The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  “You haven’t any: and duelling is out of fashion. Beside what would your mission say? And if you killed him, what?”

  Piers walked up and down like a caged tiger glittering with a theatrical malevolence. “One’s friends!” he said bitterly as if to the paintings on the wall, “One’s friends!” I caught the inexpressible contempt of his tone and said: “Piers, sit down for a moment and just think. What has this news done to our whole belief? It has simply torpedoed it, that is all. But how salutary! I wouldn’t want to go on believing something false, would you?”

  “But how I needed it,” he said wistfully, like a child. “How it seemed to fulfil my sentiments, my ideas. O it can’t be a hoax, it really can’t be. Akkad couldn’t do such a thing?”

  He looked as if he were going to give way to tears.

  There was nothing to be done about the news except to bear it bravely, like the death of a friend or the failure of some great project on which we had set high hopes. That afternoon I took Fahem back his magazine on my way to the infirmary, hoping that the whole business would gradually die down and that Piers would find some other field of study, some other philosophy to absorb his passionate beliefs. But I must confess that it did not seem likely, and I waited for the return of Akkad with some inquietude; I did not want there to be a falling out among such good friends as we had all become, for Akkad was as much Egypt to us as the country’s grand landscapes – their poetry seemed resumed in him, in his gentle and poetic mind. Two days of intense despair passed on the part of Piers, who went about as if in mourning for the death of his mother; he was sufficiently upset to sleep badly and I had to prescribe a sleeping draught. Then the newsagent delivered another copy of the magazine which he propped up on the window-sill to await the moment of Akkad’s arrival. It was to be somewhat unexpected. Akkad appeared instead of giving a telephone call as he usually did, and just before lunch, too, an unusual time for a visit. He stood modestly, kindly, with his green Scotch hat in his hand, on the doorstep of the flat, asking to be let in. Piers leaped up and confronted him with a kind of affectionate fury.

  “Akkad,” he cried, “Why did you do it to us?” Akkad blinked mildly from one to the other of us, looking puzzled. “Macabru,” went on Piers. “The whole thing a bloody fake – why did you do it?” He thrust out his arms half pleadingly, half aggressively. Akkad put out his hand and said: “How did you know? When did you find out?” In answer Piers snatched up the magazine and pushed it at him, pushed it almost in his face. “This,” he said. “This article Akkad!” Our friend continued to look bemused so I took a hand in the conversation and tried to find the article. Would you credit it? It was not there! I leafed grimly through the magazine page by page without finding it. This caused a somewhat dismayed halt on the part of Piers during which Akkad sat himself down by the fireplace and looked from one to the other of us with a curious expression, a sort of frail affectionate happiness as if somewhere in the heart of this situation something joyful was fermenting. I felt rather vexed with Piers, he cut such a silly figure in his childish chagrin and excitement. “Well, have you found it?” he cried impetuously, and Akkad looked on quietly with a grave face and those pursed lips. I hunted leaf by leaf through the magazine in a most exasperated way without finding the article; then I went through the table of contents most carefully. It was not there either. Piers gave a cry of rage and snatched the magazine from me to repeat the pantomime. It was no good. The article had disappeared. He sat down with grim face in an armchair and, cupping his chin in his hands, stared malevolently at our friend who gazed back with a kind of innocent resignation, yet offered no explanation of this strange occurrence. “It was there and you know it,” said Piers at last in a choked voice; and Akkad, as if to spare him further pain, nodded and said: “Yes, my dear Piers. It was there. I know it was there. I put it there, you see; and I put it there specially. Some time ago I asked Sutcliffe to write it for me for use on such an occasion. And I left the magazine with Fahem who produces it for clients when I tell him to. There! Now are you satisfied?”

  Piers listened to this with his mouth open; his cheeks flushed with vexation and pleasure. As Akkad ended he stood up and cried out jubilantly: “I knew it. I knew it all along.” Never have I heard such a ring of convincing triumph in his voice. No wonder the collapse of all his beliefs had made him suffer so acutely. But what a crazy thing to have done; I myself felt annoyed with Akkad for playing with my friend’s beliefs like this. “But why, in the name of heaven, did you do it?” I asked him, and he gazed smilingly at me and replied with the utmost satisfaction: “I am so glad the little plot worked out all right. You see, it was very important, Piers, a most important test. Do you realise my dear friend that you were able to go on believing something which you knew to be untrue? Your belief was not shaken was it?”

