The sheets are dirty. The walls are dirty. The soft bloom of gaslight whispers the items of the day’s news. A paper lies on the bed. The lying eye, trying to read it, sees the type blowing past the gas fire, out of the window, like a fine sandstorm. Black signal of the world’s disease—the wasting disease that calls for more and more calamities, more catastrophes, to scald the nerves. The world’s tragedy is Tarquin’s tragedy. He can feel nothing. Hilda’s tragedy is that she can feel too much. Her great cow’s heart thaws at the least thing. An ignorant, blundering Lucrece, she is raped by the first emotion which impacts on her. What? The Turks are slaughtering the Armenian children? O the pore little things. Her tears dribble into dirty handkerchiefs, into her bodice, her shift, her handbag, into the moist torche-cul which hangs behind the lavatory door. “You don’t feel nothing,” she says. “You don’t feel for them pore children, you little bastard.”
“But, Hilda,” I say, “it happened years ago.”
“It’s in the paper, isn’t it?” she demands. “If it’s in the evening paper how can it be old?”
She has been reading the first of a series of articles which reconstructs war history. However. I lie dutifully and try to imagine the Armenian children. Impossible. Corfu. Refugees. The Ionian curling along the buttocks of the island. Armenian choirboys making boots. The words echo horribly. In the night she cannot sleep. “I’m thinkin’ of all them pore kiddies.”
Or Hilda like a great bee moving about in the yellow gaslight, fiddling with her cosmetics, squinting in the pocky mirror. A soft cadaverous pollen blossoms along her cheeks, along the craters of her face. Every line means something. This heavy horse face is the Bible, the Koran, in which I can see all my victories and defeats epitomized. The whole word of my dreams is written over by these lines and wrinkles.
I have become suddenly soft and malleable inside, these days. Hilda looms across life like the image of one of those incestuous loves on which one’s family repulsions are supposed to be fed. I rely on her. I lie and let her wait on me, like an invalid. I am consumed by this wasting consumption of maternal love. I want this slow convalescent childhood to be prolonged for ever. Hilda has created for me a shadow out of the sun where I want to rest.
The time runs downhill on iced feet towards Christmas. A plunge into the crater of time which is chaos, original disorder. This great bed is the ark of desire that drifts quietly down the long corridors of water, down the pockets of dreams, through the veils and mists, waiting for the dove. Towards Christmas, and I am slowly being rolled homeward again, to the womb. The core of me is bound up like a foetus, a weak parcel to be slung again between the loins of my parent. I am drifting down again into the great matrix of lovers, the sunspot where all emotions are liquefied, blended, alloyed into the one all-conquering loneliness. The pungent misery that alone can make me feel. Everything else is tidied up, swept away—like those pieces of steaming meat Morgan gathered in sacks. Cupid’s loaves and fishes. I have nothing now, no emotional luggage, except this quiet convalescent wasting disease, this drawing away into maternity. I give up, am utterly sunk in death. Hilda is the genesis from which I shall be born again on the third day. If I shut my eyes the whole world is blotted out. I live in the womb as a fish in a deep sea. The cool drizzle of blood feeds me. Like Christ in the soft pouch of the virgin’s belly’, I wait in a slow dawdling, fish-like convalescence, for the moment of parting: bright cleavage, the flash, the cold air like the smack of a palm on my mouth. The lanterns, the heralds, the warm suffocation of animal piss and white breath in the byres. To leave this world!
Lying asleep I try to imagine it. The babe hooked out of the uterus, coming up gasping, dizzy, like the fish who perform the silver nimbuses around the heads of the fisherboys. The sudden scorch of sun along every scale. The dazzle of light from a million crooked mirrors. The yell of delirium and fire. Then the same stale hook baited again and dropped into the ocean of chaos. The brown-armed Jesus sits there, the intelligence running along the lithe rod to the pink mouths of the fishes. The fishes idiotically kissing the hooks that await them. Every tremor, every nibble runs down the line like a current to the nerves of the brown arms. He sees nothing. Only the fingers feel the currents of remote life in a dimension unimaginable.
