“Shh!” hissed Lord Galen, wrenched from a troubled sleep by these hoarse formulations which he did not understand. “For goodness sake, let us have a tiny doze!”
“The Scythian proverb says: ‘Those who eat wild garlic shall prophesy by farts!’” announced Sutcliffe gravely, though he himself was gradually being overwhelmed by the weight of sleep. To himself he went on in disconnected monologue based on the scattered notes of his maker. “If I had had a harpoon I would have thrown it —how beautiful she was! Rising from bed with the early sunlight she said, ‘I must wash my eyebrows or nobody will believe me.’” The universe says nothing precise, it hints. Cade slept smiling – the smile of a dwarf preserved in pickles. Galen dreamed now of symphonic ladies with proud bums and bushes like busbies, doing yoga in groups full of cosmic munificence! A little further on were clusters of Geneva bankers practising the Primal Cry in unison, also Spontaneous Laughter on all fours. In this they were joined by dumboid damsels full of stealth conducted by prêtres caramélisés from the atelier of the head pastrycook of the town. Yet throughout it all she slept on, jolie tête de migraine!
It was to be an evening fecund in new departures for all of them – unexpected swerves in the action. Among them, that of Felix, who was now so rich in the munificence of his new understanding of things and people. Sylvie! He sat in the speeding coach and watched her averted face with a kind of drunken vehemence, realising with an unexpected dismay that he had fallen in love with her – it is not altogether pleasant to feel powerless and bound. He felt suddenly that he had been invented for her express wishes like a bucket for a spade! Yes, but what did she feel? There was no clue to be read in her preoccupied expressions which were all ones of stress, composed around the pain for her ruined passion and its inevitable outcome – separation. What was to become of her? For some time now this realisation had haunted him and filled him with a restlessness which he translated into physical activity. He reforged his relationship with the city which had once meant so much to him, hiring a push-bike and setting off every night after dark to traverse its squares and corners with affectionate nostalgia, recalling all the bitter privations of his consular posting, wondering how he had managed to put up with such loneliness and so many petty humiliations. Sometimes he would wind up after midnight in the little square of Montfavet and press the night bell on the wall of the asylum. The little doctor was an insomniac – he knew this of old – and hardly ever sought his bed before the first gleam of dawn light. He was always delighted by the thought of late company and would hasten to stoke up the old-fashioned olive wood fire. It was he who one day told Felix that Sylvie had sent him a message informing him of her decision to return to her old quarters in Montfavet, if he would agree to welcome her back once more. He spoke with a sorrowful resignation in which there was more than a touch of asperity which signified a criticism of Constance’s role in this lamentable business. A professional criticism as between two doctors, for after all she had been in possession of all the facts and in a position to foresee all the contingencies. “It’s as unexpected as it is unfair,” he said, “and she should be ashamed of herself.”
In fact she was, deeply ashamed, but quite powerless to act otherwise, such was the gravitational pull of her lover’s charm during the first months. And now?
As for Felix, it had happened very suddenly, when he happened upon a prose poem of hers which Constance had left lying about in his room; he was startled to realise that she was far from insane, she had simply been brushed with the essential and basic illumination which comes to all virgin hearts when one bothers to prepare them. The poetic life declares itself with such force that it often looks like an alienating force which dethrones simple reason. But this isn’t madness – except for behaviourists! Reality has several dialects, and the most powerful are sexual ones. The sexual code, if ignited between two people who recognise how momentous an act it is, will automatically be conducted with reserve and great timidity. “Of course,” said Sutcliffe approvingly, “because the seed of all meditation is in the orgasm itself!”
