The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  Perambulatory paranoia, they would one day christen his case, of that he was sure.

  He had set Blanford’s postcard up on his desk as a talisman; he leaned over to read it anew now curbing his impatience by breathing slowly several times. Then he locked up his petty-cash box with its sheets of stamps and the six blank passports in the little wall-safe. He stepped out into the garden of the house, drawing the door to behind him with a soft click. How he hated that door with its ill-fitting lock. It was a glass door with a feverish design executed in squares of cathedral glass; when the sunlight fell upon it it produced extraordinary colour effects on the face of anyone crossing the hall to open it. The features became suddenly the colour of a blood-orange; then, in sharp succession, blue, green and livid yellow. Such theatrical changes often gave the unwary caller a start.

  He turned up his coat-collar and, placing his cane under his arm, drew on gloves as he began the slow martyrdom of his night march across the town.

  The westering moon drooped towards the battlements and as he turned the dark corner by the abattoir which rang all night to the sound of flushing waters like a public urinal he saw the familiar little lamplighter trotting along ahead of him with his shepherd’s crook with which he turned off the street-lights – for only a few corners of the town had been able to afford the new clean electric lighting. He reflected with a selfish pang that he would be sorry when the whole town went electric because the little lamplighters not only marked the hour for him (the lights were turned off at two) but also afforded him a kind of welcome night-company on his walks. He skirted the smoky grey battlements with their crenellations. By now perhaps even the gipsies would have retired to their tents and caravans – they kept up the latest in the town, as far as he could judge; he followed the little lamplighter who padded along ahead of him making almost no sound, and only pausing to put out a lamp with his little crook. It was like someone beheading flowers one after the other; the violet night rushed in at once with its graphic shadows. At the rue St.-Charles he mentally said goodnight to his familiar and turned sharp right towards the Porte St.-Charles which here pierced the massive walls of the town. One emerged upon the apron, so to speak, of the bastion – a dusty terrain vague punctuated with tall planes whose leaves had begun to turn green. Here were great areas of shadow and few lights – a fitting place for the enactment of mischief, a corner made for throat-slitting, settling of accounts and active whoring. The gipsies had not been slow to find it and to settle on it – in defiance of the law which from time to time ordered them to leave. In vain. But now their fires had burned low and they had taken to their caravans where frail night-lights burned behind curtains. A point or two of lights could also be seen in the tents and the makeshift shelters where they lay, piled together for warmth like a litter of cats. Felix half envied and half feared them, and as he heard his own dry footfalls change in tone as they passed between the ramps of the tall gate his hand always strayed involuntarily to the electric torch in his pocket, though as yet he had never had occasion to use it in an emergency.

  Yes, their fires had burned down to the embers and even their few donkeys and dogs appeared to slumber. But from one of the smaller tents a girl, awakened by his echoing footfalls, arose, seeming to materialise from the very ground, and sidled towards him whining for alms. Yes, she sidled yawning towards him like a pretty kitten, stretching out her slender arms. She could not have been much over sixteen and she was dressed as vividly as a pierrot in her patchwork quilt of bright rags. He felt a whirl of desire overcome him as he saw her beautiful face, so full of the sexual conceit of her people. He felt almost like fainting. Hereabouts the stout ravelins made whole barrows of dark blue shadow – an impenetrable darkness safe from prying eyes. Why did he not simply beckon her into one of these pools of black and sink his consular talons into that lithe and swarthy flesh? She would surely follow him at the mere promise of gold?

