“I have never heard a more self-centred, a more masculine declaration of love in my whole life!” she said with a certain amusement in her voice and an unwilling tinge of admiration in her heart – for this shameless egotism was accompanied by propitiatory caresses and endearments. They were lying down now, side by side, and had kicked off their shoes.
“Don’t you like omniscient men, men who are too sure of themselves? They give such confidence, they say. When first I saw you I had a tremulous premonitory feeling which told me that I would be excused every fatuity.”
“Wrongly,” she said, cobwebbed herself in the drowsiness which he seemed to project with every measured breath. My goodness, she thought, soon they would be making love again, it was quite deplorable that it should seem so inexorable. Also behind the sleepy persiflage of his speech – so belied by the gentle but perfectly assured rhythm of his caresses – she felt the deep vibration of an anxiety in him, a lack of confidence in himself which made him send out these wistful probes in order to take soundings in a possibly hostile world around him. Or was it that he found the habits of solitude hard to break and the society of a woman, even a cherished woman, menacing and disquieting?
“No,” he said, for all the world as if he had been reading her thoughts as they passed in her mind, “none of those things really – perhaps a little of the last might come later! My main concern was to preserve you in this world – I felt you might become suicidal in Avignon like your sister – and if possible to bring you back where I could approach you. That is why I told Smirgel to look after you very carefully, or answer for it with his head!” She was surprised. “So that is why he kept persecuting me with his solicitude? I thought otherwise.”
“Poor man! he was doing his duty. I even came down to Avignon once myself – it was a great temptation to call on you, I don’t know how I resisted, but I did. I knew your hours and movements. What heroism!” She felt a sudden pang of regret that he had not done so, yet it might have served no purpose at that time, living as she was. Affad then was hardly more than a thought in the back of her mind, without real substance, a faint beckoning thought without a tangible future. “What part did Livia play in all this?” He replied drowsily, “None. None at all. Smirgel loved her, that is all. You know he was there in Provence when you all were, working in the town gallery restoring the medieval paintings. He met Livia then. It was he who introduced her to the Nazi philosophy of the time. When she went to Germany it was to stay with him – he was an art critic in Hamburg.”
“Did they live together in the accepted sense?”
“I don’t know. I never asked him. They met in Avignon where he was staying. She became a party member through him and later on naturalised. He started by using her to spy on Galen, then went and fell for her.”
The thought was horrible to Constance and vastly increased her sympathy and regret for her dead sister. There was a long silence now, and she feared that they might both slide away into sleep unless some new topic were introduced, so she said the first thing that came into her head without quite meaning to: or perhaps it only appeared to be involuntary, one could not be quite sure. At all events what she said was: “Will you marry me?” This had the desired effect – it was sufficiently unexpected to make him open his eyes. “Did you say ‘would’ or ‘will’?” he asked cautiously. He placed his lips to her cheek and heard her answer quite distinctly, “I said ‘will you’!”
“Of course not,” he said at once. “At least not in fact. Whatever gave you such an idea?”
“I thought not,” she said, amused. “I just wanted to make you writhe, that is all.”
“Mark you, in certain undefined and relatively unimaginable contexts I would, I could, I might. But of course I won’t.”
“That was very closely argued,” she said.
“Surely you follow my reasoning?”
“Only too well; supposing I were pregnant?”
“Why should I when you are not?”
“Casuist and philanderer!”
“You are like the Catholic Church, Constance. This is nothing but a hold-up.” He quoted disgustedly, “Will you, won’t you, can’t you, might you, must you, would you … what a catechism for a right-minded gnostic to come up against. Of course I won’t!”
“Very well, then, goodbye!”
“Goodbye,” he said equably (how terrible it sounded to her ears), and shut his eyes once more, adding, “Marriage may be dead as a doornail but the real couple hasn’t begun to manifest as yet. At least not in the West. It will need a new psychology – or perhaps a very old one – to inaugurate the coming dispensation. O dear! It sounds terribly schematic, like cutting along the dotted line. On the other hand we can’t go on as everyone is doing. The world is coming to an end faster because of the waste, the misdirection of affect. I want to begin the new thing with you.”
“Truthfully,” she said, “I don’t give a damn about theoretical considerations. I just want to be loved by you, stop.”
But she was lying and they both knew it.
