The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  “Hamlet is a small and apparently ageless and immortal fox-terrier, and Leda is a fat old goose, lazy and thoroughly lascivious as all geese are. But she loves being mounted by the dog, she ruffles her feathers with appreciation and honks while he, like a dog or a banker, gives of his best. I realised after the death of my own that they were really our children, our own small contribution to the way things are. How extraordinary the world is. Even God is dying of boredom – it’s called entropy!”

  “Don’t say that!” exclaimed Lord Galen – a surprising interjection, coming from him – “Don’t say that, please. There will be nothing left to invest in!” And now the church bells in the belfry of the fortress-church burst out in an anguish of clamour, almost as if they were answering Lord Galen’s prayer! And Sabine laughed once more and said, “You must go and pay your respects to Sara now because soon the procession will begin and with such crowds you won’t be able to move. Then come back here and I will try and arrange for you to be skried, or read or divined – however you like to put it – by someone reliable, perhaps even our Mother, because so many of us are cheats and rogues and bluffers. India too is thick with imposters and thieving swamis, as you well know!”

  Sutcliffe murmured under his breath the folk verses they could never remember correctly.

  A slimy swami pinched his cap

  But Mrs Gilchrist gave him clap.

  “No, no,” said Blanford, “I swear my version is the correct one. I wish we could prove it!” And he recited the lines in another text.

  He swore the fairies gave him clap

  Though Mrs Gilchrist took the rap.

  He added: “In this way the British Army made its small contribution to Indian thought. I wanted to write the biography of Mrs Gilchrist who set up the first classy tearoom-bordel in Benares and imported suburban butterflies from Peckham to staff it. But there was never enough material available.”

  As he was speaking they were all turning their heads towards the main street where there was a sudden eruption of music and a gush, literally a gush, of white steeds with flowing manes and the Camargue gardiens mounted on them, sombrero on head and trident in hand. They were to form the escort for the Saints in their descent to the sea, and they were clad rather formally in the dress uniform of their profession – beautiful whipcord trousers with black piping, and flower-patterned shirts topped with black velvet coats, and short jackboots. It was a uniform which melted down two different influences into a harmonious and aristocratic unity – Spain and the Far West of America. At their appearance the guitars, rather hesitant at first, burst into a fury of passion and the air throbbed with the warmth of castanets and the swing of Andalusian dances, the whirl of skirts, the snapping of coloured paper streamers. There was just time to salute Sara, though after they had done so they wondered at their own courage in facing this dense press of swarthy bodies and literally carving a passage through it.

  Sutcliffe was happy to renounce the adventure when he caught a glimpse of the throng hemmed in by the aisles of the little church, whose walls were decorated with every kind of ex voto imaginable, depicting shipwreck, accident, fires, earthquakes, acts of violence as well as acts of God; broken heads and limbs, dying children and their parents, overturned boats and horses destroyed by accident … a whole hospital of woes which had been either cured or averted by the Saint who was now waiting for them below stairs, clad in her new vestal gown. But how could they get to her? She stood on a trestle table at the far end of a low crypt or cellar where the lack of oxygen made one instantly begin to suffocate, while the brilliant wave of light from hundreds of candles throbbed and pulsed – for they too were eating your oxygen. Yet light one you must, and place it in the iron chandelier as well as deposit a coin in the offertory box hard by the statue. The dull plonking of coins in the wooden box provided an accompaniment to the low haunting chanting and moaning of the crowd, forever retreating and advancing towards the gorgeous black statue of the Saint. She is black, yes, but the cast of her features is completely European, occidental. Beauty and youth and incorruptibility seem united in her lucent and happy gaze. She looks through everything into a beyond of such perfect felicity that one longs to make the journey with her. The gipsies whimpered and sweated and crossed themselves and muttered in an ecstasy of apprehension and requited love. The other two saints were rather a washout – they were just Biblical walk-on parts, but Saint Sara was bursting with superb unction at what she knew. She looked a darling who was simply burning to whisper the secret to someone – if only there were less noise and singing and general rumpus – for a thousand children added to the complications with their chirping and shoving. And the whole of this sweating humanity was pushed down into a little dark sinus of a crypt where breathing was a torment. How did she not melt, one wondered, for Sara was fashioned in black wax.