  “No,” said Piers.

  “It was not a matter of faith, but of a dead certainty, scientific certainty, we might say. I did not doubt that you were one of us, but I wanted to be reassured. So I take every opportunity to create doubt. Now, if I went further and told you that the article was not a fake but true…” But now Piers burst out laughing and turned away in mock-exasperation. “You have made a fool of me,” he said, “and perhaps I deserved it. But I hope from now on you’ll take me at my face value, and not repeat this kind of hoax.”

  Akkad said: “I won’t, but only if you promise to realise that we are treading a very narrow path between reality and illusion in this view of things. It is surprising only to those of us who have been conditioned by other patterns of thinking.”

  “No it is not surprising,” said Piers, almost as if to himself. He picked up a letter he had started writing from the writing desk, and, switching on the lamp, read out a few lines. “Man is in a trap, according to Akkad, and goodness avails him nothing in the new dispensation. There is nobody now to care one way or the other. Good and evil, pessimism and optimism – are a question of blood group, not angelic disposition. Whoever it was that used to heed us and care for us, who had concern for our fate and the world’s, has been replaced by another who glories in our servitude to matter, and to the basest part of our own natures.” He broke off and looked enquiringly at Akkad, who nodded and lit a yellow cigarette. “Shall I go on?” asked Piers, and without waiting for an answer concluded with: “As for man – we are protected from the full consciousness of our own natures – and consequently from that of the real world – by a hard scaly integument, a sort of cataract, a lamination covering the actual soul. It is a coating of rubberoid hardness, difficult if not impossible to pierce. It insulates us against reality, this skin. Hence unless we make a special effort we can only see the truth indistinctly – as we see the sun, through smoked glass.”

  It was part of a letter to Sylvie; the two of them often wrote to each other like this. Piers put the letter in an envelope and slipped it into a green morocco-covered volume on the window seat – his sister’s diary. “So far it will have to do, Akkad.”

  Akkad was happy now, radiant. “We cannot have it said too often, defined too often; it is such a delicate matter to slip a noose around, that every attempt is a help to us all. We need purer and purer definitions to keep us from being coarsened by the values which the world imposes on us, and which we must try our best to refuse. I think you have grasped the matter more clearly than most – perhaps your French education has helped? You see quite clearly that the stability of the gnostic universe is quite inadvertent; the conformity of matter to models or modes is very precarious and not subject to causality as they imagine. Once this dawns on you the notion of death is born and gathers force so that you start, not to live according to a prearranged plan or model, but to improvise. It is another sort of existence, at once extremely precarious, vertiginous, hesitant – but truthful in a way that you never thought you could be. …” They embraced laughingly, and all at random, as if completely carried away by the identity of their thoughts, their ideas. The good humour of Piers was now c
ompletely re-established, and he made no attempt to disguise the fact that relief played a great part in it. “What a relief,” he repeated, pouring himself out a drink and signalling us to do the same. “And yet, Akkad, suppose that I had been left without a chance of learning the truth – namely that the article was a fake …” Akkad gazed at him beatifically and said: “This is really what I should have arranged, only I had mercy on you; ideally I should have left you to struggle with the matter, with doubt fermenting all the time and poisoning your inner certainty. But I am a soft hearted man who does not like to see his friends suffer, so I decided to tell you the truth of the matter. But if you wish, I could now go on and point to a number of senses in which the fake article is true. I mean, you could question many things about our group and we would be unable to provide convincing explanations to rebut you. Some have for example questioned the little bit of folklore with the mummia – real mummia I hasten to add. What does it do? The ceremony is buried so deep in our history that nobody could explain it – we blindly follow it; but as for its origins, they must stretch back beyond the beginnings of Anno Domini. And we procure and prepare it with great fidelity, after the ancient practices which have been handed down to the embalmers of Upper Egypt. Intriguingly enough the reference in Shakespeare’s Othello is quite accurate – where he speaks of ‘mummy which the skilful conserved of maidens’ hearts’. But if you questioned that as a bit of sympathetic magic or harmless folklore I should be hard put to it to find a way of contradicting you.”

