The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  See him stalking, then, with his rather dispossessed air among the fountains and marble lions fancifully upon the Lido. He was wondering how long he would stand it, this intermittently chilly Venice, when some spring chemistry came to his assistance in the person of a young girl who passed and repassed him, walking at a much swifter pace. She was a mature enough looking person, dressed in smart black velveteen with a bright green silk shirt, plus an eye-enhancing turquoise hanky at her throat. Arresting rather than beautiful. And no wonder that her eyes had turned lime-green in a very sunburned face. It was a heavy and rather solemn prow she bore with a strongly uplifted throat – an Inca face with a heavy root to the nose and widely arched eye. She was well fleshed, well haunched in pleasant roundels, soft as a primitive landscape, promising soft rain to a parched world. Mind you, all this would be intractable bum at fifty, but she was nearer half that age. She had a clear and masterful walk – in youth one knows what one is doing, or at any rate thinks one does.

  The most discouraging thing about her was that she carried a book – no, not one of his books, though he swore that if ever he wrote about her he would say it was. The second time she passed his blood chilled for a moment because the name of the author on the dust-jacket began with a B—, could she be reading a shoddy Bloshford? But then … relief! for by the foreskin of the Risen Lord, it was Bergson. At the end of the promenade he came upon her sitting on a marble bench in a sunny corner, covering the margins of the old boy with figures. A shopping list? He could not help wondering. He swerved about with what he hoped was an unconcerned expression and craned for another look. A tourist doing summary accounts, having overspent? He was not inquisitive by nature. Finally after wheeling about rather in the manner of a waiting vulture (he couldn’t help feeling) he sat down beside her. She moved up to make room, smiling at him equably, calmly, composedly. A woman sure of herself. Later on he was to find with horror that all this maths was to do with velocity and mass, with inertia and structure, and that he had to do with a pupil of Minkowski who had grave reservations about Bergson because he knew no maths. At the time Sutcliffe didn’t know that Minkowski was the trail-blazer for Einstein, but he pretended to in order to cause her delight and weaken her defences. But he didn’t really want all this cultural stuff, no. On the other hand he liked women who could read and write, so why complain?

  He began on a very high note with a remark about Aristotle, whereupon she loosed off about Bergson, saying something like: “It’s just as if you had to have a physical model for everything before you could understand it when the thing can be stated by an algebraic equation. He has to use words which makes him as out of date as Aristotle.” He was tempted to let out a shout, as if to stop a runaway horse, but he reined himself in. Classy stuff, all this; he wondered if she talked like this in bed. If so he would leave for Avignon at once. The idea came to him to ask her and she laughed a most enchanting laugh and said no, she didn’t, adding: “Besides it is your fault, you started. Besides I am delighted to find someone who can talk about these things.” Was she alone in Venice he asked and she said that she was with her father, but added, because he looked so crestfallen, “But I am a perfectly free girl.”

  This was encouraging, in view of the fact that while he could swap a good deal of jargon, his hold on mathematics was flimsy in the extreme, and when he spoke of such matters her whole mood became dangerously intense. Sutcliffe beware!

  Well, even the spring decided to play a part in this adventure, for the sun came out enthusiastically in a last evening burst. From the garden of Floriani behind us came a light bogus jazz and the ticking of ping-pong balls. The air was full of melody. She really was, if not classically beautiful, at least very striking with her merry clever Jewish face, its satyrical smiling mouth, and so on. He coaxed her to a brilliant café where the dapples of yellow light played on her darkness like grains of gold – the sunlight firing at her through a screen of gold lamé. The motes dancing in her breath full of sunbeams. Intellectually she fired all her guns at him and he said to himself: yes, quite so, how clever, too true – but just wait till I get you to bed my beauty. Sitting smiling at her over the friendly Cinzano winking at the brim, he told himself optimistically that it would be like sleeping with an electrical impulse, an ohm or a kilowatt. He would wrap the whole Field Theory in his arms and canoodle her into sharing the sleep of the whole universe. To hell with Bergson. As he thought about it, his feeling for romantic Venice came back: it would be quite unlike anything that could happen in poor degenerate England where football had replaced public hangings.

  For a while she wouldn’t tell him her name, preferring to remain anonymous, she said, for the mild drink and the sunshine had gone to her head making her a bit blushful and youthful. When she excused herself and went to the ladies’ room he instantly suspected the worst. He doubled round the corner and caught her as she was walking away from the back entrance of the café, with the clear intention of giving him the slip. She did not protest when he took her arm and shook it reprovingly. He asked her to explain this flight and she said: “Because I talk too much and I am angry with myself.” The waiter came padding after them with the bill and he persuaded her, without undue difficulty, to resume her potations with him – he was prepared to hear all about electromagnetism and the speed of light if only he could go on looking at her and musing. It was the old Stendhalian crystallisation all right, and he thought back to all he had learned in Vienna about investing his bloody libido and indulging his narcissism. And all those awful silly case histories with their extraordinary language – phrases like “nocturnal pollutions”, if you please. Why not “nocturnal benedictions”, a natural relief from stress. “Why do you grin?” asked the girl and he found some sort of excuse for the rictus.

