The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  But he was aware that a deep fault had opened in the ground under his feet – the past was now separated from the future by it. The taste of this new freedom was unnerving, as was the knowledge that if he chose to live modestly on what he had inherited he need not seek employment. A life of quiet travel and introspection seemed to sketch itself upon the horizons – yes, but with Livia? Yes, but with a war? History with the slow fuses of calamity smouldering away … He had selected a modest hotel from which he started to take long afternoon walks in the rain, passing more often than not the gates of the school where Sutcliffe taught and read music so many moons later. Once he even went into the close and sneaked a glance into the chapel which would so often echo with the great man’s voice. On the white cliffs mewed up by seagulls with the voices of sick kittens he felt the (valedictory?) rain pouring off the peak of his hat, the shoulders of his coat. Is there only one sort of death for us all, or does each death partake of the … valency, so to speak, of the life it replaces? It would be marvellous to know. Suddenly there came into his memory the dark intense face of Quatrefages saying: “I believe Eliphas Levi when he says that the devil is God’s ruins. If you embark on the path to sainthood and fail to achieve your goal you are condemned to become a demon.”

  Suddenly Tu Duc rose up in his mind’s eye and vibrated with an almost unbearable longing; it had all been too brief. What he must try and do, he suddenly thought, is to drive down there and await the war in the seclusion of that little village of Tubain. If he was called up, well and good. (He was still envisaging a 1914-type war.) Yes, he would leave this week and see what Livia thought of the notion – would she come too? If they had to start a married life together surely that would be the most propitious way and the right place to do so? From the window of his bedroom, which gave out onto the recreation ground of the local school, he could stand and watch the boys during “break” and marvel at the unchanging habits of schoolboys through the years. Their habit of buying a tin of condensed milk and punching a hole in it – the sweetened version. This they would suck like monkeys all day long. The older Victorian versions of sweets were still on the market – like the Sherbet Dab, which made you dream you were in bed with the Queen of Sheba. It was rather expensive. Other boys bought an orange and screwed a sugar lump into its skin. This wound could be also sucked with pleasure. Most magical of all was the Gob Stopper, almost the size of a golf ball, which shed successive coats of colour as one sucked.… His own schooldays seemed half a century away. He often stood there in a muse until dusk fell, and then darkness, while once in a while the moon, “in her exaltation” as the astrologers say, rose to remind him that such worldly musings meant nothing to the hostile universe without. Even war meant nothing? Yes. He would write poems in invisible ink, then, and post them to himself. Was he then doomed to be a writer? All circumstance seemed to be at his elbow to prompt him.

  Mirrors will drink your image with intensity

  and bleed your spirit of its density,

  for they are thirsty for the inner man

  and pasture on his substance when they can.

  The double image upside-down

  They drink their fill – you never drown.

  They echo fate which is not kind

  O sweet blood-poisoning of the mind!

  It was not too bad a description of the acute narcissism necessary to become a poet. He was anxious to be away south but the Probate people kept him an extra week. It was a strange new sensation to have money in the bank, to be able to write out quite decent-sized cheques. His allowance had been a very modest one, and he had tailored his needs to meet it. Now he bought some clothes which he much needed. But the result of all this was a bad attack of panic-meanness, and for a few days he lunched in a pub on short commons, almost choking himself with Scotch eggs and other such heavy fare. Back in London things were rather different. There was some sense of urgency. He met fellow undergraduates already in uniform and talking of foreign postings. Air raid sirens were in full rehearsal. The newspapers were full of hypothetical battle fronts bristling with arrows. A national daily asked “Where are the War poets?”, and the Ministry of Propaganda set about creating some, though this was difficult, as to be really efficacious they would first have to die, and at the moment there was so little chance. Or so it seemed.

