The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  “Then gradually the voices came, I developed a whole repertoire, it was like becoming a hotel with someone different in each room. Yes, but you could mix up the keys if you weren’t careful. Laughing professionally before a public – that is something different. I began to voyage among the living and the dead – at the suggestion of my lover, an old man weighed down with his culture. Werther, Kleist, Manfred, Byron, Hamlet, he could not divest himself so he voided them all on me. I did not read anything, you understand, but he directed me and coached me and instructed me so they were more real to me than if I had read them myself. Gradually as I improved in richness I added other touches, sudden frightening grimaces, choking and falling, enacting a shooting star or a flash of lightning. A pistol shot, a groan, a sigh – Casimir developed these thoughts and planted them in me so that I enacted them. But now I had entered a new domain of total joylessness. I felt the strain. You see, right from the beginning this man had enslaved me against my own will. It’s common enough in Egypt, this sort of magic. When I refused his first advances he used magic. His wife Fatima told me long afterwards how it worked – she too was forced by his threats. He forced her to perform fellatio on him, holding her by the chignon, clamped. With his free hand he dialled my number and engaged in a long amorous pleading conversation – leaving me in no doubt as to what was being done to him and by whom. At the moment when he felt his sperm pass into the mouth of Fatima I felt it also for he had visualised my ‘eidolon’ as we say. I cried out and dropped the phone, but it was done. Next day I woke with a headache and a fever and a sore throat. I dreamed of him. I was on fire. Finally I was so exhausted by the mental waves he was sending me – the sheer weight – that I capitulated and asked him to come. I could not wait, I was in a frenzy of capitulation.

  “So it came about. He was active and vicious but very clever and a magician with money. But his look was so sad and disabused, his eyes so ignorant of smiling, that it gave one a thrill: one was talking to a dead man, one felt. He used to say, ‘Time is rusting away inside me, my heart is full of barbed wire.’ I no longer hated him, the hate had dulled. I was his slave and I hated only myself. Yet he must pay one day, I felt it. I was not surprised when the stranger came from the city with a message. A new era had already begun. The veins in my head had started to swell with water, throbbing: echoing: booming! It was this stranger who asked me if it wasn’t right that Casimir should pay, should die. There was no other real solution, it would seem; the little group of his friends had turned against him. They were looking for a passive instrument – that is how he put it. Passive. Instrument. I watched him curiously when he was asleep, he seemed so near to death already. Once he felt my gaze on him and he opened one eye and said: ‘You know this is with my full consent? Don’t be afraid to act if they ask!’ Could it be possible that he knew?

  “I had started my tricks already – I was imitating his voice on the telephone and ordering things from shops, all in his name. A mountain of jewellery was what I felt I needed to counter my ugliness. He knew but said nothing. As for Fatima, I left her for another occasion, another country, another method. The symptoms were much the same but the powder left no trace in the organs though she had already denounced me by letter, for she had been warned.”

  Constance listened with intense concentration to this professional monologue, to this desolate man, empty of all feeling. He went on: “I discovered that even when I was acting, I myself was only acting. Where had I gone? My I? My eye?”

  The desolation of the liar! He was nodding slowly with the mandarin-like nodding of the morphinomane – though he was not one in real fact. He was only illustrating time running on, running out. “Tick-tock,” he said. “So it goes on. Tick-tock. Do you carry a watch, like all doctors do? May I see it, please?” As a matter of fact she did, in the fob-pocket of her white smock. It was a pretty little timepiece, slightly ovoid, almost egg-shaped. She placed it on the table before him and he took it up with a sort of shy rapture, examining it with close attention, holding it to his ear. Then he swallowed it right before her very eyes and they gazed at each other with silent amazement, for he himself seemed astonished by his own action. It was important not to over-react, as with a child who swallows a peach-stone. She stared. “Why,” she said at last, “did you do that?” and he shook his head with a childish expression of wonder on his face: “I don’t know. I suddenly needed to stop the world. It was stronger than me. I stopped his, didn’t I? In spite of our romance I stopped it thoroughly, once and for all. But this wasn’t very clever of me, I admit.”

