The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  Well but …

  We sit down to a patriarchal dinner in the great central hall every evening, about thirty strong. The long central tables are joined together in refectory style, giving the room a monkish touch. Our end made a cruciform shape; but while we started off thus with workers below the salt and dons or bosses at high table the conversations and the good wines prompted a good deal of movement in both directions. Bruce went and sat by an old lady who seemed to play the role of chief housekeeper, while the shaggy old gamekeeper slipped into the vacant seat beside Sylvie and talked to her in an animated register about pheasants. Children swarmed about as if in a Neapolitan cathedral, while on the rush-strewn floor the hounds scratched and the odd flea jumped.

  Uninhibited were the voices flying about like doves. They speak with a fine twang and brio down here and my own rather precise version of a French accent sounds affected. I practise their way every morning while I shave – repeating the phrase “une sauce blanche” as if every word in it had two syllables. This latinised twang goes trailing off through the nymph-begotten groves which echo Italy and Spain. Of course the Midi has its own proud lore and a lot of elementary nature poetry of the ding-dong-bell-pussy’s-in-the-well sort, which appears to contain no abstract words, which makes Valéry’s existence such a mystery to ponder over. For the rest the place engulfs one and its habits and superstitions make one feel the pagan roots of the marvellous inland sea which colours our lives.

  One feels (unlike Italy) far from a catholic priest here, and to do them justice those one runs into in Avignon have a somewhat hangdog air, as if they felt vaguely apologetic for existing among the olives. So many things, however, are a genuine heartbalm like the prickles of the Pleiades rising on the night. Piers tells me that the local patois image for stars in their first state (like an etching) is “flour sprinklings”. In the long evenings we play a stately game of bowls on the green sward before the front portals of the chateau in which the old gamekeeper and the steward take a thoughtful part. In the middle of the night, but late, perhaps near dawn, the unearthly shrieking of peahens in the woods. At dawn the dark girl with the gun goes stepping softly through the misty brakes, while in the nether mist moves an invisible swarm of clonking lambs. Why is it that all country ways are reassuring, touch the roots of feeling – for I myself was brought up in a town? Toby has his hair ceremoniously washed in the yard, seated on a milking stool, and draped in a white sheet. The strapping milkmaid hisses as she washes his head as if she were currying a horse. She uses savon de Sauveterre, the same honey-coloured cakes that are used to wash clothes. Then comes a vinegar drench which makes his hair so light and fluffy that he is aureoled like an angel and has to hold everything down with a beret borrowed from Piers.

  For insomnia, for stomach pains, even for red noses, there are herbal teas of the most astonishing virtue, though it is not these which young Toby has been sampling, for after a night in Avignon he looks rather as if autumn had o’er brimmed his clammy cells. He has found a gipsy brothel, however, of the utmost charm, with music and raven-black ladies. And this is where he proposes to lead me to lighten the pains of long continence.

  The old costume of Aries is going out very rapidly but the elderly folk are still proud to wear it – the high piled coif of snowy linen, with its high crown like Cretan queens, the hair twisted into a million rats-tails and spangled with coins. Dark skirts and snowy aprons. The bright lace – the fichu – are still there. (I am making a portrait of the housekeeper from the life.)

