Schwarz cried, “Wait, Connie, wait. Let us record some of this; you will want to use it. Don’t waste it while it’s so fresh.” He quickly changed the magazine of the wire recorder and switched on the small microphone which hung by the blackboard. She had drawn two rudimentary figures, a male and a female, facing each other. She joined them with a single stroke repeated three times at the level of the eyes, the breast and the sexual organs. “Now,” she said thoughtfully, “this is how we envisage the affective discharge in sexual congress – mouth attacks the mouth, breast the breast, sex the sex. But in his idea of the affect link the male sex is really the woman’s handbag, it hangs at her side while her breasts belong to him with their promise of nourishment. Their souls trade sperm against milk. And of course in the practical sense the quality of his product depends in her care and manipulation of the money-bag. Exchange rather than investment! Barter!”
“But when you actually make love?” said the old man with some bewilderment. They both burst out laughing. She said: “He simply abandons himself, lets me have what belongs to me. The woman, according to him, should be perpetually counting her small change, manipulating the scrotum manufacturing the sort of product which will biologically enrich the race and not just impoverish it – what is happening at the moment. Indeed, hers is the complete responsibility for the erection, she can build it at will when she pleases, even if the man be tired. He is quite powerless in this sense. Poor Affad, he’d be horrified to think I was scientifically interested in his marvellous gentle love-making. That is another thing, making love with a sincere belief in this kind of reversed affect relationship leads to simultaneous orgasm – almost every time. It is built into the exchange. It sounds such rubbish doesn’t it?”
“Yes.”
She herself looked so overcome by these strange formulations that Schwarz could not resist the desire to tease her mildly: “What do I hear?” he said with a strong Jewish twang. “Simultaneous ejaculation every time as well as almost permanent erections in the male? Surely Christmas is coming! Aber, Connie, it’s too good to be true.” Truth to tell, she looked a trifle shamefaced herself, to be so carried away by her subject. She blushed. “You know,” said the old man, “it may just be a very lucky encounter with someone who really suits – such things have been heard of, and with all the apparent miracles you mention. But for the great run of people there is no joining, no chiming, no click. They just rape each other dismally or exploit each other or become prematurely impotent, lose all their hair, go into politics. It may be unique, your love, his love.”
She nodded ruefully; you could not erect a universal principle with only one example to go on. It had to work in every case, to be a rule and not an exception. Schwarz thought he had wounded her with his banter, so he came to her side and patted her shoulder. “I share your concern, my dear, who could not? We deal all day with guilt and violence and insensitivity – any solution would be marvellous to hear of. Especially as we are all hungry for an antidote to violence and what you speak of is gentle love-making.”
“Yes. Gentle with a respect for the other person and a full realisation that the sexual act is a psychic one, the flesh and bone enact but the psyche directs. But the reversed affect …” She laughed again and threw down her chalk. The telephone rang and the old man answered it, embarking on a long conversation with a fellow doctor. She listened to him abstractedly, thinking her own thoughts which still hovered about these psychological evaluations of her love-experience. She ached to be with Affad again – and to reprove the feeling she frowned and bit her lip. But the desire persisted and she recalled how for long stretches of the night she had lain at his side, quietly building up his strength as she had been told to do, “counting her change” as he had put it irreverently, preparing with care and concern an erection which she would in her own time demolish.… Schwarz went on talking but as he did so pushed across his desk one from a pile of monographs and offprints.
It was a recent contribution to the medical journal of Geneva on the grim topic of sexual violence inflicted on women during congress – either by homosexuals on each other, or by particularly aggressive males upon females. The Americans had christened this fist-thrust form of sex – the pushing of the clenched fist into the vagina – as force-fucking or fist-fucking, and the surgeon who had written the paper signalled a prevalence of cases suffering from physical damage to the head of the uterus. The general belief that men should show their masculinity by being as violent as possible was causing the woman partner physical damage, he asserted. As Constance riffled through the article, Schwarz made a number of enigmatic signs to her to suggest that here was the answer to her talk about gentleness in love-making, harmony in desire, unity in building the network of powerful love-sympathies which reward the lovers with the dual orgasm. She nodded grimly. Yes, this was her answer indeed. Fist-fucking!