  The hour was up according to the electric clock on the wall and she rose. “I will tell Pierre,” she said. “He will know what to do.”

  “I don’t feel like apologising,” he said and his underlip trembled as if he was about to start crying. She pressed the bell and the vast form of the negro appeared in the doorway, smiling. She explained what had happened in the most matter of fact way and seemed by her tone to reassure the sick man for he smiled and nodded. Pierre took his sleeve with a tactful nonchalance and they set off back to the dangerous ward together, walking away circumspectly through the trees. She watched them disappear and then slipped back to her own room, only to find that Schwarz had also gone. A passage from his new book was on the typewriter and she bent down to read it. “But Freud like Darwin was truthful to the point of holiness. Their devout scientific atheism had the necessary rigour to produce results. When you look through a telescope of high magnification you must hold your breath so the image does not waver. Now, how poor the dialogue has become. Not science but semantics rules! Paris, instead of playing a seminal role to replace the murdered Vienna has reaffirmed its lesser role as the capital of fashion in ideas, of superficiality. Spindrift of politics fabricated by educated poltroons with taste. Barbe à papa, a candy-floss culture.”

  Schwarz had grown increasingly critical of the French röle during the war. “As Darwin himself noted: ‘To reason while observing is fatal – but how useful afterwards!’“ While she read, her colleague himself appeared, with his mildly sardonic air of curiosity and amusement. “Well?” he said, and she gave an account of her session with Mnemidis and his gesture with her watch. He laughed with delight and said: “Poor Pierre will have to spend his days stool-watching until it reappears, if it ever does. How do you know – he may digest it! Thank God, however, for the session seems to have done you some good!” As they talked he had placed his fingers upon her pulse. “And your colour is good once more!” Perhaps the demon of this fatigue would pass and her composure be restored by itself? “I have had another insulting letter from Sutcliffe, probably written when he was drunk.” He took up a sheet of official notepaper and read out slowly, “ ‘Schwarz, you bloody man, supporter of lost causes among which Love looms largest, why not try another method? Instead of fretting about changing the world, why not realise and accept it as it is, admitting that its order is divine, that reality, of which we are part, realises itself thus. Swallow the whole thing whole! If you did, if you do, the great paradox will supervene; the world will automatically and irremediably change itself and of its own accord. Or so they say! Farewell!’”

  “He has been drinking again I don’t doubt. I think you must really join him one day for a game of billiards.”

  Schwarz looked startled. “Blood sports! Me?” He made defensive gestures with his hands. They were finished for the day and uncertain of how to fill up the evening. He thought he would probably go to the cinema, while she thought with dread of her empty flat. It seemed more than ever desirable to unearth some company which might help her to pass the remaining daylight hours without too much room for introspection! Schwarz seemed equally solicitous about her balance. He said, “Constance, when are you going to see the small boy of Affad – the autistic one?” She sat down and reflected. “I don’t know. I am in such a disturbed state at the moment that I thought to let things settle down a bit.”

  Schwarz shook his head. “I should start at once,” h
e said, “at least to make the opening moves. After all, there may be nothing to be done. The children of the rich and purseproud are always in the greatest danger.”

  Children!

  She remembered Affad declaiming in a mocking voice something like: “Children! you were born to disappoint your parents as we have all been, for our parents built us gilded and padded cages to live happily-ever-after-in – and look what came about: exile, bereavement, folly, voyages, despair, ecstasy, illness, love, death: all life in a single stab like a harlot’s kiss.”

