The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  Some of the encounters sparked off other feelings, for example aggression; he would stab at her eyes with his fingers, or put them in her mouth with a rough intent, but which faded into helpless tears, as though the impetus had spent itself. In the aggression she read his reluctance to surrender to the soft appeals of reason and health. Then at other times the weeping ceased and he would lie in her lap for a spell, brooding as he listened to her singing. Sometimes he carefully touched her mouth again, and smeared his spittle round it carefully, as if following out some inner ritual. And sometimes also he might lie as calmly as a nursing infant making soft sounds with his voice, “da da va va”. Once he put his mouth to her cheek in an involuntary gesture of affection, but was immediately seized by contrition and reverted to his blank, sightless look, turning his head away from her. But his eyes were at least open now, and he could now gaze even at the world outside the window of the playroom; or at the slowly unrolling lake scenery opening like a Japanese fan during the afternoon drive. The old grandmother reported that while he was still restless at night he had long periods when he was in a good mood, and his gestures and impulsive movements seemed less uncontrolled. The process would still be a long one, Constance felt, but the orientation had now changed in a more fruitful direction – the ship was on the right course. And with the first successes in this field she felt the whole weariness of her profession surge up in her. What was the point of effecting a psychic repair of this kind if one could not leave the patient to continue the work in competent hands? Who would replace her, who would communicate the loving care and the warmth to the little robot when she was forced to leave? For the moment the very evident success of the treatment was enough to keep her happy and enthusiastic, but already queries about the future rose in her mind; she had begun to divine what old age was all about! It would have been so good to spend the night with a man, instead of staying sealed off and frigid like this, incapable of warmth, of a simple, lustful response to life. This was the terrible weakness of setting too serious a valuation on experience. What to do? Once she had tried to break out of the prison of her sensibility by getting drunk at a cocktail party and succumbing to the charms of a pleasant younger colleague. But the episode had been like trying to ignite damp straw. She was humiliated not by his ineptness so much as her own inadequacy. How right Affad had been to insist so stoutly that all sex attachments are psychic and that the body is simply a reservoir of sensation. Loving from this point of view meant that reality was not compromised, and one faded into nature as if into a colour wash!

  But if there was any fatuous disposition to self-congratulation over the increasing success of her treatment it was nipped in the bud by an incident, trivial in itself, which showed how intricate and strange are the associative schemes which provoke and underlie human behaviour. Or at least so it would seem from a remark made by the grandmother one afternoon as they drove slowly round the lake. The old lady who, for all her forbidding silences, was very observant, turned her large dark operatic eye on Constance and said, “You are not wearing the scent today!”

  “It’s probably because I went for a swim in the lake – but in fact I am, though it’s much fainter. Do I smell of it so very much?”

  The old lady smiled and shook her head. She said, “No, it’s just that it is my daughter’s scent, Lily’s.”

  “You mean Jamais de la Vie?”

  “Jamais de la Vie!”

  Constance was dumbfounded, exasperated and professionally delighted – perhaps this is what had given her such an immediate associative transference with the child, had enabled her to penetrate his emotions so swiftly. And the tears … She went back over the old diagnoses in the light of this new gleam of knowledge. How lucky she had been, for her choice of a new scent to match a new hair-style, a new character change, had been quite haphazard. Had it in fact been a key? She turned to look at the small abstracted face beside her in the looming automobile and wondered. And if all human emotions and action depended on such an affective pattern of association-responses … It was a pure wilderness of associations, a labyrinth in which the sources of all impulse lay. Besides, it was after all sound psychology to trace the roots of emotion and desire to the sense of smell – its vast ramifications had never been completely worked out, and never would be. She tried to remember the smell of Affad – it was a sort of non-smell, like the smell of the desert: yet somehow at the heart of its airless-ness there was a perfume, the odour of muscat or of cloves? (I hate literary emotions, she told herself!)

  “I shall soon be leaving you,” she said to the old lady, “as I must sooner or later return to my other cases. No, don’t look alarmed! Not until I feel sure that everything is going well and that Esther can take over. Besides, I am always there if need be to consult. At the end of a phone!” This seemed to reassure the old lady and no more was said about the matter.

  At the end of the excursion she carried the sleepy patient up the stairs to his playroom and set him down among toys which now were becoming objects of interest to him.

  It was in the same week that another significant departure took place; the Swiss girl greeted her one day with a triumphant expression and said, “Eureka! Today he lifted the glass of milk himself and tried to feed himself. Constance, it’s really marvellous!”

  And Constance knew that she would soon be leaving; the obstinate Mnemidis had refused all knowledge of a letter in the bible, or indeed in any of the other books. It was quite baffling. Could he be lying, and if so why? And to make matters worse she at last received a letter from Affad, couched in the form of a reproach which she did not feel she merited. It made her feel furious, and also guilty. After all, in accepting the letter from Blanford she had had no clearly formulated plan – indeed, had she met Affad as she expected to do, she would have handed it over in the normal way. And here they were accusing her … It was really most vexatious and short-sighted.