  Ah! There was the rub – gold! How much would she want for her caresses? He did not know. Anyway he knew that he had not the courage to do such a thing; he would have had to undo the constraints of his whole upbringing. A giant despondency seized him as he waved away the tempting creature. He hurried past her, feeling her predatory fingers brush his sleeve. She was barefoot, and moved soundlessly. Why didn’t she hit him with something and then rape him sublimely while he lay insensible – then at least he would not feel guilty about so natural an act? But what about the dose which would almost inevitably follow such an act? It would be very expensive to cure a dose here, as well as unbearably painful. It was a subject on which he could speak with feeling as he had once accompanied a panicky undergraduate friend to the Lock Hospital in Greek Street. The poor boy was expiating a twenty-first birthday party spent at The Old Bag O’Nails in the usual way. Felix out of sympathy accompanied his friend to his first few drastic “treatments”: he watched these agonising sessions with fear and repugnance. The background, too, was daunting – the long marble-walled latrines hushing with water, the rows of high white enemas and their long slim tubes.… Could this really be the only cure for this foul disease? First the bowel filled and refilled with permanganate (Condy’s Fluid) which the patient was encouraged to piss away with whatever force he could command. Then he must submit to the cleaning and scraping of the sensitive mucus surfaces inside the urethra where the infection lay. The surgeon inserted a small catheter shaped like a steel umbrella in the organ and gradually opened it in umbrella fashion, to distend the member. This was supposed to break down and detach the infected parts so that they could be ejected and discharged. It was agony for the patient. Once seen, never forgotten.

  And the mere thought of these sessions lent wings to him now, strengthening his resolve to repulse the girl. He quickened his pace and turned away down towards the pretty little railway station with its dark palms. The girl showed some disposition to insist but was soon overtaken by yawns and contented herself by spitting in his wake as she turned aside to regain the tents. The last train had gone out, the first of the new day was still far off. From somewhere among the dark quays came the sharp clanging of milk churns being man-hauled and stacked in the dark sheds against the arrival of the morning milk carts. The refreshment room was also closed at this hour but one naked bulb burned on in it and through the frosted glass he could see the old peasant and his wife washing glasses and teapots and sweeping the flags with tattered straw brooms. He would have liked to drink a grog but they would not open to him until the first train of the day shook the silent station with its clatter and squeals. The fiacres still stood outside the main entrance under the clock whose hands had pointed to two-twenty for the last three months. Would it never be mended? The drivers were wrapped in old blankets like effigies, the horses appeared to be asleep standing.

  Porte St.-Roche, Porte St.-Charles, Porte de la République – the last led directly to the heart of the town, the throbbing little square around which everything of social consequence was grouped – the Mairie, the handsome old Theatre, the Monument des Morts with its disgraceful but delightful tin cartoon of symbolic lions and the flag-waving.

  Marianne.… How well he had come to know it all; he was no longer a hesitant tourist, inspirited by the romance of its history, but one of the forty thousand residents now, his spirit almost embalmed in the boredom of its silences, its frowning churches, its shuttered shops and cafés. The horrifying thing was that this sort of life corresponded most favourably to the best posting available to a young consul, apart from working in a great capital or a town as big as Marseille or Lyon or Rome. After years of expiating his sins like this in places like this he might aspire to the rank of Consul General, though still resting debarred from the mainstream of career diplomacy – for the “real” diplomats were a chosen race, a trade union, a closed circle.

  Turning his back to the station he addressed himself to the second massive Porte de la République and entered the inside of the bastions. In the summer he often took the opposite direction and w
alked over the suspension bridge to the island; but this was rather a sinister place and pitch dark, and he had no stomach to be set upon by footpads. Besides, with the present wind and temperature he could, by taking this anti-clockwise walk, shelter within the walls from the worst inclemencies of the weather. He moved towards the little chapel of the Grey Penitents set incongruously upon its dark canal with the stout wooden waterwheels forever turning with their slopping and swishing sound. From St. Magnagnen one ducked into the terrifying little rue Bon Martinet (the name struck a chord always, though the exact association escaped him for the moment: later Blanford supplied the missing fragment of the puzzle). It was so narrow and dark that one’s shoulders brushed the wall on either side and when one passed a dark doorway one prayed that there might be nobody waiting for one in it with a knife or a rope. This emerged – you could see the light at the end of the tunnel – directly upon the canals; this part of the town was the domain of the tanners and dyers, and the paddlewheels which would have driven a decent-sized steamboat, turned night and day though the actual trade had fallen largely into desuetude.

