The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  “I have clients for you. They speak English.”

  “Then you must stay and translate.”

  “I will, my mother.” So they talked on for a short while; it provided an opportunity for Sabine to perform several little offices for the old lady – such as trimming the candlewicks which were burning unevenly because of the wind, and setting out the dice with which the witch literally played herself into the mood of her client, so she could “read” his preoccupations and divine their portent and shape; and also see how they would mature or fail … But Sabine had been right, she would not take more than three for the evening. The others might come tomorrow if they wished. And she must have half an hour alone during which time she prepared her own mind, sharpened her own faculties. A clock struck, and she said it needed winding up, an act which the younger woman performed. She agreed to transmit the message and come back with the first client within half an hour. A grunt of agreement was her only response, so she tiptoed out of the caravan and down the stairs, closing the door softly behind her.

  She crossed the twilit sands towards the balcony of rendezvous bearing her message about the limitation on numbers. “Well,” said Lord Galen in some dismay, “I suppose we shall have to cast lots or play at Eeni Meeni Mina Mo?” It was as logical a course as any, but they had half an hour to wrangle about it, and the final choice as a result of their deliberations fell upon Sylvie, Galen and the Prince. The others were to possess their souls in patience or submit to the ministrations of less professional seers. They did not lack for these, for as they sat at their wine the crowd threw up half a dozen cozening faces and outstretched hands of women as well as men offering a reading of hands, a guide to the future. One of the younger women was so insistent and so pretty that they adopted her and she settled like a bird of prey over the hands of Aubrey. But the language she spoke was almost unintelligible and it needed Sabine’s help to decipher it. “She says you are worried about a building, a structure, something like a house which you wish to make beautiful. But it takes much writing. She is thinking of cheques and contracts – something of that order.” Aubrey said, “Has she ever heard of a novel?” But there were other things also somewhat ambiguous. “Now in a little while you will have the woman of your dreams safely in your keeping, free to love you. You will know great happiness, but it will not last very long. Guard it while you have it.” The advice seemed sound enough if true! But how often in the dreary routine of fortune telling must the young woman have said the same thing? As for the hand of Cade, she simply turned pale and dropped it like a hot coal. She crossed herself and spat and retreated from him with an expression of alarm. “As if she had been scalded,” said Sutcliffe with amusement. “What can the poor fellow have done to frighten her?” It was not possible to find out for the girl melted away into the crowd and was replaced by a man with one eye who seemed every inch a fabricator and whom Sabine refused to encourage. She drove him off with a few sharp phrases of reproach and he left with anger and reluctance.

  But with the fall of darkness new styles of celebration came into being – impromptu horse races on the sands, championships of such games as boules, Provençal bowling, and archery. With the Saints safely back in their niches among the ex votos it was time to turn to more secular amusements, so that while most of the world fell to dinner the little arenas of the village were of a sudden brilliantly floodlit and the gates thrown wide to receive their black Camargue bulls. The rest of the evening was going to be spent in bull-fighting – not the Spanish-style killing fight but the Provençal cockade-snatching ones so suitable to the temper of the place. In this mode the only danger is incurred by the white-clad fighter whose task is to snatch the cockade and skim the barrier out of reach of reprisals – for the little black bulls are fiery and carry long-horned crowns with which to defend their cockades.

  Weariness was setting in, however, and it was clearly about time to start thinking of the return journey; but as yet the fortune telling was not at an end. There was nothing for it but to set the table for another repast and to replenish the glasses. This did not come amiss for some of them – notably Sutcliffe who was somewhat weary after his impromptu afternoon honeymoon. Sabine was away helping to translate the divinations of the old gipsy. The little boy had fallen asleep on a bench in a shadowy corner of the balcony, and it was clear that for him at any rate the party was over.

  But when the three postulants returned with Sabine it was clear that the results had been far from satisfactory, perhaps because of the massive potations of the old lady. On the other hand both Galen and the Prince looked elated for they had been assured that the treasure they had sought so long and so ardently was a real tangible and concrete one, and not just a historic figment. But the somewhat confusional approach of the old woman had provided several enigmas, for in talking of one of them she made references to others – to Constance, for example – which were easy to decipher. But of course the usual trappings of fortune telling were present – the colourful language and imagery, for instance. Sabine’s gloss went as follows: “The treasure is real and a very great one, but it is locked in a mountain and guarded by dragons who are really men. Great dangers attend the search. Nevertheless it will not be abandoned, even though the whole business could turn to tragedy. If you proceed it must be with great caution.”

