The Revolt of Aphrodite: Tunc and Nunquam

by Lawrence Durrell

  Yet now that I am officially mad and locked away here in the Paulhaus, it would be hard to imagine anywhere more salubrious (guidebook prose!) to spend a long quiet convalescence—here by this melancholy lake which mirrors mostly nothingness because the sky is so low and as toneless as tired fur. The rich meadows hereabouts are full of languid vipers. At eventide the hills resound to the full-breasted thwanking of cowbells. One can visualise the udders swinging in time along the line of march to the milking sheds where the rubber nipples with electricity degorge and ease the booming creatures. The steam rises in clouds.

  Billiard-rooms, a library, chapels for five denominations, a cinema, a small theatre, golf course—Nash is not wrong in describing it as a sort of country-club. The surgical wing, like the infirmaries, is separate, built at an angle of inclination, giving its back to us, looking out eastward. Operations one side, convalescence the other. Our illnesses are graded. A subterranean trolley system plus a dozen or so lifts of various sizes ensure swift and easy communication between the two domains. I am not really under restraint. I am joking; but I am under surveillance, or at least I feel I am. So far I have only been advised not to go to the cinema—doubtless there are good clinical reasons. Apart from the fact that I might see a film of Iolanthe’s again I do not care: the cinema is the No play of the Yes-Man, as far as I am concerned. I am for sound against vision—it runs counter to the contemporary trend: I know that, but what can I do? Konx Ompax and Om Mane Padme Hum are the two switches which operate my brain box: between the voting sherd and the foetal pose of the sage.

  There are many individual chalets, too, dotted about upon the steep hillsides, buried out of sight for the most part in dense groves of pine and fir. They are pretty enough when the snow falls and lies; but when not the eternal condensation of moisture forms a light rain or Scotch mist. The further snows loom indifferently from minatory cloud-scapes. One sleeps well. No, I won’t pretend that it is anything in particular, either comminatory or depressing or enervating: except for me, the eye of the beholder. For I am here against my will, badly shaken, and moreover frightened by this display of disinterested kindness. Yet it is simply what it is—the Paulhaus. Subsoil limestone and conglomerate. Up there, on the further edge of the hill among the pines are the chalets allocated to the staff. Our keepers live up there, and the lights blaze all night where the psychoanalysts chain each other to the walls and thrash each other with their braces in a vain attempt to discover the pain-threshold of affect-stress. Their screams are terrible to hear. In other cells the theologians and mystagogues are bent over their dream anthologies, puzzled by the new type of psychic immaturity which our age has produced—one that is literally impermeable to experience. When he is here Nash lodges with Professor Pfeiffer whose dentures are loose and who has a huge dried black penis on his desk—a veritable Prester John of an organ. Swiss taxidermy at its best. But nobody knows whose it is, or rather was. At any rate it isn’t mine.

  Here they must discuss poor Charlock in low tones, speaking of his lustreless eye, the avain quality of his gaze. “Such a lack of theme” Pfeiffer must say. It is his favourite expression. And there opposite him sits Nash in his bow tie, author of The Aetiology of Onanism, in three volumes (Random House). Little pissypuss Nash. You wait a bit, my lads. My goodness, though, it was worth the journey, it was worth the fare. Mind you, it is easier to get in than to get out—but that is true of other establishments I have known….

  It was not entirely my fault that I awoke with a head like a giant onion—swathed as it was in layer upon layer of surgical dressing. Like the Cosmic Egg itself, and I damned well felt like it. Chips of skull (they said) had to be removed—like a hard-boiled egg at a picnic. No damage to the Pia Mater. Clunk with a couple of pick-helves as I reached for my knife. Then a kind of bloody abstract but rather lovely abdication of everything with darkness hanging like a Japanese print of an extinct volcano. Angor Animi—fear of approaching death. It haunted me for a while. But now I have gained a bit of courage, as a mouse does when the cat does not move for a long time. I am just beginning to scuttle about once more … the cat must have forgotten me. Actually they must see that I am on the mend; by special dispensation I have been allowed some of my tools back, as I say; along with them some private toys. One, for example, has enabled me to discover the position of the two microphones in my room. Instead of plugging them as a clumsy agent might have done I fill them with the noise of cisterns flushing, taps running, dustbin lids banging—not to mention the wild howls and squeaks of the tapes played backwards; and music too, prodigious wails and farts in the manner of Alban Berg. Poor Pfeiffer, he must shake his shaggy head and imagine he is listening to the Dalai Lama holding a service.

