The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  The change in her when she did come round was marked. She had become languid, slow-witted, and protested that she was old and finished. Indeed she looked ten years older. The new crop of worry lines around her eyes I attributed to the calming drugs they gave her. But the tone of her whole spirit had changed. Partly it was revenge, and partly it was that she was in mourning for the destroyed selves, her toys. This mood endured for a good long time, and her skin became greasy and her fine blonde hair lank and toneless. Then the attacks of kleptomania began which precipitated more medical intervention and set us on the road to Vienna where (God be praised!) we learned a very great deal, though not enough to save the wreck of a marriage which had been perhaps imperilled from the beginning by the genetic distribution of the good fairy who divides things into male and female … I was suddenly alone, and now I knew it. And then the return of the native – which was no return at all. It was obvious that things could never again be resumed on the old basis. And in the intervening time I had become aware of so many little tics of character which I had never noticed before. My new scale of judgement, thanks to Joy, was of some help. For example Pia could never spend the whole night in bed with a man; she must get up and go away to another bed after making love. These small and indeed insignificant things only began to become significant for me after the whole Vienna period which was at the same time inspiriting and depressing. I think because I realised that the whole system of Dr. Joy was limited and narrow in operation, though absolutely marvellous within very small limits. But it could or would never arrive at formulating something like a philosophy by which one could live. It was a lever, and as brilliant an invention of our epoch as is the petrol-engine. Anyway.

  The lady in the painting, do you recognise her, under so many layers of childhood, coat after coat of whitewash? It takes a lifetime to learn to die with all you have learned, or else to live with it.

  Yes, there we were with our sackload of misfortunes, and there was old Doc Joy with his grave and beautiful formulations – he refused himself every ignoble consolation when thinking about man. We learned, hand over fist, but the more we learned the less hope we had, the deeper the division seemed to go. It exasperated me when Pia told me that she only loved me because I smelt like her father. I suddenly remembered how she used to take up a sweat-shirt (I was a rowing man and still like to take a boat out for a skim): pressing it to her nose, closing her eyes in an absurd rapture. It was no compliment. Her old father, the retired Ambassador, lived on forever in Tangier, stone deaf; going for a drive in his car sometimes, or else passing away a long retirement full of bordeom by playing gin rummy or bridge. A sort of benign cyst of diplomacy who had risen by gravitation and sleek kindnesses. Poor Pia! Other smaller and more touching things. When I had reproached her for something which hung heavy on her conscience she would stand against the wall and cry into the wallpaper, throwing her arm over those poor eyes. And I suddenly saw stretching behind her a long chain of infant misdemeanours expiated by this standing against a wall. In the other life, in the old days, our nurses and our parents punished us in this fashion; and feeling reproved by my cruel words she instantly accepted the blame and expiated the rebuke in this way. It gave me a lump in the throat when she did it.

  It was in a way to placate the Gods and assuage a guilty conscience that I recounted all this to the old Duchess last week. Afterwards I was annoyed, at so obviously trying to claim sympathy. She was wise to write back about other things, about how the Duke made her take banjo lessons; also about his terrible fear of being bored. He had come to the conclusion that idle conversation was a sin. Whenever people called he retreated to the end of the garden and sent word that he was praying. As he was supposed to be a devout Catholic …

  Another form of expiation was to take up Toby’s invitation to visit the gipsies whose ragged and sordid encampments ring the walls of Avignon – they have been forbidden the interior. Here lying on some filthy straw pallet in the arms of a gipsy girl I can formulate more clearly my explanations of past events – reminded by a gipsy doll pinned to a pillow, as if for an act of sorcery. The doll sent me back to Pia, and then to odd thoughts of association which had been stirred up by the patient mage, Joy. In the layer beneath the dollies (as in a box of chocolates) were stored all sorts of necrophiliac thoughts and tendencies which lead to an exaggerated dread of graves, corpses, etc. These fears are sublimated into love for statues, waxworks, effigies, all dead objects. The reason for the fascination is the appeal of defencelessness. The corpse cannot defend itself. “Listen to that,” I cry to the sleeping gipsy. “The corpse cannot defend itself, nor can the sleeper.”

