The Black Book

by Lawrence Durrell

  But even Ponce de León fades when, that evening, we three weary travellers creep into the crowded Abbey pews, weary with the exploration of ourselves—the old world of the self—and stand, our faces turned one way, like blind things, under the wild concord of music playing along the slats of the organ pipes. And from the pulpit the derision of a single voice, plump and round with practice, intoning, forever intoning, until our souls are sick and begin to reel under the sheer pressure of pomp. Light, high up there, where the slender pillars buttress one another, fossilized swans, falling in diaper and arc and floss: now crisscross, now lateral, now shafted, coiled, pendent, leaning: O Jesu, Jesu, enough to make the crypt sweat and the autumn cinquefoils flutter among the graves. Our sweet white choir hanging to each note like synchronized corpses in a gallow dance. Breaking rollers of sound, crushed like perfume across the poor shabby things which creep in here like rats, to snap and choke on the poisoned bait. The communion bowl awash with a red sea of bacteria from mouth to mouth slopping dismally; the wafer sticking like gelatin to the roof of the mouth. And above all this noise, above the noise swarming from rafter to batlike rafter, from beam to bolt to nut to beam to bolt to nut to beam, the roar of the chorale; until the sympathetic metal whines along the pulpit, and the whole catacomb tilts, struggling, swarming with our clamant souls, sick for sanctuary, with a “Jesu, Jesu” downward into the bottomless basin where the white Thing washes its feet among the lilies—and the pontifical catamites lower, and set up a whizzing like gnats.…

  The negress is clutching my hand, terrified by these barbarities, like a child. The light of the cross is shining on Lobo, in his eyes, on his forehead, like a brand. Everywhere we are surrounded by insects in white. Anselm is standing before the face of the Lord in his dancing fighter’s stance, his great golls working like pistons, his jaw like a ham, his eyes pure shrapnel in their black orbits, Anselm clean of the clap and the drink, fighting the good fight with all his might among the soutanes. It doesn’t matter, he is telling me in a whisper. It doesn’t matter. Juanita burned up her sugar too fast, her teeth fell out, her eyes swelled up. He is terrified the negress will understand what we are saying, but she is in a fright at the Host; her ears are laid back like a whippet’s. I am afraid at any moment she will streak for the black doors. He would never have married her anyway, so it didn’t matter. In the name of the father, son, and Holy Ghost. Yes, it was only accident they met. He never really cared a damn for her, as her. It was only that she was there at every crisis in life, so that after a while it seemed that he would never be free of her. One is never free of one’s past. Amen. She had become, by identification, everything, Lima, the dead sister, the panic, the gulls; and now among the northern ruins he turned back to her, regressed, whimpered for her like a child. Amen.

  Afterwards, when we go out through the great doors, it is as if the night had burst open in a dark fruit, so immense and pithy it is, so silent and unshaken. I know then there are no questions to be asked any more, there are no queries to be put to the Host. Everything is washed clean in the stream of faces from the gold doors, the beards, the sacristan, the verger, the whore, the fillock, the slut, the gentry-mort, and the lusk. The light is leaking out among the blue gravestones. Sacred to the memory of Lawrence Lucifer who died this day of August. Offer a candle or a sprig of holly. I am a gnarled backbone of stone, speaking in many hectic lichens, a remote powder in a sheath of tepid lead, out of the reach of iambs or fugue. The whole question, in essence, is acceptance, the depersonalization of self, of the society which one has absorbed. It is not only a question of art, but a question of life. You are altered, affected, transmuted by this orientation. Whatever was your antecedent, your history, that no longer matters to me. I can no longer whimper when your head goes down like a hammer on the white pillow. The strange accidents of bone, the syntax of muscle and cartilage, exist in a relation to something that is no longer history or ideals.

  “Lie down and die, frail helmet of dust,” I wrote once; and dying that way you were Sappho, you were Beatrice, curling up like a petal in an Egyptian evening. Death among tombs. Death like the salt whips and discord of the winter sea on the first day of desire. Yes, I am serious. What you are now is a lowest common denominator, agonizingly held for an hour in my vise of bone and blood. Believe me, I have taken nothing from you; or rather, by taking everything from you—everthing irrelevant, confusing, historical—I have made such an unbearable poignance of you, that just to try and utter it would send me mad. That part of what remains, when cupid’s loaves and fishes are gathered up, I keep always inside me, like a reserve of strength. I need it in life. I cannot destroy it by writing it—and destroying myself in a pattern of contagious syllables for the dull world. Never, I promise you, never. That much belongs to life. Amen.