  To love, then, to conjugate the great slow verb … Some people have all the luck. It would have been a pleasant thing to enjoy the artistic privileges of a troubadour, who was fully entitled to love the queen, and probably spent the days in disreputable ways while her lord was absent. Droit du jongleur – it is roughly what Bruce must enjoy in his quiet relationship with Piers and Sylvie. But this is not how he sees it himself. In further meditations upon the unholy trinity they form, I had a sudden small gleam of light. I suddenly saw the underlying unity of the three children as a total self, or the symbol of such an abstraction. Against the traditional duality-figure of our cosmology I placed a triune self, composed of two male and one female partner – a gnostic notion, if I remembered correctly. “To romantic people only the romantic can happen.” This led me back to the dissatisfaction with my own rather carefully landscaped novels with their love-motivated actors. I supposed that I was not really ripe to write about the Other Thing, which I had vaguely situated in or around the region demarcated off by the word “God”. That is perhaps why I caught an echo here and there of Akkad’s notion of a still-born God, an abortion. I have always ferried about with me a weight in that part of me which I always symbolise as a sort of marsupial’s pouch – my womb, in fact. There is something dead in there, or unrealised, soggy as a Christmas dinner. It won’t get born. I have tried every kind of ergotic mixture to provoke the necessary contractions of the pouch – for even a still birth would be better than no birth at all. But no, it swings in me as I walk, all this undigested Christmas pudding, with its six-pences and holly and little British flags. Our Lutheran gut-culture, so to speak, our inner piggy bank with our paltry savings.

  It is late and the strong Marc we drank after dinner has set me thinking furiously. The sharp differentiation of the sexes in our culture was shaped most probably by monogamy and monosexuality and their tabus. It was an abuse of nature. Thus the typological couple which has come to dominate our style of psyche was the baby-founding duo, husband and wife, city founders. But now comes the great revolution – praise be to Marie Stopes who has freed the woman from sexual bondage by the discovery of contraception and restored both her self-respect and her freedom. That is why the sharp distinction between the sexes has begun to blur, with man becoming more feminine and vice versa. In this context my trio of lovers must present the prototype of a new biological relationship, foreshadowing a different sort of society based on a free woman. A matriarchy, then?

  I wonder.

  I wonder.

  The fact of the matter is that they are irritating me profoundly by posing questions of capital interest to a novelist: namely how to render them plausible, real, for the purposes of a fiction. It wouldn’t work, One would be defeated by the romantic content, if only because they are what they are – young and handsome. In order to seem plausible to a reader they would have to seem real to me – and they baffle me. If I changed their characters, however, it is possible that I could render the whole thing more convincing. Supposing Piers was a pursy fat little peasant with perpetually moist lips and the drunkard’s unfocused eyes. Supposing Sylvie was beautiful but totally deaf, trailing a withered leg? As for Bruce, the village doctor – he might have a lupus stain spread like a purple caul over his face and neck. … Yes, that might work. Nearer to Zola, alas.

  This evening Sylvie played two-handed piano with Piers while Bruce stared into the fire, a little saddened by a reference made at dinner by Piers about an impending crisis which might spell a new order, a possible separation. I could not help envying them Verfeuille – there was nothing else in life they seemed to need or want. The Philisopher’s Stone was theirs. Or was it simply their youth that I envied?

  All day we had been pelted by a freak rainstorm which sent the temperature down and justified a deep fire of furze in the hall fireplace. It was here that I read them what Piers always referred to as “the astonishing letter from Alexandria”. It came, as may be imagined, from my friend Akkad and was full of what I regarded as special pleading for his gnostic cause – though why he should have urged these things on me I cannot say. He knew me for an ironist and a sceptic, unlikely at any rate to fall into the toils of some grubby little Middle Eastern schisms. I think Piers was a little shocked when I said as much. For the letter ignited him into a frenzy of appreciation; it seemed to him that Akkad’s insight matched his own. Well, the letter described a sort of nougat-land before the Fall, so to speak, before the Flood: before the fatal deat
h-drift started which was to become the reality of our time. Akkad wrote: “Yes there was a definite time, a definite moment, which one can visualise in a manner which makes it as actual as tomorrow will be. There came a radical shift of emphasis, as marked as any historic moment like Copernicus or the Fall of Constantinople, which pushed the balance over from the domain of spirit into matter. Hints of this can be traced in the old mythologies. The whole axis of the human sensibility was altered – as if somewhere out of sight an Ice Cap had melted. The ancient vegetation gave place to our new steel vegetation, flowering in bronze, then iron, then steel – a progressive hardening of the arteries. The table of the essences gave place to the table of the elements. The Philosopher’s Stone, the Holy Grail of the ancient consciousness gave place to the usurping values of the gold bar; it was the new ruler of the soul, and now the slave, deeming himself free, measured his potency against coin, against capital value, the wholly saturnian element in his nature. The dark sweet radiance of usury was born. And freedom, which is simply the power of spending – its prototype the orgasm – was shackled in the mind and later in the body. The faculty of accumulation, the usury, embedded itself in the very sperm sac of man, who began to found cultures based on key repressions – the faculty of storing, holding back, accumulating. Then came periodic bloodlettings in the shape of wars with their symbolic cutlery of steel weapons – the penis and the vagina are plain to the view as well as the lathe-turned egg of death. This death-desiring culture could only be consummated and realised by suicide. The new sacrament was to spill blood, not to spill sperm and impregnate the universe. To hoard gold and to spill blood were now the imperative, and this is the order against which our small communion of gnostics are opposed; we are quietly opting out, and in some places and times, pushing the issues as far as death. Sperm against specie.