Lying asleep I often wonder whether Christ was not born of a prostitute. Whether the tale of the immaculate conception was not some showy literary metaphor of the day, which we translate wrongly. The symbol of the fish; the ray of light; the messenger: Hagion Pneuma! How tolerable the world might be if we could face an idea like that. Mary and Hilda, with the breath of plenty blowing in their souls, the gourds plumped with riches. The Christ we have made is a fish: a pale intellectual parasite who has gnawed our livers for an aeon. Son of tragic mother, tragic. The soft intellectual fish of the fairytale brooding in silence on the hooks which he would never have the courage to swallow. Jesus a damp scrotum which has lain for two thousand years on the butcher’s slab, under the knife …
The great bed drifts on under the stars. Hilda the great quiet maternal body lying here. The bread of life. Her crude paws seeking along one’s ribs as soft as the sacramental wafer. Memory has many waiting rooms. We have encountered and passed the spirit which broods on these immense waters. There is no fear left now of chaos. I am like an imbecile child visiting the Zoo. I will never be happier for I will never recover from this soft phthisic paralysis, the absorption into the maternal womb. Hilda is the great comforter.
Or screwing her hat down before the great mirror. The mantelpiece is a morgue of wild creatures, stuffed and petrified in glass boxes. Owls with pained expressions and eyebrows. The gas hangs fizzing on the knotted chandelier. My own reflection in the mirror is turned upside down among Hilda’s face creams, cosmetics, underclothes, photographs. The hanged man of the Tarot! Hilda’s great head is rooted to her trunk with heavy thonged sinews. She turns this way and that so that the cords stand out sharply. She purses her mouth up like a giant sucker to take the colour from her pencils.
In the night everything is blotted out except the comfort of this heavy flesh, the comforting pressure of a hand in my hand. I am the infant in the hospital bed: Hilda the incandescent nightlight which cherishes my death-still face in sleep! Paralysed. Even the passion itself has become an idea, a figment without relation to myself, the idiot in the truss. Blind, the vast tide spins us on its back, and desire folds up its tent, and misery blooms quietly in passion which is beyond tears. Beyond tears, and gently rocked on the fathomless paralysis of chaos. The night smells as musty as a phone box. The eyebrows of the owl project a vast travesty of Connie’s face across the dark. I am simply a cheap cosmetic touched to the lips in darkness. I provide a colour which soon smudges, dims, washes away. The newspaper, like a bomb, lies on the chair among my underclothes. O world, be nobler for her sake!
Blind, in the darkness, the faint images of the world project themselves on the wall. The chart of Lobo. The boundary which we are all forbidden to cross. The passion which winged me until I was an exciting skater, covering the thin crust above fathomless blue water. The wounded gulls for the Latin whore. What have I become at last, that the night has bulged, swollen, burst into pieces? The face of the virgin shines vibrantly out of everything, the virgin prostitute of the fable, grimacing painfully under a throbbing star. A flux of little fishes waits in her entrails, eagerly, for the door to fly open on the world. Fishes with a knowing look—intellectual martyrs!
Here I am crucified at last in the dirty bed. The umpire is the owl with Hic Jacet eyebrows. I am at peace at last, fingering the nail holes, like the mad actor. It was a wonderful house tonight. Seven calls before the curtain, not counting the whole-cast ones. Across the trembling, deflated womb of the vision the curtain slips down giddily, bearing the one apocalyptic word: Asbestos. (If any mystics call before I’m through, just show them to the dressing room among the gauds and flowers, will you?)
The great bed drifts on among the planets. The snow has st
opped. The sky is familiar again: clean and shining, with a harvest of brilliant prickles. The airs are the impalpable cerements that clean our bodies; the essences of the embalmer soak into our bones. Poor parcels of soft rank flesh, with the wine and cigar smoke blowing in and out of our nostrils, what should we do with the souls that are supposed to inhabit us? The moon is peeled like a billiard ball. Hilda is crying for the Armenian children who are really her own. Shall I tell her that she is Mary? She wouldn’t believe me. That her time is drawing on now for the son of man to be born? One must avoid alarming her. Tomorrow the door of the womb will be rolled back. Tonight, drift on among the familiar constellations and dream. Sufficient unto the day is the woman thereof. Blind, the night has shrunk to the dimensions of the wasted penis—the hollow reed in which life is carried and generated: shrivelled under the taut stars like an empty paint tube.
