The Twyborn Affair

by Patrick White

  It was all very agitating. There stood the person poised on a rock above the sea. Because a romantic, Monsieur Pelletier saw the naked flesh as white marble, or perhaps ivory overlaid with the palest gold leaf, though if in possession of telescope or binoculars, he might have had to admit to its being a dirty grey in keeping with the tonal landscape. Only for a moment, though. The straight figure raised its arms, composed its hands in the shape of a spire or an arrow, and plunged into the disquieted and disquieting sea. At the same moment a wave, more emotional than the majority let loose in the aftermath of the storm, struck the rusted rail separating the plage from the concrete and asphalt esplanade, from which the spray was catapulted straight into Monsieur Pelletier’s eyes.

  Aaahhh! He stood arrested, groaning and grinning with anguish, frustration, astonishment and some measure of fear, all trickling water, grey stubble, mauve gums, and a few prongs of decalcified teeth. Only for an instant his disarray: intense interest made it necessary for him to locate the swimmer’s head.

  And there it was, dark against dark. Bobbing intolerably, though the person appeared to be a strong swimmer. It was still impossible for the watcher to decide whether the hair, illuminated by sudden slicks of light, was that of a folle Anglaise or pédérasts romantique, but in whatever form, the swimmer was making for the open sea, thrashing from side to side with strong, sure, professional strokes. It must be a man, Monsieur Pelletier decided, and yet there was a certain poetry of movement, a softness of light surrounding the swimmer, that seduced him into concluding it could only be a woman.

  With this inference in mind, he began spinning on the heels of his coarse boots, their nails grating as they ate into the paving. For some reason, he remained distressed. It could have been the news in the damp papers with which his iron stall was cluttered—toujours les Bodies, at work like salt air or termites- or it could be his own re-barbative life: Simone’s fallen womb, Violette Réboa’s ulcer, his own never wholly reliable sputum—or or—the swimmer headed for the open sea and the single hair dividing this from sky (though a Romantic, the newspaper-seller was not a believer) as life from death.

  This was it. As the swimmer toiled farther out, Monsieur Pelletier was convinced to the extent that he began to moan, to fumble, then to thrash at himself inside the pepper-and-salt trousers he had worn on and off over the past twenty years, and as he approached his climax, it was in conjunction with his own precariousness, the activities of les Boches in the newspapers, and the action of the obsessed swimmer, so strong, yet so poetic, so hopeful yet so suicidal, as indeed we all are, in our sea of dreams.

  At the actual moment when Monsieur Pelletier came in his pants, the light struck through the congestion of oyster tones which had represented the sky until then, and the glistening oyster-forms of cloud slithered apart, so that the waves were streaked with violet and the hyacinth of their normal plumage was restored. Monsieur Pelletier, who had lost sight of the swimmer’s head as he relinquished that of his own throbbing penis, again caught sight of hair in long black strands, undoubtedly a woman’s, the figure describing an arc as it turned, and returned towards the shore, away from the Sargasso of its intentions.

  His relief united with the trickle of his own cooling sperm. A single gob, on reaching his kneecap, struck him cold, disgusting to the extent that he spun round, and there was Violette Réboa limping in the direction of the kiosk.

  ‘Qui est cette personne, madame,’ he shrieked at the intruder, ‘qui nage—sans raison—à cette heure du matin?’

  Madame Réboa’s cod lips prepared to protest at the question she was being asked at the same unseemly hour as the swimmer had chosen for a swim.

  ‘Ma foi!’ she pronounced sulkily.

  She had come to buy, or, she hoped, to be given a box of matches.

  Neither Madame Réboa nor Monsieur Pelletier believed in each other entirely since the relationship they had enjoyed long ago, before the ulcer started eating into Madame Réboa’s leg.

  She now demanded her matches, and Monsieur Pelletier led her as far as, and no farther than, the kiosk’s perimeter. (There were those who said that Violette Réboa’s Joséphine had been got by Aristide Pelletier behind Simone’s back; when it wasn’t TRUE, Simone insisted.)