  Akkad sat down once more, and this time as if he were entrenching himself, which indeed he was, for what followed was a kind of marathon intellectual orgy which went on all afternoon until ten o’clock at night. It was as if for the first time the two friends had met after a separation of a hundred years. The servants kept announcing lunch and retiring again with reproachful looks. Lunch was ignored until poor Ahmed’s soufflé had gasped its last. Then the meal was eaten in perfunctory fashion between disquisitions, arguments, agreements and a certain amount of wild laughter. Sylvie had gone out for the afternoon to ride so that the three of us were alone, and I must say that this time I followed Akkad’s ideas with greater ease, and I also found him both charming and beguiling as a companion even though there was a certain monotony of exposition in what he had to say about the sect and its beliefs. It is not possible to reconstruct more than a part of it – inevitably the part which most interested me. “You speak about society, Piers,” he said, “but your view of it will fundamentally depend on what view you take of the human psyche which has formed it, of which it is a reflection. For us the equation matter-spoil-loot-capital value-usury-alienation … seems to sum up the present state of things. It runs counter to nature, that ideal nature the direction of which we believe has been usurped by an inferior demon, the Fly. Of course if you are a Marxist you will see it in the terms of economic values, labour costing and so on. If you are a Freudian in terms of an impulse-inhibition machine, excrement-oriented and for the most part hardly educated beyond the anal stage.”

  “And we?” said Piers. “How do we see it. The group I mean?”

  “Something like the view of society that Arthur had; the Knights of the Round Table, a society of Guilds at its best. That is probably what you smell and what attracts you to us, for you are clearly of that Arthurian stock, at least by birth.”

  Piers burst out laughing and shook his head. “Alas!” he said, gazing at us both and shaking his head. “Alas!”

  “Why?” asked Akkad.

  “Because,” said Piers, “de Nogaret was a traitor, the original and famous one, my ancestor. He was the King’s secret agent sent to spy on the Templars. He joined them under false pretences, in order to betray them, which he successfully did. He played the role of Judas in the whole affair. Some say that his grand-parents (who had been cathars) had been condemned and burnt at the stake, and that this was his way of revenge. I would very much like an excuse of that kind to hide behind. But the fact remains that he was paid so richly in lands, manors, rivers and farms by Philippe Le Bel, that I can only think that the traditional thirty pieces of silver must have been the stake. So perhaps did he, for he went grievously and publicly out of his mind in the end. And then my family, his descendants, by poetic justice lost all he had gained by this act of betrayal – everything except the old chateau of Verfeuille which becomes more of a financial burden every year.” He fell silent, and sat staring down at the table-cloth as if he were seeing in his mind’s eye these scenes of his family’s ancient history being enacted. I knew that these facts hurt him deeply; he could never speak of them without being upset. Even when he was helping Toby with his research into the Templars these true revelations cost him an effort to make. It was brave too, for he could easily have destroyed all the documents which were there in the muniments room at Verfeuille and so left the whole thing as the mystery it has always been. “I am a descendant of Judas,” he said quietly, as he turned to Akkad, “and I don’t know how that will fit into a society which …”

  “The Round Table also had its Judas,” said Akkad, and smiled at Pier’s obvious sorrow. “Come, take heart. You would have a harder task if you were the son and heir of Arthur. You know, we say that the Gods are simply dogs who spell their names backwards.”

  It was almost dusk when Sylvie walked into the flat with her purchases and an air of subtly disquieting stillness which at once alerted the concern of her brother who rose to greet her and take her parcels from her. “Have you seen the paper?” she said, turning to Akkad. “I bought one, and look at the front page.”

