The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  It was as if she had lip-read his mind for she said slowly, “I wonder how we look now, after all this time?” They stood listening to each other’s breathing, just their antennae touching, so to speak. Then he said, “I have a light, if you wish to see.” Actually he wished to see her, to evaluate how she was, from her eyes. Silence again. “Shall I show you?” She said nothing but just stood, so he slowly reached back into his pocket for the little torch which always aided him plant his latchkey correctly. He held it above his head like a douche and switched it on so that the light flowed down over his countenance; at the same time raising his head. She gasped. “It does not look like you at all,” she said. “Not at all.”

  He was dismayed and a little astonished because it seemed that she was talking about someone else, to somebody else. He had the sudden impression that he was now impersonating somebody he did not know, had not met. “What is your name?” she asked, with a touch of peremptory sternness, increasing his discomfort, his sense of being there under false pretences. “Surely you know,” he said. “Surely, Lily!”

  She burst into tears, but very briefly; after a single cry the current was switched off, so to speak, and she knuckled her eyes free and said humbly, “I have forgotten. Not speaking for long, my memory has gone.” Her wild look of sadness was replaced by one of savage expectation. She took his wrists and shook them softly. “Shall I guess?” she said slowly. He nodded. “Yes, Lily, guess.” She bowed her head on her breast in deep contemplation. Then she gave a small snort and said, “It is like a gigantic crossword puzzle, only instead of words just sounds to be filled in and colours!” She was speaking of reality, he quite understood. It made him feel helpless and morbidly sad. “O God, why can’t you remember? Can’t you remember when you dropped the basket and all the eggs were broken – every last one?” She gave a cry of amazement, youthful and lyrical, her face cast up to the sky as she pronounced the word, the elusive word: “Sebastian.1 At last I have got it. O my darling! How could I?” And now she was really crying and in his arms, her fragility made all the more striking by the tension, the electric current flowing through her body like wind through the foliage of a tree. He held her humbly and with pity and a wild desire to make amends to her for the shortcomings of the world which had allotted her only half a human mind, but not (cruelly) withdrawn the capacity to love! He groaned in the inside of his own mind, groaned. It was stupid, he knew. One always feels that one should be able to cure the whole world. That one is to blame for everything, every iniquity. It was a form of false pride, he supposed.

  He felt that what was needed at that moment was to give her confidence, and so with a kind of necessary innocence he sat down on the ground before the hut, pocketing his torch. And after a moment of indecision so did she. So they sat in the dust facing each other, like Arab children. Now her breathing had become less laboured, and her fingers had ceased to tremble, so he felt that he could embark upon a recital of his adventures since last they had met. Nor did he omit anything, speaking about his attachment to Constance with a kind of puzzled sincerity which seemed to her very moving, for she stifled a sob and put two fingers sympathetically upon his wrist. He told her that Constance was to try and evaluate the position of their son in medical terms and decide upon what treatment, if any, was best for the case. But even as he spoke she shook her head softly from side to side as if she had already made up her own mind about the matter, and that it did not offer much hope.

  And then about himself. “I have received my own orders as well; you know that for some time I was quite expecting them – well, now the die is cast, though for the moment I haven’t got the actual details. But this will be our last meeting, of that I am sure. So I must thank you for everything, and for having put up with my shortcomings as you did. It was not your fault that things turned out the way they did.” O dear! It was the truth and yet it sounded terribly prosy when put into words; and why the devil did he have this sense of contrition? Had it been his fault? Lily was like a butterfly born with only one wing – otherwise perfect in every way. The fatal handicap stood in the way of fulfilment – or perhaps simply changed its prerogatives. She would sit there in darkness now, perhaps for life after life, gazing at a hole in space throughout the full length and breadth of time. He could see her whole future of darkness in his mind’s eye – as if she stood on the bridge of a liner; the night was a liner, slowly travelling through absolute darkness towards an undisclosed goal somewhere in the darkness ahead. “Well,” she said humbly at last, “So you must go at last. We must all go.” And she gave a sigh full of world weariness and passed into a kind of compassionate silence, still touching his wrist with her fingers. After a long time he stirred and rose, and they embraced and stood latched one to the other in a final decisive gesture. Kissed also. It was like kissing the face of a rag doll. Then he left her.

