Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel

by Lawrence Durrell

  With the others it is not so. With Vasec it is only a cog missing in action. He will drink ink because he knows it is time for his milk, and sit there smiling with a black mouth and African teeth. With Pieter you know what it is: little ailments in the hip, sciatica, rheum—until the Lord of Hosts tells him to take up his harmonium and walk, when he is reborn in rather a hideous way. The Starfish wonders why his mother does not call. It was April, the first clean jewels. The girls were at table, rich with pigtails and humour. He saw her over the food, and knew she had eaten his life. “My darling,” he said, “My darling,” and took down the whip from the antlers of the black-buck. In the bedroom she was pregnant. He was choking with divine love, his woman, his hearth, and the fine children like saplings. The peat was stopping his throat, the winter highlands, the hard earth, dour, dour as porridge. In his passion he saw the red, worn hands, the murky circle of gold, the nails peeled away with dishes and greasy plates and tedium. In the room downstairs the children were silenced like a brood of owlets, when he began to whip the unborn generations, the hanging fruit of her womb. Terror climbed the stairs, but his love was too much, until she went all silly like a doll and the sawdust ran out of her neck, and the price went up from sixpence to half-a-crown. Do not judge as easily as twelve good men and true. There is a supreme justification in action which you cannot understand. Honour the monster in him, if you expect the miracle. Do not judge, by request of the management, do not judge.

  It is the same with Hamlet when he came to us last night, unannounced. It was difficult not to judge, to see the threads that had snapped, and still distinguish them from the threads that were whole. He came walking with that delicate Elizabethan tread, like a guilty child who has stayed away too long. “There is a moment or two of time left me,” he said, “before I go into my little black box. I come to you (that was I) because you, more than anyone, understand. With Vasec there is love, but no understanding. I come to you because I do not want to go away into minus quantities and be forgotten. I need the fragile consummation of memory. Give it to me as a last gift.”

  After that he went away into a quiet contortion of weeping which you would find disgusting: but his silence and utter mask when they screwed the lid down, was anaesthetic with pride. Death, you see. The last status. We did what we could with manners, according to the old custom. From between the bars I watched the procession gather and flow out into its immemorial manoeuvre: the stiff black robes: the language: the cataracts falling between the beds of tall cypress and cedar: Bennu, the phoenix, with the green Nile water heavy in its beak: the sun touching the wing-tips of olive, until the night fell, and nothing moved on the vast plain, but the faint medieval luminous cross with its furniture. The furniture of Christ. Death had become his host. The long lines of insects were swallowed slowly in the west. Last came Ophelia, her face stiff, her yellow hair electric with fate. Her eyes were two silly cornflowers, numb at the roots, after a dry summer. I did not go, but watched from my cage, in order to make my loneliness certain. The procession concerned them: what was cosmic in the drama of bodies was mine. I was jealous of it.

  Slowly we are all dropping away into the patient maw of events. Soon Vasec, too, with the great burden of love he owns, and the Starfish with his glamour. All of them, and us, and at the last, perhaps, I. But the target is not certain yet.

  When I think like this, at night here, I make a kind of dialogue with you about the hypothetical future. I speak to the empty wall, to the nook where Fifi lies, where the Dancer travels on the moon like a jet of silver soda-water. At my language even the seals, startled among the ice, under the northern lights, sit up in bed and make question marks with their ears.

  My life has settled on me like a great lens, focused to a diamond-point of sanity. Would you say I was more lucid, more at home among the ordinary elements? This light burns on the paper, a picture too like a sun-spot for me to look at it for long. You are there in the inevitable room, car, snow, summer, bathing. The supplication thongs me, I cannot move. These eyes, swollen up into mere commas of supplication, the heart with the full-stop written in it. What shall I say to make it plausible? The pen draws fine geometric abstractions round this lonely house among the apple-trees, the autumn smoke in a rusty sky, the cattle.…

