The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  “I understand nothing of all this,” she said, and as he rose and hunted for a wrap in the bathroom he told her to follow him and see for herself what it was all about. They tiptoed down the cool corridor to what seemed like an outside lavatory – but was a radier solid-looking room with a steel door, which bore a sign proclaiming it a power point with dangerous wires. “Do not enter,” said the notice, and “do not touch”.

  “That is just camouflage,” he said and opened the door with a small key to reveal a comfortable office-like room with a tickertape machine punctually extruding what appeared to be news items or stock reports. “It’s Smirgel,” said Affad with a chuckle. “He has become very alarmed and excited since the first attempt at landing. I am drowned in information.” He indicated the piles of striped yellow transcription paper which littered the floor and with a grimace said, “I hardly dare to go to sleep for fear that I will find myself strangling in the coils of this infernal ticker. At any rate he works for his money, Smirgel. Look!” The machine clicked steadily on, the paper lengthened. Affad opened a hatch and replaced some paper drums with new ones, passing them into the jaws of the rotor and securing them to ensure continuity. “Where does he do this?” she asked curiously, impressed by the element of risk incurred. Affad said: “In the so-called dangerous wards at Montfavet-les-Roses, separated from the half dozen or so madmen by a bead curtain and a frail door. He is scared stiff. But it’s the safest place. It was suggested by Dr. Jourdain, to whom we owe much. By the way, what sort of chap is he?”

  “The doctor? Rather mannered, highly cultivated and very pro-English. He wears a college blazer – he studied at Edinburgh. Has a death-mask on his desk. I think he is secretly in love with Nancy Quiminal, though I never speak of it to her, nor has she mentioned it to me. But that is all I know!”

  He sank into a chair and allowed the long paper streamer to pass through his fingers as he slowly read the progress report of the agent. “The interminable list of Jews deported – nearly forty thousand now, it’s hardly to be believed,” he said with sorrow. “Smirgel always sounds grimly approving – I suppose from what you say he could hardly feel otherwise.”

  “It is sickening.”

  “Yes. And doubly so, for we shall never hear the end of this calamitous blunder; the Jews will extract the last ounce of blood from our horror and repentance, they are masters of the squeeze. We will have to hang our heads in their presence for a century at least.”

  “You don’t sound as if you like them very much.”

  “I am from Alexandria, I live with them and know their problem to be insoluble – so brilliant and fragile they are, so conceited and afraid and contemptuous of us. After all, Constance, the Gentiles did not invent the ghetto – it’s they who wished to lock themselves up with their monomania and their pride and cosmic solipsism. The little I know about racial discrimination I learnt from them – once I had the temerity to want to marry an Orthodox Jewess in Cairo. I was offering a quite straightforward and honourable marriage. But the row it caused! Everybody, up to the Grand Rabbi, meddled in the affair, while the parents of the girl locked her away for safety in an asylum, pretending she was mentally afflicted. From which I was forced to kidnap her and force their hands, which I did. But it opened my eyes to the whole matter of race and religion – everything to do with monotheism, monolithic organisation, everything mono, which leads to this self-induced paranoia called Western Civilisation.… The Germans are simply following out the whole pattern in their usual gross fashion. It’s heart-rending, senseless, barbaric. But even the Jews are not helping themselves! Anyway, let’s hope we are in time to rescue at least half of them. Not to mention gypsies, tramps, jailbirds and ‘slaves’ of every persuasion. It isn’t only the Jews, you know, though of course they make the most noise as a majority.”

