The firelight splashed upon his grave features as he expounded; but now his exposition was punctuated by yawns. We lay watching the climbing sparks spray the night sky. The whole of this rich elucidation of the gnostic sin – some of which I had heard or read before – went drifting through my senses like a drug, illustrated as it were by a great gallery of coloured scenes from our own history, our own encounter with the last survivors of this ancient heresy. I saw the large opaque eyes of Akkad gazing at us across the whorls of incense. The great snake, the Ophis of their beliefs, rose hissing once more to the height of a man. Toby was talking with regret of the shattered remnants of Gnosticism, of how the central faith had been shattered and dispersed by the persecution of the orthodox; riddled by schisms, weighed down under the sarcasm and hatred of the early Christians, they took to the deserts, wandered into Syria where the mountains sheltered them, or followed the gipsy trails into Europe, gaining precarious footholds in places like Bulgaria which lent them such an unsavoury name. Meanwhile the Church Fathers saw to it that all accurate documentation on their lives and beliefs was destroyed or garbled. Can they have been as vile as the orthodox believed them to be? They were, after all, the real Christians. … I could hear the voice of Sutcliffe cry “Libido scienti! The very albatross of unreason!” The pitiful fragments remaining can only offer us a hint of those early systems which were grouped around the basic contention, the basic grammar of spiritual dissent. Early communists like the Adamites, for example, who proscribed marriage as sinful and declared all women common property. Sex played a leading role, if we are to believe their enemies. The first conventicles were in caves, and the religious services led to mass sexual congress. Carpo-crates …; Epiphanius speaks of a sect which during secret rites sacrificed a child, doing it to death with bronze pins, making an offering of its blood. They were accused of eating human flesh – and their fire-baptism is one of human flesh turned to ashes by fire. A child gotten upon a mortal woman by a demon – our old friend Monsieur in fact. The ashes were a religious viaticum, a sacrament at birth and death alike. …
Unsavoury?
“You know very well,” says Toby, “that I have always been in love with Sabine. She has always exemplified this horrible faith to me. Rob was right to call it a grubby little suicide academy. It isn’t even a pessimism of a philosophic kind for that would be the opposite of something. It’s worse, a sort of ungraduated colourless hopelessness about the very fabric and structure of our thought, our universe. A silent anguish which rises from the depths of non-being. A flayed mind still attached to the tree, but which won’t give in, stays upright under the lash. How could an ordinary healthy man like me go in for it? It revolted everything in me, and yet without it, Sabine would not be half as perfect as she is. Yet it is thanks to her that I know what I do about the provisions made by the central members to do away with each other, since individual suicide is forbidden to them. You and Sylvie never belonged to the inner club, neither did I. But Piers did and Sabine did.”
“Is she dead then?” I was startled.
“No. I had a letter last week from her.”
“Toby are you making this up?”
“Upon my honour, no.”
“Then where do the Templars come into the picture? Surely the chief charge against them was the setting up of a false God, an idol as focus for their black masses. Where does that fit in?”
He sat watching me with curiosity for a long moment and then said: “I have been thinking a great deal about what you told me. You know the mysterious idols they were supposed to set up to worship in their chapters – were they really human heads treated with natron after the Ancient Egyptian pattern – idols of Persian or Syrian provenance? I am waiting for an answer, and it must come either from Akkad himself or from Sabine. I simply dare not go any further than that for the moment. Because of Piers.”
Of course I could see that in his mind he was thinking back to our conversation about the macabre funeral – it had shaken him as much as it had shaken me. “When they decide to join the fraternity in the full sense they agree that when their time comes, and lots are cast to determine it, they agree to be murdered by someone belonging to the chapter who will be designated for the task – but they will never know exactly who and exactly how the order will be executed. You understand, I took all this for an elaborate joke for a good while, until the facts convinced me. Those names on the so-called death-map of Piers – remember? But what he was actually trying to do with that map was to assess the probabilities, to try to guess who might have been told off to do the deed. Piers had received the little package with the straws which showed that the chapter had considered his destiny. He must have been warned that only a few months lay ahead of him – it was customary. But I suppose he was curious, excited, perhaps very much afraid. It is not agreeable to be informed that one’s time is up – whether it is a doctor or a gnostic who brings the information.”
“And the Templars?”
“Well you know, the setting up of idols and the gnostic baptism by fire – there were hints of all that; my thought is that they were of a degenerated valentinian order. The idols represented the eons, divine emanations, and their origin was probably ophite-about which we know a thing or two at first hand.”
“I see. And what about the great aerolith at Paphos which they are supposed to have worshipped under the name of Bahomet? Have you any explanation?”
“The name could be either a corruption of the word Mahomet or come from bàphe metéos, the baptism of wisdom. Why not?”
“A gnostic hint?”
