The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  There was a pause. “Schoolboys!” she cried in accents of distress.

  “Affad is leaving the day after tomorrow. He rang me and asked where you were. He thinks you are going to be bitter and reproach him for what you once called his ‘pre-lapsarian twaddle’.” She smiled a trifle wistfully. “Perhaps I shall, when next we meet.”

  She had sent the car away, and now set off to walk back around the lake shore; at their old meeting-place opposite the promontory near the town approaches she saw the car of Affad standing, its engine uncovered, apparently in difficulties. Its owner was trying to execute some inexpert repairs, or remedy some defect in a fashion that seemed almost laughably inept and despairing. He was no good with machines, as he always said, and the machines knew it. He saw her coming and for a moment did not know quite what line of action to take – it seemed so ignominious to be stranded there with an expensive car. So he did nothing, simply stood still and smiled sadly at her in all his humiliating dishevelment. When she was still a little way off he said, “Have you heard? I’ve been recalled at last.” She said nothing but went on walking towards him, looking at him with such hungry intensity that one would imagine her to be storing up memories of this moment against his fatal departure. “You have come to reproach me,” he said, and she shook her head. She had suddenly seen him as he really was, she had seen his eidolon in all its gentle passivity and feminine warmth. There he stood, covered in oil and with his hair standing on end, pained beyond measure and quite humiliated by his defaulting motor car. She felt a tremendous shock of sympathy, a warmth about the heart, and with her eyes full of happy tears, put her arms round him, as if to comfort him in his defeat. A new pang had shaken her, and with it a new and quite unexpected magnanimity. “Yes, I came to reproach you, damn you.” But the malediction was not really meant as such – it was an endearment. He looked at her with his sad, protesting, sea-grey eyes. She said, “I really came to thank you for giving me the key to myself – teaching me to live and create without a man. I owe you that.” They kissed exultantly. She added, “I know you are ready to take me back with you, but I am staying here where I belong; perhaps you will come back, perhaps not. We shall see.” His look was a whole discourse of rapture and deep gratitude. “With so much death in the world surely we have a right to a little love?” she said. “Let’s not spoil this, diminish it by pettiness or playacting.”

  She got into the car and pressed the self-starter. By some miracle it worked. They drove off along the lake. Never had friendship and love joined forces in this way for her. It was as if henceforward she understood everything, no more turning back. It was the right way to part even if it was not forever.

  “What will you do with yourself?” he said, putting his arm round her shoulders, for she had elected to drive. “We may have years ahead of us.”

  “I shall pursue my obstinate theology course – building the Taj Mahal on an icefloe, as you call it.”

  “Deciding how many psychoanalysts can dance on the point of a pin!”

  “Of Jews an infinite number, I feel sure.”

  There was a long silence as they watched the blue lake unrolling beside them, and then he said, “What made me so suddenly and acutely aware that perhaps I wasn’t being fair to you was a conversation I had with the Prince; for the first time on a somewhat acrimonious note. He said that in the present state of my engagements – about which you now know I don’t doubt – I was not free to love you. In the most literal sense. I could not prejudice my commitments towards the committee – it would be like breaking the chain of belief which binds us. Like breaking a letter chain. In fact, that I was loving you under false pretences and he, the Prince, was jolly well not going to have it!” He could not help grinning affectionately as he mimicked the tone of the Prince’s voice. Constance smiled also, “Good for him,” she said, “at least somebody loves me.”

  Affad said, “I am duty bound to go back and consult the brotherhood as to my chances of freeing myself from them. If I could achieve that I would be free to return to you – it would change everything. One could envisage another sort of life based on this experience. Would you encourage such an idea?”

  “You would never do it,” she said after a long pause. “It’s your whole life. You would be wrong to try. I’m sure when you reflect – when it comes to the point – you will feel bound to them, to the organisation, and not to me. Outwardly I will still be there, of course, and nothing forbids us to continue to meet. But the inward landscape has changed, and that may well be for good, forever.”

  “For love it’s the acid test,” he admitted. “But I refuse to pre-empt the future. In my present mood I feel sure that I am going to free myself and join you while there is still time. Constance, look at me.” She turned her bright eyes on him for a second and then bent them back upon the road. He said, “Can I leave you a hostage of a kind – a hostage of a strange sort? I have been meaning to ask you if you would study and pronounce upon the illness of my little son. I hesitated; but now I feel it is right to ask you if you will see him while I am away. Will you?”

  She said nothing, but her eyes filled slowly with tears, though she did not shed them. An appalling thought had come into her mind, shocking in its baseness, namely: “He wants me to cure his child in order to recover the love of his wife.” How could she think anything so foul and so untrue? In order to expurgate the fearful supposition she leaned towards him and kissed him quickly on the mouth. “Of course I will, my darling,” she said, “of course.” And he thanked her, saying, “Lily suggested it long ago. She will be glad. And the thought will link us while I’m away.”