  The fug inside the kiosk was intolerable: over and above the collaboration of methylated spirit, mildewed tobacco, damp news, salt air and rusty iron, there was a smell, or scent rather, of chestnut trees in flower, which only he could distinguish, Monsieur Pelletier liked to think. Or could Madame Réboa too?

  Anyway, he kept her out.

  And drew her attention seawards, where the swimmer was nearing rocks refurbished with their familiar porphyry by the increasing light. ‘C’est une fille? Ou un gars?’

  Again Madame Réboa was unable to give an opinion, but announced with seeming irrelevance, ‘Elle est belle, hein? la femme du fou Grec—qui est elle-même folle—une espèce d’Anglaise—mais gentile …’ and added as she stumped away, ‘Ils n’ont pas un rond’ thus declaring herself firmly against beauty, charm, and madness.

  Monsieur Pelletier was relieved to see her go, just as years ago he had been relieved when the outbreak of the ulcer gave him reason for ending a relationship which, though passionate enough, was inspired by lust on either side.

  Strangely, it did not occur to Aristide Pelletier that the emotions the swimmer aroused in him might have been occasioned by lust, not even taking into account the trickles of sperm still moist on his groin and thigh. Whether the swimmer were the young wife of the crazy Greek or some unknown woman or youth, neither physical passion, nor even a burst of lust, could enter into a relationship which presented itself as a tremulous abstraction, and which must remain remote from his actual life. In one sense disgusting, his regrettable act of masturbation seemed to express a common malaise, his own and that of the swimmer headed for the open sea, as well as a world despair gathering in the sea-damp newspapers.

  As the swimmer, as the light, as the colour returned, what could have remained a sordid ejaculation became a triumphant leap into the world of light and colour such as he craved from the landscape he knew, the poetry he had never written, but silently spoke, the love he had not experienced with Simone or Violette—or Mireille Femande Zizi Jacques Louise Jeanne Jacques Jacques Jeanne—a love he knew by heart and instinct, but might never summon up the courage to express, unless perhaps at the point of death.

  He had forgotten the swimmer, who had by now climbed out, glittering with archetypal gold and silver, of light and water—life in fact, before the flesh was doused in the sombre cape. Head bowed, hair swinging, the figure began traipsing up the shoulder of the hill and out of sight.

  At the same time as the anonymous being was lost in the fuzz of gold above the hyacinth sea, Monsieur Pelletier remembered, and hurried in to where the coffee was boiling over in a series of expostulatory ejaculations on to the resilient flame of the rickety little spirit lamp.

  18 mars 1914

  Have done my duty by Mrs Golson. The letter is writ, and delivered. Now we can forget about them.

  I find to my astonishment that the minutiae are what make life bearable. Love is over-rated. Not affection—affection is to love what the minutiae are to living. Oh yes, you’ve got to have passion, give way to lust, provided no one is destroyed by them. Passion and lust are as necessary as a square meal, whether it’s only a loaf you tear into, or devour a dish of beans, with a goose’s thigh, a chunk of bacon, buried in them.

  This is where I differ from my darling. He is nourished by coffee and cigarettes. He provokes passion, but doesn’t enjoy it, except its more perverse refinements. I doubt he has ever experienced lust, which is why he could appreciate the sainted Anna, and why he has created the aesthetic version of me—so different, far more different than he could ever understand. For all his languages he could never understand the one I speak. Oh yes, he does, he does, I know. And doesn’t.

  We read each other’s thoughts as clearly as one can
follow the snail’s track across the terrace. In spite of it, he crushes me—regularly. Do I crush him, I wonder? Of course I do—oh Lord, yes—I do! Knowing will never prevent it.

  For this reason it is so important to concentrate on the minutiae: the mauve-to-silver trail of the snail unaware that he’s going to be crushed, the scrapings from the carrot which hasn’t yet been sliced, the lovely long peeling from the white flesh of the unconscious turnip … (I can thank the defection of Joséphine Réboa for most of these revelations.)

  All afternoon I was dragooned at the piano: Jeux d’enfants. Very upright, rigid, I was not rapped across the knuckles with the ruler, only morally. We are the chevaux de bois gyrating, gyrating, the painted nostrils.

  I must break away.

