The Black Book

by Lawrence Durrell

  Sweets to the sweet. To Lobo sensual lust. And for the journalist inevitably, a journal. A journal! What a delicious excursion it sounds! The path lies ready, the fruit grows on the hedgesides. But the stupendous arrogance of such a record! What should it contain, then? A pedestrian reckoning by the sun, or aphoristic flights, or a momentous study of my excretions covering years? A digest of all three, perhaps. One can hardly tell. No matter. Let us begin with Lobo. To insects sensual lust. And to Lobo a victory over the female, because that is what he wants. I say victory but I mean a rout: a real beating up of his natural enemy, who degrades him by the fact that she carries the puissant, the all-conquering talisman of the vagina about with her. If it were possible to invent a detached vagina, which has an effective life of its own, then Lobo would be a profound misogynist, I am sure.

  But consider him, as he sits there, working over the enormous parchment chart of South London. Consider the lily. Every week after a certain lecture, he takes it down from the wall, and gets busy on it with his tools: compasses, protractors, dividers, his India ink which hardens in shining lines along the thoroughfares; his pencil box full of rubbers, tapes, stamps. On the black wood is a garish cockatoo. This reminds him of Peru, though why, he cannot think. In his childhood there were boxes of oranges with this bird painted on them. Perhaps that is the reason. But it reminds him of Lima, sitting out there on the map, a beautiful grey husk of life. Lima, with the parrots and the oranges, and the almond-eyed whores, and the cathedrals, delicate, delicate. I invent this, because though he is incapable of saying it to me, yet he feels it. Dust, the eternal dust along the highroad, and the hucksters, and fine swish motorcars, and lerv. The facile, hot Latin lerv, with its newt’s eyes fixed on anyone ready to ease you of a thimbleful of sperm. Sunlight along the lips of the shutters, or the guitars wombing over the Rimac, hot and seasoned. And the sour booming of many steeples, Santo Domingo, San Augustin, La Merced. He imitates their hollow noises, raising his hand and keeping himself in time with his memories.

  Fascinating to watch him sitting there, this little brown man, penning his map; his thin girl’s fingers with their unpressed cuticles carefully unstopping bottles, cleaning nibs, clutching a penholder as they move forward to letter or draw. Lobo is as much of an enigma to me as this fantastic locality of blind houses and smoke which he is drawing must be to him.

  Perhaps the remark about the insect was a little strong, for it is not my business to raise my own standards to the height of an impartial canon. But it seems to me accurate. The female is a catalyst, unrelated to life, to anything but this motor necessity which grows greater day by day. Lobo! Perhaps this all has something to do with his homesickness, his Latin tears and glooms. What I am concerned with is the enigma, not these erotic manoeuvres, all carried out on the plane of nervy, febrile social welfare; the kind of thing Laclos did so vividly. “My God,” he says sometimes, “I think never to go with womans any more, never. Why is the mystery? Afterwards what? You are dead, you are disgust. Smell! It is impossible. I go along the road, pure as a Catholic, then I see a woman look to me and …” His heavy head bends lower over the chart; the compressions gather in the cheeks under his bossy Inca nose; he is silent, and it is a little difficult to find anything to say in reply.

  Lobo has the fascination of an ancient stamp for me. I can’t get past the thought of this little Latin fellow sitting in his room night after night, working like Lucifer for his degree; and all the while his mind riddled with thoughts of home, like a pincushion. He admits it. “It is my home makes me blue, dear friend. I think in bed of Peru many night and I cannot sleep. I put the wireless till twelve. Then I go mad almost. That bitch nex’ door. I can kill her when I am alone. Listen. Last night I made a little deceit for her. Truly. I weeped in the night. It was quiet. I weeped a little louder. Nothing. I weeped like hell. Really I was lonely, it was true, but not real the tears. I could not make the real tears. Listen, I heard her put the light and sit in the bed looking. I went on with the tears. Then she speaks: Who is it? I was not knowing how to speak. I had no words. Soon she put off the light and lay. No good. I ran to the door and knock it very quietly. I say, It’s only me, Miss Venable. Nothing. I tap tap tap but nothing. I was angry. I sniff like hell, but nothing. No good. The dirty bitch. After that I went to bed and really weep, I wet the pillow all through, I am so angry I could kill.” His eyes dilate earnestly under the sooty lashes. At such memories he becomes pure emotional idealism. Like the Virgin Mary. He will cut himself one of these days for lerv, he says. I confess I did not know what this phrase meant until the night of the festival, when we returned at three to drink a final nightcap in his room. He was pretty drunk.

