The Black Book

by Lawrence Durrell

  “Last night she didn’t come again.”

  “Bad luck.”

  “What to do, dear boy? What to do?”

  He lifts the flap of his coat pocket and lets his hand lie firmly along the rim, fingers hidden. He bends his right leg, and places his toe outside his left foot. This is a sort of symbolic pose with which he is waiting for Christmas, and the rewards of a whole season’s erotic manoeuvring. He begins to describe the vigil on the damp common last night. He has caught a cold, he thinks. And all because of that little strumpet. “Think of me, dear boy, with my heart full of lorve, waitin’ and waitin’.” It is impossible not to. The winter night falling downstairs among a million busted pillows, and Lobo sitting on a tombstone, frozen stiff, but drawn back like a trigger with lorve, starting at every sound on the frosty roads. Lobo, sitting there with his heart full of lorve, and his pockets full of French letters. It is something to be put on a greeting card for a Peruvian Christmas, under a gothic script and a bloody robin. Tarquin must be told. (But I am not paying attention.)

  “Think of me, dear boy,” and so on.

  Whenever possible he likes to put a big tinge of pity into his conversation because it gives his beautiful black eyes a chance to look their best: soft, molten, wobbling in tears, betrayed. Originally this must have been one of his seduction motives, this expressive sentimentality; but his repertoire of expressions is so vast, and changes so continually, that one finds a few cast-off leftovers among his ordinary mannerisms. This soft, invocative pity is one of them, left over from erotic exploits long since forgotten, except for the lines of his face, of course. That serious chart which he examines so earnestly every day, to reassure himself that his lefthalf profile is really his best side. With Englishwomen, of course, one needs a touch of healthy manliness, in order to get their pity. This he has discovered. So he wears his hat a bit more rakishly for the nonce, and tries to walk with a flat-footed rugger stride. Later, when his protective colouring is better—then his knockout exploits will begin in earnest.

  His breakfast arrives in the arms of the newest chambermaid, who looks healthy, raw, and adequate. He presents his half profile to her until she leaves. One of these mornings she will be spread-eagled on his bed while the coffee gets cold. This, one recognizes fatally, is one of the conditions of life. The wireless will be on the whole time. Fiat voluntas, with the family looking owlish and the little shoes in their static ballet.

  He takes the tray on his knee and begins to eat fastidiously, like a cat, pushing the spoon between his broad ripe lips.

  “I think”, he says at last, “I will go into a monastery. Will you come with me? Eh? We forget all these bitches, dear boy, and be holy holy holy. In black.”

  (Draw back the blind and let the soft translucent light into the room. She is lying there in bed among the apple trees and the frozen lakes, long and cool as a dormitory. The immense gothic monastery between her legs, etc.)

  Snow like a great chain from pole to pole. The enumeration of our sins, the forgiving of our sins, the postmen, the buses, the letter with the halfpenny stamp in the rack. The gutters are clotted with filth. The buses scatter. Monologue of the white road stretching down past the Catholic church, the Municipal School, the Lock Hospital, the exchange, the postbox. Tarquin lying like Gulliver in Lilliput while the buses roam up and down him, over his hips and thighs. Tarquin like the island of England in its winter chains, and the hills like many blanched nipples.

  “I am a Catholic,” says Lobo cleverly, with the air of having done a trick.

  His watch strikes the hour in his waistcoat pocket, and he springs to attention. He will miss the lecture on ferroconcrete, and that would be evil, in the moral sense. His dear father is paying his fees. Moral: honour thy father and thy mother in their frames, and learn to build more Catholic churches in ferroconcrete.

  He gathers up his manuscript, his instruments, his textbooks, and switches off the wireless. “Well,” he says with finality, locking the door carefully behind him.

  Half past ten of a Yuletide season. Lobo has vanished in a sweeping draught through the stone pillars into the main road. His scarf dangles over his shoulders. The streets are sharp with frost, the shops with decorations. The lamb is born, or will soon be born. I present the telephone at my temple gingerly, like a suicide. Marney pipes and blows down the other end. I can feel the hairs stiffening on his hump. No work today. I have a bad cold. He is angry, to be left in charge of the school like this, and deserted by all but a few good-natured oafs. The miserable children are crowding into the form rooms, piping and farting to keep warm, huddling round the tin stoves. The hunchback usher resents my illness. The sounds are all mangled with cold, indeterminate anger, pique, dignity, despair. “I thought we could count on you at least,” he says. I am tempted to reply, “Sorry, but I am a Catholic.” Instead I ring off and consult the lounge clock. It is too late to go to Communion: the only gesture in this life that contains the full quota of irony. It is early to go to bed. It is always too late or too early to do anything at all. However, when in doubt, consult the lounge clock. I consult it. New paragraph.