Schwarz put down the phone and said: “Violence to be equated with inability to ejaculate, or simply badly, or praecox or what have you! But pain is also exciting, Connie.”
“I hope I didn’t give you the impression that we have started a Sunday school; pain is part of the play, but not a cruelty-substitute for incapacity. This oriental style uses everything, but modestly – the target is the double orgasm which is the base of all dialogue – even in the genetic sense.”
“Which remains to be proved in my view as being general to all men!”
“Of course,” she said humbly. “I am a fool to try and attribute universal laws to what might be a solitary experience. I wonder what poor Affad would think if he could overhear us.”
“That you had a rather chilling, analytic mind – it augurs ill for romantic love, if that is what it is.”
“Not quite that either,” she said, but she felt rather a fool for having been so youthfully enthusiastic. She switched off the recorder and eased out the cartridge which she slipped into her pocket. Yet the subject itself would not rest, and she felt impelled to pursue it while the memory of her night-long dialogues with Affad was still fresh – for where else would she find a listener and critic so apt to evaluate and recognise what her lover had had to tell her? Schwarz could scent this and was himself sufficiently curious to try to encourage her to pursue her theme. In the silence they smoked, and she walked slowly up and down, deep in thought.
“Well, you are in love,” he said at last, gravely, but just as gravely she shook her head and replied, “No. The word has no context. It’s a commitment far beyond that in a way, because we are sharing something. Most people just follow out their immediate desires and when they dry up they are at a loss. They don’t share an experience together step by step, building it. We are much closer now, at the start, than most married people. So, it’s worse than being in love, as you call it, and much surer. It’s oriental or Indian in origin, I suppose, but it has its own scientific rationale.”
She told him of Affad’s theory about oxygen, the basis of everything, the genetic food of both sperm and ovum, without which they were, according to Affad, “poorly documented”, ill-equipped to help the race struggle to maintain itself; about this element or quality which was the real nous, the genetic “document” upon which almost everything depended, including the quality of the product on both sides. “When the quality of the sperm deteriorates a whole culture can be put at risk – which is what is happening now in the whole Hegelian West! And the first sign, the first signal of alarm comes from the woman who is biologically more vulnerable and more responsible than the man for the future which they literally weave like a tissue with their kisses and caresses. The spool upon which time is woven in the ancient Greek sense – not to mention the coming child which contains, like a grenade, the elements which will unfold into a full-sized skeleton with limbs, teeth, brain, hair … Where should we situate human love in all this vast context? Yes, you are right, I do love him, but not in the way you think – but because he showed me this schema of which I had a profound need. At last I can rest my intellect upon so
mething which seems solid! As he says, ‘When the asterisk marries the figleaf all is well.’ The rest is this marvellous amnesia of love-making where all we have to do is to bring home the harvest. It seems another world altogether where people debate ‘love’, where couples bring their cases against each other, and marriages wallow and founder. But it’s not only that, my dear, it has a direct bearing on my poor art, my little cottage-industry psychiatry. I understand Miss Quint much better than I did!”
They both laughed; Miss Quint was one of the quaint old ladies among her patients whose fantasies and Victorian timidities had given rise to such a strange psychological state, a dream-world worthy of Lewis Carroll, a garden of puns and weird spoonerisms. “When I told Affad about Miss Quint, how she had christened her vagina after her cat, and how she claimed that it not only mewed in complaint when the milk had turned, but also followed her about and jumped on the beds of her friends, he was absolutely delighted. He said, ‘Nature always supplies essential information in the form of ailments. But she is right about her pussy.’ When the documentation is poor or incomplete the woman knows it at once – indeed it creates a state of alarm. The quality of loving, of coupling falls off, and the man’s erections become compromised, his sterility sets in. All this not seen from the selfish point of view of a couple becoming tired of each other, but as a form of cosmic calamity threatening the race and its mental balance. Love-making this way is unaggressive and deeply logical.”