  “This basic shift of emphasis has many other, and sometimes dire, repercussions. For example duality became the key not only to philosophic thought but also to language itself whose basic brick, the word, features this central dichotomy. With everything changing scale and relationship like this, death became obligatory, mandatory, instead of being a choice, arbitrary, and under the psyche’s control. Before this time you could have your cake and eat it, so to speak. You were not obliged to die if you knew how to go on living without wearing out – you could cross the time barrier into the deep hibernation of selflessness, such as the wise men of the East still know in fragmentary form, for it falls just short of immortality. But what I speak of was not the fruit of effort or meditation or the fruit of exceptional minds. It was as ubiquitous as it was optional. The sense of freedom conveyed by this state of affairs can hardly be imagined by spirits like ours, so bent and bowed are they under our perverted system of values. I can hear Monsieur Le Prince chuckle in Machiavellian fashion as he reads this over my shoulder. You will say that we only imagine him this depressing locum tenens: that he is a sort of carnival head, a totem head like the ones the Templars are supposed to have set up to replace the cross. Nevertheless what is imagined with enough intensity has a claim to be real enough. It is always useful to have a point of focus for the wandering and promiscuous mind – hence ikons and altars and shrines and herms. So, my dear Rob, if you meet an angel on the street be polite and raise your hat like Swedenborg; and if it descends like a dove on your unbeliever’s head then remember that it is a Blakeian or Rilkean angel and must be fed on poetry, which is the manna of the old initiates. Yes, that other world, Rob! One sometimes sees it so clearly. Those who surrendered their lives while living in it did so with the quiet relief of a helmsman surrendering his great wheel in a heavy swell, happy to go off watch, to go below into the underworld. In other words the key to the whole stance was the redeeming of death, which is always present in the psyche and can be realised and used up like an electric charge, like a philosophic power. Failure to do this thing withers one. Today death is a limbo peopled by living.

  “So it is that we believe that this world, so much misused in its powers which are wholly beneficent, and although worn to a shadow of its former seraphic self, is still accessible on the old terms to a happy few, a minority whose duty is to hold the pass, to fight a Thermopylae of the psyche until perhaps by some lucky switch the emphasis changes again and we can hope that man will no longer be turned to a pillar of salt for turning aside to gaze upon the truth. Is truth redeemable by the direct vision? Yes; we believe it is. Across the abyss of our present despair and darkness the frail light is still there, though it seems always to be flickering out. Of the two forces in play in the world the black is winning, and may win completely. When I am depressed it seems most likely. What can be done to reverse the situation? Nothing, you will say. But there is a kind of nothing which we can do creatively, which will add oxygen instead of diminishing it, which is more fruitful than fruitless. But we can’t do this without facing the basic truth courageously – namely the death of banishment of God and the ascendancy of a usurping power of evil. There we stand.”