  The paper was perforated at regular intervals so that one could tear off each sheet and assemble the strips in the manner of a book, giving easier readability. She helped him to do this, to assemble his dossier of information for him. It was strange to see the city from this angle of vision, to see it in depth, so to speak, and not from the blinkered viewpoint of a Red Cross employee operating in a strictly limited field. Here she could read of troop movements, of reprisals against isolated acts of sabotage, of the steady stockpiling going on under the Pont du Gard. Several thousand Czechs and Poles had been drafted in to do the work, presumably because they would be less likely to leak the information – already they had created a sizable language problem, not to mention problems of public order in the surrounding towns of Nîmes and Avignon. Their drunkenness had rendered the streets dangerous in the twilight hours before curfew – the only time when the housewife was able to shop. Happily they were only sketchily armed, the group-leaders carried pistols and pick-helves. As night fell lorries went round the town picking up the fallen and shoving them aboard in variously comatose states: and the city breathed again. But Smirgel’s despatches listed two important brawls which had led to the death of two Vichy policemen and the rape of a girl of ten. There were also punitive actions against so called “terrorists” in the surrounding hills – but these were mostly work-shy youths trying to dodge the forcible deportation which had been decreed by the Germans. It was nothing to burn down a whole village, while a few exemplary hangings was argued to be a necessary deterrent to further lawlessness. But the tide had turned at last, there was no doubt: the iron jaws of the Allied war machines had begun to close on Germany slowly but inexorably. What would they do with the new world which would be born when once the guns fell silent? They did not know, for the old would be somehow buried in that fateful silence of peace. She felt consumed by restlessness at the very thought of peace, as if she could not get rid of this war-time insomnia, this persistent feeling of having her heart ravaged by the brutishness of human behaviour.

  It was agony to separate, but their duty called them to do so. The next meeting was, by common consent, to be in her little flat for dinner.

  So again that night the bed floated them both out to sea like some precious catafalque. Reality and dream again became coeval, time and space commingled. When sleep came it was deep as death might be.

  But not entirely, for now they awoke always upon a new world both of unique privacy and of Promethean simplicity – for pain mingled with the pleasure and the reassurance of their passion. Yet in spite of this profound intimacy, this flirtation of private minds, she was still hungry to get nearer to him, to devour him woman-fashion. Almost in exasperation she cried, “O have you no other names, Affad, no Christian name? Must I invent a nickname to lay claim to you?” And to her surprise he replied, “Yes, I have, but I have never liked anyone using it after my mother died. She pronounced it in a special way.”

  “May I know? May I use it?”

  “I am called Sebastian.”

  “How did she pronounce it?”

  He hesitated for a long moment, staring curiously at her. Then he said, “Sebastiyanne, with the accent on the last syllable. There! I have given away my soul to the devil!”

  “My love, surely not that! Surely not that, Sebastiyanne?”

  He said nothing but lay in the stillness of his wakeful drowsing with eyes firmly shut as if he dared not open them upon the rapturous face of his lover. He was debating deeply within himself, resisting an impulse to shed tears of joy and helpless fatigue. In a whisper she repeated the name, and said, “Was it like that?”

  He shook his head and replied, “No. It won’t do. Call me Affad like the rest of the world. Keep the other for yourself.”

  The revelation and the name had brought them much closer together. But lest the claims of ordinary life be neglected she permitted herself to add after a moment, “God! I am so hungry. I think I will die.” He at once shook off his sleep and said, “I will make you the breakfast you deserve. Tell me where everything is and leave it to me.” Which she was weak enough to do, guiding him in whispers, once more half-asleep.

  “Bacon, saus
ages, eggs. O certainly God exists,” she whispered, to which he added piously, “God bless our happy home,” as he struggled into a borrowed kimono.

  It was marvellous to be waited on.

  “You would make a wonderful slave,” she said, still mentally smoothing herself, her psyche, down as a cat might lick its own coat clean after a love-bout. He had collapsed into a state of complete submission, resembling a case of deep shock. To feel him so passive and so enslaved had aroused her to the highest pitch. Afterwards, exhausted, bathed in sweat, she said reproachfully, “You never seem to let go, damn you; you are always there.”