  When the drums begin, and the opaque lightning trembles in the night sky, I become a child again, in revisited history. I per se I, Lawrence Lucifer. In my dreams there is only one possible protagonist. I am moving across the scenery of the world on noiseless castors; my hand is held, but by whom I cannot tell. O per se O. Among the soft fermenting pastel green of the Himalayas Father Paul whittles his sailing boat from stumps of deodar; the hills breathe snow over the deserted playgrounds, a Tibetan panic of winter. The passes glow with eternal malevolence, and the river moves in soft packs of ice, or curdles with green velvet. On the highroad the lamas pass, twisting their tin wheels in their paws, murmuring; in the soft ferns of the hills the pug marks of the bear. On the treble slopes of the foothills the snow is gathering in clouds, the first dour caravans are wheeling up the plain to meet them. The duffle-clad Bhutias huddle in their sheepskins and grovel among the coloured cards on the flag steps of the churches. I am alone weeping over Everest. Somewhere over there, eternally veiled in blue, the forbidden City is lying, glowing like a stone. Lhasa where the great horns are braying and the devils jump one by one from the cliffs. I stretch out my arms and fall in the snow; the clouds gather, the avalanche walks down the hills in a toga, throwing petulant boulders. The wind opens up volley upon volley of empty words which drive past me like refuse. All that is locked up in a dream of Lhasa, is driven down into the river among the ice and the serpents. Nothing remains for me but the deaf-mute syllables of a tongue I have yet to learn. The priests are conducting the thunder of the litanies. In the Palace they are clicking their beads and smiling the canine smile. The slopes are writhing with flags; and the coloured paper horses gallop over the precipice, clipped with life-giving scissors, swept away as soon as created. The late voyager gathers his cloak in his armpits and bores his little pit of air into the hurricane. The antelopes gossip and quiver, their eyes molten, their flanks stiffened to the wind; and the man drops slabs of butter in his teacup and swallows a pill of sacred dung.

  I am standing at the window watching the storm gather. The lightning is so smooth and trembling that it lights the room with a queer sustained glint of green, as it might be an aquarium, and me standing here, on the carpet of weeds and slimy rock, waiting. I am thinking of Tarquin’s music, and realizing that of all this fear and turmoil it has recorded nothing. From music we demand our whole life if it is to move us: every modulation of dream, despair, love, yearning. It is the past and the future, the first rapture of living, and that future going down into the tomb; the descent of Ishtar among the soiled roses; the entry into the chamber of the cosmos; the first kicking in the womb, and the last elegant spasm of cessation, lull, status.

  Tomorrow the earth will be drenched, exhausted, and born again from this orgasm of water: sopping and juicy to the hilt, the roots of the bush. The penis buried and shriven, sliding back into hibernation, curling and somnolent as a taproot. The quickened walls of the cunt lined with quilts and membranes of gum, resin, foxgloves, puffballs, wheat. We will go out together on the steaming arable among the cattle, by the river, and re-create the legend of the kingcup which Tarquin missed. It will not be difficult if we practice humility: humility from the roots upward
, all-devastating, all-devouring, omni-passionate. If we have wounds we will show them.

  This morning it is Chaucer. We are following the pilgrims’ way southward. It is in order to refresh the negress that I am compelled to come out here with you, to taste again the prehistoric world, and reflect on its quietus; because in that stale room, overlooked by the charts, by the blind wall, I have been impregnated with the data of an epoch which is the subject of all contemplative dope. I am stifled in it. I mean the vellum and ground-ink ages, the patient, beautiful work, so complete and formal within the limits it set itself. The first presses groaning out their rich black ore of literature. Caxton, Mallory—the simple cunning of widowed children. Wiry paper smelling of candlesticks and glue. Choirs writhing with goblins alleged sacerdotal. Trefoil, cinquefoil, and the whole body of perpendicular gothic gray in the spires aspiring. Minted coins and humorous rapes. Inlaid hilts and beautiful women with the gummata growing in them. The Green King tied by the derelict barge to his mother’s breasts. Tertiary noses carved on the laughing faces of the court hunchback. The swans flying backward and the breviaries pullulating in heraldic animals. All this beautiful stuff circulating in the veins of the negress, poisoning her. It is in order to destroy history that I am compelled to experience it, all of it. But behind it all there is the image of the paper mill, the great domes of pulp, endless spools of marrow and garbage and cloth, woven into daily papers, sanitary towels, toilet wafers, blotting paper. I am again on the high tower among the sea-gulls, shaping the decision, when I watch this beautiful stuff poured away down the sewers. Somewhere the line has been broken, and we are wandering among the staggering nebulae, in a region of consciousness so cold, so rarefied, that we want to scream aloud for warmth. A region where the healing mythologies are so etherized that they float away elusive, before the mind can grasp them and burn them for fuel. This is the proper No Man’s Land, crammed with plenty and radiant steel, where the heart screams for pity, where the viscera contract at the smell of money, multitude, masturbation; where the warm thoughts, the feelings, the delights are stunted from the womb, vaporized and snuffed. Ephemera! Between Golgotha and the slaughterhouse where daylong one hears nothing but the hollow screaming of pigs. There is no quietus; no bodkin, dagger, bullet can ever a quietus make. The dance is on, eternally on.