O world, be nobler for her sake!
Items of our peculiar death. This, in the category of epilogues, though the show has not ended.
January brings the first raw cleavage of weathers—a blind hint of the merchandise which begins to fructify under the snow. Foxes’ ears underground, odorous, odorous. From the chalk breasts of Ion an Ionian asphodel. As always, the weather I am continually referring back to is spiritual. Winter is more than an almanac: it is dug in invisibly under the fingernails, in the teeth—into everything that is deciduous, calcine. Winter, as the figures produced by the shadow of the retinal blood vessels on an empty wall. I tell you it is part of the spiritual adventure, like our meeting in the snow, and the great arterials stretching away to God like a psalm; and you, gathered in the snow, a soft cave of flesh. That is why I am marking down these items in the log of that universal death, the English death, which I have escaped. It is lonely work. For each day there is a blank space to be filled. I am not as industrious as Gregory. One thought of you melts down the old fount of words, the runic, the mantic, the mystagogic, so that if I so much as dare to lift a pen I find the nib clogged with a lump of lead. I suffer your absence, but I cannot reconcile myself to it. It is as if part of my spinal column were absent. I cannot stand erect, but slouch like the Pekin man. All night now I am writing.…
Winter morning. The slow painful birth of something raw. Lochia. All hair and embers. A wound across low ridges of cloud. A celestial snail has trailed its slime across this valley. All feeling obliterated. The room, my coffin in immense shadows. At half past five the whisky has given me such a belly-ache I cannot sleep. I draw the curtain and stand before the fire, confused by the explosion of fitful dreams in the consciousness, arms hugged under armpits, watching the morning lift. Toes cold, nose cold, belly cold.
In the vacant bar the ash of the fire must be grey, the empty glasses upended in the sink with the froth stiff in them. I remember with a pang the rowdy company who stood about the blaze, the gold urine fermenting in them. The fine smell of rye whisky, gin. Crisp green pound notes. Acrid cognac that caught one’s throat and moved along the veins in spikes and needles of feeling. At one gold tilt here was a crown of thorns for any Christ among us. The shuffle of boots, and punctual tap of phlegm in the spittoons …
Lobo is away in Germany on holiday. An occasional postcard with an inevitable obscenity on it arrives from him. Tarquin is very interested. “Tell him to describe it in detail,” he says angrily. He wants details. Tarquin himself lies in bed, with a shawl round him, sipping Bovril. He is hurt because Clare has not been to see him. He will stay in bed until the gigolo’s pity is aroused. For weeks, if necessary.…
On the fifth there is a storm. Lightning and vast thunder running along the ribs of the Palace, shivering fire and quake. A woman killed by a roof tile. Driven slates skiddering in the snow like little snow-ploughs.
On the sixth I wake to find the world finally snowed under. Drifts a foot high on the roads, in the gardens, cemeteries, playgrounds. That statuary coy and naked, ankles rooted in the white quilt. Morgan with a red nose, sneezing his head off. Big fires howling in the lounges. Every visitor who opens the front door sends a great ringing blast of air down the corridors. Death creeps in among the other scents which run laughing from one end of the hotel to the other. A breath of cold as piercing as ammonia eats our nostrils.
Altogether a curious expectancy hangs over this day, as if I am expecting something utterly momentous to happen to me. Or perhaps the world. I scan the paper, but there is nothing to justify this premonition. War has not been declared. The nature poet occurs on the middle page. Snow. Bird and holly. Even this is not the expected cataclysm. All the old invocations served up in metre: I can never understand this frightful brand of Englyshe Countrie sentiment, with its inevitable false rhyme which is so much more annoying than no rhyme at all.