But after such a realisation you cannot go on in the old way, grudging away a whole life from pure lack of attention. The sublime anguish evoked by her words had moved him to the depths, and he had “crystallised” her in his heart – that wonderful gloating walk, the whole mesmerism of her beauty. Such a profane beauty as permits almost penitence after pleasure. With each new realisation of it his passion crowded on new sail, as did his anxiety also – for if she did not respond, did not “see” him, what should he do then? Sometimes she looked so distraught that he wondered if she would refuse her jumps, or bucked so that her riders fell off. A fathomless ignorance swallowed him; he realised that you cannot codify the reality of love, for it moves too fast for the eye and mind to follow it. The sweet topic of love only dealt with a parody of the great event. Ah, to become a saint for her sake, to solicit states of calm and interventions of grace on behalf of both! Sutcliffe clicked his tongue disapprovingly and quoted one of the joke petites armonces of Blanford: Druide très performant cherche belle trépannée. To improvise on the great keyboard of love! But Sutcliffe disapproved once more and cried, “Useless! Like rubbing cold cream into the belly of a dead porcupine.” Until death do us nudge into the total reticence; man’s function on earth is to allow it to realise itself in him. Ugh! But once you stop caring in the wrong (i.e. awkward) way, everything starts to cooperate and blitheness sets in and the lovers comprehend everything. Felix appeared in her room and wildly, impulsively, said to her as he took her hands, “Sylvie, don’t let them send you mad again – let me love you! Your illness is just the growing pains of a solitary cogniser. In Japan they would give a party to celebrate the vision you have experienced! It is the first step by which the yogi gains admittance to his final omniscience! I want to marry you and look after you otherwise you will stop writing out of fear like Rimbaud! Come and live with me.”
Yet as she trembled in amazement and hesitated before slowly toppling into his embrace, Constance by the same token was bitterly addressing the mirror image of herself: “You cannot be a doctor and a human being at one and the same time!”
On they travelled through darkness stained with patches of white, the noise of their springs creating around the dozing forms echoes of a secret language – voices repeating obsessive phrases over and over again, like “miniature pigeons”, “miniature pigeons” or else “conscientious gypsum” over and over. Blanford listened in his sleep, reminded of older hallucinations. He reminded his other that “when Professor Dobson began to break up he started reacting with dismay to the conversation of French intellectuals, specially men with bushy beards. If any such person cleared his throat and started a sentence with ‘C’est évident que la seule chose …’ or else ‘Je suis tout à fait convaincu que …’ he turned pale and faint with distress and if nothing were done he fell slowly to the ground, to lie there helplessly drumming his heels.”
“I don’t know how you can talk after undertaking this weird prose barbecue, evolving a vexatious prose style based on Rozanov, Hegel’s Aesthetics and Mallarmé’s Igitur.”
This for some reason irritated Blanford who felt forced into a defence of his methods. “Nonsense. I have been explicit enough to expose my thoughts most clearly. My style may be described as one of jump-cutting as with cinema film. The basic illustration is of course the admission that reincarnation is a fact. The old stable outlines of the dear old linear novel have been sidestepped in favour of soft focus palimpsest which enables the actors to turn into each other, to melt into each other’s inner lifespace if they wish. Everything and everyone comes closer and closer together, moving towards the one. The great human models – the Emperors and Empresses – were related by blood ties, were brothers married to sisters. Breath by breath, stitch by stitch, they wove their winding sheet of kisses and prayers. Even before puberty she was there in my bed, the little tantric mouse. Their speech became a rainbow. After them came poets to live in
a bewilderment of women. But the book, my book, proved to be a guide to the human heart, whose basic method is to loiter with intent, in the magic phrase of Scotland Yard, until the illumination dawns! The apparent disorder is only superficial and is due to the fact that part of the notes which I scattered out of the train window were notes I had borrowed with permission from Affad – the little sermons he pronounced at Macabru in the desert. Huge bundles of them were stored in the muniments room at Verfeuille. They were full of striking gnostic aphorisms and I copied many into my own notebooks. Hence the overlap.
“By the same token the people also, and even pieces of them, spare parts which are not as yet fully reincarnated. One must advance to the edge of the Provisional, to the very precipice! And when you think of it, you haven’t done too badly considering that you are only a figment of my fancy; you could be considered as more than half Toby when it comes to the novel which I almost wrote and then funked because of all these considerations. Somehow you have managed to hold your separateness, your own identity … do I mean that? Yes, a book like any other book, but the recipe is unusual, that is all. Listen, the pretension is one of pure phenomenology. The basic tale which I have passed through all this arrangement of lighting is no more esoteric than an old detective story. The distortions and evocations are thrown in to ask a few basic questions like – how real is reality, and if so why so? Has poetry, then, no right to exist?”