“Yes. You know, Bruce, the Templars’ primitive role seems to have enjoined them to seek out and redeem excommunicated knights and admit them to the Order after absolution by a bishop. Naturally at first they gathered up a rabble of rogues and masterless men, perjurers, robbers, committers of sacrilege, who streamed into the Holy Land in the wake of the armies in search of plunder and perhaps salvation. Unlike the Hospitallers it was a military order from its very inception. The pretentions towards chastity and spartan living were very clearly defined. Plain white was their colour, plain white wool, linen undershirts and drawers of sheepskin. Their standard was a piebald one. They offered hardship, poverty and danger as the only rewards for joining them. You see, they were not joking! They were inflexible moral puritans – just the kind that suddenly breaks under certain exotic influences. Now while they were on active service in the Middle Orient they came to grips with the Assassins, a sect based in Persia which performed ritual killings under the influence of quat, hashish. The leader of this sect was the Old Man of the Mountains – Hassan ibn as Sabbah, whom the Templars knew well. His assassins were free-floating mercenaries who made common cause with Saracen or Druse, or any other group that took their fancy in Lebanon or Syria. But their transcendent aim was not so much the destruction of the infidel invader as that of the Orthodox Caliphate at Baghdad. But in their way they formed a sort of Moslem military order not unlike that of their Christian adversaries.
“There is an odd similarity in the hierarchy of the groups – it extends even to the costume: the fighting uniform with the red hood for example. The whole thing was really a momentous meeting of a grass culture (blue grass, hashish, quat) and a wine culture – the Christian wine doing service for the redeemer’s blood. Wine as a blood substitute held the Christian guilt partially in check, but not always. When it broke out, as in the siege of Jerusalem, one sees what a hecatomb these creatures could build of their fellow men. They wanted to drink blood, they could not disguise it. The assassins killed frugally, imagining they were killing minds, dry as flies.”
He was silent, thinking, with his sleepy head on his breast. Then he went on. “Grape and grass cultures suddenly meet and for a while do battle. Then one side wins with the sword and loses morally. One kills like an automaton, the other must drink the blood of the victim. The Templars started going astray right here.”
He chuckled and placed the sacred typescr
ipt under his head to form a pillow. “Can you not now see the right true end of poor Babcock? His hair will fall out around the time of the menopause, he will wilt, he will lose all his mayonnaise, Bruce.”
But my mind was far away from these common-room squabbles. “Tell me what Sabine had to say,” I asked and a preoccupied silence overcame him. He said suddenly: “How difficult is it to remove a human head?” “Not very difficult,” I said, “and it can be done quite neatly. Just clamp off the big arteries, section the cartilage with a butcher’s saw and lift.”
“I do not know what to think about Piers, and the letter Sabine wrote was full of ambiguities. One thing is sure, Piers had received his laissez-passer and was waiting for the blow to fall. He must have confided in Sylvie, hence her relapse, her conflict, for she would have wanted to go with him and at the same time stay with you. Her relapse was a compromise which absolved her of refusing to choose.”
“And the head – are you suggesting that there is some disgusting secret society trying to resurrect Templar practices with the head of the last Nogaret?”
“We won’t know the truth until Sabine comes and tells us. I can think of a number of different explanations of these facts, but none which covers all the possible contingencies. In every explanation there is an odd fact or two which won’t. But usually the truth is quite simple. Suppose it was Sabine herself who had been elected to complete the task? Piers could hardly be suspicious of her. We know that she was among the last of his visitors, perhaps the very last.”
“Yes, but how did he die?”
“Of course they found no trace of poison, but there are quite a lot of poisons which leave no trace. Fresh prussic acid for example among others … But of course none of these considerations would explain the removal of his head. Who took it off and why?”
“The death mask was made on the orders of Jourdain, but nothing so drastic as the removal of the head would be needed for that sort of operation.”
“Of course. You know, Sabine once told me of a very clever murder which took place in Alexandria – it was on the pattern of Judith and Holofernes. To drive a nail without a head swiftly into the skull of a sleeping man … the hair would hide its existence. But of course in an X-ray one would see the shadow of a spike that stuck into the brain. …”
Far away, on the stony garrigues by the fading light of the harvest moon one could hear the musical calling of wolves. Provence slumbered in the moist plenitude of harvest weather, the deep contented mists and damps of fruition. The dusty roads were furrowed by the wobbling wains and carts and tractors bearing their mountains of grapes to the vats. Blue grapes dusted with the pollen of ages. In the fields lines of harvesters moved with their pruning hooks and sickles; followed by clouds of birds.
“Toby!” I said, and he gave a grunt, hovering on the very borders of sleep. “Do you really believe that something like that happened?”
“I can’t tell,” he said at last, “but if anyone knows the truth it will be Sabine. I have a feeling she will turn up one of these days and then we shall get the whole truth from her. I have written to her everywhere.” When she was wandering the world like this she had no address, not even a Poste Restante. The faint chance of reaching her was some celebrated café with a notice-board on which one posted letters, the Hawelka in Vienna, Molard in Geneva, Baudrot in Alexandria, Groppi in Cairo, the Dôme in Paris.… There was an outside chance of catching her on the wing in one of these places.