  They talked on, weaving up a skein of bright thoughts, but all the time he realised that his conquest of her had become more and more improbable. Specially as it was now his turn to want to go to the lavatory, and he knew that as soon as his back was turned she would vanish, nameless, into the evening. Heavens, but she looked choice in her war-paint. So like a hero, like a philosopher, he decided to renounce her. He rose and excused himself, paying the bill as he did so; then he retired, gazing lingeringly at her the while and permitting himself a certain dark majesty as he withdrew, as befitted genius. She smiled at him, all warmth and affection, and he held that brown hand for a wee moment during which he recited the whole of Paradise Lost to himself. Then he was gone – and of course so was she.

  He came back at last, but it was to face an empty chair. There was nothing between him and his bloody novel now, for when real life had nothing to offer him he fell back on the dull brooding which one fine day would squeeze out into a novel. They seemed for a moment stale, the distractions of this quaint haunt-box of a town. Old Venice glittering and liquefying among her multiple reflections, wing of a thousand peacocks fired up into a sun-cloudy evening sky. Round and round the bloody novel like a blind horse circling a well. His hero would be called something like Oakshot, and he would be far from heroic. He is seen standing all night in the Paris – Avignon express, speeding southwards, summoned by the telegram which told him of the death, suicide, disappearance, or whatever of Pia. It had come from the brother who was in the possession of private information which might throw light on the matter. What sort? Well, let that go for now. It would come to him later. A portrait of Trash with her lovely terracotta colouring, her expansive gestures. Throwing wide her arms and crying: “Thank you, God,” when she was pleased. Did Trash perhaps fire a shot into her back while she slept? No, Trash would be cruelly satyrical – graduate of Horrid College, Nebraska, who had taken a doctorate in Human Warmth and a diploma in manual manipulation and morbid massage. O damn everything. The man standing in the lighted train …

  “The southbound train from Paris was the one he had always taken from time immemorial – the same long slowcoach of a train stringing out its bluish lights across the twilight landscapes like s
ome super-glow-worm. It reached Provence at dawn, often by a brindled moonlight which striped the countryside like a tiger’s hide.”

  What sort of chap was this Oakshot? Sutcliffe yawned. Why not change his name to Rodney Persimmon and make him a homosexual publisher?

  He was working off his petulance lingeringly, rather enjoying his suffering if one must be honest. He told himself that he would go to a brothel and hire some bloodless turnip of an octoroon clad in a straw mat and with a paper poppy behind each ear. That was it; but the mood did not last. Venice plucked at his sleeve – the fervent tension of flowers on stalls in the light wind, the flakes of apt sunlight, this huge museum of snowy architecture, the gallant spring, the amber women … in the little while he persuaded himself that he was cured, his heart was as light as a feather. He was prepared to spend the evening alone. Hurrah, yes, alone. To loiter and dine late under a striped awning over the water-wobbled, gondola-scratched canals. What would Oakshot like for dinner? Solid grumpy fare like whitebait. Not like Persimmon who was all the time on the lookout for a dauntless boy. As for Sutcliffe, he was for seafood. He made some notes on his craft on the back of the menu and asked the waiter where he should dine that night. “Item. You must not yawn up your reader. Oakshot, if he resembles Bruce, will become a bore. A serious Toby, then? It is hard to chew.” He smoked slowly and decided that he missed the young lady, yes he did; there was much that she had to say about determinism in science and the new attitude to causality which was apposite to his own intentions … Be careful, for these notions sound cumbrous, and a novel must speak not lecture. And Oakshot? Fuck Oakshot. If he closed his eyes he saw a gloomy tweed-clad figure eating a sandwich and swaying in a swaying train. What sort of man was he? He supposed that she had found him a trifle insincere and so disappointing. But had he enacted a really mammoth insincerity she might have loved him for ever. In science the notion of scale … Never mind. His attention shifted to a young English girl who was eating scampi with her fingers and saying: “What rotters the Italians are – how perfectly septic.” She had had her bottom pinched in a vaporetto. Good. Good.

  It was largely to drown this banal recitative that he fell to scheming up a chapter or two of his book once more. He was going to call it: Tu Quoque – O God, he could hear the wails of his publisher already. Why can’t you give it a nice rational terre à terre title like “Cruise of the Beagle”? Bloshford would have christened it Oakshot Rides Again and left it at that. It was reckless, but with all the sumptuousness of the city around him he felt feather-headed and irresponsible. He would indulge in modish prose musings and if Persimmon didn’t like it he could put the manuscript where it would do most good. By the bleeding piles of Luther, the molimina excretoria, he would stand his ground!

  That reminded him – he had forgotten to take, as always, a few sheets of lavatory paper in his inside pockets, against accidents or paperless café lavatories. Never mind, the hotel was not far away.