Dawn was breaking with its chaste silver points of lake and forest, and their sleep entered a deeper and sweeter register; reality seemed fragile, provisional – a mere breath might blow it out like a candle, so you felt. Indeed, the snoozing Blanford who dwelt among dreams which seemed felicitous abbreviations of truth, told himself that a human being might be described as simply a link between two breaths. Oblong thoughts to drive philosophers like Quine and Frege sane, again! To siphon off love, to hive off desire, that fancy reptile by what Sutcliffe called “low grade mercy-fucking by some inadequate pixie – someone with big elementary toe-nails and salient balls!”
Memory dropping stitches; all night long in his subconscious played a sleek and baleful jazz – esprit de vieux piano-bar! Le baisodrome vétuste de l’âme française! It is not as Cioran has it “de bricoler dans l’incurable”, but rather “bricoler dans l’ incroyable” once the vision makes itself felt. In the terms of the true alchemy both worldliness and vanity can be seen through and defeated by countermeasures. You need not give in to media clowns or dozing quietists. (I wish you would shut up and let me sleep.) I am six foot of pink convinced English baby and I write prose without thrust. Cade, go bring me my love-bacon, my sex-grog!
But Cade’s dark nightmares were of a uniform scheme and content – picture of a huge insect as the World, using primitive factors of intelligence which worked functionally but which were devoid of affectivity, of feeling! Poor fellow, this was troubling; but nevertheless he felt himself to be the servant of this faculty. Rather like someone who finds that he can read minds unerringly. It makes him feel always a little apologetic. To see so far …
The World as an armour-plated saurian with an insect mind and belated feathers – the mindlessness condemned by the gnostics, but which ruled the world. The Beast! What could be done to replace such a monster by something a little more human? Apparently nothing whatsoever.
In the case of Constance the situation with Sylvie led to a breach with the little doctor who had loved her so devotedly for more than a decade. He burst out: “What a fearful aberration this has been! How could you give in to such a folly-and drag this mad girl back once more into schizophrenia and quite possibly suicide? Constance! I am angry with you because you know better. You are not Livia with her partie à trois! It has been an amazing folly.” Constance was on the point of bursting into tears but she resisted the feeling and said, “I fled into this parody of passion to defend myself against the realisation of Affad’s piteous death – I felt it would drive me insane. I hid like this and played for time until I could muster the courage to confront the hole in the middle of nature which he left me!” He turned his back to hide his emotion and she realised how much she meant to him. “We don’t have any luck as far as love is concerned!” she went on with bitterness, “and I was rather counting on your sympathy. It hurts to be reproached.”
Nevertheless he was right and she knew it. But in order not to wound her too irremediably he changed the subject of the conversation in the direction of Livia. “You tell me that you are still asking questions about Livia. But did you know that several Germans who might know something about her are still with us? No? Well, Smirgel the double spy is still in Avignon. He was able to demonstrate quite triumphantly that he was working for the British all the time with his own transmitter. But more astonishing still is the existence of Von Esslin, the German general who commanded here. He is almost blind owing to an accident and has been more or less hospitalised in the Nîmes Eye Clinic while he awaits trial on a War Crimes charge of one sort or another. There must be others around but these two are likely to be able to help, and in the case of old Smirgel they were actually associates, were they not? I mean that the two worked together up at the fortress. I have got his address in my day book since he often comes round to read to depressive patients – he enjoys doing that. So you could ring him and make a rendezvous if you wished to ask him questions about Livia …”
How extraordinary to realise that these relics from the war were still in existence, and still in Provence! It seemed hardly possible, so far away did the war seem with all its follies. “The General!” she thought. “Perhaps it would be worth it!”
Yes, she would visit him.