  “Not for me,” said Sutcliffe. “I can’t face this sort of thing. One hand on your pocket book and the other on your balls … it’s too much.” So he elected to go for a walk among the tents while the saints were being carried down to sea on their wooden trestle – part of the traditional service.

  The. beaches were swarming with families who had settled in for the usual three-day festival, around flourishing camp fires where food was roasting on the spit. Sabine walked with him, pausing from time to time to greet an acquaintance or relation, and say a word to the children at their heels.

  “Coming down through the chestnut forests of High Provence we had a wonderful stroke of luck,” she said, “for we ran into an absolute colony of hedgehogs: you know that for the gipsy it’s the greatest delicacy of all. That’s what you are smelling now. Mario is doing three or four for lunch. We dug out an old abandoned clay pit for the event. We gut them and then cover them thickly in wet clay before putting them to roast in a fire built just below ground. Have you ever eaten them?” He had not. “Slightly richer than Chinese puppy but very good in flavour. When the clay is baked and cooling it is knocked off with a hammer or a stone and all the quills and the skin go away with it, leaving the flesh exposed. I know – it must sound horrid!” For he shuddered at the description. “So I won’t invite you for lunch today!”

  “Sabine!” he said, suddenly stopping to look at her rather pathetically. “Darling, why did you leave me? You knew you loved me.” She smiled and put a hand on his arm. “Of course I did,” she said, “but you must ask Aubrey that; I could not take you with me, after all. Our lives were split down the middle, no way of joining them that I could see.”

  They stood for a long time thus, staring at each other while the crowds swirled round them, streaming down to the seashore in the wake of the Saints. Then they turned back against the human tide and in a quieter side street found a dark wine cellar full of barrels of local wine; and here at a dirty table they sat down and ordered a glass to drink. She was still talking with a kind of considered impetuousness, simply for the pleasure of talking English again. She seemed so real it was hard to think of her as purely imaginary. “And the big question is always ‘Why?’” she said. “Starting with my surprised and half-incredulous father – old Banquo, as they called him in the City. I adopted it also as a form of address and it amused him. But this thing outraged him so, his sense of logic and reason. He knew a lot about gipsies and the relentless persecutions they had had to endure over the centuries. And there was one particularly savage tale which he thought might clinch the matter and dissuade me from the choice I had made. He had heard it first from an attache of the Austrian Embassy in Sofia – you know he began as a diplomat, my father, and left the service because of the inadequate pay. In his first posting he met this little crippled Austrian – I even remember his name, Egon Von Lupian! They became friends despite the difference in age because both were mad about orchids and collected them. Von Lupian was a leg short and wore a wooden one with a spike in it which made – I quote – a ‘characteristic clicking sound’ on the marble floors of the old Chancery. He was a strange number – Aubrey has
written about him elsewhere. But he told my father about his childhood in Austria. He came of an ancient and aristocratic family, and one of his uncles owned vast estates in the north. He was a great hunter and often had the boy to stay with him. He ran a great pack of stag-hounds in the barren marches of his part of the country; and sometimes they would course some poor wretch of a tramp who had strayed into their lands. But the choice quarry was a gipsy, and if possible a woman with a child at breast! Imagine. He remembers once his uncle, a big red-faced man with a curling moustache coming down to breakfast rubbing his hands and saying, ‘Today we’ll have the perfect hunt! It’s all too rare, but it does happen from time to time!’ Gipsies had come to town in the night and as usual had been arrested. His uncle was the chief magistrate of the region and thus a law unto himself. On the morrow at dawn they were to set off. It was only in after years that he understood and appreciated the details about the hunt. They had taken the gipsies the night before and among them they had found what they wanted – a gipsy with a child at breast! They were going to turn her loose and course her like a stag!