Schwarz began to become a trifle plaintive. “Are we going into marriage guidance or matrimonial aids?” he asked wryly, and added sadly, “Yesterday my nice old philosopher Ginsberg committed suicide, Connie, and he had promised to confide in me the secret of the universe. But he left no message – or perhaps the act was itself the message, like love is supposed to be?”
She smiled. “You are right to shoot me down – I must seem unbearably prosy about all this. But I never heard this sort of thing before or experienced passion in such an unrequitable way – as if there were no floor to it. And it doesn’t come from a man, it comes from an attitude. Why shouldn’t I try to catch a hold on it and rationalise it? It might serve others like me, like I was before Affad arrived, bleating in the wilderness of my logical positivism?”
“Indeed! Indeed!” said the old man, touched. But to himself he said: “It smells of Vedanta! Ah, these clever Orientals, what would they do in our shoes? With every damned illness our whole culture is called into question! Damn Affad!”
Indeed! She said: “Doctors with all their phobias and philias, like statues from some Graeco-Roman museum. You begin to realise that we are cannibals in fancy dress.”
“It doesn’t help!” he said gloomily.
“It doesn’t help!” she echoed just as sadly.
A nurse brought in a tray with coffee and cakes and for a moment their attention was deflected from these abstruse matters. “Gosh!” she said with surprise, helping herself, “I am absolutely ravenous! What a surprise!”
“I wonder why,” he said drily, sipping his brew.
It was marvellous to have someone to whom she could talk, with whom she could discuss these burning topics. She kissed his forehead piously and thanked him for listening. “I should charge a consultation fee,” he said.
It freed her to continue this feverish disquisition upon her new experience. “Being in love with an Oriental is eerie because we are so different. He is like a piano of perfect tone but with no sustaining pedal. I mean that we do not share the same historic pedigree, intellectual connivance. My soul, my heart is of a more recent manufacture, sixteenth- or seventeenth-century – the world where sense, sensibility, sentiment were formulated as modes of enquiry and expression, where romantic love first threw up its narcissisms, its Don Juans. His backcloth is a huge hole in space, something vast, an Egypt of utter blank indifference to actuality. I live in the contingent, he in the eternal – in prose rather than poetry. It is superior in its way, though a trifle top-heavy: I can snipe at it with my humour, which is the weapon of my insight. But I would pay for a refusal to abdicate to his maleness, and he vice versa with my femininity. It’s made me see that my love for Sam was only a transaction and not a full commitment – we were eaten alive by reciprocal sentiments. I also see now that the old-style couple is simply a fortuitous composition designed by lust; the new one I envisage could be triggered by desire yet be fragile as a wine or a water-colour which are both compositions and which can achieve aesthetic value, be beautiful in a geometrical way like a bird’s nest or a cradle for the future. For the first time I feel optimistic about love, do you hear? Love!”
“O God!” said Schwarz with the full weight of his Jewish pessimism compounded with a Viennese upbringing. He was thinking: man is born free, free as a nightmare. We live forever encroached on by future and past, the dead and the unborn. Both live in the full horror of a perpetual present. Aïe! And here she was getting enthusiastic about contrapuntal fucking or about lying all night kissbound in a honeysuckle sweat as the vulgar tavern song said! Doctors were people of limited uptake, limited intellectual outspan, faulty insight. Their function was simply to reveal what was already known but unrecognised. A monotonous and limited role, like that of the coprophagous beetle forever rolling its balls of dung. What did it matter?
“What does it matter, Connie,” he cried, “if you can find some well-earned happiness? You alarm me, you are far too articulate. You will bore him.” She nodded and said, “I know. I am in danger of becoming too bossy – I could bore him, as you say. He already says that women who think should be lapidated by psychiatrists.” Schwarz said, “I wish you would stop walking about as if dragged by a huge dog or propelled by a high wind. I’m dizzy.”