  Lately Nash has taken to visiting me regularly about thrice a week—hurried and apologetic harbinger of Freud. Pale with professional concern. “Come Nash, let us be frank for a change. Julian had me captured and brought here so that you can try to break my will with your drugs.” He laughs and pouts, shaking his head. “Felix, you only do it to annoy, because you know it teases. Actually he saved you just in time, for all our sakes. Seriously, my dear fellow.”

  Nature becomes almost transparent to the visionary eye after even a moderate period of sedation. I could see so to speak right into his rib-cage, see his heart warbling out blood, see his timid and orderly soul neatly laid up in dusted ranks like a travel library. A telephone rings somewhere. “Felix” he says tenderly, reproachfully. “I suppose” I said “you must have dreamed of escaping once, when you were very young. Where has it gone, Nash, the impetus? Will you always be the firm’s satrap, its druggist?” His eyes fill briefly with tears, for he is a very emotional man and suffers when criticised. “For goodness’ sake don’t give way to delusional ideas of persecution, I implore you. Everything has turned out right after a very nasty and dangerous passage. When you are rested and well and have seen Julian there is no need why you shouldn’t send in your resignation if you wish. There is no obstacle—all that is a comic delusion of yours. We want you with us, of course, but not against your will….” I can’t resist acting him a little of a private charade based upon Hamlet’s father’s ghost—nearly managing to secure the heavy paper-knife which I make to drive into his carotid. I bulge my eyes and wave my ears up and down. But he is fleet enough when danger threatens, is Nash; once round the table and to the door, ready to bolt, panting: “Cut it out for God’s sake, Felix. You can’t scare me with these antics.” But I have, that is what is mildly engiggling. I throw the paper knife in the air and catch it; then place it betwixt my teeth in pirate fashion. He comes back cautiously into the room. “You want me mad” I say. “And you shall have me so.” I comb out my overgrown eyebrows in the mirror and try a stern look or two. He chuckles and continues to talk. “It’s lucky you have caught me during my safe period” I say. “If it had been any other woman….”

  “D’you know,” he says effervescently “I have a patient who makes up natural Mnemons just as Caradoc used to; he was a famous philosopher, and he illustrates the ruins of his dialectical system with them. Free association is the Draconic law, no? La volupté est la confiture des ours—how is that?”

  “Woof! Woof!”

  “Felix, listen to me.”

  “Ja, Herr Doktor.”

  “These dreams you are turning in to Pfeiffer—anyone can see they are faked. I ask you, psychoanalysts riding on broomsticks and sliding down moonbeams with fairies … a joke is a joke, but this is going too far. Poor Pfeiffer says …”

  I play a little game with him for a while chasing him round and round the table, but he is nimble and I tire rapidly; I suppose that I am rather ill still, weak in the knees, and of a tearful disposition: and he knows it.

  “And Benedicta?” says he.

  “Was sent to help me compromise my reason and my feelings.”

  “Good heavens, Felix: how can you?”

  “How did it all happen to me, Nash—to Felix Ch, eh? Perhaps a desire to po
ke some frivolous and egotistical strumpet, to plough up some sexual ignoramus? Ah, listen to the alpha rhythms of the grey matter.” I hold up a finger to bid him listen. He shakes his head and sighs. “Poor darling” he says. “You wrong her and soon you’ll know it. Anyway she will be back on Tuesday and you’ll see for yourself. In the meantime you see how free you are to walk about, even without her. Even walk into town if you want one afternoon. Treat this like your own country-club, Felix. It won’t be long before we have you back in our midst—I’ve never been more confident of a prognosis. Meanwhile I’ll send you plenty of visitors to cheer you up.”

  I must have given him a woolly look for he coughed and adjusted his bow tie neatly. “Visitors” he added in a lower key, filling out a longish prescription form with deft little Japtype strokes, and adding the magic word in block capitals at the foot of the page. “This for the nurse” he added sportively, waving it as he stood up. “Until next week then, my dear Felix. Julian sends his warmest regards….” He just got through the door in time before the heavy chair burst upon it; a leg fell off, a panel was cracked right across. The German nurse came in clicking like a turkey; a strapping girl with the square walk of the sexually unrealised woman. She had a big bust and an urchin cut. I liked her white smooth apron and her manicured capable hands. Nash had fled down the corridor. I helped her gather up the pieces and redispose the furniture. I asked her if it was time for my enema, but she registered shock and disapproval at this sally. “If not, then will I to the library go,” I said and she stood aside to let me pass. As I walked, still puzzled by everything, I told myself: “Benedicta and I come from a long line of muddled sexers, spectres of discontent. What dare I believe about her, or about anyone?”