  Tonight again we have been over the Bogomil heresy without my coming any closer to what essentially it means. Perhaps it’s that way with any heresy, more than most others those of sexuality.

  E.: But don’t you think it a ferocious act to burn a heretic?

  A.: Depending on the times.

  E.: But is a human being less human depending on the times?

  A.: Who can say? Anna, a correct, a strict woman, believed it necessary to burn Basil the Bogomil.

  E.: Anna your sainted wife believed in the bonfire?

  A.: Oh dear no, the Comnena—a forerunner.

  E.: Forgive me if I’m confused. Past and present are so interwoven in the Orthodox mind.

  (Like cigarette smoke in the kitchen after midnight.)

  A.: What you will never understand is the Orthodox mind.

  E.: Certainly not in an un-believer like yourself!

  A.: One might have believed then—as one does now—in the structure of tradition—of Orthodoxy—as one believes in the visible Church of Ayia Sophia.

  E.: And in the Holy Ghost no doubt!

  A.: Why do you laugh at the Holy Ghost?

  E.: You’re right. One can’t laugh at what is omnipresent.

  All the while a storm is raging. One doesn’t reckon on the storms which arise along this serene coast. One thinks of it as a place of convalescence, honeymoons, benign airs and perfumes. Not the potential suicide in half those drifting euphorically among those same airs and perfumes. Over which the Holy Ghost presides, even in the souls of unbelievers, as he does over most marriages, A. to E., Boyd to Joanie Golson, Eadie Twyborn to Edward her Judge. Sometimes the Holy Ghost is a woman, but whether He, She or It, always there, holding the disintegrating structure together (or so we hope in our agnostic hearts) and will not, must not, withdraw.

  At one stage there was such a crash the largest olive-tree could have been uprooted, thus proving that the Holy Ghost has indeed withdrawn, I have come to need that olive-tree. My lover/husband kisses me on each nipple and in each armpit before falling back asleep. Drunk with heresies, with Orthodoxy, he cannot reach farther. He is growing frail, but of the two, I am the frailer. I used to imagine I could burn for love, but now to drown for it would be the less obtrusive way out.

  At least I’ve written the letter to the Golsons.

  19th March

  Got up this morning with the intention of being precise, methodical, final. The storm had withdrawn very early. A.’s death-mask was still snoring on the pillow. So as not to disturb it I leave him for other rooms before unlatching any shutters. It is a moment of false dawn before the real. Wind still blowing, if not so frantically. Such light as there is gives the impression of being visibly blown in different directions. Silver bouquets strewn on the surface of a black sea. As after any violent storm, one’s own fears have done the worst damage. My olive-tree is standing. The garden would seem an argument for permanence—only one or two insignificant, dispensable branches lying uncouth amongst the silver tussocks, the hummocks and cushions of lavender, dianthus, southernwood, and thrift. My rented garden. Nothing is mine except for the coaxing I’ve put into it. For that matter, nothing of me is mine, not even the body I was given to inhabit, nor the disguises chosen for it—A. decides on these, seldom without my agreement. The real E. has not yet been discovered, and perhaps never will be.

  Oh yes, only return to that point at which I ran from the tennis court, from Marian’s hysterical giggle, her white, sinewy arms, the thud of the felted ball as she drove it at the ivy-throttled screen, disturbed sparrows twittering, ascending.

  Around me in this half-light of deserted rooms evidence of the minutiae on which I’m trying to base my doctrine of life. In the false dawn it doesn’t work. The Holy Ghost was never such a ghost. I am perhaps the only stereoscopic object to be found—if I could believe in myself, but I can’t. Moving very slightly on the bathroom tiles was this little ball of hair-combings, which I had thrown at the waste-basket, and missed. All my misses, if they could be gathered up, embodied like this insubstantial ball of hair, would make a monument to futility.

  If there were need for that. The fact that I sit here writing as I do, and rereading what I have written, is evidence enough. By now I should be inundated, along with all that I cherish—my old A., our life together, the piano duets, glimpses of thrift and pinks, even my failures in the kitchen (those burnt-out saucepans) sea and light, sea and light.