  But Austria! The bombs, the parades, the curfews self-imposed from panic, the bands of uniformed thugs roaming the streets all night, surely all this was moving in the right direction? In London the left-wing poets announced that Plato was a Fascist and his mature thought was exemplified by Hitler. It was Syracuse all over again. Blanford had no literary contacts, only a few donnish ones. He aspired mildly to be a historian and apart from a few sporadic attacks of verse had little interest in the world of so called literary values. The scene was not wildly exciting. It was still fashionable to fustigate Lawrence, while at home the “serious critic” devoted energy to wondering if Walpole had genius. But Austria was another matter!

  All this was preoccupying Sutcliffe no end, for he was stuck in Vienna, waiting for the treatment of Pia to yield some “concrete results” – what a cliché! He was waiting for her to “come to herself” – what a cliché. And this new science was a sort of hedgehog of cross-reference in which one could only have an approximate faith. He spent most of his time in a pastry-shop round the corner, on the square by the Somethingstrasse, ‘twixt the so-called Rathouse and the office for the registration of foreign Labour. His German did not exist, so he lived in a sort of fearful fog. He waited for his darling, engulfing the while, at breakneck speed, those ponderous sweetmeats, puffs and flans for which the capital was famous, and feeling himself covered with spots at each new intake of sugar. They lived in a small hotel-room where they returned each night in trembling silence to eat a sandwich while he brewed a coffee in the lavatory. Then slept. She turned her back to the horrible folksy wallpaper and sighed and trembled and talked in her sleep all night. There was no more communication between them; there was nothing they could say to one another that would not wound, would not spoil the chances of this fragile “treatment”. It was a real war situation, and moreover it was a costly one. Blanford was touched by his plight and sent him quite a large cheque which was no sooner cashed than swallowed up by the treatment. But Rob had discovered that all the barbers in the capital were females – there were no male figaros. In black dresses with white frilled collars and cuffs they attended to the male scalp at all hours of the day and night. It was his only solace, to be soothed by the fingers of one of these amiable maidens and have his scalp tingled by some alcoholic concoction which made him feel as if he had gathered a halo.

  In that small world of neurological patients and terrified Jewish intellectuals who could see the world coming to an end, they made a number of good friends, but the best among them was a dramatic and beautiful Slav whose extravagant and fleshy ampleur was somehow wonderfully sexy and composed. She was a writer and a new disciple of Freud, and she spoke of poets then unknown like Rilke and even of Nietzsche whom she claimed to have known – which made them laugh in secret. But they liked her, and she developed a deep fondness for poor Pia.

  He stood in the late spring wind – cutting despite the time of the year – and watched his newly acquired motor-car hoisted up into the air at Dover and then plonked down with a shudder on the deck of the ship in which he proposed to travel. He was fearful lest the bump damage its interior – which he visualised vaguely as something very fragile: an engine made of china and supported by hairpins. But it worked well enough when it was discharged again and he set off in a gathering twilight for Paris, driving with immense devoutness on the wrong side of the road. He had been assured that he would soon get used to it and indeed by the time he reached the capital he felt quite at home in the new vehicle. He had avoided thinking too explicitly of Livia partly because he was still in a state of concern and distress about the news Constance had brought, and feared to force a breach between them by dema
nding an explanation: and partly because with one side of his mind he was troubled by the vague intimation of a side to her life which might in the long run prove fatal to this painful attachment to her.

  To his surprise, he was reassured to find the flat empty – or apparently empty, for after a long moment of questing about for evidence of her possible presence in the form of cigarette-butts or journals, he became aware that there was indeed someone in the bathroom at the end of the corridor. He heard the flush clank, and then the sound of running water in the basin. There was light also shining through the fanlight over the door. In this new mood of hovering irritation mixed with sadness, he tapped lightly with his finger and turned the handle, to find that the door was unlocked. As he did so the girl standing naked in front of the long mirror turned also and confronted him with a bold and impervious stare. No, both adjectives were quite incorrect – it was simply the calm animal quality which made him qualify her gaze thus. It was as if he had interrupted some self-assured pussy-cat at her ablutions. In fact she had just finished shaving under the arms with a small safety razor which he recognised as his own. She had swabbed the pits with a sponge and patted them with a rolled towel. Now she was simply there, and her great bronze face with its marvellous Easter Island eyebrows gazed equably at him full of a keen friendship. A vivacious light shone in those sumptuous eyeballs, the light of tropical islands, where all thinking is muffled by sunlight. “She went this morning,” said the Martiniquaise hoarsely, setting her fine head back to clear her helmet of dark hair off her shoulders. “But only a moment ago.”