  They will not let me ride away with you when the Tuesday automobile calls. I would be happy in the sodden woods, with the falling leaves and the mild shotgun. Amen. The children crossing the stream. The oats. Here it is so familiar that I am stifled in its tedium. I do not belong here. I sit and surfer the carnage, the havoc of these unhappy people, and speak to them as gently as a doe. Luke, and Malaria, and Tiryns. And Vasec with the enormous head. His skull is a sounding-board of bone. When he eats you hear the resonant crumping of a horse at his oats. The Dancer, on the other hand, is so fastidious that he puts pinches of salt on the back of his tongue before he eats. The salt preserves his balance, he says, and makes all sweet and savoury. It is all so known. They are so cordial they do not notice my boredom. The limbo of egoists. Pieter with his optic disc in a state of atrophy and Luke with the magnets in his pockets. Twenty spines curved over a ravenous dinner-table in a dance of food. Afterwards Vasec’s cranium in concentration over a chequered board…

  All this havoc of spirit is the product of your weeping: the moment when you grin with tears and put your mouth to my wrist. You are the thong, the mantrap without which I could accede easily, fold up my emotional baggage, and cross the border into a landscape so still that it might be painted. A beathless, coloured territory where the hermit sits forever, bowed over a butter-lamp, and Mind is luminous in every shrine. I reach over, but find I am hobbled. In the night I struggle to untie the bonds, break prison. You are there like a desert of agony, and I think of the car, the escape we will have on Tuesday if I can speak. It is hollow wishes, the old skeleton of escape. The old picture is so silent, so familiar in its austerity. We were glorious men and women in days of yore, etc. Look, there is the husband, there is the happy man. She is warm and filled with scented bread. The children sleep like birds. The little house broods on a moonlit triviality and falls asleep. Deep ash in the woods the deep note of the night-jar, the oak and the ash. The peaceful skein of living gathered up and put aside in the coloured basket among the knitting-needles. Two plain and one purl. Do not stir, by request of the management, do not stir. We are asleep in the deep armchair, the windows are moist, the fire breathes underneath the bed of ash. T-h-e D-o-g A-n-d T-h-e C-a-t S-1-e-e-p O-n T-h-e M-a-t.

  I escape from the chain-shot and stumble up the steps of the lighthouse, trembling with fear. The birds are still falling. Judas sits in his original place, the eternal pilot of continents. We do not have correspondence. If there were a fraction of my spirit to be carried in words, in paint, in music.…

  It has all fallen away from me: it is all falling away, lapsing, loosening. You and the picture like a painful inevitable amputation. My clothes stick to the wounds. I tear them away. I would be free, but for the machinery of familiarity which you start with your gauds, the cavalier with breasts and soft hair, terrible with silk. The new country waits, sunk in its own terrible finery of mountains and glaciers: the dove and the panther: the spirit forcing the roof of the skull in its flight. The prayer-wheels twiddling their charms. The ambience of will, the monopoly of God.

  Shut in the tower I am shot with sanity: time does not pay her dividends. A man can only stand so much. The farm, my God, the hot ash of dead fires, the kettle urbane, the lantern on the hook, the breathing of cattle, the marl and mulch of January, the rime and ribbons of March, the dividends of corn.… I am ruined by the delicate bodies of men and women who haunt the house, their delicate days and ways, somnolent with mud and patience. The serfs. The roaring girls whose lusts are almond-seed and seams of quaint shale. The terrible patient hunger of the landed men, whose bodies were trees and the gestures of history. I would enter my lineage if it were not for this. The pith of my thought is the silk girl, trampled
in the late corn among the poppies, stuck in a framed oil-painting, out of date as mud, but instinct with pain. It is suddenly as if a loose driving-rod were clanking between my eyes. I run to where the old man is. I am in great agitation: “Look,” I say to him with the old gesture, “I throw in my hand. I am not understood here. Let me go, I will be as other men are, talking of ordinary things in the ordinary way, I cannot stand this equilibrium between two worlds. The continents fall between my fingers like sand, and I cannot grasp them. Send me back into the painting. I am really a ladybird after all. I must fly away home, my house is on fire, my children will burn. Also I have an appointment with the vicar. Seriously.”