  * * * * *

  Over the week-end I tested my freedom in tentative fashion by disappearing for the afternoon: no, not into town where I am always followed at a discreet distance by a white ambulance; but into the dangerous ward. Who would ever have thought of looking for one there? I reappeared in my own quarters as mysteriously as a conjurer’s rabbit and simply would not tell them where I had been. Would they have believed me? I doubt it. The thing is that I found I was actually picking up the thought-waves of a schizo on one of my little recording devices. He was knocking on the wall at the end of the corridor and singing a bit. I sneaked to the locked door and passed him a wire with a tiny mike on it. (Of course I myself have lots of tinnitus, which is only static in loony terms.) But we hit it off wonderfully well. He didn’t really want to get out, he said; he was only troubled by speculations as to the nature of freedom—where did it begin and where end? A man after my own heart, as you see. He turned out to be a wife-murderer; higher spiritual type than the rest of us. Our electronic friendship flowered so quickly that I felt it about time to test my set of keys. The second worked like a charm and I was inside the ward with the red light, shaking hands with my friend. He was a huge fellow but kindly, indeed almost diffident about his powers. The padded ward was just like anywhere else; spotless and obviously well conducted—and with a much more refined class of person than one finds in the rest of the place. Yes, I liked it very much, even the corridor with its sickly saint-like smell: smell of sweaty feet in some Byzantine cloister? And then all the pleasant diversified humours of Borborymi. Woof! Woof! There would be no visitors between tea-time and supper, so we were free to play at nursery games—on all fours, for example, barking in concert at a full moon, trying to turn ourselves into wolf-men.

  You see, anxiety is only a state of deadly heed, just as melancholia is only a pathological sadness. I might have foundered here, I suppose, had she not appeared; foundered out of sheer exhaustion, out of defiance to Julian’s obscure laws. I could have retreated by sheer imitation into a genuine hebephrenia, to follow out the dull spiral of some loony’s talk; under the full sail of madness steered this cargo of white-faced gnomes towards the darkness of catatonia. A Ship of Fools, like the very world itself. My friend speaks of freedom without quite being able to visualise its furtherest reaches; yet he is almost there. Ah! Folie des Gouffres. But cerebral dysrhythmia will respond to a cortical sedative, even in some cases of cryptogenic epilepsy…. You ask Nash! Om.

  The thing is this: coming round in the operating theatre, under the arcs, surrounded by a ballet of white masks (white niggers, appropriates of a blood sacrifice): bending down to plunge needles into me: I heard, or thought I heard, the quite unmistakable tones of Julian. They spoke, all of them, in quiet relaxed voices, like clubmen over their cigars while I lay there, a roped steer, with wildly rolling eye and flapping ear. I knew that the operation was over by now; I was just waiting to be wheeled away. The figure I mean stood just back from the circle and was obviously neither surgeon nor dresser, though he was masked and gowned like the rest of them. It was this one that said, in the tones of Julian: “I think the X-ray findings followed up by a pneumogram should tell you….” Talk filled the interstices of his phrases like clods raining down upon a coffin-lid. Explanations proliferated into jargon. I felt perfectly well by now, the pain had gone with the tachycardia, leaving only the spearpointed attentive fury of the impotent man. Someone spoke of brainstem sedatives, and then another voice: “Of course for a while he will undergo what will seem like electric charges in the skull—weird haptic sensations.” Hence, I suppose, the longish period of surveillance among the odours of guilty perspiration; life among bedridden schizos under insulin torpor therapy, beings whose “Rostral Hegemony” is faulty—to quote the brave words of Nash. Much of this is a blank, of course, punctured by dim visions. I dare say I ran the gamut of D Ward. Petit Mal to Grand Malheur. Bed-wetting is common. By day their speech exhibits uninhibited lalling. Welcome, electrically speaking, my new-found friends, possessors of the spike-and-dome discharge! I see the anxiety rising in the Centro-cephalon, the rapid 25 per second high amplitude rhythms of the Grand Mal, the focal seizures rising in the cortex. Last week the Countess Maltessa had an unrehearsed, unsupervised epileptic fit; she died from the inhalation of her own vomit. “It so often happens” Pfeiffer will be saying, shaking his head. “You can’t watch everyone all the time.”