  He drove himself back across the desert in a state of dejection and exhaustion, glad of the car’s tinny radio which accompanied his thoughts with the monotonous ululations of Arabic music unwinding its quartertone spools forever upon the moonlit night. His headlights put up startled desert creatures – were they hares? They fled so fast into the surrounding darkness that he could not say for sure. And then at last the dispiriting city of chromium lusts and avarice and boredom! How well the music illustrated its suffocating monotony, its limitations of growth, squeezed between two deserts! He would be glad to get away again. Abruptly he snapped off the radio and allowed the swishing desert silence to fill the hull of his car. It was late. He was exhausted by so much fervent thought. The house was dark except for the hall light. He felt suddenly sad and mateless. He lay down on his bed fully dressed and went to sleep at once, only to be woken by the discreet knock of Said as he came in bearing a cup of early morning tea. He drank it with relief and treated himself to a long hot shower before going downstairs to where his breakfast awaited him beside the small lilypond with its whispering water.

  At ten the phone rang and a somewhat irascible Prince asked him where the devil he had been, “because I was trying to reach you last evening and there was no reply”. Affad explained; but he was intrigued by the note of concern, almost of alarm, in the Prince’s voice as he went on, “I spend almost the whole day on the phone to Geneva – you will imagine the difficulties, the bad lines and so on – in the hope of finding out about your famous letter. It was delivered to your office, and thence taken by Cade to the clinic, thinking you were with Aubrey, but you had gone. Now comes the funny part: Aubrey gave it to Constance, thinking that she would certainly be seeing you. But apparently she did not, or forgot it. At any rate she seems to have it, but after a series of calls to her consulting rooms I managed to get Schwarz who tells me that she has gone on leave of absence, to have a rest. Of the letter he knows nothing. It’s to be presumed that she still has it?” Affad was puzzled by the tone of the Prince for it conveyed a notion of alarm, which did not seem to match the rather commonplace facts of the case. After all, a letter had gone astray, but was not lost. He said, “You sound sort of strange.”

  “I am a little put out,” admitted the Prince, “and I will tell you why. When I managed to get through to Aubrey and he said that he had handed it to her he said that she had been angry and depressed, and said that she had half a mind to put it into the fire or tear it up unread. You see, she disapproves very strongly in … well, in us, all we stand for. I wish to hell he had not been so indiscreet. But you see that if she were to do anything impulsive like that it would constitute a sort of technical miscarriage vis-à-vis the central committee. I could not foresee the reaction, but once more you would come under fire.” Affad groaned and agreed. “I would have liked to tell Constance direct that any attempt to interfere with the course of … well, justice, historical justice, in a sense, might put you in a gravely prejudicial position … But now she has gone away somewhere and we don’t know for how long. I have left a message with her colleague Schwarz, but he is a pretty vague fellow like all analysts
. Anyway I can do no more.”

  “Thank you, anyway,” said Affad. “I see no undue cause for worry. But of course once a woman disturbs a sequence of events by a rash act …”

  “Exactly,” said the Prince. “It always makes me nervous when a woman intervenes. Things usually get into a tangle. At any rate, for the moment there is no undue cause for our fears. Have you made any plans yourself?”

  “I haven’t yet said goodbye in Cairo so I plan to spend a few days there this week. Back Saturday.”

  THREE

  Inner Worlds

  AS FOR CONSTANCE, SHE HAD AT LAST TAKEN THE ADVICE of Schwarz and left for the little lake house which they used for weekends of leave. It lay in a sunken garden and was built over a boat-house containing the precious motor-boat of Schwarz, which he had christened Freud. There was also a tiny skiff which they used when they wished to sunbathe on the lake or to visit the local auberge for lunch or dinner. It was a delectable corner and there was no telephone – a fact which set off its quality of seclusion and quiet. As ideal for work as for rest, then.