  He put his arms round her, as if to comfort her for her disappointment. “There is nothing to let go,” he said, “I feel I am there the whole time, at the centre of you. I am trying to eat you alive, to swallow you like a boa. But it is not easy: you will take ages to digest.” They lay breathing into each other’s mouths, full of the convalescent sweetness of this transient form of death in life while their desires roved about them in packs, as yet unsatisfied, the remnant of truthful impulses perverted by lack of zeal. “In your work,” he said, as if the formulation had cost him deep thought, “you are the bondsman of the ego, but in mine I begin with the Vor-Ich, the pre-self, the pre-self, my dearest Constance. The marvellous little pre-self like an acorn, like an unshelled penis, like a lotus bud …” He began to laugh at her exhaustion. She tried to get up more than once, but fell back each time into his arms, sleep-impregnated, her whole body in deep soak. At last with a groan she turned and tore away this veil of nescience, and made her yawning way to the lavatory, pausing only to draw hot water for his bath. “Lie in peace,” she said, “it is well earned. And let me make you the bath you deserve!”

  Later on they parted once more, but gravely, reluctantly; he watched her set off walking along the lake reaches, the long Corniche, towards the bankers’ city, with her head bowed as if in profound contemplation. His eyes followed the lithe, striding figure with its impenitent head set so firmly on slender but strong shoulders, its look tilted slightly upwards, giving it a youthful urgency. It was as if she had forgotten all about him – she had swallowed him like a drink, and turned her mind back lifewards. But she was very deeply shaken, and when at last she entered her office at the clinic it was to sit blindly before the mountain of dossiers, staring at her own fingers. She remembered some words uttered by the good Schwarz during a seminar: “Aber, Constance, man is not a natural product of nature – he is an excrescence like the truffle, a cancer, an illness, it is only his high gamy flavour that makes him acceptable!” He was smiling, of course, though the words were seriously meant. He believed that when man had sacrificed sexual periodicity it was the fall into a freedom he could not manage. He could not face the freedom offered by choice, whence history.

  During the afternoon she fell helplessly asleep and dreamed archaic dreams of haunting incoherence. Somewhere from the deepest recesses of memory there swam up upon the white screens surrounding her bed – dream of a hospital – a painting she had once loved, The Parting of Chirico, with its clinical rigour, its glacial detachment which freezes the optic nerve like anaesthetic; the palette cool, the tone-range Roman as befitted partings where grief bit too deep for expression. A mental foliage of rusty wire, barbed into drypoints of fingers or leaves or hair, bundles of twigs birds organise into the cradles and nests from which one flies into comfortless futures of thought. He had taken his ***** in quiet fingers and countered the web of tensions in her by his deep ***** and careful *****. He could hardly tell what ***** for it stirred the classical cocoon of all vice, opening and shutting her lips with his ***** while she for her part ***** and reaching into wealth behind her groaned as she *****. She concentrated on the screen memory to assuage her pain. (Paintings are to bring calm.) How deeply he hurt her now with his ***** and his violent *****, each awkward spasm lifting itself into the centre of her *****, the flower and branch of all sex. Still she clung to the lovers’ goodbye, the turning away, the imprint of the primal crime, the original fall, thought catapulted into matter and fixed by Saturn into the hysteria of dust. O God! It was friends who parted in the painting, not lovers, for they can never be separated, the flesh having grown together. Such scar tissue would put them at risk. “Tell me again the *****; you know how it shames me.”

  Fragile as a nautilus afloat their sexes plumbed the innermost recesses of sinus, heartless as a forgotten creed, the numbing pain of the bruised bones conveyed their own amnesia. The meaning of lovecraft only grew out of parting. The breath hissed like seething milk, the whip rose and fell, but in the painting your ***** is completely ***** and you hear nothing while the imaginary figures were not designed to feel the blows. Sebastian, Sebastian, Constance, Constance. The stepping stones yield as one treads on them. The painting is complete. In the turret of the church the clock has struck two and the lovers are still there, unwilling to part with all their ***** so fresh the ardour of genitals created to pierce and fill. Why go? Why not stay? Soon it will be morning and all options will be renewed.