  But despite the ambiguity Lord Galen felt a wave of optimistic elation; all the doubts and fears which had been evolving within his mind seemed set at rest. The Prince also felt elated, though of course he was less prone to believe in soothsayers. Sometimes, though … The reference to the mountain was tantalising, however. He shook his head doubtfully. But the person most affected by this séance was Sylvie, who returned to them step by slow step as if blasted by the weight of what she had heard. There were tears on her white face and she held her hands before her in a pleading, twisted way, as if it was their infamy which had been revealed. She had been told that her partner, companion, lover would soon leave her – indeed, that she was not any longer loved. And with this she suddenly felt the extent of her dependence upon Constance. It also clarified a lot of small incidents and occurrences – she realised that her lover was trying to find a way of breaking off their relationship, and that she was suffering with guilty feelings because of it. She was thunderstruck when she tried to imagine a world without a Constance at her side. The fearful fragility of her grasp on reality became clear – she saw herself diminishing, becoming a parody of a person, empty of all inward fruitfulness, of love. Swollen with this revelation, she felt she could hardly look her lover in the face. Drawing a shawl over her head like a gipsy in mourning she climbed back into the bus and hid herself right at the back, where soon the little boy found her and fell asleep at her side with his head in her lap. So she sat in a daze and felt the night flowing round her like the waters of a dark lake. The voices, the snarl of mandolins and the crackle of dancing heels in the main square under the portals of the church – they lacked all significance now. They referred to nothing, expressed nothing. There was no flow in things, no element of time to enrich the future with promises or desires. It is always at this point, when reality loses all freshness and seems unable to renew itself, that the little hobgoblin of suicide appears. Constance would have been terrified had she known of this reading entirely because of this factor. What price the psychology of the day? How untruthful it seemed, this pickpocket loving! But the one basic truth of the matter was that they must soon break up, separate from each other, rejoin the ranks of the walking dead – those who were out of love! As the others drifted back to their base, and thence slowly began to take their places in the little bus, Sylvie drew her shawl closer and tried to sleep – what a mockery! Sabine seemed somewhat anxious about her and sat for a while with a protective arm about her shoulders before returning to the cafe for a last chat with Sutcliffe.

  For her part she was worried lest the idea of the impending breach might once more undermine Sylvie’s fragile grasp upon reality. “I only ho
pe that Constance is aware of the probabilities – but she must be because of her professional training.” Indeed Constance was when she heard of the prophecy, and at once her affectionate compassion sent her to the side of the girl to try to palliate the pain of the wound. In vain, for Sylvie simply dropped her hand and said simply, “I understand so many little things which puzzled me these last days. You were trying to tell me that everything was over between us.” And her lover sat beside her in a sort of choked despair, stroking the head of the sleeping boy and saying nothing because there was nothing to say. It was clear that out of this new information some momentous new dispositions would have to be taken. There was the danger, in a manner of speaking, for Sylvie had nowhere to go if she decided to leave – unless it were back to Montfavet, which in fact was what later transpired. Constance reproached herself bitterly for her own weakness, but it availed nothing: what was done was done. It remained to try and skry into the future, to the new life which so vaguely beckoned to her from beyond the screen of the present. “No,” she said, “we are friends for ever, Sylvie!” And this too, in a strange sort of way was true. “Don’t shake your head, darling, it is true.”

  From the cafe’s edge, where a corner of the marquee was drawn back, Blanford watched their expressive faces with pain and helplessness. He could not hear what they said but it was obvious from their expressions that it was not happiness which preoccupied them. How he longed at moments to be alone with Constance! But what could he tell her that she did not already know?

  Sutcliffe, to console him and amuse Sabine, said, “When I read somewhere that Chinese peasants stuffed up the anus of their pigs with clay in order to make them weigh more when they came to market I realised in a flash why so many American novelists write to the length they do – they have been end-stopped by relentless publishers. Subject for a doctorate: ‘The novelist as many-splendoured pig’.” But his bondsman who was still poring upon the distant face of his true muse hardly heeded him. He sat locked into the parsimony of his sexual insight, quoting to himself the lines: “In an inferential realisation of emptiness, an emptiness is cognised conceptually or through the medium of an image. Despite the profound nature of such inferential intuition, direct realisation is yet to be attained!” What was one to do? But now Cade was packing up in earnest and the bus driver flashed his lights as a sign of his impending departure. They must return northward and leave the fair to dwindle away in the darkness, under a gibbous moon.

  They threaded their slow way across the sands to the main road, fully aware of how many fires still burned in the darkness and how many families lay about, sleeping where they had fallen, so to speak, on a battlefield of black wine at thirteen degrees! Here and there a child still scampered across their headlamps, bent on some midnight manoeuvre. The smoky fires damped down the moonlight into spindrift which lolled and subsided upon the surface of the inland lakes – the étangs. But once on the more secure purchase of the macadamised main road, their driver turned off his gig-lamps and let the passengers swell slowly into drowsy sleep as he set sail for distant Avignon. As Blanford slept, the whirling confetti of his abandoned notes drifted him silently into a great drowsiness. He wondered what the time was because he did not wish to miss seeing the dawn come up over the river, over the spires.