  All round they are cooking over wood fires. The encampments hug the walls, and have been here so long they seem to have grown right into the ramparts. Here they live a sort of raffish troglodytic cave life, these birds of prey who dress like birds of Paradise, and scorn to learn a word of French – or just enough to tell fortunes under the bridge, though their real relish is quick and pleasant whoring.

  Well, then, here I am in Avignon; the falling of the grey municipal night over the dusty recreation grounds trampled by the ghosts of public children … I walk among the empty benches and the loops of twisted wire which try in vain to encourage roses. These gardens are unlike the opulent ones on the headland with their marvellous views and splendidly tended greenery. They are more in my mood however, more contemporary.

  The centurion walls girdle the sable roofs whose sliding planes take the light at different angles, turning terracotta, tobacco, violet: at times the city looks very much like a brown piecrust cooking away in its stone dish. But now twilight has its own degrees of brown dark, sprinkled in patches of shade on grass or freckling the lemon-tinted bark of the tranquil planes. And everything held superbly in frame by the headlong river which cuts its sinuous path towards the necropolis of Aries. Once, says my historian, Toby, corpses were confined and tipped into the swift river together with the burial fee; they were fished out at the Alyscamps and decently interred. Along the banks of the Rhône where I have been walking stretch the tents and booths of itinerant vendors of toys, coloured ribbons, sugar plums, straw hats and shawls; as well as wares which address themselves to the taste and judgement of agriculturalists – rope, sheep bells, sieves, harness, pitchforks, chemical sprays and fertilisers, ploughs. The garment stalls carried the traditional blue vine-dressers’ outfits, sunhats, and the great willow pitchforks grown in espalier at villages like Sauve. Inevitably the gipsies blend into all this, flickering here and there in their bright rags and jingling jewelry to catch unwary clients superstitious enough to cross their dirty palms: or thieving: or whoring openly in the shadow of the bushes which fringe the river. Though here we are relatively far from the sea the advent of the car and the train has brought fish to our doors and in Avignon one can eat the best fresh fish of the Mediterranean. Of course the primitive and dusty old coach roads discourage modern traffic so that in contrast to the tamer country round Nice and Monte we must seem more backward and dusty here. No matter. Things feel more authentic; everything has bone-structure and style. And the land is all the more delightful for being a little unbarbered, unshaven.

  Under the famous broken bridge which the inhabitants of Verfeuille have always regarded as a highly symbolic structure, there are sometimes real dancers, during the frequent fêtes and holidays. There is also the famous cockade-snatching fight such as someone has just rediscovered on the vases of Crete. It is kinder than the Spanish fight for it does not slay the bull: it is the white-clad man who is in danger. The bullring is easily and hastily improvised by placing the carts in a ring to form an arena. The audience is mounted on the carts. Here we have snuffed enough red dust to see the summer out, and drunk enough red wine to float a gunboat. And from time to time, in a trick of slanting light, one is reminded that the Middle Ages are not so very far behind us – as a reality rather than as an abstraction. Machicolated walls grin with the gap-toothed, helot-dwarf expression of the l
outs in Breughel. Up against the night sky the massive and ugly factories of God loom like broken fret-saws. In the green waters of the great fountain of V., which throbs on with the heartbeat of Petrarch’s verse, the polished trout swim and swarm and render themselves in all placidity to the gaff of idle boys. Darkness is falling. I am hunting among all these booths for young Toby, whose potations never cease to amaze me, and whom I will doubtless find at one of the wine stalls which offer free drinks as a kind of advertisement for country wines on direct sale at the fair. Sure enough. He stands in a clumsy and dogged way with a glass in his paw. Under his arm the latest Pursewarden much battered and full of river-sand (we bathed this morning). Vainglorious though I am I do not hold this against him for P. is the only endurable writer in England at the moment, and I gladly cede the palm to him as the saying goes. Toby has hiccups and is trying to cure them in the only way he knows. By drinking from the wrong end of a glass.