  The enthusiasm of Piers for this pie-in-the-sky idealism was endearing, but he read into it more than I myself could see. Perhaps I am blinkered by my mental sloth and my curiosity? At any rate these formulations make me quite impatient. I remember Pia saying once: “If one really deeply believes something one shuts up and never dares to speak of it.”

  Yesterday, today, tomorrow – the chrysalis of time resolving itself into the butterfly of process and death. In dreams the links seem much more clear than in waking. This week I wrote a long letter to Pia and posted it to the notice-board for messages at the Café Dôme in Montparnasse. You never know. I dreamed of her in two or three old situations and tried laboriously to analyse them when I awoke. As a matter of fact like many women she remained extremely childlike in her feeling-range. A sort of child-wife in many respects. Sometimes there is an organic foundation which stamps such girls as half-developed, and which their psyches echo. The uterus is small, narrow and elastic like that of a child. The breasts are beautifully formed but small also – mere sketches for motherhood. The hips are transversally narrow, the limbs most gracile, the face and often the posture decidedly infantile. Many perverse trends are hidden in all this innocence – one detects a hidden criminality because of the great interest in crime stories and so on …

  Among other things I sketched out the story of the great theatrical hamper we carried about with us for so many years. I was always forbidden a glimpse of the contents, and was indeed implored not even to mention its existence. Pia blushed and paled in turns if ever, in a fit of exasperation, I inveighed against its cumbrousness and weight – as when we travelled by sea. It had to go with us. The label said “linen”. I followed my instructions and never asked about it, never spied on her. The soul of honour was I. Then during the period before the crack when she had become progressively more anaesthetic to me sexually (I did not know that she had met Trash already) the singular old wicker hamper came into its own. What do you think it contained?

  Mind you, whenever I had to go away for a while, I had a feeling that she opened it, for she moved it into the centre of the bedroom floor wherever we might happen to be. Well, I said to myself, if it keeps her happy to gloat over a lot of linen what business was it of mine? After one flaming row I left the house, however, saying that I was going away for the weekend. Inevitably at the station I repented and took a taxi back to the house intending to make peace with this dear torment of mine. Guess what I found?

  She was seated on the floor before a blazing fire. The hamper stood beside her. It was wide open now, the lid thrown back. All around her, sitting on velvet cushions of different brilliant colours, were dolls of all sizes and nationalities in bright costumes. A beautiful miniature tea-set on the floor before the fire contained real Chinese tea. My dramatic entry – I was moist with regret and a heartfelt adoration – caught her in a fearful state of disarray – speechless and pale. But when I saw the dolls I seemed at once to recognise my real rivals and an overwhe
lming rage seized hold of me. “So that is how it is,” I said, and all the bile of old sterile disputes rose in my throat. I did not clearly know precisely what I had divined in this infantile display, but I knew with certainty that these little homunculi must be put out of the way. They constituted an obstacle to our relationship. I seized one, and then another, and tossed them into the flames. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, grim-faced as a German professor. Pia let out a shriek and fainted, while I continued the pillage of her dolls, which I now realise must have represented a whole lifetime of memory, of childhood. It was worse than murder. But I acted like a maniac in a trance, unaware of the meaning of my acts, aware only of a blasting jealousy. It was like the sack of a town. The poor woman looked with horror-widened eyes at the ogre who was tearing her memories limb from limb and hurling them into the fire: then broke. I had profaned the inner reality of her far childhood.

  She lay in this sort of catatonia all night long, and when she did awake in the morning it was with an extravagant fever which set the local doctor talking of typhoid and meningitis. I sat beside her bed, pale, soaping my hands and pleading for forgiveness. But she ignored me, closing her eyes, to sink ever deeper into the sheltering fever which cradled her and which might, if her heart went on beating as it did now, manage to carry her away into the super-silence. So it was that I played my part in provoking her illness – perhaps the greatest part. Clumsy, lumbering Sutcliffe, myself, he, I.