If one were lucky she would reply at once. But some sort of obstinate premonition seemed to tell me that we would not see Sabine again – she had hinted in a recent letter that she too had received her quittance, her message – and that all these brain-wrenching problems would remain unanswered, lie buried in the dusty future or the rotting palimpsests of the past. Provence is particularly rich in myths and symbols, and does not like to be interrogated by the idle forebrains of modern hominids. It was like the key – the great key which the Nogarets had handed down to Piers. The legend ran that it was the key to a Templar vault where a vast treasure had been buried out of reach of the King. But where to find the lock which would fit such a great pistol-key? Piers spent years travelling about all over the country in a vain attempt to find this perhaps mythical treasure. In vain! In vain. Now the key lay in the muniments room and was used by Toby as a paperweight. There too I felt that no issue to the mystery would ever be found. It was all part of the Provençal image, the story of a land which from ancient times had given itself up to dreaming, to fabulating, to tale-telling, with the firm belief that stories should have no ending.
Dawn was breaking and a heavy dew had settled on our blankets; we would be slightly stiff and perhaps a little rheumatic as we retraced our steps to the little inn by the Pont du Gard where we had left our horses.
THE GREEN NOTEBOOK
(Sutcliffe Papers)
Comedy or tragedy? Which side up, old boy. The truth is that one could make either out of our troubles. When, for example, I decided to take my “homosexual component” (O! felicity of phrasing) for a romp I instantly got a clap. After all, Dr. Joy had assured me that my choice of a boyish sexual partner like Pia argued a heavy homosexual layer in myself. Curiosity got the better of me. But it was like sleeping with a graphic mule. It was ludicrous, it was tragic, it was funny. Pia was upset when I wrote her but Trash, in telling me so, added: “Honey Rob, I’m gonna tell you I jest laughed myself yellow when she read me your letter. You crazy great man you. I’d jest love to’ve been with you for the kicks.” Things are what you make them and a salutary clap is where one might imagine it to be. Clowns weep where angels fear to tread. For quite a while I was out of action. Sat alone of an evening mulcting a piano of tunes: Poor Rob.
A few words passed between us that evening in the sunken rose garden where they had planted Chinese tea-roses the colour of champagne. Perfumed, and yellow for Tao. I can still feel the weight of those words, like an oracle which brushes schizophrenia. Pia sat so still, hardly breathing.
At the beginning, afraid of losing her, he hit upon an idea of genius. “I must get really ill to make her love me.” He did, it worked, now they are married – or were. I can show them to you if you wish.
Ah Pia, aim always for the lowest uncommon denominator. Trash, you big out-of-date Thing, come here and put your shoes in my mouth and your puss on my hat. I’ll fit you, my black giraffe, and teach you to solder those rubber lips to Pia’s.
In the chateau at Verfeuille when an old chambermaid died in her bed, from “natural causes” as they say, they covered all the mirrors in the house with black crêpe until her funeral.
What does it matter? Every wish contains some grain of death. The mind has an idler switch, an automatic pilot. That is where the pretty inventions come from.
Talking of collective nouns with Toby, pride of lions, flock of sheep, etc., he suggested an “amazement “of women.
In the midst of life we are encircled by the great sea of death about which we know nothing. For the sage silence is a fuel; it whistles through the rigging of the nerves like a Force 8 gale. Time has it in for us, and we for time. I was aware of this all the time, with every single kiss. At Innsbruck the föhn was blowing enough to drive one mad. The old novelist confided his manuscript to a traveller in Malta who on arrival in Marseille was found to be suffering from the plague. They burnt all his belongings, and that is how the work disappeared. (Coleridge.)
Sylvie says that the word “love” is a blank domino. She is right. I am swallowing my pride. Àme sœur, âne sûr.
When loneliness goes gaunt, Pia, nourished on long absences, honey …
Régine had the air of a rather vulgar duchess playing a part. Had she been a real duchess like old Tu she would perhaps have been even more vulgar but much more natural.
Cloudy white wine of Aramon with a bluish meniscus hinting of ethyl.
Swollen tongue, cloudy urine, enuresis, spatula … Ugh! Dying of an obscure kidney condition. The old defeated pr
iest. I felt sorry to be so anti Christian when I saw him so nobly suffering.
Je souffre chérie, donc je suis bien portant, c’est à dire presque humain.
Je suis ni un refoulé
Ni un cérébral
Mais un vieu Epicurean
Un peu ogival.
Printer’s ink from a proof gave him Scotland Yard hands. Ink lingering malingering.
The blood chirps and twitters, it is dateless;
Our ancestors send their dead tap-roots through us.
Her toes printed in baby powder
On a bathroom floor in Orta. Clean and pink as pigeons’ toes.
Outside the window a catspaw of wind on the dark sifted lake.
One sail throbbing, trying to break loose.
On the balcony beauty takes you by the throat. Yield!
The Avignon Quintet Page 25