  In his little underground Hades overlooking the garden Peters will be lying, pondering on his own genius—or masturbating. The great problem for him is whom to be like, if he is going to be a genius. Leonardo liked port and crab apples, for example, whereas Dowson preferred a cigar. It is difficult. Swinburne took it straight from the bottle, and Wagner wore nothing but silk next to the skin. Beethoven’s syphilis, was she contracted or hereditary? If the latter, then it is too much to ask. Frankly, all this is a little boring.

  Let us take a novelist-in-the-cupboard peep at Tarquin. He has already managed to crawl out of his tepid bed and lift the window sash. The sight of the snow disgusts him. By instinct he hops back and draws the covers up to his chin, trying to hurl himself back into dream with skinny ferocity. No good. Then he remembers the dream he was having and broods pleasantly upon it. A girl on a riverbank. Or boy? It would be better as a boy on a verdant bank, a Cretan saffron gatherer now, that was the theme. Thou still unravished bride of quietness. Very little in Tarquin’s dreams remains unravished. I know because he tells me about them; we discuss them together, examine textbooks to see what caused them, and generally psychologize. For his benefit, not mine. Forty years of pious introspection have given him a nose like a bloodhound for his own weaknesses. In this case it is Clare, who lives in the box room at the end of the landing. I say “in this case”, in order to pretend that he does not always dream about Clare. But this is untrue. He seldom dreams of anyone so often or so moistly, as he does of this tall black dancing master with the sparrow’s knowingness and the cockney twist of the tongue. Therefore the mornings are pleasantly spent in analysing his unhappy passion and entering the findings in that long-nosed diary of his. If the dream was wet he gives himself full marks (sublimated); if dry, arid, and intellectual then he gets worried (repressed). There is a grave alarm in the air for the healthiness of his “life sexual” (such a dainty pre-Raphaelite arrangement of those clinical terms, don’t you know). Over breakfast we rearrange the clinical scheme, and bolster up his courage for him. It is an endless game of chess with his psyche. Tarquin’s effective working life is spent lying on his back, and catechizing himself. His spirit divides itself into two essences, pictured by the words Question and Answer; and he swears to be quite honest with himself, though he does not quite know what he means by this. Honesty and clear thinking are the general idea, however, followed by largeness, scope and a fine bold spiritual design.

  But Clare, on a morning like this? He is painfully dressed, cracking a new packet of candles and filling the sconces. The kettle is boiling. Clare is that unhappy crying for a boy’s body at some hour of the evening, or a few scrappy, ill-considered phrases in that remote diary, in which everything must be entered before he dies. Clare? The dirty little brute with the bitten fingernails. Clare is this fatal world which you can see if you stand at the window. The l
ong concrete road, its pure white nap now gouged and muddied by the rubber lips of the buses, the casts, the feet of the ants. Clare is this morning, advancing stage by stage, grimly, painfully, like a paralytic, the crisp morning sounds; the eggs frying; the loaded trays moving about; the geysers running in little spurts and gallops, and the steam leaking into the landings; or the figure of Lobo in diminishing perspective on the roads. Actually Clare is nothing of the sort. When Tarquin thinks about him his face is the face of a broken-down actuary.

  But I am not here to interpret him, nor even to make him grow. I simply put him to bed on paper among a few random syllables of English. In an atmosphere so homely one can only help oneself and hope for the best. But Clare?

  Tarquin raps on his door primly with the air of the Raven. His dressing gown flows over him in exotic folds. Or else he barks “Clare” once, like a siren, and enters. It is always the same. There is no answer. Once the door is open there is nothing to do but to stare in on the customary wreckage of the box room. The usual foul litter of shirts and pants decorates the bare linoleum. The window is open and the snow has been blowing onto the bed, the floor, the table. The gigolo is hidden.

  Tarquin calls, “Clare.” No answer or movement. The bed might be nestling a corpse. The wall is a solid mass of photographs: dance steps torn from trade journals which moves slowly in the wind—the whole wall, I mean, as if it were about to collapse on him. Tarquin begins walking around, examining the pictures, pretending he is interested in them. From the open door he looks like a maiden aunt visiting the zoo, or the Academy. He hates himself, it is obvious. Why does he worry Clare always like this? Why can’t he leave him alone? The dirty little beast! After all, dirty: because somehow the sight of Clare’s room with its snow and littered underpants is a raw awakening from the idyll, the Marlowesque dream of the riverbank, and the delicate copulation of Narcissi. As usual he does not damn literature, but damns Clare, who cannot live up to the literary reputation which has been invented for him. All this is interesting to the silent partner, the confidant. I am not called upon to remark, or to suggest, or even to admit my own presence. Merely to exist. I am the umpire whose judgement is never even asked for. It is understood that I suffer for Tarquin in his terrible affliction.