FOUR
The General Visited
FOR A SHORT WHILE NOTHING WAS TO COME OF THESE notions, but then with the first few warm days of spring they gradually took shape and turned into promptings fed by her native impatience and the impending changes in their lives – for Blanford had decided that if Sylvie betook herself off to her old quarters in Montfavet he himself might return to Tu Duc at last. Constance seemed to favour the idea at any rate. So she found her thoughts turning in the direction of old Von Esslin who spent his days cooped up in the little Eye Clinic of Nîmes in a state of ambiguous half-imprisonment, waiting upon a War Crimes Tribunal to pronounce on his dossier. He was almost blind and the prognosis for the future was so poor that he had already invested in the traditional white cane, though in fact he could just dimly see things and people, often only as outlines which he filled in from memory. He sat stiffly at a child’s desk trying to learn a little elementary French in order to temper his isolation and loneliness. The authorities treated him with respectful civility proper to his exalted rank and this did not surprise him for, as he was to put it to Constance, “They understand the logic of the uniform – what is a crime after all? A soldier’s duty comes first and they know it.” It was one of those intellectual quibbles which left a bad taste in the mouth, like the scholar’s proposition that “The Templars were the bankers of God but not of Christ”!
Things did not move with great urgency, nor were the French anxious to hasten them, for with every new move the full extent of their shameful collaboration with the Germans became more and more clear. As for Von Esslin he felt rather an orphan for he had lost touch with his family and home which was occupied by Russian troops now. What little news that leaked out was anything but reassuring. Later on he would find out that the Russian Army, responding to reports of Nazi atrocities further East, had burned the chateau. His mother and sister had perished, locked in a barn with the servants. The silence emphasised his isolation. The world had closed in and his movements were limited to a walk of a few hundred yards in the romantic public gardens of that austere fief of Protestantism, the city of Nîmes. He tapped his way across them until he found a sunny spot in which to sit, basking in sunlight whenever there was any, like an old lizard. He suffered very much from the winter cold, for the little clinic was inadequately heated.
It w
as of course a great surprise when Constance burst into his life as she did, without warning, and she supposed that it was the surprise of her perfect German which made him disposed to welcome her. But in fact it went deeper, very much deeper than she herself would ever guess, for through the screens of his fading vision the blonde and beautiful woman seemed to be reincarnating a screen-memory of his blonde sister Constanza – even to the name! “My name is Constance,” said Constanza, and a piteous pang of joyful recognition was his first reaction. Of course confusion and disappointment followed it-he had wondered for a wild moment whether by some miraculous military dispensation the real Constanza had not been permitted by the Red Cross to cross the lines and visit him … It was cruel, and it took some time to accommodate himself to the truth. It was also in a way exasperating, for this life-inspiring vision had to be continuously edited and re-edited to meet the needs of the present. Moreover the sweet resemblance of voice together with her mannered stylish Prussian turns of speech went far to confirm at first blush that it actually was, it might be, it could be, must be his sister! Alas! But in their first interview while the girl introduced herself and opened up the subject of it, this thirsty delusion came down over his heart and mind like manna from heaven and it was little wonder that within an hour he was devotedly at her service and fully ready to cooperate with her in her quest for more information about Livia. His age and fragility were touching. They became friends.
What seemed strange at first was the fact that they remembered nothing of each other despite the fact of having spent so long together in the same city during the same critical period. Perhaps twice she had seen him with a column of soldiers crossing the town, face turned away, pale and remote as a cipher – which is what he was. He could not remember having seen her at all, otherwise he must have been struck by the resemblance to his sister. Of Livia he knew only a little and that by accident, for he had spent a weekend in the infirmary of the fortress being nursed for an infected tooth, and this rather taciturn field nurse was on duty that week. But the eminence of his rank had hardly encouraged them to indulge in casual conversation. Nevertheless he had heard some vague gossip about the English girl who had defaulted to join the Nazis and who was working as a staff nurse in the field force. He himself felt that such independence merited admiration and was rather shocked when the security officer who outlined her record spoke of her with pity and contempt. They were suspicious of Livia apparently, and in part it was due to her association with Smirgel who was the senior intelligence officer posted in Avignon and whose acquaintance with her dated from before the war when he had been an art student spending a period of study in the town on a scholarship. He had met Livia one day while working on the restoration of a painting and they had, with some hesitation, become lovers.
The Avignon Quintet Page 124