  The face of Casimir Ava the actor was unmistakable – the professional photo showed him in the costume of Hamlet, dagger in hand. But the headline spoke of his death in a car accident on the main Cairo highway. His petrol tank exploded, no doubt from the heat, though this was rather unusual, and he had not been able to free himself and escape the sudden blaze which swept the vehicle. Piers read out the news aloud to us, his brow wrinkled with sad amazement, for he had had a particular fondness for Ava – despite the fact that his sister could not bear the sight of him. I glanced at Akkad’s composed face and thought I saw a kind of resigned expression, either of foreknowledge or of already being in possession of the facts. Had he known? Of course such an item of news would excite the whole city, and the telephone could have carried it all over the place; yes, he could easily have known. And yet …

  The singular thing was that there was a witness to the accident – no less than Jean Makaro who was chief of police in the city; he had been following behind Ava’s green Lagonda and had seen the whole thing. It did also strike me as unusual that both men were part of the Abu Manouf group, and I was about to make some sort of remark about the fact when Akkad, fixing a candid and calm eye on Piers uttered a strange remark. “Now do you see that we are not joking?” he said, and rose to put out his cigarette and take up his hat.

  How long ago all this was – and yet how perennially fresh it is, like everything else in the context of Egypt, with its mirages we have carried about everywhere in our memories for so many years.

  It would be a charity to find one’s way through this labyrinth of concealed motives, and doubtless this is what Sutcliffe’s unfinished book first set out to do; but either the material proved too prolix and too contradictory for him, or the simple defection of Pia robbed him of the necessary emotional strength to create. The greater the artist the greater the emotional weakling, the greater the infantile dependence on love. Of course I am only paraphrasing in my own words what he himself has written over and over again. And now he has gone, leaving behind the Venetian notebooks and a hamper full of letters, both received and sent; for he always wrote in longhand, and always took copies of his own letters. That is how I know so much about his relationship with Pia. He kept all her shy hesitant and accidentally brutal letters in a velvet folder of bright green colour.

  “In our age it is best to work from documents,” he used to say.

 
; It has done me good to put so much down on paper, though I notice that in the very act of recording things one makes them submit to a kind of ordering which may be false, proceeding as if causality was the real culprit. Yet the element of chance, of accident, had so much to do with what became of us that it seems impossible to search out first causes – which is perhaps what led to the defeat of Rob in his fight with his last book. He was overwhelmed, he says, by realising to what degree accident had determined his life and actions. If he had never met Toby, he would never have heard of us, while it was an even stranger accident in Venice which led him to make the acquaintance of Akkad.

  Meanwhile (I am quoting him) he had lost his “tone of voice” in writing, which he compared to the sudden loss of a higher register by a concert soprano. His voice had broken. This must have been after the failure of Pia’s analysis, and her defection with the negress. The great Sutcliffe found himself at last on his own with only his art for company, clanking across the Lombard Plain in the direction of Venice – all the nervous sadness of the violet rotting city. It had become clear to him that the salt had gone out of everything, but in order to stop the fountain of tears which burst like a whole Rome in his heart, he had to adopt a bristling flippancy, a note of Higher Unconcern, which gave literature one of the novels still regarded in the best circles as somewhat funny-peculiar; it was self-immolating that horrible laughter. Paradoxically he could not help thinking that had Pia died things would have been better for him, because clearer. But simply to desert him for darling Trash, the negress … To be sexually betrayed is to be rendered ridiculous, and if one is famous and marvellous in one’s own conceit, why it is only the sense of outrage which keeps one going. Of course these are more the sentiments of a woman than a man, and if one probed them one would reach the central chamber where the first dispositions were taken, the first complexes stored up. And how lovely Trash was with her deep rosined fiddle of a voice and her skin smelling of musk melons and her little stilted pointed accent of the deepest south; a lazy sensual toreador of the love-act, marvellously armoured against ideas like psychoanalysis or Romantic Love by the fact of falling asleep when one uttered a word of more than one syllable. “My, my,” she would croon, turning over lazily on her side and falling into a coma, “you slay me, honey.” To think that Sutcliffe never guessed, that it had been going on even before he had met Pia. It was infuriating. “I guess Robin’s sad to death, honey.”