  “Know what I do when a man make me angry?” he asked. He explored the washstand drawer and appeared before me with a knife in his right hand. He was so gentle and friendly that for a second I was afraid. “See this,” he said, and handed it to me as simply as a girl. It was an enormous folding knife, sharpened to great keenness.

  “I cut him,” said Lobo unsteadily.

  Taking it from me he divided the air which separated us neatly into four portions, grinned beatifically, and replaced the weapon in its secret hiding place. When he talks like this, then, it is an enraged hara-kiri that he plans—or a murder.

  But confidence for confidence Lobo finds me a very unsatisfactory person. My humility devastates him. Particularly my complete ignorance on the subject of women. He says in tones of gravity and wonder: “You? A man of forty, an Englishman?” Really, to be frank, if one must be frank, I have had few and unsatisfactory experiences in this direction. Literary affairs with aging Bohemians, in which my ability to compare the style of Huxley to that of Flaubert was considered more important, even in bed, than physical gifts; a stockbroker’s widow; an experimental affair with an experimental painter, in which, again, our mutual respect for the volumetric proportions of Cézanne’s canvases was almost our only bond. Affinities, you might say. I suppose in this direction I must be rather a dead battery until I meet Grace. Lobo is bored. An Englishman of forty? Well it must have been forty years in the wilderness for all the adventures I can recount. Never mind. I comfort myself with Pascal’s remark about the thinking reed.

  Chamberlain is not less scathing. This canary-haired zealot, living in one of the flats nearby with a young wife and three dogs, spends his moments happily lecturing us one such esoteric subjects. “Sex, sex, sex,” he exclaims roundly, his manner closely modelled on the style of Lawrence’s letters. “When will we get the bastards to realize?” Fraternizing in the bar-room among the blue spittoons. He is powerful and convincing, standing over his bitter, and appealing to his wife for support, “Glory be to hip, buttock, loin, more ferarum, bestiarum, uterine toboggan, and the whole gamut of physical fun. Don’t you think? What about more bowels of compassion, tenderness, and the real warmth of the guts, eh?”

  Really I am scalded by this curious Salvation Army line of talk. Bad taste. Bad taste. Tarquin winces and bleats whenever Chamberlain gets started.

  “Let us invent a new order of marriage to revive the dead. Have another beer. Let us start a new theory of connubial copulation which will get the world properly fucked for a change. Tarquin, you’re not listening to me, damn you.”

  Tarquin bleats: “Oh, do stop forcing these silly ideas on one, Chamberlain. You simply won’t admit other people’s temperamental differences. Shut up.”

  He is mopping the froth off his beer with a discoloured tongue. Chamberlain turns to his wife, who is standing, breathing quietly, like a big retriever: “What do you think? Tell me.” She prefers to smile and ponder rather than think. “There,” says Chamberlain in triumph, “she agrees.”

  “All this damned sexual theorizing,” moans Tarquin. “Don’t you think, Gregory? I mean damn it!”

  “Don’t you agree with him,” says Chamberlain. “Now, Gregory, you’re quite a good little fellow on your own.”

  “Young man,” I say weakly.

&n
bsp; “Oh, I know you’re a patriarch in years, but that’s mere chronology. You need to grow a bit.”

  “Oh, do stop,” says Tarquin, acutely miserable.

  “The trouble with you, my dear,” says Chamberlain, “is that you’re still fighting through the dead mastoid. Now what you need …”

  And so on. One revolts from transcribing any more of his chat, because it becomes infectious after a time. His personality is attractive enough to make any dogma plausible and compelling to the imagination. As for Lobo, they spend hours quarrelling about themes domestic and erotic. This always ends in trouble. “Listen, Baudelaire,” says Chamberlain, “you’ve got yourself up a tree. Climb down and take a look round you.” When he really wants to frighten the Spaniard he suggests calling his wife in and putting these problems before her. This is hideous. Lobo’s sense of chivalry squirms at the idea. Tearfully, under his sentimental eyelashes, he says, after Chamberlain has gone: “A beast? Eh? He is beastly. Doesn’t he have the finer feelings? His poor wife, like a prostitute in his home. It is terrible, terrible. He only understands the prostitute, not the real woman. He is terrible.” And a string of Spanish oaths.