“I am sorry,” she said, all contrition at last, and sat down at the desk with a fair semblance of composure. “But I have been thinking of ways to formulate it. Look, it’s like the contrast between a cathedral and a mosque. The mosque has no altar, no centre of focus. In it the truth is everywhere, though the whole is in fact oriented only gravitationally, aiming at Mecca. The cathedral is not oriented geographically, but inside it is focused upon a special spot, the High Altar, where the critical blood-sacrifice takes place. This is, so to speak, the butcher’s slab of the Christian transaction. Here the wine is diluted, the bread is cut up and consecrated. This place is also the telephone booth from which one can ring up God and try to strike a bargain with him for one’s individual soul – that precious figment! All right, I know I sound rather like old Sutcliffe weighing into you about Pia, but there is the whole contrast between us – mosque and church. But this thing outweighs the difference, it’s common to either. Affad in discussing it spoke of it being calculated by an ‘engineer of love in terms of puissance massique – the mass-power of weight-ratio’ I must say it sounds as elegant as it is esoteric, but I know what he means.”
“Damned if I do,” said the old man doggedly.
“Of course you do.”
She felt as if she had been separated at last from the world against which their science was fighting – a world of attachments without resonance, adventures without depth, embraces without insight! The embrace of Affad had in some singular way acted upon her as the drop of scalding olive oil had done upon the cheek of sleeping Eros. Perhaps she had even been cured of that obstinate old dream of all women, to become indispensable to someone’s happiness – the running sore of self-esteem, the old dysentery of human narcissism.… Or was that too much to hope?
“I’m going home,” she said abruptly. “I am in no mood to work, and I have so much leave accumulated that …”
“I know,” he said with resignation. “Go on home.”
She felt she could not last another moment without seeing Affad again, so she took her leave and went back to join him at breakneck speed – but only to find an empty room and an unmade bed beside which, to her surprise, disdain and concern, from a medical point of view, lay the little hashish pipe which smelt recently used! He walked in wh
ile she was sniffing at it like a suspicious cat and she put it behind her back while they embraced. Then she wagged it at him, saying, “You didn’t say you smoked.”
“Must I reveal everything? I am Egyptian after all, yes, I smoke.” But he added that it was neither very much nor very often.
“Does it matter?” he asked.
“Only because you do.”
“It’s harmless,” he said. “It’s ritual.”
She was relieved to hear it. She took herself off to the kitchen to make some tea while he searched slowly and methodically along the bookshelves for something which might interest him. “Ah, this bogus science!” he exclaimed as he caught sight of a series of blue-backed books, a psychoanalytic series. “It doesn’t go far enough.” She said, “How do you know?” and he sat down slowly balancing his tea-cup as he replied, “Hear my story, then. My parents were very rich, I was brought up very carefully but all over Europe to give me languages and make me quite at ease in every society and every circumstance. But I was shy, and, being sheltered, very slow to develop. I mixed badly. I preferred to lock myself up and indulge in abstruse studies like alchemy and mathematics – Egypt is the right place for that sort of thing, indeed everything occult. An only child, I became very solitary when my parents died, locked up as I was in a vast flat in Alexandria with few friends. My gnostic studies led me to a small group of seekers among whom I found Prince Hassad, and became his man, so to speak. Apart from these people – they were of every rank and circumstance – I frequented nobody. Then by an accident a charming and ardent young woman drifted into my life and took possession of me completely. Our marriage lasted seven years, but the child we had turned out to be deficient intellectually and the shock separated us for good. My wife went to live in the monastery of the Copts at Natrun as a solitary hermit. Her old mother took charge of the boy: she lived in Geneva, that is why I come here so regularly, to see how he is getting on, and to see her and give her the news of Egypt. After that calamity I went on alone, I had lost the taste for any other close relationship, so I made do, and got to like it. Once or twice I may have had a chance encounter with a woman but I made sure that it was ephemeral – some tired cabaret artist or street walker. But this was exceptional and due to loneliness – perhaps thrice in all these years. So I am hopelessly out of practice, and can be easily put to flight if you find this situation too demanding. It was in this state of fragility that I encountered you and was attracted, heaven knows by what, for I have known greater beauties and met more massive intellects. I took my courage in both hands and with great daring tried to stake a claim to an experience which – clearly I am wrong about this – seemed to me essential if I was not to die of spleen and boredom during this senseless war!” He yawned in an outrageous way.
The Avignon Quintet Page 85