  They drew up at the office of the Red Cross and left the car in the courtyard. It was an appropriate place to say goodbye – even a provisional goodbye. She kissed him and walked away towards the billiard bar, leaving him to look after her with his gentle and hesitant regard which somehow held finality in it. She seemed as she walked to overhear the voice of Sutcliffe say, “There are no more great loves, my lad, just Snakes and Ladders instead.”

  Soon there would only be reminiscence left, going backwards into time as one unwinds, undoes an old sweater, on and on towards the dropped stitch, the original sin. Most love just lapses from satiety and indifference, but he had given her a version of the old text which one could continue to follow out, like a salient dialogue which went on even in absence. The rendering conscious of the orgasm as a gradually shared experience, it was like something new to science! Later the thought of him would perhaps ache on like a poisoned arrow, but for the moment she felt only her exultation, her solidarity with him.

  This love was a separate culture. The world like some great express switches points without asking anyone’s permission, passing from tobacco smoke to wine, from steam to sail, satyr to faun, from one calculus to another: we live under the thrall of its symbolism. One simple default, a switch thrown too late, and the giant can be sent howling and hurtling from the rails out into the night, into the sky, among the stars. It was hard to try and see things clearly. Twixt vérismo and trompe l’oeil they were doomed to try to live and love. That night, watching dusk fall over the impassive lake which reflected a heartless city, she seemed to see death and love like a single centaur joined at the waist walking through the ice-blue waters to reach her.

  THIRTEEN

  Counterpoint

  SUTCLIFFE, DESPITE HIS DISPOSITION TO WAGGISHNESS and frivolity, was nevertheless a most obedient slave. Obsessions usually are. He materialised on the chair beside the bed just as Blanford woke from a somewhat unrefreshing sleep, opiate-imposed. “Well,” he said robustly, “at last we meet. Dr. Dyingstone, I presume.” Sutcliffe nodded gravely, and said, “At your service!”

  They both burst out laughing as they eyed each other. “I imagined you as much fatter,” said one, and the other replied, “And I much thinner.” Well, they would have to make do with reality – it was all they had to work on; it’s boring, this question of there being several different versi
ons of a self, so to speak, no? Sutcliffe had actually combed his hair and donned a respectable suit – it might have been described as tenue de ville, his get-up. With him he carried the battered scarlet minute-box with the monogram of the Royal Arms on the lid; it contained his novel – the “other” one. “What are you calling it?” asked Aubrey curiously, and nodded when he heard the title, to show that he found it suitable: Monsieur. His own version was not quite finished, and he hoped during this convalescence to complete it, taking his cue from Sutcliffe. His visitor held up the red box and said, “It’s all here!”

  “The whole quinx of the matter. Your quinx?”

  “No. Your quinx, rather. My cunx.”

  Aubrey gazed admiringly at his friend and chuckled as he said, “By the five wives of Gampopa, you keep up a pretty recondite style. Quinx to Cunx, eh?”

  “A dialogue twixt Gog and Magog.”

  “Between Mr. Quiquenparle and Mr. Quiquengrogne.”

  “Ban! Ban! Ban! Caliban!”

  “That’s the spirit!”

  It was marvellous to see eye-to-eye like this. Sutcliffe had already spotted the whisky decanter in the corner with the tray full of glasses and soda syphons. “May I?” he asked politely, inclining his throat and trembling wattles in its direction. Without waiting for an answer he crossed the room and primed a glass. Then he stood and admired the lake view while Aubrey watched him with an affectionate if somewhat disembodied air. “My vision, like yours, is not absolutely panoramic yet. it’s selective: so there is always the blind spot.” Sutcliffe nodded, frowning, and said, “It’s the point where Monsieur intrudes on the cosmic scheme. The Counterfeit Demon in the pages of Zosimos. Or in more modern terms the demon figuring among the electrical properties of Faraday.”

  “I was delighted to find that he was reborn to the R.A.F. Command as ‘the gremlin’ and is still with us. His uncles – the joker in the pack of cards and the Hanged Man of the old Tarot – are proud of him.”

  “And no wonder. He lives a very full life.”

  “And now that the war is ending, Robin, what is going to become of us? With our sad bifocal vision and the awful sense of déjà vu?”

  “We will go slowly out of date like real life.”

  “I doubt that; much remains to be done.”

  “Where?”

  “In the city! We return there!”

  “All of us? To the dead city?”

  “As many as remain. The survivors of love.”

  They reflected on the probability with doubt, almost with distaste. Aubrey said, “In the Templar legends there is one crediting the Last Supper with having taken place in Avignon. If five sat down to dine which was Judas? So runs a riddle without an answer.”

  “Will Constance come?”

  “Of course! Constance is a key,”

  That seemed a slightly less bleak vision of the future. At any rate to Aubrey it seemed still a way ahead – the other side of his convalescence. Here he must lie for months as yet, woozy from drugs, with reality dissolving like a tablet in spittle.

  “In my version,” he said, “I return to Provence with the ogres after a war something like this, having retired from the world to a chateau called Verfeuille. It’s unsatisfactory; something about their ill-starred love wasn’t right – you will help me there, I hope. The reality we had lived was more engrossing than the fiction, which was unpardonable. Now we are going back at a different angle, and with a different crew, so to speak.”