  Here the darkness was like wet velvet; he paused, as always, at the entrance of the chapel and recited the inscription over the entrance to himself in a whisper. Mostly he took out his torch hereabouts to read such things. This was the Grey Penitents – the Black ones were situated in a further corner of the town. He pushed the door and it squeaked open upon blackness. Sometimes he sat for a moment in one of the pews. There was an electric bell in the wall with the name of a priest – a duty-priest, so to speak, always ready to take confession if summoned. One night he had “disgraced himself”, as he would have put it if he had been describing it to someone else. In an access of misery he had entered the church with some intention of praying; but when he found himself in the pew facing the cold repugnant statue which was to act as a focus for this novel set of emotions his spirit strangled within him, he became choked. He felt as if the centre was sliding out of his mind. He understood what the phrase “wrestling with the dark angel” meant. But in his case it felt more like the slimy tentacles of Laocoön which closed around him and from which he could not disengage himself. There was nobody in the place, the silence echoed to his deep panting. At last, overwhelmed by these stresses, he crossed the aisle and pressed the bell. Underneath it there was a card with the name of the duty priest typed on it – Menard. Then he stood aghast at what he had done. The sepulchral sound of the bell died slowly away in the further entrails of the building, awakening nobody, arousing no answering sound. He stood there feeling now as foolish and as irresponsible as before he had felt anguished. Ringing for a priest at two o’clock in the morning – it was a scandal! And yet, surely if the religious crisis were a truthful one, a serious one, no priest could complain of the hour – any more than a doctor complain of a night call by a patient in extremis? But no, he felt a guilty fool for importuning the church at this time of day. Yet silence was all that his frantic ring had elicited. He stood there with head cocked on one side. In the dark street outside two cats started their macabre love-wails. Where could he be, the priest? He felt stupid, blameworthy, undeserving of consideration since he himself had shown so little. Turning, he ran to the door and opened it onto the dark causeway with its swishing canal and impassive paddle-wheels turning. Then he closed the door of the chapel silently and leaned his head against its oaken panels, as if to cool his feverish forehead with the cold touch of the wood. As he did so he heard the shuffle of footsteps entering the chapel and the clicking of the confessional wicket. A priest had, after all, answered his summons. The thought panicked him anew and turning, he hurried away into the darkness leaving priest and chapel to their darkness and silence. What a bad show this was! It took him an effort to confess it, not to the priest, but to Blanford who later joined him on these night marches, when they were hunting for traces of Livia. It was here too that Blanford untangled the associative strands which made rue Bon Martinet so evocative. The Marquis de Sade!

  “It has one thing, this town, for me. The huge span of human aspiration and human weakness are symbolised by two figures from its bestiary, so to speak. I mean Petrarch’s Laura who invented the perfect romantic love and the Marquis de Sade who carried it right back into its despairing infancy with the whip. What a couple of guardian angels!”

  Felix pushed on doggedly now towards the next bastion, the frowning Porte Thiers where he started to cut diagonally across the sleeping town. Once or twice he passed signs of life, like an old man on a bicycle who passed him riding so slowly that it seemed as if his journey had begun a long time ago – back in the Pleistocene era perhaps. His bicycle bobbed and bounced upon the uneven cobbles and flags of the street, but quite soundlessly. The old man himself looked neither to right nor left – was he perhaps asleep? Then he coughed sharply and Felix nearly jumped out of his skin. The little wooded Place Bon Pasteur slumbered among its dense planes under which the nearby inhabitants had parked their prams and bicycles and carts which would soon be pressed into service when the market opened. From the end of the street he caught a glimpse of a frail light shining in the cavernous tin shed which housed the three trams. At five their squeals would awaken the toughest sleepers in the town – for they traversed the whole length of it. It was all the townspeople had in the way of public transport – the two large and shaky motor buses were a recent innovation and given over to tourism; they slumbered outside the Hotel Crillon and at ten would carry their fares off to inspect Aigues Mortes and the Carmargue. There was a shadowy figure with a storm-lantern moving among the slumbering trams with an oil-can, servicing them for their daily work. Dawn was as yet a premonition in a clear mistral sky prickling with stars – a mere lightening of the sky at the furthest edges of futurity; but it was like a faint chord struck somewhere far away that echoed here, for the bird colonies in the dense foliage of the trees which sheltered the beautiful old market had started to stir and stretch and converse. In the Clinique Bosque he saw a faint bud of flame under a coffee-urn – an alcohol lamp. In the Banque Foix a night watchman stirred and clanked open massive bolts to let in the two shapeless old ladies – the office cleaners. Somewhere in a nearby street an invisible whistler executed a phrase from a popular tango, and then broke off, as if in embarrassment.