  This was the girl whose French was so “killing”; and in her satiny nakedness she was of great beauty but also of great strength. The figure was athletic – that of a discus thrower or an Amazon of the javelin. But she was friendly, and had no thought but to please.

  It was indeed her professional cue to be so and an endearing paganism shone warmly out of her eyes and mind. Those little tip-tilted breasts she leaned towards him now in a soft gesture of shy friendship. “Take me,” they said, “I am all antelope. I am all musk-melon. I am spice-islander.” He raised his hand perhaps to slap her but she did not flinch, she almost appeared to welcome the blow – perhaps as a sort of expiation; his hand fell to his side again. He stood there quite still and listened to the ticking of his own mind – no, it was his wrist-watch. The woman said, “All finish with her – fini. Elle a dit à moi!” She tapped herself on the breastbone, stretching her long throat-line the while, with the dignified mien of some Polynesian queen. Yes, it was finished. He suddenly realised that, and, wondering at the irrationality of the human mind, he asked himself which of two reasons was the stronger. Was it because of the sexual betrayal as much as because he had discovered her opening his letters? Curiously enough the second reason seemed every bit as wounding as the first. He had old-fashioned notions about marriage and privacy, the fruit of his English education. “You say nothing?” said the woman, and he agreed, shaking his head and staring steadily at her until he felt the small prickle of incipient tears starting up. He felt ashamed of them.

  She moved towards him in sympathy and then his hand, groping for a handkerchief, encountered the black rubber dildo which was still attached to her pubis, buckled on to her body by a section of dark webbing with a fastening at the back, over her rump. He took it awkwardly in his hand. There were little metal buckles round the crown of the penis, presumably to add pleasure. But what an extravagant invention, and how coarse compared to the tender and sensitive organ for which it was so pathetic a substitute. She poked it against him and laughed. Then with hands behind her back she undid it, with the gesture of one who unbuckles a sword, and let it flop to the floor where it lay, a grotesque trophy of their coupling minds. He turned on his heel and went back into the small salon, where a tremendous confusion reigned. In his haste he had overlooked this tangle of lipstick-marked towels and torn paper wrappings – marks of a hasty packing-up and departure. Through the open door he could see the unmade bed, with the pile of old newspapers lying beside it. Standing there, breathing softly and considering, he felt the weight of his grief mixed with both anger and relief. But where was the letter of farewell which she must undoubtedly have written and left somewhere? The dark girl must have scented his confusion and divined the reasons; she went to the cupboard and opened the door. It was there with a few of his clean shirts. It was terse and to the point. She was going into Germany and not coming back if she could help it. They must divorce.

  About the sense of failure there was no doubt, but it was perplexingly supplemented by a feeling of freshness – the fresh wind of freedom which quickened all the staleness of the last few weeks, all the doubts which he now realised that he had been stifling. It was with a pang of remorse for this feeling that he watched the dark girl change into a clean frock and express herself as ready to accompany him towards the inevitable consolation of a drink which would topple sadness and free him once more to see the world for what it was … an absurd way of putting it. The new world that was beginning to emerge from the slime of history – would it be so very different from the old?

  Boys and girls come out to play,

  Children of the godmichet

  Now let each seraphic mouse

  Between the thighs keep open house

  Let their uncanny kisses rain

  Upon the upturned face of pain

  In grief at having lived in vain.