  Dear Constance: I really did not think, my dear, that you would meddle in my affairs in such a resolute fashion; it is all too painful, and I understand your feeling that things can be prevented from happening by an act of resolution … But they can’t. I regret having told you as much as I did about the structure of gnostic belief and the grave experiment our group is engaged in trying out. This stupid letter would have only contained a death-date, with no indication of how or by whom. That is the little bit of essential information which enables us to complete our devoir – without it we are just ordinary people, dispossessed, taken unawares: the original sin! It is the equivalent of letting me die unshriven! The knowledge of this simple fact enables one to take up a stance consciously towards the only basic feature of human existence which is never studied, is always avoided, is funked! People expire, they don’t die in a positive sense, “mobilised in the light of nature”! I ask you to restore the letter to me. You have no right to it, and I have. I cannot believe that you would betray me like this even though you are a determinist, a behaviourist. Ah! What a stupid charge to lay against you! I am terribly sorry for such a sudden explosion of bad temper, but I am both frustrated for myself, my own salut, to use an ironic phrase, and also for the man or men after me. I am only a link in a long bicycle chain. I believe you understand this, as it is also expressed in sexual terms in our love for each other – has it forever vanished? Are you cured of me? Have you forgotten the beginning when we played cards by candlelight with the dying Dolores?

  It came back to her now with a shock; no, she had not really forgotten, she had just put aside the memory, perhaps out of pain, for Dolores had been her best friend at school and then later in medical school. When her husband who was a musician died she cut off her beautiful hair and threw it into the coffin. But it grew again, as beautiful as ever, and so did her only child. She was a brilliant surgeon among the younger ones, but by ill luck she infected herself and contracted a fatal type of poisoning. Constance used to take Affad to the ward at night to keep her company, and the three of them would play cards on the night t
able. As she grew weaker the effort increased but they kept up the habit out of friendship. One night the dying woman handed over her cosmetics and said that she would like to be sure that if she died suddenly in the night her face would be made up for her before her son was allowed in to see her. They promised, and set about playing the usual game of rummy. But tonight she felt much weaker, and kept fading away, drifting into quiet dozes; until with a small contrite shudder she simply stopped breathing. They were both shaken with sadness and resignation. Constance checked pulse and breath and then drew the lids down over the sad and dignified eyes. Affad put his arms round her and she embraced him with a triumphant abandon, touching his hair and throat and ears as if she were building up his image as a sculptor might from the moist clay of the primary wish for love; to affirm, to unite, to triumphantly rescue him from time. And later on when they went hand in hand down to the deserted buttery to make a cup of coffee, Affad had said, “As you know, when one has seen someone die, someone stop breathing, one realises with a start how one breath is hooked into another, is attached to another. In between the breaths is the space where we live, between the beforebreath and the afterbreath is a field or realm where time exists and then ceases to exist. Our impression of reality is woven by the breathing like a suit of chain mail. It is in that little space, between the breaths, in that tiny instant that we have started to expand the power of the orgasm, as a united synchronised experience, making it more and more conscious, mobilising its power and fecundity with every kiss. Constance, we can’t go wrong. Love can’t make any other sense now for us! God, how I wish I could make you pregnant in the light of this! She had replied, “If you go on talking like this, you will!” But he had not. Nor would he now. Well, it was something real and for her something new in orientation and intensity. Better than the usual business, making love in a sort of moral pigsty of vaguely good intentions. Or not at all. Or not at all.

  My whole time here has been taken up with silly discussions about this fatal letter; and I at first thought it was all a mistake. But now I am forced to conclude with the Prince that you took it upon yourself to execute a coup de main in my favour. Darling, it is most misguided. Please believe me when I tell you so. The Prince is also writing you, and has telephoned so many times that I feel quite ashamed. Constance …

  She put down the letter thoughtfully and devoted a moment of reminiscence to that faraway period – how close it was in actual clock-time, and how far away in memory! They had lived out the attachment obsessionally – was the past tense correct? She listened, stiffened to attention, to her own heartbeats as if she interrogated them. Was Affad really over? In a paradoxical sort of way only he could answer such a question by the act of reappearing on the scene. They had worked not just for pleasure but for ecstasy, not for the merely adequate but for the sublime, and this is what seemed to her unique about their love. It was without sanctions, without measure, and wholly double. Nor could she envisage it being over because the experience had been so complete, had marked them both so irremediably! She swore slightly under her breath and tried to pretend that the whole thing had shown a regrettable weakness on her part, but she was being insincere and she knew it. And now the whole damned problem of the letter had come between them. It was with a resigned sadness that she packed up, locked the little lake house, and took the road back to the city.

  Her flat seemed somewhat gloomy and forbidding, so she bustled about and dusted it and generally set things to rights. An empty frigidaire gleamed frostily at her, empty as the heart of a sun. Thence to the clinic where she found a gloomy and irate Schwarz waiting for her with a nasty gleam in his eye. “Listen,” he said, “I have a bone to pick with you, about this Mnemidis caper. He has been restored to us safe and just as unsound of mind, though of course rested and ready for any mischief. Constance, we cannot go on with him, whatever you say; we are simply not equipped, even the high-security wing, to look after him as he must be looked after. He belongs to the civil law, and should be returned to the authorities. If you go on poking away at his paranoia you know full well what the result will be. There is no point in incurring senseless danger or difficulty. He is quite certainly beyond our help and I think we must admit it.”