  But while you look at the ***** the couple is slowly dissolving, the acid has reached the armpits, the fair breasts, the throat. “I am *****,” she cries out in harsh triumph and he increases the summary rhythm of his loving ***** to danger point. Then drop by drop into ***** will go like seeds pouring in to a drumhead. Tonight will be fatal to someone’s hopes. The whip rises and falls, the painting changes. We are lovers who have buckled under history’s pressures. Later the historians will come and set out the typology of contemporary humours to measure us by.

  The painting faded and in its place there shone out from the heart of Avignon, lambent like the Grail, the old smoky masterpiece of Clément, half-obliterated by grime; she saw again so clearly its weird mixture of elements – a sort of Paradise Regained painted, superimposed upon a Last Supper, as if printed upon a gossamer veil. The painter had called it Cockayne, and Smirgel had received a grant to clean its blemished surface. The sleepers were asleep in their chairs, the candles had melted and run all over the place. Strangely enough it was outside in a grassy meadow, sheltered by a coloured marquee. There were gold coins lying about in the grass, handkerchieves, articles of wear. Parts took place in the seventeenth century, Christ had the head of Spinoza. Judas looked with a conger’s gaze. The wine had been doped, perhaps? Had they all fallen asleep at the table? Maybe the gypsies had sneaked up and cut their throats while they slept?

  She woke with a start to find Schwarz smiling at her across the desk.

  Schwarz smiled as he watched her, but his smile, as always, contained a sort of undertow of gravity while his ugly, lined old face contained a great sweetness of emphasis. He sighed and said: “It’s a long time since we two made love. I was thinking so today because it is Lily’s birthday.” Lily had been his wife. They had been together since they were students at medical school. Then they broke up, and when the Nazis came he fled from Vienna, leaving her behind. The news that she had been sent to Buchenwald finally leaked through and the full realisation of his own cowardice and callousness had caused him a severe breakdown through which, and indeed out of which, Constance both nursed and guided him. She was supposedly his student and he her controller, so the situation was paradoxical in the extreme; in order to keep their relationship private and unprofessional rather than formally medical and subject to all the boredom associated with a psychological “transfer” he had been allowed to make love to her half a dozen times until he came to his wits, and returned shamefacedly to his responsibilities. “So long ago; yes, so long that now it seems never when I think back. It has all washed away. But you are still here, my friend; we are still friends. What a lesson you gave me in sagacity – you were ahead of me in your completeness. Ach! It sounds clumsy. I am thinking in German.” He clicked his tongue reproachfully. Indeed his English and French always had a Viennese slant.

  Constance said: “You had a moment of doubt – you lost your centre of gravity. It was lucky I was there to
catch you. But you’d do the same for me, would you not? Indeed you may yet have to certify me! My present behaviour …”

  “You can’t regret being in love?”

  “No. Of course not, who could? But this Egyptian lover of mine is employing a strategy completely at variance with your established ideas of how the couple couples.”

  “You mean sexual deviances, variations?”

  “No! No!” she said vehemently. “Absolutely not. Not a shadow of such oriental treats. But a reversed affect technique entirely new to me, to us, and which gives brilliant results.

  And which he seems to regard as being in the very nature of things. I thought for a while that it was simply that we complemented each other perfectly, that was all. But it’s more than that and it deserves our attention as psychs.” She lay back in her chair for a long while, quite silently reflecting. Then she dragged herself to her feet and went to the blackboard on the far wall of the consulting room. Old Schwarz gave a chuckle. “I know,” she said, “I know. I am going to sound pompous; but it is very singular what this so-called gnostic man believes about us; when the couple was created out of the original man unit, clumsily divided into male and female parts, the affective distribution did not correspond at all with the biological. The sex of the man is really the woman’s property, while the breasts of the woman belong to the man. Wait! I know it sounds crazy unless Affad himself expounds it, but it seems to work, it’s not a hoax. The male and female commerce centres around sperm and milk – they trade these elements in their love-making. The female’s breasts first gave him life and marked him with his ineradicable thirst for creating – Tiresias! The breasts are prophecy, are vision! Her milk has made him build cities and dream up empires in order to celebrate her!”