  In the Sphinx all was light and the pleasant frenzy of welcome by all the acquaintances he had made when he was last there. The Martiniquaise disappeared about her tasks of pure ablution round earth’s shores – his Keats was rusting visibly – and left him to the silence and introspection of his notebooks which even by then had started to gather their aphoristic fungus, their snatches of verse and prose. He plunged his hearing into the swathes of coarse talk and laughter, his sense of smell with delection into the smoke of cigars and Celtique cigarettes. Friends came up to salute him, students from the Midi with warm accents so different from the curt Parisian parrot-accent. Didonk mon gar comment sava – his ears transliterated sound and conveyed it to his limping understanding. No, his French was not bad, just rather slow. It would have been appropriate to reply: Cava très mâle – with the circumflex. But really he was too despondent about his circumstances to appreciate his own feeble witticism. He set himself to drink ardently in the traditional manner of the jilted Anglo-Saxon. Later he would break up the bar, get himself knocked out and put in custody for the night. This would obviate sleeplessness and idle thoughts about suicide which would be simply anachronistic – since the whole of Europe was bent upon that course. It would be pretentious, an individual act of the kind. Even if the hemlock, love’s castration-mixture, worked. Who did he think he was, Socrates? Passing to and fro, leading her clients up the stairs or dismissing them at the foot, the dark girl took the time to stroke his shoulder or hair. Was she trying to fire him? He bent more closely to his book.

  The fatal absinthe did not so much fire the blood as alter the heartbeat, anaesthetise one; one became steadily gloomier and more wretched until, just before the cataleptic trance of oblivion, one was seized with a positive epilepsy of joy, a frenzied ecstasy in the mode of St. Vitus. One pulled beards, danced with chairs, imitated famous ventriloquists. The police came. He had never as yet gone beyond a second glass of the mysterious and milky liquid. Yet already the first stage – that of an unsteady torpor – had seized him. His desires had become unwieldy, infused by a sort of sulky passion. He gazed around at the long bar with its patient and attentive clients sipping their drinks and allowing themselves to be fondled into heat by the all-but naked girls. Trade was brisk. In the outer café beyond the bead curtain a harsh music burned like straw – la vie forever en rose. The next time she passed and placed her hand on his head he was sufficiently emboldened by hemlock to run his fingers up into her fork and touch the moist fountain of youth under her sarong. “Viens, chéri,” she breathed, and buttoning up hi
s serviette to secure his precious notebooks he lurched to his feet and obeyed. Quick as a swallow now she ducked back to where the Madam of the house sat, enthroned in wigged splendour like a very very old ice cream of a deposed empress, watching keenly over the form of her female stable. The girl took a jeton and was given a fresh towel which she draped over her arm like a waiter. They then mounted the stairs, negotiating them very successfully, and at last entered the little cubicle which was white and clinical and decorated only by a hideous eiderdown on the bed and a crucifix over the bidet.

  The divine spasm assuaged nothing, nor did it modify the hunger it was intended to cure. He saw it now – with a phantom of disgust – as an act of barren retaliation. But skin was as glossy as ivy, breath as sweet as newly minted cocoons, so who was he to challenge fate, especially after his second hemlock? It was later that he discovered that she had managed stealthily to empty his wallet; happily his rentier’s low cunning had foreseen something of the kind and he had placed two-thirds of his fric in the hind pocket of his trousers which he kept firmly in view at the end of the bed. It remained only to catch a homely clap now and he would be all artist. The serpent lay beside him breathing softly, waiting for him to recover his strength, fondling him the while to see if there wasn’t another kick in the old manivelle. As a sort of testimonial to his masculinity she sowed a few love bites, little suçons, upon his throat and shoulders. Heigho! So this was the creative life as lived in this seamy capital? He had begun to feel somewhat of an initiate by now, though his mind still flirted with anger and sadness.