  Already walking down the coast road I regretted my intention, and seeing myself, never more clearly, as I am. I’ve always hated stubbing my bare toes. I’m neither an Australian nor an Orthodox martyr. If I had taken him by the hand, my dear Angelos might have been walking beside me, far more exposed than I, his old testicles swinging in the grey light, towards fulfilment by immersion. Instead, I am alone. Everything important, alas, can only be experienced alone—the rocks I must clamber down before entering this repulsively oily sea.

  Then the plunge. I am swimming. Yes, I can swim as I could never walk barefoot. I am swimming in the direction of Africa, of nowhere. That, surely, is what I have chosen? It is just because I can swim with ease that finally I burst out laughing. Like an amateur, I swallow a gutful of water. And light. All the refractions of light around me—violet into blue blue. I swallow it and spout it out. I am the Amateur Suicide. I turn and snooze back through healing water. I am not ashamed, as I shall be later. For the present, snoozing and spouting. Rising, as Angelos must be rising out of those other, grey waves, to bare his teeth at the bathroom mirror, farting, regardless of whether I’m there or not. This is marriage, I would like to think, enduring marriage as authorised by our version of the Holy Ghost.

  But I must escape, and not through suicide. I knew it as I dashed the (healing) water from my face and body on those damn rocks, to which I should have had no intention of returning. Was this why I wrote the letter to Joanie Golson? to enlist her sympathy, her help? Can you escape into the past? Perhaps you can begin again that way. If you can escape at all.

  When I got back, Angelos said, ‘Where were you? I began to worry. What were you doing? Look, your feet are bleeding!’

  ‘Yes, they’re bleeding, I’ll put iodine on them. That will be hell—but your wife Anna would have approved. Actually, I only went for a swim—nothing less orthodox than that, darling.’

  A. laughed. ‘I wondered where you were, and why you didn’t bring me my coffee.’

  This is why you can’t help loving A.—in the absence of a Holy Ghost, his trust in one frailer than himself.

  Mrs Golson had just returned from the English Tea-room and Library where she had succeeded in securing (there was no other word for it) that elusive novel by Mrs Wharton. If Mrs Golson was already intimidated by what she saw at a glance between its covers, she would be proud to sit with it in public places. In fact she had already more or less decided to venture into the rotunda and order tea instead of having it sent up to their suite, when she discovered that it was Madame Vatatzes, no less, standing at the reception desk.

  Mrs Golson’s spirits soared, which did not protect her from simultaneous confusion.

  ‘Are you visiting somebody,’ she asked, ‘at our hotel?’

  Madame Vatatzes also appeare
d confused. ‘I was passing,’ she replied awkwardly, ‘and thought I’d look in—to see whether you were still about.’

  ‘What good luck that I am!’ Mrs Golson hoped she sounded jaunty rather than rakish.

  Madame Vatatzes seemed to find her manner acceptable. They both laughed.

  But almost immediately the unfortunate Mrs Golson was faced with another dilemma: whether to take her attractive friend up to her private salon and keep her to herself, or to flaunt Madame Vatatzes, far more spectacular than Mrs Wharton’s novel, in a public room?

  When suddenly she was tossed, with no effort on her part, on what seemed the dilemma’s only possible horn. ‘Shall we be devils and brave the music in the rotunda?’ It sounded most unlike herself.

  ‘Why not?’ said Madame Vatatzes. ‘We’ll have each other to fall back on.’ Immediately after, that white smile broke in the terracotta face.

  Mrs Golson almost took her by the hand and led her towards the music. If she thought better of the hand-play, she continued to feel extraordinarily daring, as she marched ahead across the gloomy hall towards the more luminous rotunda, where the palms stood quivering in their jardinières under onslaught by piano and strings.

  Mrs Golson paused to look about her in triumph and choose a table worthy of her guest. Not neglecting that other alliance with Mrs Wharton, she held the volume flat against her bosom. They made an imposing trio, Mrs Golson saw reflected in panels of amethyst and amber, her own lips sligntly parted, Mrs Wharton’s lettering at least displayed, Madame Vatatzes graver in expression, perhaps because censorious. It might well have appeared a worldly, and to a refined, reclusive young woman, a vulgar scene.