  She sat down at her desk and said, “What about the letter?” Schwarz sighed and said, “No trace! Did you expect any? I didn’t. He could have put it down the lavatory, of course.” In a sudden burst of resolution she got up and took him by the shoulders. “I feel I must go on with him until I am sure that he did not see it; grant me a month or two more and I’ll surrender him as you see fit. But I must try out the matter and see – for Affad’s sake.”

  “For Affad’s sake,” he echoed despondently. He swivelled his office chair round and pushed his spectacles back on his head. “Another thing! What do we do about visitors? Several people have asked to see him, including a doctor from Alexandria who claims to have had him both as a friend and also under his wing. Now a prison has its security rules and all its precautions. A prison could answer these people. But we have no code of rules. Do we let anyone in who wishes to see him? One is a doctor, one a business associate …” He was in a frightful temper, she could see that. But, to be truthful, the problem was a relatively new one. “Could we not establish a visiting day like the state prison?” He said, reminding her, “what do you mean by ‘close detention’? Define it.”

  They sat glumly staring at each other for a long moment. She knew that in this mood he would not give in unless she wheedled. It was unfair, but … “Please help me,” she said. “I feel I am only doing my duty in making sure. It’s the least I can do. And after that I promise to be good, absolutely good!”

  So they came to a compromise about the treatment as well as the visitors, and she won her way over the misgivings of the sighing Schwarz.

  But of the letter there was no sign; yet Mnemidis’ way of talking about it, of answering questions about it, seemed somehow sly. He talked sideways, turning his face away, and said, “From who to who, and why? What a strange name, from Egypt certainly? Yes, from Egypt originally perhaps. Why should I have seen it? The Bible? It is full of untruths. And there are no dates so you cannot tell when it all happens!” In the middle of all this verbiage she imagined an occasional gleam, the barest hint which suggested that perhaps … But she was also aware of the desire which might lead her into a self-deception. The long sleep had done him good in a way for he was much fresher and his ideas flowed more freely. But of course what was missing was the basic connecting links between them – it was the standard paranoid configuration. And of course she was on the lookout for the first signs of persecution-delusions which pointed to danger for the therapist. Persecution was the code sign of violence, and she must be careful not to provoke this vein of feeling by too great insistence in her questions.

  He had been watching the nuns from his window, for among the nurses on the wards there were a number of young nuns. He was intrigued to hear that they belonged to a silent order – he who spoke so much, in torrents, indiscriminately! “When there is nobody there I can still hear myself talking to myself, it still seems necessary – my whole intellectual formation and my expensive education all led to this state of affairs. I wish I could see some end to this situation because sometimes I am out of breath and out of voice. I get headaches even. But on goes the torture of the dialectic – the parallel straight lines which are supposed to meet at infinity, but never do. I know this because I have reached infinity, I am there, and still they haven’t met.” His eyes filled with tears, beautiful violent eyes which had only known one kind of rapture – death! The clock chimed, it was the end of the new session. She told him that arrangements had been made for him to see his friend the doctor on the morrow, and Mnemidis nodded, smiling enigmatically, joining his hands on his midriff like a mandarin. But the name stirred no particular echo. As for the letter, it appeared to have vanished for good. Was it worth being obstinate and keeping on?

  It was at this juncture t
hat Lord Galen, like some long-forgotten carnival figure, strayed on to the stage, so unexpected a presence that for a moment she could not fit his name into her memory. “My dear Constance,” he said reproachfully, “of all people to forget me. Of all people!” She expressed an unfeigned contrition for she loved old Lord Galen – the mention of his name made one want to smile. And here he was, vague and wide-eyed as ever, with his rolled copy of the Financial Times under his arm. He carried it about as others might carry about a book of poems or a novel, to be dipped into during the day. They had lunch at a fashionable place and he signed the cheque with a flourish in the name of some international agency. In answer to her query he said, “My dear, I have come here to coordinate things. After a big war there is a lot of coordination necessary. They have made me Coordinator General of the Central Office of Coordination. I oversee almost everything and in a twinkling coordinate it! It is an immense saving of time and money for us all.” She was tempted to ask him what his salary was, but refrained. He also apparently lectured, on the subject of which he obviously had a perfect command. But just what it was she never found out. He had learned it in America, he said. “I am very pleased with America!” he said, as if awarding a school prize. “After those beastly Germans it is just fine to be a Jew in America. America speaks with a Jewish voice and that goes for a lot. After all we won the war and now we will win the peace. Constance, you are smiling! Have I said something effulgent? I have come here to coordinate World Jewry. It may take a moment, and I may have to make sacrifices, perhaps take a cut in my frais de représentation. But what of it? And by the way I have managed to get Aubrey a decoration for his bravery – an O.B.E. You should have seen his face when I told him! He was pale with pride and surprise. He never expected his gallantry to be recognised but I saw to it. One word to the Prime Minister and …”