  But in her present disturbed mood it would have been hard to think of rest, so she had done what she had so often done before, namely taken her work with her in the form of the medical dossier which the central clinic had built up out of their investigations of Affad’s son; a document which depressingly reflected the objective medical view of the child as “a case”. It lay before her on the rough deal table together with her typewriter and a cluster of pencils and notebooks. She shrank from it somehow, for she could foresee its dispiriting evaluations of human misery, and the inflated vocabulary which could hardly disguise the almost total ignorance in which their science lay shrouded. Nevertheless. One must begin somewhere, one must make an effort to understand, the hunt for exact observation was their only raison d’être. She could hear the cautious voice of Schwarz cutting into her thoughts to warn her, “Yes, but method, while desirable, must remain an art and not dwindle into a barren theology – the sort of superstition upon which dead universities exist!”

  Okay. Okay. Symbiotic child psychosis with marked autistic traits. As she read the portrait of the small staring face in the sailor hat, fervent in its withdrawn impavidness, gazed out upon her from the slowly gliding limousine. It was of course the face of Affad in miniature that she watched.

  The child was referred by a hospital where he had been kept under observation for three weeks of tests at the request of his father and the child’s grandmother; the mother, who had a long record of psychic upheavals punctuated by ordinary periods during which she resumed her responsibilities, exhibiting a normal but hypertense relationship to the family circle when she was at home. But during periods of collapse or stress she herself returned to her home in Egypt and had herself committed as a voluntary patient for rest and treatment. The evolution of the boy’s childhood seems to have been normal and regular, but after the mother’s first disappearance for long from the scene during his sixth year, he fell ill with a fever which resisted accurate diagnosis, but which kept him in bed for several months during which the present traits slowly evolved. The behaviour pattern was sufficiently striking to prompt parental anxiety and the father sought medical aid. The case was referred to my care and a fairly detailed and intensive period of observation and evaluation followed, during which I saw the child for several hours a day. His grandmother was permitted to stay in the hospital with him, though he himself exhibited neither alarm nor curiosity and stayed sunk in the apathy of his condition.

  The report had been written by an old friend and fellow-student of Constance, a wise and experienced neurologist not lacking in insight and affection, with children of her own; and it was extremely detailed, though as always with such a subject, consistently tentative. She heard Schwarz again: “Despite such a river of verbiage we know damn all about the human condition either in health or in sickness. Yet we must slog along.” Slog was the word! Constance made herself some tea and returned to the thoughtful and painstaking document of her friend.

  The standard preliminary tests showed no trace of anything pathological. There seemed to be no history of lues or any other family illness in the background. Cerebral computer tomography registered normal states.

  Up till the time of his illness which could have been touched off by the crisis of his mother’s departure, his development had been somewhat retarded as to speech and the making of sounds; but not sufficiently marked to warrant real anxiety – some children are slow to learn to speak. But from the illness onwards his autistic behaviour grew so marked as to prompt a question as to whether he were not actually deaf and not responsive to sound-signals. Yet this did not seem to be the case for at some loud noises he turned the head, but very slowly, and his look was blank and incurious. Sometimes he stood quite still with eyes narrowed as if he were listening to some inner noise, though his reactions remained expressionless and stony. He submitted to caresses with equal indifference, and if a human face approached his would look away or look through it into some imaginary place, as if something or someone were waiting for him there. His great physical beauty makes it easy to be fanciful about him. But he was like a mechanism which proves defective, had stuck definitively at a certain stage in the building. With both eye-contact and physical contact lost one became somewhat hesitant about an explicit diagnosis of the case. I myself alternated between notions of cerebral damage, pure autism, shock and hyperkinetic syndrome: since whenever he did move the procedure was almost ataxic in its lack of coordination, though always violent and directed towards some inanimate object around him, into which he often sank his teeth before dropping it and then standing still, to stare at a wall or door with total expressionlessness. He did not behave destructively with his hands, tearing things apart, but simply sank his teeth into them, and then dropped them.