  This was the hour when Quatrefages at last fell asleep in the Princes Hotel, with the lights still burning on – he could not bear the dark. What would Felix have done without the thought of poor Quatrefages, the knowledge that poor Quatrefages was alone among the forty thousand souls, awake all night as he himself was? The warmth of this thought made his wanderings somehow possible; the lean youth was a sort of symbolic companion for the consul, a poor scholar who was also, like himself, a serf to Lord Galen. Quatrefages looked like some sleepy raven in his rusty black tablier which he wore over his clothes when he worked; on this work-apron he wiped his pen with its steel nib during his pauses; his hand was a copyist’s Italian cursive, as beautiful as Arabic script or a Chinese ideogram. Though why Galen should retain the services of this poor scholar to decipher and copy medieval documents, was for a time something of a puzzle.… The dark, famished-looking youth had had quite a chequered history before he found himself here, immured in an ill-lit bedroom of the Princes Hotel, working with the savage concentration of a slave on the projects which Lord Galen had proposed for him. His story began with the Church – he had once been a sexton and then a curate of the Church, but a scandal accompanied by the poisonous gossip of a small village had unseated him – he had been defrocked unjustly, or so he felt. His ardent religious faith died in him there and then and was replaced by an overwhelming sensation of loss – as if the whole outer darkness which lay outside the narrow field of the doctrine had rushed in and taken possession of his soul. “Possession” is not inapt as a thought – for he now became convinced that God could not exist and that atheism was the only honourable philosophy for a logical person like himself. He had wasted his whole youth in mum
bo-jumbo. In the grip of this despairing belief – for it did not render him happy, this train of thought – he turned his attention to evil with the same single-mindedness as he had once devoted to an orthodox goodness. The path led downwards by obscure stages towards symbolic mathematics, enigmas, emblems and the shadowy reaches of alchemy and astrology. On the way he discovered orthodox mathematics and became, to his own surprise, a very able performer. It was an accident, but a fruitful one, that had resulted in him being co-opted into the department of Lord Galen’s business which was called “Trendings”; here a group of four young mathematicians analysed graphs of prediction as to their future movements up and down the scale. It was over these large and pretty graphs that Galen pored at night, wondering whether to sell or to buy. His little band of statisticians provided him with a rough guide to the disposition of his markets, and while they were not infallible there was quite a large element of correctness, in what they found. Here Quatrefages found himself in congenial surroundings; he was well treated, relatively speaking. As he was afraid of the dark and could not sleep until dawn, for the most part he elected to do his work at night. He would sit over the old teak drawing-boards in the uninspiring offices of the firm, his long pointed nose slanted towards his papers. He looked like some sleepy raven; his nails were bitten down to the quick, his fingers always a bit inky, his trousers frayed where the bicycle clips went. His small black mouse eyes were full of a sullen brilliance and impatience. His dry cough and eternal light fever spoke of tuberculosis; indeed his whole physiognomy was that of the old traditional poitrinaire, and he had once been placed in a sanatorium where they had collapsed a lung to let it mend. In vain.