphemy for the shaping human mind to impose one of his own? Shatter syntax also, and with it time and the relationships of space. That Canadian

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