  I hiccough terribly, but he does not speak. For the first time there is an understanding in him, but it is hidden in fear. He will not utter.

  “It has been a mistake,” I repeat to him with more pathos. “I am a husband and a husbandman. You mistook me for a disciple. For that matter I thought so myself. I am wrong. I can never cross the border. My papers are not in order. See, the passport was faked. The ticket-collector was a royalist. For God’s sake. I shall never enter. Never. I shall never get through to the other side.”

  Then he says, more sternly, with great vacuous orbs: “Give me the writing.” I give it to him, whimpering, but saying, as if novel, “I shall never get through. Never.”

  The breath of the Word enters the rooms and fills the flowers with scent. Life is so godly, waiting behind the apparatus of a few papers, some ink, a white wall. Life is solid flesh, warm hip and loin, and more than half mine. He reads while I smile the lethal smile. Then he says fondly: “Be at peace. You are there already, but have no compass, nothing magnetic. March on Orion and be happy. You have nothing to lose, because all is lost. Look. Here in the paper is written. You have already said it on the first page. The first sentence. Turn back. There is no way forwards. Turn back.”

  Asylum in the Snow

  (for Anaïs Nïn)

  (Strictly in confidence), there are five of us. I am not (Scounting Vasec or the Dancer or the magic man; I am not counting the other flesh and blood who are like arrows, running here and there in the gardens, digging holes in the earth to bury the hatchet: or crying like birds. Not them. Not the red man who is lying exhausted on the lawn in the morning, elegant starfish: they are all so silly that they are allowed to run all day in the garden. It is we who exist. From the window I watch the children pushing bags of sweets through the railings. Fifi is feeling her breasts and calling for her milk. They will bring it to her in a glass soon and tell her to stop saying those things. This makes us all laugh. The walls are very thin and made of dust, so we can laugh elegantly towards each other, and the other understands. You see it is a sort of blood-brothership. Our bloods are full of little animals and songs which call out, or tickle us and make us laugh. The people in uniforms never understand. At first I was a bit afraid. Now I am so hugged by the secret that I close up like a knife with laughing. Well, there is the snow. All night I could feel it falling on my nerves. For we five who exist in these rooms it is a kind of signal for faith, hope, and hilarity. In the morning they take away the little tin pots. Mine is nearly full of laughter, I am such a happy fellow. It comes out of a brass spigot which I keep in my trousers with my loose change. It is never the change that comes out, but the laughter. Green laughter. Vin ordinaire. Kümmel. Soda. Milk. Orangeade.

  Towards evening the hunchback goes and rolls in the snow. We look the other way because we are embarrassed. No one dares to speak of him because he has become mute. His eyeballs are all scraped with cold. They turn him the right way up, so that even the sky can see the change. He has become God. He is the fifth of us when he rolls in the snow, but otherwise like a mouse, not speaking, not laughing, not saying anything. His face is crucified, and a certain thing comes out of him. I try to write it but I cannot. Then, after that, all night it is psalms falling from heaven so white, and huge shafts of harps and angels and psalms, on my nerves in concussions of harps and angel-cake. (Look.) Here is the pen they gave me and some sheets of paper. I used to go quicker, quicker, until it was no more pen and paper, but a sort of cinema inside my breast, a sort of mass: black candles, Irish whisky, stoles, soutanes, bell, book, and choirs of violet bats. This is quite true. I was an inevitable conjurer. In the spring I used to impregnate everything with my paper and pen, until the whole earth was stifled: it couldn’t come up. I couldn’t live. Then I was so happy because I was sowing the death everywhere, and the virtue was growing inside me. I was master of plants, bees, hills, fishes—everything walking, creeping, rooted: in the air or the sea. Everything acknowledged me. I used to make a list of the earth and read it over. Very little escaped. A few weeds perhaps, or deep-sea fishes. But the rest was a chaos of broken paper, tissue, gum, ink, clips. And I? I was the magic man. I would breathe quickly and murder my wife with language and heavy instruments. Vasec laughs when he hears this, and scrapes the window. In the snow it is so queer to hear Vasec scraping, scraping, all night long like a mole in the darkness. I can’t get over it. He is so copious, Vasec the butcher. They said he was a fat man, but really he is so little, so minute, so utterly one of them. A needle in a haystack of flesh. If you give him paper and pen he will sit in front of it all day, while the sealing wax falls from his nose and puts little burning flags on the table. He is useless. We have given him up for lost long ago. Amen.