  “The pack was in training always, raised so to speak on camphor and menstrual blood, for it was not always that there was a quarry at hand during certain parts of the year. The woman was taken off at dawn on a cart to a certain crossroads some miles from the village where the hunt would begin. Her person and her clothes were dowsed with this mixture of camphor dust and bran soaked in human menses. They had an hour or more to take her out to the chosen point and drop her for the hounds. Meanwhile in the manor house all was excitement and anticipation. The little boy, cripple as he was, was taken up by the strong arms of his uncle and perched upon the high saddle from which he could command an excellent panoramic view of everything that took place. So when an hour had passed a signal was given and the horns began their deep braying sound soon to be matched by the bass baying of the great hounds which were almost as tall as the stags they had been raised to hunt. A medley of confused sounds and the whole hunt set off across the frozen marches in pursuit of the solitary cart and its victim, the woman with the suckling child.

  “The cart with its two drivers dropped her at the agreed place, a point where three ways met, and with a last burst of malevolence whipped her away from the cart into the unknown. But she was a sturdy girl and hardly whimpered as she set off at a stumbling run into the snow-lit landscapes which surrounded her. There was no mistake now; she could hear the deep baying of the pack as it rolled across the marches towards her. There was no time to be lost. She must try and cross water somehow, somewhere. She ran vaguely in the direction of the river, but her memory was at fault for no river came in sight; and the baying of hounds and the shrill groans of the stag-horns thrilled her blood. She felt as if she were already bleeding to death as she ran – it was time foreshortened bleeding away in her! (I know something about that!) Then on a distant hill the hunt came into view. It made a brave show on that frosty morning, scarlet and black and bronze and gold. But she had seen water – it was not the river but a shallow estuary with several lakelets of brackish water. With luck she might save herself. The little boy shared the thrilling vision of it all with his big-boned uncle riding before him on the Spanish saddle. He saw the gipsy’s bid for freedom fail. She managed to reach the water and walked into it almost to her waist, holding the child above her head. But the hounds had seen their quarry and they burst out of the woods and crashed through the thin ice-sheet of the lake in order to drag her down as they did the stags of the region. He heard her screams, and those of the little boy, and then everything was silent and the water of the estuary turned carnation-red as the hounds ate their fill. It was after all their reward for a highly successful hunt. The Master of Hounds and his whippers now drew rein and produced sustaining drinks for the hunters. The little boy was to be affected throughout his life by this scene, and not less by the enormous impression made by it upon the hunters. His uncle remained speechless and out of breath from the sexual orgasm he had experienced after witnessing the hounds at kill. And happy, tremendously elated! His laughter was the laughter of a maniac. As for the boy, he never forgot, and in every capital to which he was posted he commissioned a local artist to paint him an oil, always choosing this scene for subject. He had a whole collection of them at his home in Vienna – a whole gallery of Gipsy Pursued by Hounds.”

  Sutcliffe was quite pale with lust. “You have excited me terribly,” he said in a whisper, and she replied, “Yes, I wanted to. We must make love after so long. We must fuck.”

  “Yes!” he almost shouted. “Yes, please, Sabine!”

  She led him by the hand and they went first into a dark passage and then up a long flight of shaky stairs which led to a garret which she had borrowed from the servant. Here on a grubby bed they enacted the fulfilment of a crucial dream, recited the whole vocabulary of lust and disaffection. There was a sob buried in every kiss, as there always is when real couples meet. They pierce the thin membrane of time with every orgasm, they taste despair to the full. The partial joining of the love act was a torment – why could it not be for ever? “It’s maddening! I love you irremediably!” she said, counting out his elderly heartbeats kiss by salt kiss.

  They lay together later in tears of happiness, playing with each other and caressing each other with their minds. “I never thought it would happen again. I hardly recognised it the first time round! What luck!” And they thought with compassion of their poor creator who sat so stiffly over his wine now, watching the crowd flowing down to the sea, admiring the tears and the fervours and feeling sorry because he could not share them. He saw himself, Aubrey did, as a dead body lying in some furnished room in a foreign city, in a bleak hotel, made famous now because once a poet was allowed to starve to death in it! Paris, Vienna, Rome … what did it matter? Via Ignoto, Sharia Bint, Avenue Ignoble! Yes, Sutcliffe was right to reproach him with all the brain-wearying lumber he had taken aboard – all this soul-porridge, all this brain-mash of Hindu soul-fuck. He would change tack, he would reform. He would be possessed by a new gaiety, a new rapture. But where Was Sabine?