Their attachment had been born into a new age of sexual friendship which would create new responsibilities and problems in the measure of its new freedoms. But somehow not for them – what he had told her made her sure of it. Yet the whole subject-matter of his thinking was still full of mysteries – perhaps even absurdities, who could say? She was still, after all, a hostage of the logicians and consequently full of scepticism. He seemed so intellectually cocksure, a bad sign in a man, and particularly an Oriental. She lay beside him and watched him sleeping so peacefully, his head turned away in half-profile from her. What, she wondered, was the meaning of the little slip of thread round his throat? Some people wore a christening chain with a cross on it, or else their names graven upon a talisman of a saint. Perhaps, like a true Mediterranean, he wore it against the evil eye – but where was the usual blue bead? Beside the bed there was a pair of nail scissors which he had been using to clean out his pipe and settle his plug of hashish. Half in a spirit of idle mischief she took them up and placed them upon the thread as if to cut it. At this moment he opened his eyes and saw what she was doing. A look of horror and supplication came over his face, and he gasped, “For goodness sake!” Constance, delighted at the alarm she had created, withdrew her scissors and said, “I knew it! The Evil Eye!” And she put the scissors back on the side table. He said, “One can’t turn one’s back for a moment! You were actually going to sever my lifeline, were you? And so carelessly? If I had fallen back dead upon the pillows – where would you have been then?” She could not quite make out if this were banter or not. “Explain!” she said. “What is the thread?” And slowly fingering it, he told her dreamily that it was a signof his affiliation to the little Orphic group of which he had spoken more than once; it was the umbilical cord which united him with the buried world they were trying to bring to light with their association.
“The little thread is flax, grown on the Nile. We have imitated the Indians in that. It’s the sign of the yogi, of his frugality and his mental chastity. The Templars wore it as a belt – and those idiot Inquisitors took it for some secret sexual symbol arguing a homosexual affiliation. Idiots! The double sex was quite another thing, a syzygy of the male and female affect.”
“Would you have died if I had cut it?”
“Just to punish you I would have tried! But I would have regretted it, for it stands for other things. My fate, woven by Moira, the fates of Greece, my umbilical cord through which I connect with the rhythms of the earth yoga. No, not died, but been sad and regretful.”
“I am sorry. It was thoughtless of me.”
That night she asked her lover: “Did you know it was going to be like this?”
He looked at her and slowly nodded but said nothing; he closed his eyes and appeared to reflect very deeply upon her question. “Did you, tell me truthfully?” She put her fingers upon the drum of his chest and felt the deep rise and fall of his breath, the archaic oxygen-pump which fe
d his thinking and his love-making alike.
“It isn’t like a love affair at all,” she said aloud, echoing a thought which had been formulated by her mind a while since. Their relationship had developed an odd kind of continuity so that it seemed to be a succession of small surprises, their endearments were like stepping stones towards … towards what, exactly?
“It is in fact the prototype, the original love-affair which we’ve tumbled into by luck: or perhaps a design we are not wise to. Today’s loves are mostly debased currency, the timid investments of undischarged bankrupts with nothing to offer but undocumented sperm, trivial aggressive lusts, stuff of little richness. Sperm without oxygen, and with poor motility, will never reach the Grand Slam. All that is the domain of Unlove, Constance, it’s not our concern.”
“But where are we going?” she asked in a low voice full of concern. “We seem so linked now. I have changed so much in such a short time.”
“It’s only the beginning – that’s why I hesitated so much. I did not want to go away as I must soon.”
So, inchmeal, their love advanced.
And yet there was some inward check, for from time to time there would be moments of abstraction when she discerned an expression of tremendous sadness on his face; he might stand staring at the lake, or simply transfixed before the mirror in which he was knotting a tie, while this shadow of immense distress settled upon his features – it needed an effort to shake off. Then it was replaced by the look of loving wonder which he always wore when looking at her, talking to her. But she was alarmed by this sudden change and once, surprising it as she awoke (he stood by the balcony gazing down at the water) she cried out, “What is it that comes over you, comes between us all of a sudden? You must tell me. Is it someone else?” He laughed, and came to sit on the foot of the bed. “Yes, I must tell you because it concerns us both in the long run – it’s aimed at us. Yet it’s so fantastic that it is hard to realise, its novelty is so unexpected. Constance, I have been to Canada and I have seen the thing – what they call the Toy: the bomb, the new one.” He fell silent for a long moment, staring at the pattern in the carpet.
He had visited the smithy of Haephaestus so to speak, the flaring forges where the huge grenades of the atomic piles roared and shivered, as if about to give birth, while the boiling steam and water rushed from the sluices and filled the air with dense acrid warmth; and outside the vast snowscapes like another inclement Russia, snow falling in the quarries with their long caterpillar-lines of linked chariots. He shivered in his soul when he remembered those shivering and sweating grenades full of a new fever.
“I had to report on this to the small group of Alexandrian searchers to which I belong and which I sometimes direct. I won’t bore you with all that. But what I saw – my dear, all that is going on now, the fighting taking place, is already as out of date as the Battle of Hastings. We are fighting with bows and arrows. Compared to what has already arrived, the Toy.”
“I had heard some vague talk about it from a patient who was a Viennese mathematician.”
“It’s not the war that’s at issue. This thing is aimed at our bone marrow, and the bone marrow of the earth we live on. It confers sterility or genetic distortion – we will be born without heads and legs like illustrations to the propositions of Empedocles. Constance, nature has lost all interest in us; from now we are orphans! And how appropriate that a Jew should have triggered this murderous extract of pure matter, what a terrible revenge of the Semitic brain – a really Faustian denouement awaits us; it completely dwarfs the war, what matter who wins or loses? It is a shadow-play, for both sides are orphaned by the same stroke.” He was trembling so much that she took his hands in her own strong ones and succeeded in calming him without speaking. “Not only that,” he went on at last on a quieter note, “as if that were not enough – woman is compromised; in her we are destroying our nurse and muse, the earth.”