The robin hangs upon the bush
A jewel in the winter hush.
Altogether nothing is happening and there is the huge feeling that something has happened or must happen. Traffic disorganized. The postman dispenses his spurious cheer of dishonoured cheques and late greetings. A very merry Yuletide to you and yours. Tarquin will not let me draw his blinds. He knows, he says, that it is a bloody day and prefers to spend it by candlelight.
The robin twirts upon the bough,
The postman has a nasty cough.
But nothing turns up; the anticipated Thing leaves me in suspense. Then.
At teatime, buttering toast in Tarquin’s room, swallowing my spittle at its appetizing flavour, I am approached by Charles, the deaf mute. On his little tablet he has the hieroglyph: “The flat telephone. A lady.”
I hound down those immense corridors like a convict. Everything is silent in the room. I think suddenly of Gregory, I don’t know why. Gregory has just gone up for a breath of air. I put the receiver to my ear and it is cold. You are talking suddenly in that pure animal’s voice. Gracie is lying dead in the bed. It is unrolling through me, your voice with its queer frigid tones, a fugue of snow and cattle, and our bodies like lumber on the white quilt. I am sitting here like a drawn fowl, feeling my viscera dissolve and flow down over my knees to the carpet. You are taking a holiday, you say. A holiday! From what? And, above all, how, when every latitude is swollen with desire and unrest, every meridian poisoned? Here I will show you my wounds like Mercator’s projection. A new cartography. Forgive me, I did not mean it. You cannot help the snow. There are four candles in the room. Yes, and the first edition of Baudelaire. Books? Do not send me a book. Not even the Song of Songs. You cannot sleep with a book! No, there’s no comfort. Hullo, can you hear me? No, not even poetry. The nerve centres are all dead. Send me a scalpel, a bright new scalpel with the cutting edge of prophecy to it. Send me a poleaxe, a humane killer. Why do you not speak to me? Hullo. Are you there? Then go on speaking, because I have nothing to say to you. Nothing. I am being burnt inside with the old damnable bruises. To hell with books, do you hear me? I said nothing. Good-bye. The Italian towns are lying there crippled among the priests and the Mother Church. Give my love to Keats. Are you weeping? After this I shall go to bed and order a bowl of snow. I shall press it to my face with trembling hands. A month from now we shall meet, you say? If I could believe in eternity as a few slips of printed paper with numbers on them, I might find you intelligible. Speak to me. You are speaking but it is like water squirted over a statue. Say something sharp, decisive. Speak me a scalpel or a jack-knife. No, I am quite alone. The laughter? I heard nothing.
As you are about to blurt out something comes the bright cleavage, I return to my buttered toast on the top floor. Premonition fulfilled. I am suddenly aware of the dullness of the evening, the snow closing with its blue breath; old women in their prisons knitting, milk, hassocks, prayer books. Gales of fire in the lounges and old men dressing for dinner. Tarquin in bed, surrounded by the bones of history, dying piecemeal in life, dying. There is no one I can turn to for comfort.
A gale of wind has begun to ripple across the world; the poles are toppling over into the blue fluttering wings of snow like doves
. There is a glacier running slowly in my blood. My skin is chapped and rough as canvas.
I could go quietly mad here, in this room, by this three-day cadaver who sits wrapped in a shawl, decomposing. One of these days you will find me lighting matches and holding them to my mouth. The last kiss under the mistletoe, the last druidical idiom of departure on the wet mouth.
“Your rustic besom?” says Tarquin nicely. He is being very tactful and dramatic. He would sell his soul for a mouthful of schoolgirl confidences. I lie to him, but I can see he does not believe me. His nose quivers like a carrot.
Come, you attenuated skeleton, with the razor nose and the one foot in eternity, let’s brim a negus to the death of the world, to the snow, the calamity of whiteness, the doves, the harlots, the music. I mean a real toast, with laughter that is not a cheap swindle. This desire was too delicate an infant. By God! we’ll make a man of it.
The Black Book Page 10