  The snow is growing upward from the earth. There is a quiet light in the passage. Life is passing into us like the light, through a filter. I make my feet like compasses and draw Ptolemaic universes on the floor, skating to make him envious or angry. Our conversation through the walls is gaudy. I am speaking to Fifi. The eastern star. The magic apples on the fire. The magi burning in eleven thousand trees, in eleven thousand Chinese wash-drawings on the tents of the philosophers. The polished piano. Brass criticizing the music, forests of bugles, critical brass complaining: and the violins ripening. Fifi is opening her legs and saying to the doctor: “Lift him up. Lift him up.” There was so much water that it was an easy birth. The star is brooding over the manger. Soon the egg will be laid. The cattle thrust their great faces into the crowd of wise men and are indistinguishable from them. The morsel can feel the damp noses on him like sponges. The dewlap laps the dew from the Virgin. A bovine arson of faces in the light of the eastern star, the wise men with their pipes, falling asleep like skittles. It is enough. Then the snow coming down in many psalms on Vasec’s fingers, filling his enormous eyes with fate, soap, and barbarity. And we five so lonely, so simple and lonely, lying on a back bed, saying her name and feeling her in the pillow: and drinking the cry as it comes out of our eyes. Her backbone was eaten by mice, and the auricle and ventricle broke off relations. I say it in the paper (but in strict confidence). Very well. She opens her legs, but before you can lie down across her she becomes the snow, the snow like the uniforms, and Christmas comes out of her, with toy trumpets, and pork, and holly, and the mistletoe, and the face of the hunchback, and the children saying prayers over an empty stocking. It is frantic that she should appear cold snow running down the legs to the belly, the pork, the valentine, the little brass spigot where the wine comes from. I am excited by this writing. They say it is not good. They sweep it up like old snow and burn it, I remember, tomorrow. It is silly, but the old man is weary. Too much paper. Too much ink. He likes the bead work better, it is restful. Soft colours with many saints and something artful in it he has a name for. A name? What is that? When you are afraid of something, or you want to hate it, you give it a name out of the alphabet. Then you can let it into the house and it will not hurt you. It is covered in a name, and you do not see it properly, you only see the little black letters. In this way you can lie quiet beside your wife in bed and have no fear: when you put out your arm or leg you will not find a Christmas tree, or a Chinaman, or amputated holly in many bloody berries, but the thing you are looking for. I mean the snow; the time when you cannot see, but it is beautiful, and the snow
touches you with many rubber bladders: and behind your head the pulse begins to beat. And you know it is mammal, warm with pith, juice, and another kind of charity which isn’t just a word, but an alphabet of essence. This again I cannot write. I could show it to you in my face, but I cannot write it. It is too ancient, drawn on the walls of many caves by the bears who never knew what a Christmas Tree was. Leave it alone, or the pen will burst into fire and burn me severely. It is an arsenal in the ink-bottle, so be careful.

  All night Fifi is snowing, and today her breasts are more troublesome than ever. They bring her the milk as usual in a glass, but it is frozen: so there is more laughter than ever in my little tin pot. You see when her breasts got slack she said to the doctor: “Give an actress a change.” So they filled them with paraffin.

  Then, of course, the first frosty day she woke up and found they were full of stones. No one seemed to care. They are so heavy and full of pebbles. They just bring her the milk and go away again into the snow.