  “Can’t I opt out, go away, right away?” cried Sutcliffe in exasperation. “To India, say, or China?”

  “You want to go back into life and you can’t,” said Blanford with his bitter smile. “Nor can I – it’s back on to the drawing-board, back to the blueprint stage. Back to Avignon! There are only two ways out of Avignon, the way up and the way down, and they are both the same. The two roses belong to the same family and grow on the same stalk – Sade and Laura, the point where extremes meet. Passion sobered by pain, an amor fati frozen by the flesh. The old love-triangle on which Plato based the Nuptial Number taken from Pythagoras, a triangle the value of whose hypotenuse is 5.”

  “Quack! Quack!” said Sutcliffe irreverently. “You will not distract me in my search for the perfect she, the mistress of the sexual tangent, les éléments limitrophes. I demand as my right love-in-idleness, a Laura unconscious of her fate, femme fatale, féotale, féodale.”

  “Instead you will find only the ‘five-stranded’ Tibetan breath, the ‘mount’ or ‘steed’ of white light, and a titanic silence with no geography. A tall tree with the sap arrested in its veins.”

  “But where?”

  “In Avignon, rose of all the world.”

  FOURTEEN

  By the Lake

  THE DAY DAWNED SO UNUSUALLY WARM OVER THE LAKE that Blanford grew impatient to be lying thus, gazing across the green lawns to the still blue water. Why not a sortie? His first operation was in two days’ time. “Cade,” he said, “today is my birthday. I want to get a breath of air. I want to go for a push along the lake. I want to celebrate the birth of my mother’s death. Get a chair and a rug, and bring your Bible. You will read to me as you used to do to her.” To his surprise the valet looked almost elated as he bobbed his assent to the idea. “Very good, sir.” Tucked down in rugs, elongated in the rubber cradle, Blanford hardly felt the rubber tyres on the paved Corniche. But he was still drowsy and also lightheaded from calming drugs, and his thoughts evolved in pericopes without a sequential pattern.

  “Cade, we shall never see Greek drama as the Greeks themselves saw it.”

  “No, sir.”

  “For them it was an expiation.”

  “Yes, sir. Shall I read? And where from? D’you want ‘In the beginning was the Word’?”

  “No. ‘The Lord is My Shepherd’, rather.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  The words reached deep inside him and he felt his bowels moved, his entrails plucked by their ravenous splendour of language – an English which was no more. And paradoxically while he listened he thought of other things, of Nietzsche’s missing essay on Empedocles, of madness, of evolution, of the emergence of man from the belly of the time-bound woman, and with him all nature. Slime and warmth and water-lulling plants and infusoria and larval fish. The Creator thrusts his hand into the glove, up to his arm, as into a sausage skin, and then withdraws it while a collection of wet organs rushes in to develop into man. A weird assemblage of arms, legs, eyes, teeth, gradually sorting themselves into completeness: a ditto of mental attributes flowed out like electricity playing – sensation, ideation, perception, cognition: the whole held together by the centrifugal forces of the spinning turntable of a world. Whee! Then each in its category rose – plant into tree into fish into man, whose mind’s eye would lead him into the mischief of paint, words, music and above all buildings to exteriorise, celebrate, and even house his body – living, as a temple, dead, as a tomb. Hubris came somewhere after this and with it dread. The antlers of the god grew on his temples, he went mad, dared to see!

  He discovered fire, wine, weapons and tools, but also the stone-fulcrum for building, the enigmatic formula of Pythagoras, the arm of gold. (Every man his own true pyramid.) He could not detach himself enough from the maternal shadow to understand Death and come to terms with it, even to harness it as he harnessed rivers. (The Druids had a way perhaps?)

  The voice of Cade ran on like gravel in the stream of the language; his coarse diction gave the words a robust music of their own. The vowels swelled like sails. Meanwhile Blanford’s mind played hopscotch among the pericopes of fond ideas which might one day inform his prose. “The crisis came when early man first lost sexual periodicity, for then he risked running out of desire. The race was imperilled by his indifference. So the anxious divinity, Nature, invented the specious beautiful crutch of Beauty to spur him on. What could be more unnatural, more delightfully perverse? Looking through each other’s eyes the lovers saw more than the memory of each other, th
ey saw ‘it’, and were at once humbled and captivated. The body knelt to enter the mother-image like a cathedral and to die, so that the fruitful larval worm could hatch its butterfly, the nextborn soul, a child.”

  “In the midst of life we are in death,” said Cade.

  But, Blanford thought on obstinately, the Greek ideal of Beauty was a wonderful invention, for its value was transferable to other things, projected like a ray from man’s own precious body. Artisan and his artifact improved into art pure. Beauty can reside, like the smell of musk, even in functional machines: substitute-bodies enjoying proportion and bias (callipygous women with haunches rich in galbe). Mental orgasm can be approached, abstract as paper-money or music or rain. The poet droops, suffers and invites his Muse – a one-man intensive care unit for the romantic invalid! You cannot look upon Eve future with impunity, for she carries within her the seeds of the idea of Death!