  Fog over the gardens. Fog, marching down among the pines, making dim stone those parcels of Greek statuary. In the distance trains burrowing their tunnels of smoke and discord. Lights shine out wanly against the buildings. The red-nosed commercials will be lining up in the bar for their drinks. I can see the whisky running into their red mouths, under the tabby whiskers, like urine. I sit here, in the shadow of the parchment chart, smoking, and eating the soft skin on the sides of my cheeks. The customary madness of the suburban evening comes down over us in many enormous yawns. Ennui. “We do not exist,” says Tarquin. “We do not exist; we are fictions.” And frankly this idea is not as outrageous as it sounds. Toward evening, when I walk down the row of suburban houses, watching the blinds lowered to salute the day’s death, with no companion but that municipal donkey the postman, I find myself in a world of illusion whose furniture can only be ghosts. In the lounge the veterans sit like Stonehenge under the diffuse light of the lamps. Old women stuck like clumps of cactus in their chairs. The Times is spread out over the dead, like washing hung out on bushes to dry. Footsteps and voices alike trodden out in the dusty carpets; and the faint aeolian sofas appealing to the statues. Night. The clock whirrs inside its greenhouse of glass, and the Japanese fans breathe a soft vegetable decay into the room. There is nothing to do, nothing to be done.

  In the flat that my body inhabits, the silence is sometimes so heavy that one has the sensation of wading through it. Looking up from the book to hear the soft spondees 6f the gas fire sounding across nothingness, I am suddenly aware of the lives potential in me which are wasting themselves. It is a fancy of mine that each of us contains many lives, potential lives. They are laid up inside us, shall we say, like so many rows of shining metals—railway lines. Riding along one set toward the terminus, we can be aware of those other lines, alongside us, on which we might have travelled—on which we might yet travel if only we had the strength to change. You yawn? This is simply my way of saying I am lonely. It is in these movements, looking up to find the whole night gathered at my elbow, that I question the life I am leading, and find it a little lacking. The quiet statement of a woman’s laugh, breaking from the servants’ rooms across the silence, afflicts me. I consider myself gravely in mirrors these days. I wear my skullcap a trifle grimly, as if in affirmation of the life I have chosen. Yet at night sometimes I am aware, as of an impending toothache, of the gregarious fibre of me. Dear me. This is becoming fine writing in the manner of the Sitwells. But let me discuss myself a little in green ink, since no one takes the trouble to do so in words of more than one syllable. In the first place, my name is not Death, as it ought to be, but Herbert. The disgusting, cheesy, Pepysian sort of name which I would pay to change if I were rich enough. Death is part of the little charade I construct around myself to make my days tolerable. Death Gregory! How livid the name shines on the title-page of this tome. Borrowed plumes, I am forced to admit in this little fit of furious sincerity. Borrowed from Tourneur or Marston. No matter. The show must go on.

  My estate, to descend to the level of Pepys, is in a neat and satisfying condition. A lifelong sympathy with Communism has never prevented me from investing safely, hoarding thriftily, and living as finely economic as possible. This means my tastes are sybaritic. On bread I have never wasted a penny, but an occasional wine of quality finds its way into the trap-doored basement I call my cellar. The books I own are impeccable—the fine bindings lie along the wall in the firelight, snoozing softly in richness. Unlike most men, I read what I buy. The table I keep is frugal but choice. The board does not groan, but then neither does the guest, ha ha. Taste and style in all things, I say to myself with rapture, taste and style! Neat but not gaudy, fine but unadorned! All of which makes these nostalgic moods so incomprehensible, so damned unreasonable; for have I not chosen the life of reason and moderation as my proper field?

  Chamberlain is in the habit of saying: “Of course, my dear, your system is bound to break down sooner or later. Or else the system will stand and you will break down inside it. I’m all for tightrope acts, and fakirs, and trolleys full of pins, provided they entertain. You do not. You are walking a tightrope with no safety net under it, and it bores. Gregory Stylites, come down from your perch and have a slice of ham.” All this, however imprecise, is vaguely disquieting, sitting here over the fire, with a calf-bound Pascal and a glass of dry ochrous sherry on the table. Such a comforting system after all! So safe, so cast-iron in construction! Such a clever device, when all’s said and done. But then, if one does not fit a system? That is the question. I am reminded of the little formula which he tacks on the end of his customary good night, whenever he calls: “Well, good night,” he says insolently. “Grand show you put on.” There is a quality in all this which ruins my façade; I am less sure of myself: I wince in a quaint schoolboy nervousness. Not that I show the least sign of it, I flatter myself. No. My control is perfect, my poise almost geological in its fixity. I “carry” my skullcap with distinction none the less, for I am as proud as Lucifer. But is it a little boorish of him to pretend that my modish charms do not touch him at all. I like his wife better. True, she takes her cue from him and tries to find me amusing, but she can scent that little Prussian core of pride in me. She is a little awed, in spite of herself, at those qualities which my skullcap is intended to suggest. Shall I bore you with a discursion on the intuition of women? It is a subject I know nothing whatsoever about. But that should not disqualify me from writing about it. Here is paper, seven pages covered, here is ink, and here is that isolation which breeds many fantastic notions in my pen. If you are afflicted by my tediousness, take heart. This might have been a novel instead of anything so pleasantly anonymous as a diary.