  She was thinking sadly of the absent Affad and suddenly coming to herself she saw that Schwarz was contemplating her with solicitude and concern, trying to estimate just where she stood in the face of this crisis in her affairs. “My God! what a shabby profession it is – or perhaps it is us, worn out by the sheer magnitude of the task and the limitations imposed by inadequate knowledge. I have started dishing out pills, the first sign of morbid frustration. And our job is to teach our clients how to rediscover a state of joyful nonchalance in the face of things, something as calm as death but just not death … And here we are falling sick ourselves. I’m worried about you. You have become a bore.” Thus Schwarz.

  “You mean in love! I know it!”

  “But that is not why he left?”

  “No. It’s more complicated.”

  It was both more complicated and yet quite simple, quite transparent. “You know what I think? I think I will try to patch up my wounded self-esteem by buying that fur coat which I need for the winter. I have been putting it off all the year. It seems just the moment. Do you think it will save the day?”

  “Yes. The instinct is sound!” he said, not without a tinge of irony. He was about to add that it was one of Lily’s habits when she felt depressed, but was suddenly assailed by a pang of depression at the thought of her, at the thought of having betrayed her, as he put it to himself. When going to the cinema he tried to avoid the newsreels which preceded the big film, lest they show scenes of the advances into Germany. “And those pictures,” she said, “that’s another reason – I found them on Affad’s desk, the whole exhibition folio spread out on the floor. They are mind-blenching in their horror. It’s quite beyond weeping. One wanted to bang one’s head on the wall from sheer incomprehension. How could they? How could we?”

  Schwarz sighed and drew obscure diagrams on the writing pad at his elbow.

  The confusions caused by the onset of war had been great, but had given place to a certain artificial order during the prosecution of it over a period of years. Some sort of haphazard system had emerged based on the prevailing military and political options. Now with the return of a hesitant and fragmentary quasi-peace this factitious order was once more disturbed and on an even wider scale, for the whole world by now had reeled out of orbit under the hammer blows of the sick Germany. The confusions engendered by this peace were almost worse; Switzerland was an oasis of calm, an island, compared to the surrounding hinterland which was so fully occupied with the disbanding of armies, resettlement of disturbed populations, onerous shortages, dislocated communications, broken civic threads everywhere which must be retied, respooled. The terrifying photographs of which she spoke had been taken by the armies as they advanced, and they were of concentration camps and their inmates. Everyone had known about the extermination camps, it is true, but people find things hard to realise, to accept what they might intellectually know. The Red Cross had received all this frightful documentary material with instructions from the military and political arm to give it the widest possible publicity; and to this end the pictures had been enlarged and an exhibition formed which showed the work of the camps in all their dreary horror. The idea was to mount a travelling public exhibition together with an illustrative text in several languages. Blanford had been approached for that and the whole project had been the subject of a number of committee meetings.

  “I was intrigued to see from the minutes,” said Constance, “that you came out rather strongly against the display idea for the pictures. We thought that as a Jew the subject …”

  Schwarz made a noise like a snort and said, “Aber, Constance, I am first of all a doctor, and my decision was according. The subject is horrible, the injustice and horror palpable, but on such a scale should we turn it into a peepshow? Of course the thing must stay on the record and we will somehow have to try and forgive what it will be impossible to forget. But finally this whole-scale outbreak of German lust-morder was a national aberration on a fantastic scale. What is even more interesting though is that they managed to start the French off behaving like that at first; doubtless the British would have followed suit if the Channel expedition had come off. All this raises a medical and philosophic problem of such great importance that we must try and study it coolly, as we are trying to study Mnemidis. What a triumph it would be if we could throw that Faustian switch and get him working with rather than against us. Roughly, all that was in my mind when I voted against.”

  “I see.”

  “I wonder if you do. I know that Affad does because I was able to discuss it with him, and of course in the new book I try and deal with the whole matter in general terms. Our whole civilisation is enacting the fall of Lucifer, of Icarus!”