They sat for a long time, as if posed for a photograph, she with her head against his shoulder, he with his arms round her shoulders. “You see what comes between our kisses?” he whispered at last, stroking her attentive and beautiful face. “When man starts to feel with his reason, with his intelligence, why, Monsieur is there!”
“Monsieur what? Monsieur who?” she asked.
And then, “We are being too serious,” he said all of a sudden, briskly, shaking off the enormous weight of this ugly daydream, and at the same time feeling absolved because he had told her, had spoken it all aloud; at last there was someone to whom he could really talk. As she was putting on her clothes she said thoughtfully, “There must be a strategy for being happy. It’s our duty to find it!” How like a woman, he thought.
“No such thing,” he said.
She found some of his thinking interesting, but some downright silly. “How like a man,” she said, “you are just feeling out of your depth, that is all; the new polyandry has scared you. But honey, the woman was always free, though not always allowed to say so openly. Is it a bad thing to come clean? She can now indulge her always dream of being an unpaid prostitute of pure benevolence, a public benefactor. She has become a collector – seven men to one woman seems about right – I have worked this out from what my patients have told me. Farmyard mathematics!”
“It doesn’t work,” he said. “Would that it did!”
“I know. But why not after all?”
“Because the poor quality of the male sperm becomes at once felt by the woman who is now the assailant. Anxiety and poor erections set in. Ejaculatio praecox! The poor little vagina must be likened to a little animal always eager for its nourishment. The sperm literally feeds it, it bathes the walls with their mucous membranes, it permeates the whole flesh and psyche. You can taste the odour of male sperm on the breath. The vagina starts to die of inanition, to falter from hunger; a hundred men with inferior sperm cannot feed it. In the gnostic sense a sperm which is poor in oxygen is deficient in the needed nourishment; it is poorly documented, poor in oxygen and the fruits of thought.”
“Go on,” she said, for it seemed a new and unusual way of looking at the sexual act, at the economy of the whole transaction. But he had turned quizzical now, as if he did not for a moment expect her to believe his theories. Smiling, however, he went on with his exposition: “The walls of the little animal – prettier often than the mouth of its owner – gives out a replete hum when the quality of the sperm is high or well-documented as we say: like a beehive or a small dynamo or a cat purring. The possibility of making a strong child with rich brain content and powerful sexuality presents itself and is eagerly welcomed by both lovers in their psyches. But with poor-quality sperm the poor little animal becomes parched and withered; sperm with no spiritual axis cannot feed the woman’s ideas or her feelings. The more she performs the more diminished she feels. Genetically she is being starved, her ideas become poor and exhausted, the joy of living deserts her. And then comes the last stage.” He put on a story-book voice and wagged a cautionary finger at her as he said, with great assurance. “Guess what? Nymphomania!” She clapped her hands at this revelation. “The girls begin to scratch themselves to death; the men find that they cannot achieve a climax easily – even younger men. Their hair recedes. They go into politics …”
“Or come to the analyst. I have restored the hair to two tired men, and have heard of analysis unblocking the sex drive. But you must know that. Where did you pick up your psychological knowledge?”
“Here and there. But I went to a woman and she could not resist my honesty – she fell in love with me.”
“And?”
“And!”
He took her hand and put it to his cheek. “Your life is full of hazards because as yet your science is inexact. She went mad and was locked up: she writes to me, long, long letters of self-reproach for having loved me. Yet there was nothing between us of a personal sort – it all went on in her head!”
“Love! It’s all done by mirrors!”
“Exactly. But I don�
��t care. I invest! I love you!”
“Prove it.”
He shook his head. “We are living out the death of the couple, the basic brick of all culture.”
“You are out of date and out of focus,” she said.
“Out of date and out of fashion, rather,” he admitted.
She said: “It’s all going too fast; you understand too much; I shall use you up too soon. I had imagined this relationship being slow, full of hesitations and nuances and unwitting naivetés. I wanted to build it slowly, match by match, like a ship in a publican’s bottle.”
He: “I thought you were too beautiful to be really clever.”
“You are not against me because I am a Freudian and a doctor? I was scared to death that it might make a sort of shadow between us – that I knew too much to be sufficiently feminine to appease you, to get my hooks into you: but it’s been so easy sliding downhill, en pente douce. I have forgotten how to brake.”
“It’s a sign of our intellectual abjectness that psychology with its miserly physical categories and positivist bias should prove liberating and enriching as it does; it proves that the psyche is seriously ankylosed by the rigour of our moeurs. The real seed of the neurosis is the belief in the discrete ego; as fast as you cure ’em the contemporary metaphysic which is Judeo-Christianity manufactures more I’s to become sick Me’s. On my word as a Professor!”
The Avignon Quintet Page 86