  But if he drowsed his bondsman did not; the events of the day had put him in a resounding good humour, not to mention the snoutful of red wine. “Ha ha, as we used to exclaim in the tropics!” he cried, banging his knee for extra emphasis. This was mysterious – why, for example, the tropics!” But he would not have liked to be asked to explain the outburst – for him the sheerly inconsequent and the inadvertent were close to the sublime, a kingdom of mad laughter.

  “Shut up!” said Aubrey, “and let me get a speck or two of sleep.” But the flying confetti with its conspiratorial messages kept teasing him with its gleams of subversive insight. “Tell me, Mr B., how would you describe yourself?” Answer: “As a mortally shy man suffering from delusions of grandeur. I have been impelled to try the path of negative capability – how to cross the river without a bridge across it. I am aware that when a culture cracks up soothsayers and false witnesses abound!” All these midnight conversations with the time-clock! (If the communication between the sexes falters the whole universe, which is imaginary, is put at risk! Of course it is pure impudence to think like this.) Ah! Cats-paw of the loving mind, which takes refuge in the Higher Flippancy. To sit in a cave and argue substance away dialectically could help you to shed the skin of your mind – but how laborious a method. Is there no other? Yes, there is always The Leap! The Avignon bridge symbolises it.

  The real tragedy is that the whole of the Vedanta becomes mere gossip when she smiles – and nobody is to blame because the whole Universe is indifferent to our prowess!

  On they went, swaying through the darkness like a night express, only more slowly, elbowing their way through the forests and the demesnes of divine Langue d’Oc, while Sutcliffe informed the world at large that “human beings displace a good deal of air – mostly hot air” and that “for the artist to take a vow of chastity which is quintessential for his inmost self is also to invite rape!” The lights from passing villages briefly illumined their forms, showing who slept with arm hunched up against the window of the coach – Cade: or who bowed into the immensity of sorrowing sleep – Constance. Sutcliffe was humming improvisations full of the plenitude of his genius.

  Cloud-forged and water-lulled

  From heavenly cirrus culled

  My heliocentric honey come

  Confide the treasures of thy golden bum

  To one who merits ripest sugar-plum

  Come O come!

  Blanford slept and allowed the idolatrous image of his only love gradually to overwhelm his consciousness – what a honeycomb of smiles, what a pincushion of kisses! He recognised this unflinching open-endedness as a way to comprehend a poetic attitude! Its theology was resolution-proof – the religious message not penitential but exuberant. It had its laws, the right kisses always breaking a code, the right approach scoring points in the old-fashioned gymkhana of self-realisation. Like the boom of surf upon the desert lakes, his cloud of notes assailed him with both promises and accusations. “To live in a fearless approximation to nature – to cultivate the consciousness of material intangibility. To create poetically in books written from the hither side of a privileged experience – the posture of awakening. Not phrase-making but direct experience experienced, printed and disseminated. The central truth of the Dharmic brain-flash is linguistically quite incommunicable, it outstrips language, even the most conceptual forms. It is a privileged experience. But by simply exchanging a look you can tell at once whether you share this body-snatcher’s love with someone else, and the laughter follows spontaneously. The glance is not such an idle combustion of acquisitive desires but a lock-step in art of the highest reticence. You cannot help hugging yourself once you realise that there is no such thing as a self to hug! And you have all the time in the world – there is no concept of impatience in all nature!”

  No escape from the dozing notebook of the brain. He told himself, “You can keep lighting candles to yourself on the great Wedding Cake of the Sages, but one day you will have to cut a slice yourself!”

  Sometimes the terror of the pure meaninglessness of things seized him by the hair – for there is no reason for things to be the way they are. Suppose Aristotle to be wrong, to have wallowed in pure presumption, the observer influencing his field of observation, what then? Yet he had a feeling that the notion of emptiness would save him. Yes, to savour to the full the sheer inherence of things, so pure and gentle is it; if you get still enough you can hear the grass growing. You can see landscape in terms of a divine calligraphy! Ah, the mind-numbing ineptness of the rational man with his formulations! Defeated always by the flying multiplicity of the real. “Ordinary life” – is there such a thing?

  Yes, the observer fouls up everything by trying to
impose a plan, an intention, upon nature which can only reproduce the limitations of his understanding, the boundaries of his personal vision. He disturbs the rest of the universe which has no fixed plan, but simply lolls about and goes whichever way things tilt, just as water does. What to do then? Why, play for time just as nature does! Become what you already are! Realise! Discontented and vigilant body so much adored, you know too well that death and life coexist.

  But as he sank deeper into his loving swoon his irrepressible bondsman took up the tale, despite the gesture of reproach sketched in the air by the Prince who wanted some peace in which to work over in his mind the prophecies they had received at the fair – for as a good Egyptian he believed in the other world of alchemy and divination. “I mean,” said Sutcliffe, “how would you like to be just a counter-novelist, existing on relief on charity, or in the imagination of a friend? I wake sometimes with my face bathed in tears. Ontology-prone Judeo-Christians have stolen away my heritage. On the other hand all the gibberings of Paracelsus are coming back to us under a Tibetan imprimatur!”