  His grandmother with whom he lived was herself a somewhat dramatic old lady, and seemed disposed to help, but owing to her defective French and Italian did not seem able to provide much understanding which might be of medical aid to a would-be physician. The boy was named Affad after his father, a businessman who came frequently to see him but lived in semi-permanence in Egypt and did not reside in Geneva. The old lady lived in great luxury in her own lakehouse with several servants, a large private limousine as well as an expensive motor-boat for outings, on which the little boy always accompanied her after being carefully dressed for the occasion in true Levantine style. The family came originally from Alexandria in Egypt.

  In these circumstances the child lived a strange non-life, or a life of total non-cooperation despite the presence of kindly servants. His vast playroom was full of toys which he ignored, even the musical ones, like the toy piano and drum and xylophone which would normally tempt a child. Of course with both father and mother absent there was a lack of family atmosphere about his life, but many children suffer such conditions without becoming ill. This could be a subsidiary reason but did not seem to be central. Nor could his father offer any clues; he was a somewhat effete and withdrawn figure, fashionably and even elegantly dressed, but overcame the first impression of insipidity and proved extremely articulate, though of course completely in the dark as to the child. His own medical history offered none either, and he seemed depressed and concerned about this highly intractable condition which had, as he put it, rendered his child as silent as a mummy. I obtained his active agreement to venture upon a series of tentative visits to the child with a view to trying to penetrate this mask of impassivity, or at least come to a definite conclusion as to the causes. I spent over an hour in his presence about three times a week, just to observe his habits, however passive they might be. He was taken out on the lake sometimes in the big motorlaunch, dressed up and clean. He liked to sit and trail one hand in the water, though without any evident pleasure. The other excursion was in the limousine which went slowly along the lakeside for an hour or so. He sat looking at the passers-by and the houses, but saying nothing, impassive.

&nbs
p; He does not refuse food but he has still to be fed, although old enough to feed himself; nor does he show any preference as to dishes. He goes through the actions of eating with indifference. He sleeps restlessly and sometimes groans in his sleep or whimpers and has been known to suck his sheet – but this is a fairly normal suckling hangover like thumb-sucking; one is tempted to think that it would be too easy to assume his condition to be the result of shock at his mother’s departure. I would say rather that the shock touched off a more deeply based anxiety historically situated in the remoter past, and was concerned with his suckling problems. I suspected that the mother might have been guilty of depriving the child of its milk either from distaste for the whole business, like so many mothers; or simply had broken off the suckling period in favour of the bottle at too early a stage. Of course this is a traditional view after Klein, yet it is rather puzzling that he showed no disturbances over eating now, that his whole condition seemed to be independent of a food problem.

  Here the dossier came to an end and there followed some notes in the hand of Schwarz which began:

  By ill luck this unsatisfactory preliminary sketch could not be amplified as the therapist was forced to return to Canada on duty and owing to staff shortages we could not allocate another for many months, so that the situation was allowed to drift and at the time of writing has not markedly changed. All the elements described here remain constant, and the life led by the child maintains its steady rhythm. I think it desirable that we try and penetrate a little further into the obscurity of his condition. There are a number of things which have not been tried; for example a pet, say a kitten. It is hard to resist a kitten playing with wool or a rolling ping-pong ball. Harder to resist the advances of a puppy. Then, what effect if any have images? Images projected on the nursery wall could be tried, just to see whether they raise the tone of his response. What about music while he sleeps…? I throw out these suggestions at random. I think, however, that since you have gone as far as to promise your friend a consultation you should perhaps take the place of the therapist and continue the portrait of this (in my own view, looking in from the outside) classical autism!