  There was a barrel-organ with a nice monkey atop dressed in a coloured cap with tassels, which beat time perfectly to a plaintive little version of “Solo Per Te”. He sang a bit himself, huskily, nostalgically, thinking of the unknown mathematician, beating time with his fork. The long kaleidoscope of fish on the stalls were full of frenzied glittering life, winking at him: shellfish, molluscs, winkles and whales – all of them throbbing and winking away for dear life among the spattered reflections of the smelly lagoons. An old man stood there, leaning negligently on a stall and looking criminally like a Michelangelo cartoon. But if you shut your eyes you could turn him into a little coloured mandarin, block-printed by a slavish Jap. Her dark throat with the sequins floating across it like a shoal of tropical fish. Damn, why had she dumped him?

  Forking up mouthfuls of fish he said: Now about this Tu Quoque book, and about Oakshot; let us suppose a man world-weary and world-travelled, who has spent a lifetime hunting for a philosophy and a woman to match.… Hum. The woman is dead. But he, who has walked the Middle East, has been marked by an encounter with a tribe of Druse-Benawhis. They feed him on lotos or whatever and induct him into the beliefs of the tribe – a kind of pessimism of an extreme cast. Actually the word is a misnomer for truth cannot be either pessimist or optimist when you reach bedrock. These ideas had come to him after an encounter with a young Alexandrian in Paris, who spoke a beguiling and negligent French, and who appeared to be in possession of a number of farfetched and recondite beliefs of a gnostic cast. He was a member of the saddest profession on earth – a banker and man of affairs. Between ulcers, which he came to Paris to have darned, he lived in opulence in Alexandria where Oakshot had been invited to visit him. Akkad, the name. “I am not really a banker so much as a student of cosmic malevolence.” The propositions of this languid fellow with the enormous soft doe-like eyes much beguiled Oakshot. Sutcliffe. “What happens after that? I don’t know.”

  He clung obstinately to the image of the man in the train eating a sandwich as it raced through the night. At the station his wife’s brother, the doctor, would be waiting, with some privileged information about the death. Or perhaps Trash would be waiting in a white sports car. “Robin, honey, I jest had to do it to her.” He shied away from Bruce a bit because he judged him to be a dull fellow and incapable of anything really dramatic as a role. He was a good chap and all that, but pretty humdrum. Nevertheless Pia had loved him and some of her pollen had come off on him, so that he himself felt a certain affection of kinship for him. But he was a dull dog on the whole, and inspired no fiction.

  Akkad insisted that the whole of man’s universe of sorrow was the result of a cosmic lapsus – something small in scale but absolutely critical in effect. Something as small as a slip of the tongue, or a moment’s inattention – on the part of God, that is – which reverberated throughout the whole cobweb. A slip of memory, the bicycle-chain of recollection, which threw all the gears out of true, altered the notions of time and place. Thus human reality was a limbo now peopled with ghosts, and the world was embarked on a collision course with the spirit of default, of evil, at the helm, guided to destruction by inferior demons. That is how cosmic justice works – one little slip and the Pit yawns open. Man becomes an être-appareil, an être-gnome. He dare not face this reality. But the gnostic boys say that if you do face it you start to live a counterlife. (Oakshot grunted in a philistine manner and decided that people who talked like this deserved to have their hands cut off above the ankles.) Alternatively, Oakshot was profoundly marked by this little discourse and felt that he had tumbled upon something which related quite distinctly to his own life, the sad marriage that he carried about inside him like a dead foetus. Another kind of life beckoned to him; these beliefs did not promise happiness, there was nothing cosy about them. But they promised truth. Oakshot sighed and lit a pipe.

  Leaving Oakshot to smoke his coarse shag Sutcliffe abandoned ship, so to speak, and pushed off for a stroll. All these ideas rattled around in his noodle like nutmegs in a tin, and he made no attempt to sort them out. He promised himself instead several days of gallery-going, to bathe his wits in colour, wash out his soul in rainbows. Memory dawdled him along diverse canals in a delighted trance of architectural circumlocution to where at last, in his little shop, Gabrielli hovered like a most ancient moth, among his exquisite vellums and moroccos. He was finishing the little Tasso which had taken him so many years – and had been destined as an anniversary of marriage present for Pia. It was at last done, and he had been about to send it to Sutcliffe, who made no mention of Pia, simply saying how very pleased she would be. All of a sudden he had the impulse to lift that withered old craftsman’s hand to his lips, to kiss it with reverence. Looking into the glaucous old eyes he thought: we are the vestiges of a civilisation gone dead as dead mastoid. No doubt those desert boys were right – evil was at the helm and the pace was increasing. One could hear the distant thunder of the falls towards which we were sliding – the distant cannonade of doom. Meanwhile here was this little old man who ha
d lived to see so much, frail as a leaf, still quietly working among his colour blocks and gold-leaf. The little book glowed in his hand like a fire opal. Her name in gold upon the spine. Gabrielli was at peace because he was the master of his method. This was the key of all happiness. Why couldn’t he feel that way about writing books? Oakshot hated books in which everything was carefully described and all conversations woodenly recorded. So did Sutcliffe as a matter of fact.