  Where indeed? She was lying in the rickety bed with her arms round her mate, staring over his shoulder at a corner of the ceiling and wondering whether this meeting would ever be repeated. She recited to herself a popular gipsy proverb. “In a lean season the gipsy never forgets that the cemeteries are full of gold teeth!” Why were they not free to forge their own futures? What damnable luck to be simply figments of the capricious human mind!

  “Lovers,” he said sadly, “are just reality-fools! There is nothing to be done about them!”

  “And yet?”

  “And yet! How good it is, how real it is!”

  They embraced again violently and she said, “If you knew Spanish I would quote you the words Cervantes puts into the gipsy’s mouth. It is less rich in English. Do you know them? Listen! ‘Having learnt early to suffer, we suffer not at all. The cruellest torment does not make us tremble; and we shrink from no form of death, which we have learned to scorn … Well can we be martyrs but confessors never. We sing loaded with chains and in the deepest of dungeons. We are gipsies!’” And turning her magnificent head she made to spit twice over her right shoulder. A ritual salute. Her lover was deeply moved. He had sunk into a profound melancholy at the realisation that in a day or two they would separate once more, perhaps never to meet.

  But time was getting on. A flock of horsemen galloped down the main street firing off their guns and pistols in the air, while the deep vibration of guitars was now taken up and underpinned by the skirling, pining note of mandolins – Orient answering the Occident, East mingling with West. “It’s time to go!” she said, struggling back into her clothes. “I must arrange for their fortunes to be told by our tribal mother if possible. Hurry up and dress now. The party is over for us, worse luck.”

  The evening had started to lengthen out its shadows; they were beginning to feel footsore as they gradually found their way back to
the tavern balcony which was the rallying point where the remains of their lunch still stood, waiting to be packed up in the straw hampers. But there was still wine in abundance to be disposed of, still plenty to eat.… Therefore Cade had hesitated to start the process of packing up, for the party might go on all night. There was at least one person who hoped it would, and that was Affad’s child; he had by now become quite drunk on the beauty and colour and movement. Moreover a kindly cowboy, an elderly gardien on a white steed, had adopted him for the afternoon at the behest of Sylvie, and he had viewed the proceedings from the crupper of a white Camargue horse, a safe enough vantage point, and one from which one could really see everything that was going on. The brilliantly dressed and painted saints, the ecstasies of the crowd, the fervour and the tremendous pulse beat of the music made him tremble with pure rapture. Never had he known anything like it. And the two women who from the depths of the crowd could see his rapture in the expression his face wore were almost as happy themselves.

  By the time they had regained the balcony, however, it was to find a thoughtful Sutcliffe sitting beside Aubrey over a drink; night was slowly falling. “I have been with Sabine!” he explained. “And she has gone to try and arrange for your fortunes, though she thinks that the old girl will only accept to do three of us because it tires her so much.”

  As a matter of fact the witch was already drunk, though in her monumental agelessness she showed no signs of it and remained in fair coherence. She inhabited the brilliantly painted and carved caravan of the old style which was set somewhat apart from the fairground on the beach. Inside it candles and joss contended – for the wind had dropped and already the spring mosquitoes of the Camargue had started their onslaught. She was the race-mother of this small troop and everyone, even Sabine, was afraid of her; she could if she wished command the death of someone who had sinned against the ethos of the tribe – by adultery, rape or any other such trespass. Moreover she did not like or trust Sabine, whom she knew to be a woman from the world “out yonder”. There was also a touch of fear, for she smelled the weight of her education, her culture. Yet Sabine was so useful that one found no excuse to gainsay her, above all when she came to propose clients who might pay well. “Shalam!” she said, twice bowing her head and pouring out another stiff portion from a bottle marked “Gin”. “Shalam, Sabina! What brings you here?”