  I do my best to try and remember this ward, but in vain; nor indeed do I remember its inhabitants with their diversified idiosyncrasies, though of course some of them I have known about, have heard about. But if I met them during my last sojourn here I have retained no memory of the fact. They are all freshly minted—like for example the famous Rackstraw, who was Io’s screenwriter, responsible for some of her most famous work. I would have been glad to remember him; and yet it is strange for I recognised him instantly from her descriptions of him. She used to visit him very often I recall. He himself had once been a minor actor—and, some say, her lover. In its way it was quite thrilling to see this legendary figure face to face, weighed down by the Laocoön-toils of his melancholia. “Rackstraw I presume?” The hand he tenders is soft and moist; it drops away before shaking to hang listlessly at his side. He looks at one and his lips move, moistening one another. He gives a small cluck on a note of interrogation and puts his head on one side. Watching him, it all comes back to me; how well she described his imaginary life here in this snow-bound parish of the insane.

  How he would sit down with such care, such circumspection, at an imaginary table to play a game of imaginary cards. (“Is it less real for him than a so-called real game would be for us? That is what is frightening.”) I hear the clear dead husky voice asking the question. Or else when walking slowly up and down as if on castors he smokes an imaginary cigar with real enjoyment; smiles and shakes his head at imaginary conversations. What a great artist Rackstraw has become!

  His hair is very fine; he wears it parted in the middle and pasted down at the sides. It is someone else who looks back approvingly at him from the mirror. His ears are paper-thin so that the sunlight passes through them and they turn pink as shells, with all the veins illustrated. He will appear to hear what you say and indeed will often reply with great c
ourtesy, though his answers bear little relation to the subjects which you broach. His pale-blue eye gazes out upon this strange world with a shy fish-like fascination. What a feast of the imagination too are the interminable meals he eats—course after course—cooked for him by the finest chefs, and served wherever he might happen to be. Who could persuade him that in reality he is nourished by a stomach-pump? No, Rackstraw is a sobering figure only when I think that these long nerveless fingers might once have caressed the warm smooth flesh of Iolanthe. (The final problem of intellection is this: you cannot rape yourself mentally for thought creates its own shadow, blocks its own light, inhibits direct vision. The act of intuition or self-illumination can come only through a partner-object—like a host in parasitology.) If one is tempted to kiss, to embrace Rackstraw, it is to see if there is any of Io’s pollen still upon him. Can one leave nothing behind, then, that is proof against forgetfulness?

  But Ward D is only another laboratory where people are encouraged to live as vastly etiolated versions of themselves—and Rackstraw has taken full advantage of the fact. At certain periods of the moon his old profession seizes him and he fills the ward with his impersonations of forgotten kings and queens, both historical and contemporary; or will play for hours with a doll—a representation of Iolanthe in the role of Cleopatra. At others he may recite in a monotonous singsong voice:

  Mr. Vincent five years

  Mr. Wilkie five years

  Emmermet ten years

  Porely ten years

  Imhof ten years

  Dobie five years

  and so forth. At other times he becomes so finely aristocratic that one knows him to be the King of Sweden. He mutters, looking down sideways with a peculiar pitying grimace, lips pursed, long nose quivering with refined passion. He draws hissing breaths and curls back his lips with disgust. He sniffs, raises his eyebrows, bows; walking about with a funny tiptoe walk, lisping to himself. When the evening bell goes and he is told to go to bed he bridles haughtily, but he may mount the bed and stay for a long time on all fours, thinking, “Rackstraw’s the name. At your service.” His every sense has become an epicure. On the wall of the lavatory near his bed someone has written: Mourir c’est fleurir un peu. Then also for brief spells, with the air of someone looking down a well into his past, he will produce the ghastly jauntiness of the remittance man—he is living in the best hotel. “I say some ghastly rotter has pipped me … top-whole Sunday … the boots doesn’t clean suede properly….” He has become the professional sponge of the ’twenties, cadging a living from the ladies.