  She felt a rush of affection for all that he had given her over the years and a quickening of love and admiration for the dignity of the man and his faithfulness to his craft. He worshipped method like the wise old god he was. “Affad was right when he said that the most tragic thing about the German decision to abolish the Jews was that their solution, for all the horrible pain and suffering it brought, was profoundly frivolous – cruel paradox! For the problem of the Jews is far more serious, not less, concerning as it does an alchemical prise de position on the vexed question of matter. Demos Demos Democritos … now we see that matter is not excrement but thought. If we have come to the end of this cycle and are now plunging into a hubristic dénouement I can’t help as a Jew being deeply proud of the tremendous intellectual achievement of Jewish thought. I am thinking of our three great poets of matter. What a stupendous Luciferian leap into the darkness of determinism. Will there be time to correct the angle of vision, that’s what worries and intrigues me? This Jewish passion for absolutism and matter has already started to modify itself – entropy is the new sigil! Freud arrived on the scene like a new Merlin to take up the challenge of the Delphic oracle. He resolved the riddle of Oedipus. A Hero! He paid for it with his organ of speech, just as Homer and Milton each paid for his inner vision with his sight! But the confusion of gold and matter is a philosophic problem, and you can’t deal with it by abolishing the Jews’ physical presence. Our racial passion must become less visceral and more disinterested. The Jewish mind cannot play as yet! O Christ, what does all this rigmarole matter? Who will read my book? They will say that I am anti-Jewish!”

  “Yes,” she said. “I am familiar with this line of thought because of …” – strange that she should have a kind of inhibition about pronouncing his name – “Affad!” There! but it made her feel shy. “Unhappily we still have a need for heroes. Myths cannot get incarnated and realised fully in the popular soul which seeks this nourishment with sacrifices, for reality is just not bearable in its banal daily form, and the human being, however dumb he is, is conscious of the fraud.”

  “Yes. It’s what that bastard Jung is up to. Affad approves a little bit but not entirely of his attitude. The alchemical work is in distillation or decoction – the personal ego decants itself in thoughts which are really acts and slowly, drop by amazing drop, virtue, which is voidness, precipitates.” They both laughed, he with that sardonic helpless Viennese despair which had taken so many generations to form. It was not cynicism. It was a profound creative distrust of the dispositions taken up by reality, by history. He said softly, “A sort of pourriture de soi …”

  They were both wondering what Mnemidis would have made of this conversation – highly articulate as he was. How could one talk to him about such
matters, which were after all vital for his health, his recovery? His response would be “acted”: for him all love was the genius of misgiving, which rules the human heart.

  Schwarz was sick to death of this world and its works. Even as he felt the pulse of Constance under his fingers he felt rise in his own soul the thick sediment of despair, like the lees of a bad wine, which dragged him always towards suicide – the suicide which always seemed to him so inevitable. One day it would claim him, of that he was sure. At such moments when the demon had him by the hair he wanted to bury his face between the breasts of a woman and hide from this all-pervading idea.

  “I dreamed last night that we killed Mnemidis with one simple injection; you helped me. We were so happy to be delivered from him!” He sighed and cleaned his old hornrimmed glasses and he thought to himself, “It’s a question of patience. The vast weight of cosmic submission, the inertia of mass, will prevail over all.”

  “I’d like a dry Martini,” she said.

  “Done!” he said, stripping off his white tunic.

  They took the ferry across the lake whose glassy surface reflected the coming night, and made their way with slow steps across the town – carefully avoiding the old Bar de la Navigation, for they did not want any more talk – and slowly arriving at the main station of the town where they sought out the first-class buffet, incomparable for the size and quality of its pre-war Martinis. The barman was an old friend, and had in his youth worked at the Ritz in Paris. Yes, they wanted to sit quite quiet in a companionable silence. And this came about as planned except that as they sat down he said, “I am profoundly worried about you.” And she replied, “I know you are – I have a juicy neurasthenia coming on, like influenza. It will pass, you will see.” No more. Just that and the alcohol burning in the mind like a spirit lamp. And of course, dimmed by the heavy doors, all the distant romantic stirring of trains arriving and departing.