  He takes a few turns around the room, in such precise don’s paces that he almost trips in the snowy bits. On the washstand a comb, thick with dirt and grease from Hylas’ sable locks; on the pisspot holder a thriller, face down; the book he had lent the boy on the first day of his campaign for higher thinking and purer love is deep in dust. The bed lamp is on. Hylas is afraid to sleep in the dark. On the shelf is a broken enema syringe and carton of crab ointment. Tarquin explores these things with disgust.

  “Clare,” he says, “get up.”

  He has always promised that he would begin to take strong line with the gigolo one of these days. So “Get up.” The truncated body raises itself grimly from the bed: born again on the third day. Clare’s soft black curls hang on end with a blue-black electric life of their own. His pillow is greasy. The yellow goat’s eyes stare out of the window, not seeing Tarquin. He is not properly awake. At the sight of my beauty sitting up there in his dirty sheets Tarquin is angry. He would like to take a stick and beat some decency into him. He comes and stands behind me, snapping, “Get up, and don’t be such a lazy fellow.” He is hoping that Clare will imagine the words came from me. Clare sighs, sitting there, as yellow as a potentate in the snowy quilt. Lifts his soiled feet clear of the bed, and lays them down beside him, contemplating the dirty soles.

  Tarquin agitates the doorknob and rehearses exits. He is angry but nervous with lorve. “Next thing I’ll know,” says Clare, “I’ll wake up and find you in bed with me.” This produces a sort of insanity. Tarquin begins to whistle. “In bed,” continues Hylas, “right here in the bloody bed wiv me.” In all this I do not exist. Custom merely has demanded my presence.

  Tarquin bounds down the passage to his room. As always when he walks, the energy seems drawn to his head, like a top, pulling him up on his toes. He locks the door loudly, insultingly. Without speaking he begins to make tea. He is quivering with rage. His great bald cranium shines. I can see that he will not be able to keep away after all. However, tea, sugar, and a drop of stale milk. Custom has rather staled this eternal psychic crisis, so that I am not surprised when he flings down his cup, and reaches for the door again. In God is my hope, though the Devil will have scope. Tarquin whizzes down the passage to the box room like a prima donna, his robe purling after him. He bursts open the door and stands still, staring in full on the yellow eyes. His resolution to insult, to injure, to ravage, dissolves inside him. His very guts are liquefied by rage and contrition. He is so humble now, so plaintive, so full of expression, so docile, so in love. It is astounding, this change. Then, like a blow in the solar plexus, Clare’s yellow voice, “Go away.” Boisterously he yells, “Get to fucking hell out of here and lemme be, will yer?”

  The world is laid out before the fire like a chessboard on which we plan the most exciting moves. It is only a game. Tarquin is running barefooted on the scorched Cretan rocks, while the darkeyed shepherd is allowing himself to be overtaken, to be gathered up, covered in kisses. Instead of his gaunt stringy body he should really have a fine lithe trunk. And a sheepskin. Not to mention a flute. “You will not mock me,” he says seriously, “because I can see in your face that you believe in love. In dying for love.” He holds a spatulate finger between us, which we contemplate, as if expecting it to die there, visibly, in the air. “Now Gregory could never see my point of view at all. It was too strong and positive for him, I think.” In silence we are gulping the cold snow, the hot tea, the hotel, the geysers, the stricken pines, the statues, the yellow goat’s eyes. And I am pondering on Gregory and Grace and the curious design he made of them both in the little green handwriting. Gregory is a sort of chessman, like a green bishop, entangled in his pawn, and writing with the quiet venom of a player who has forgotten the rules. The book which is my secret, in the cupboard downstairs.

  “The presence of oneself!” That is how he begins. “The eternal consciousness of oneself in substance and in psyche. The eternal consciousness of that shadow which hangs behind my shoulder, watching me flourish my ink on this nude paper. What a recipe for immortality! The one self and the other, like twin generals divided in policy, bungling a war. The eternal, abhorrent presence of oneself.” Small green writing, like lacework on the tough pages of the black dummy. Who Gregory was I have not properly discovered yet. This tiny basement room was evidently his. At some epoch in history he vanished, leaving behind him a few gross of torn papers, Latin classics, gramophone records, teacups. On the title-page of this book, undated, is the inscription: Death Gregory, Esq. To his most esteemed and best beloved self, dat dedicatque. Oblivion has swallowed up this chance eviction, and there remains only the queer speckled personality of this tome, so durable and recent in age (for Tarquin and Clare and Lobo exist here) that it suggests recent visitations. “I cannot be older than a thousand years. I am not speaking of my isolation as yet, which is six by three. The isolation of a coffin. The isolation of a gargoyle hung over a sleeping city.”

  The isolation of the snow, he would have added, if he were turning the pages today. The isolation in which the hotel broods, like a baroque incubus.

  Here begins an extract from Gregory’s diary:

  The question with which I trouble myself is the question of the ego, the little me. The I, sitting here in this fuggy room, like a little red-haired, skullcapped Pope, insulting myself in green ink. The red dwarf, the lutin, the troll—the droll and abhorrent self!