  It only takes one match to ignite a haystack, or one remark to fire a mind. Piers is determined to meet Akkad on his next visit and to plumb all the mysteries of the sect; and by the same token Toby has suddenly seen the way into the centre of his own work. The little that I was able to tell him of the gnostic predispositions suggested a possible solution to the nagging old problem of the Templars – wherein had they sinned, why did they collapse? The suggestion that the central heresy might have been gnosticism suddenly blazed up in his mind and gave substance and form to all the dispersed material he had been wrestling with in the muniments room of the chateau. The mere possibility that he had a theory which might be fitted into a thesis to be offered for a Ph.D produced such a wild fit of exhilaration that it led to a three-day drunk of notable proportions. We kept meeting him and losing him in the town. At each encounter he seemed drunker, slower, more elaborate. And when Toby drank too much one was never sure what he might say or do. For example take the only taxi and cry: “Follow that neurosis!” Or recite nonsense verse: “The apple of my gender aches, I seek an Eve for all our sakes.” And then of course Byron – for he sees himself as Byron and is continually addressing an imaginary Fletcher – but this happens mostly in bed.

  “Fletcher!”

  “Yes, my Lord?”

  “Abnegate.”

  “Very good, my Lord.”

  “Fletcher!”

  “Yes, my Lord?”

  “Convey my finest instincts to the Duchess.”

  “Very well, sir.”

  In the incoherent maze of his rocking mind all sorts of diverging ideas and thoughts bounced off one another. “I see little point in being myself O sage,” he might intone. Adding: “Sutcliffe, that huge platform of British flesh and gristle ought to be in a dog-collar. He is criminally drunk and has joined the engineers of sin. A murrain on his buttocky walk and chapped hands. Free will is an illusion honey, so is the discrete ego, say the Templars. Who impregnated them with this folly? The wrath of the nymphs was hidden from them until the last moment.”

  Or simply fall down on a bench and go to sleep like any tramp using Pursewarden’s Essays as a scant pillow. Only the cold and dewy dawn would awake the unshaven sinner and drive him down to the Princes hotel, or back to the chateau.

  “My advice to Robin Sutcliffe is as follows,” he might add, and recite aloud while his finger marked the bars:

  Always shoot the sitting duck

  Pass up the poem for the fuck

  At worst the penalty may be

  A charge on poor posterity.

  “Fletcher!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “By the naval string of the risen Lord

  bring me some bicarbonate of soda tablets.”

  “Immediately, my Lord.”

  Somewhere, under a bamboo ceiling, hidden in a coloured transfer of tropical birds, there where the great philogists keep holiday, she may still be waiting for me. “Darling,” the letter said, “Burma was such a trap. I feel I am going mad.”

  Wandering in the older part of the town, near the market, I found a few barrowloads of books for sale; among them a very old life of Petrarch (MDCC LXXXII) which I riffled and browsed through in the public gardens of Doms. It would make the ideal going-away present for Sylvie. I was not so hardhearted as not to feel a quickening of sympathy at the words of the old anonymous biographer of the poet.

  J’ai cru d’ailleurs que dans un temps où les femmes ont l’air de ne plus se croire dignes d’être aimées; où elles avertissent les hommes de ne pas les respecter; où se forment tant de liaisons d’un jour et si peu d’attachements durables; où l’on court après le plaisir pour ne trouver que la honte et les regrets, on pourrait peut-être rendre quelque service aux Mœurs, et rapeller un Sexe aimable a l’estime qu’il se doit si l’on offrait ê ses yeux, d’après l’histoire, le modèle d’un amour délicat, qui se suffit à lui-même et qui se nourrit pendant vingt ans de sentiment, de vertus et de gloire.