  Talking of loneliness, since we must talk tonight, or suffer the silence to become unbearable: Tarquin is also a sufferer from this malady, this geometrical insanity of day followed by night followed by day, etc. But his study of himself is so strenuous that he is in a much worse condition. Tarquin is already behind the screens, attended by the one fatal nurse of the ego. His researches have been rapidly making a wreck of him. Complex, inhibition, fetish, trauma—the whole merde-ridden terminology of the new psychology hangs from his lower lip, like a cigarette in the mouth of a chain smoker. “One must explore oneself, don’t you think? One must try and reduce one’s life to some sort of order, don’t you think? What do you think of Catholicism, Gregory? Sometimes I get such a feeling of devotion—it’s like being in love, sort of raped by contemplation. Does Lobo know anything? I must ask him. I used to faint at one time, and have dreams or visions, what would you call them? Trauma, it seems like according to the books. Real fits, like epilepsy, what do you say? Eh?” And so on. The terminologies of theology and psychology running neck and neck, each outdoing the other in vagueness. Duns Scotus and Freud. Adler and Augus
tine.

  “I suppose one really ought to read the best books,” he says hopelessly. “One must cultivate one’s garden like who was it said? One’s taste and all that. But that damned Iliad, Gregory, honestly I can’t get on with it. And pictures, too. Christ, I look at them, but it doesn’t mean more than what’s there. I don’t feel them.”

  Every now and then he has a syphilis scare, and off he trots to the hospital to have a blood test. The vagueness of the Wassermann torments him. One can never be certain, can one? Standing naked beside his bed he whacks away at his reflexes with a rubber truncheon; closes his eyes and finds that, standing with his feet together, he does not fall. Or he will pace up and down the floor, pausing to examine the microphotographs of spirochetes which hang over his cottage piano. Why is his chest spotty? Why is he always so run down? Is it lack of calcium or what?

  Everthing is plausible here, because nothing is real. Forgive me. The barriers of the explored world, the divisions, the corridors, the memories—they sweep down on us in a catharsis of misery, riving us. I am like a child left alone in these corridors, these avenues of sleeping doors among the statuary, with no friends but an audience of yawning boots. I am being honest with you for once, I, Death Gregory, the monkey on the stick. If I were to prick out my history for you, as Lobo his plans on the mature parchment, would you be able to comprehend for an instant the significance of the act? I doubt it. In the field of history we all share the irrelevance of painted things. I have only this portion of time in which to suffer.

  The realms of history, then! The fact magical, the fancy wonderful, the fact treasonable. All filtered, limited, through the wretched instruments of the self. The seventy million I’s whose focus embraces these phenomena and records them on the plate of the mind. The singularity of the world would be inspiriting if one did not feel there was a catch in it. When I was nine the haggard female guardian in whose care I had been left exclaimed: “Horses sweat, Herbert. Gentlemen perspire. Don’t say that nasty word any more.” I shall never forget the phrase; it will remain with me until I die—along with that other useless and ineradicable lumber—the proverbs, practices, and precepts of a dead life in a dead land. It is, after all, the one permanent thing, the one unchanging milestone on the climb. It is I who change; constant, like a landmark of the locality, the lumber remains. Like a lake seen from different altitudes during a journey, its position never varying: only its aspect altering in relation to my own place on the landscape. I think that what we are to be is decided for us in the first few years of life; what we gain afterwards in the way of reason, adjustment, etc., is superficial: a veneer, which only aggravates our disorders. Perish the wise, the seekers after reason. I am that I am. The treasonable self remains. I am not more astonished now by the knowledge that gentlemen can, if they want, have wings, than I was by that pithy social formula; or, for example, that red blood runs in fishes. I shall never be more amazed.