  Alas poor Pia! My mind went instantly back to the lakeside of Geneva where I had the first glimpse of the slender pale girl buttoned into white gloves. Parasol, pointed shoes, light straw hat. They had sent her to a finishing school and on Sundays the girls strolled by couples along the lakeside. She was on the pale side, and a little too slender, too much waist to her severely tailored suit. I had a rendezvous with someone else, and was waiting in a little café among the gardens when she passed by, smiling at something her friend said, and left that little ripple of complicity in her kindly glance which provoked my interest – an interest which deepened as I watched her eating an ice, dainty as a cat. Nothing I learned about her afterwards surprised me – it was as if I had always known about that sad and solitary life among the great embassies, always taught by governesses and tutors, always forbidden the company of other children of the same age. The little brother was too young to be a companion for her. So that even the strict Geneva finishing school seemed a marvellous escape from her former life. The degree of freedom permitted the girls seemed to her to border on the dangerous. I followed her, and from a chance remark learned which church they worshipped at on Sundays. The next Sunday I made a point of joining them in these obligatory pieties. On the second Sunday I passed her a note asking her to dine with me and telling her the name of my hotel. I added that I was taking Holy Orders very soon. I did not believe for an instant that Pia would accept. But even staid and gloomy Geneva seemed to her, after what she had lived through, a carnival of freedom. For once in her life she showed a wild courage, an almost desperate courage – I mean, to use a back door and scale a low fence … I couldn’t believe my eyes. I was completely knocked off my plate in a similar manner to old Petrarch.

  Le Lundi de la Semaine Sainte, à six heures du matin, Pétrarque vit à Avignon, dans l’église des Réligieuses de Saint-Claire une jeune femme dont la robe verte était parsemée de violettes. Sa beauté le frappa. C’était Laure.

  How simple, how ineluctable these experiences seem when they come one’s way. How calamitously they turn out. Perhaps not for the lucky, though. Nor for them.

  The old doctor in Cz once told the Duchess: “I have always felt that I was a spare child, a spare part, a spare tyre. People only turn to me in distress. Nobody wants to share their happiness with a doctor.”

  “Fletcher?”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “Hand me my lyre.”

  “Very good, my lord.”

  “And also some purple therapy. I am a bit

  cast down by my hypogloomia or common

  hangover. Some methylated spirits, please.”

  “At once, my lord.”

  Smoking living salmon

  Stuffing living geese.

  I’m a little Christian,

  Jesus brings me peace.

  (A spontaneous lyric outburst by Toby as he stood face to face with the Palace of the Popes.)

  To feast on loneliness – it is too rich a diet for a man like me. Yet I have had to put up with it. Piers said: “People who can no longer fall in love can simply pine a
way, go into a decline, and select unconsciously a disease which will do the work of a pistol.” He is not wrong. Despite the new found freedoms the area of misunderstandings about love remains about the same. The act is a psychic one; the flesh simply obeys with its convulsion-therapy and amnesia. Yes, but now that the young have at last, thanks to Marie Stopes, found the key to the larder, it will be apple tart and cream for breakfast every day, and cakes and ale all night. Why should I make such extraordinary claims upon life when I have all the gipsies of Avignon to choose from? Because I am a fool. I remember that I wanted to bleat out: “I love you,” but she put her hand over my mouth and all I felt was her breath in my fingers.

  In the evenings I take a long slow bath by firelight in my room; a large hip-bath does service for something more modern. A big sponge with dilatory squeezings warms my body. Then to wander the lamplit maze of the old house, taking always the direction pointed out by the distant piano. Lights blaze upon the wine glasses. How much longer will this life go on for them – living in the quiet parenthesis of Verfeuille’s pulse-beat? After dinner to play a round of cards or drowse over a book. I feel all the magnet’s deep slumbering passivity, the bare weight of inertia. Toby accuses me of being selfish because I pay no heed to social problems, but there is no social answer to private pain, to loneliness, alienation, the need for love. Once a French girl, grubby and unwashed, lips hewn apart with yawns, smelling like the Metro in summer, completely absorbed my affections for two months. Her reactions had been slowed down by a youthful meningitis – it had slurred up her speech, and the stiffening of the muscles on one side of her mouth gave her great beauty and stealth. A committee cannot love, a society still less. She brought me an unusual happiness, which is only the sense of wonder suddenly revived. I told Pia all about her and she listened with her patience coiled up in her like a cat saying nothing at all. I snatched off her fresh straw hat and kissed all those sunpilfered freckles with gratitude. In those days I was lighthearted and used to sign all my letters: “Well cheerio, best agonies, Rob.” I little knew!