  That evening I was so certain of the age which lies beyond all this, the new dimension, the novel being—a dim gnosis. I have seen the tonsures moving along the leads at Christchurch where the Saxon river drags its sherds of ice all winter, lame of foot; have seen in peacetime a rosy Abbot come down in the dusk to fish the glacid water for trout, while the lights jump one by one to the tall windows.

  Last night Morgan was sitting by the boiler telling me about the asylum in which he was an attendant. Juanita was prowling the corridors, her hair in her eyes, a chopper gleaming in her hands. Lobo was whimpering softly as he smoked. They had arranged a rendezvous by the foothills. It was the last attempt on his part to bring her round. He would rape her there and fill her mouth with sand. He was not quite sure whether he would kill her or not. But when she was there, with the child on her arm, lousy, hungry, red-eyed and sore with prickly heat, the whole focus of normality was restored in a second. He knew then that his weakness was too great ever to make him a murderer. He took the child from her and buried it up to its waist in warm shaly sand, so that it could not escape. And she saw at once what was coming, and began running away from him, groaning as if she were stabbed. He was gaining on her, murderously exultant, almost in reach—when suddenly she threw herself down like an animal, and gathering a handful of sand, scooped it full under the shabby dress; filled her cunt up with it, and lay exhausted, panting, utterly without a word, waiting for the tussle, like a bird. He was so unnerved by this gesture that he began to weep, to bluster, to protest, to shout. And all the while she lay there saying nothing. He exhausted every gesture, every threat, every shade of feeling between madness and death, and still she did not answer. In the end he had to go away and leave her lying there as she was, gathered up like a ball, waiting. Speechless. Terrified. Victorious.

  What is history beside this unrolling reality which Lobo offers to me with emotion and cigarettes? The progress through the guts of a beggar. When I am covering you my cranium is packed with images, the whole body of the lost worlds is being poured down that narrow slipway to the absolute; history is launched suddenly for me like a dreadnought, the myth, the prophecy, the gloze, the glyph, the haunted hexameter, the dactyl, the pastoral. The world is crying for it to be restored, but we are offering it only a regression—an escape out of the geometrical rat-trap which is really only temporary. It is not only a question of going back to a myth. The myth will come back to us. That is the tenor of this rainy morning; that is what it is telling me, among its polished components of town and valley and farm. In such moments I can tell you for certain that this is the break-up, the cataclysm, the drop curtain on the world. A new language, a new deity, a new indulgence impend from heaven. No, they are already slipping on us. Forms are dying, becoming obsolete, falling aside. Everyone save the antiquarian is afraid. The man of learning has become a cipher—epicene, neuter—with the equipment of a book reviewer. Everything is drifting up in the Sargasso of progress, swathed and shot with weed, tangled in the fins of fish, bibles and lavatory seats, turds and turbines, shuttlecocks and battledores. In the Abbey they are still marking the places in the hymnbooks, oblivious of the fact that tomorrow we shall have forgotten how to read; in the hospitals the forceps are snapping at the sutures of the child; in the Sunday papers the great men become retromingent, pissing backwards into the mouth of the public and talking about the shapely subsisting beauty of tradition. In London they are dancing round the Walpole, the Faber poets are marking time and ushering in the millennium with a series of elegant squibs, the Lesbians are onanizing with squeals of buttered sperm, and the noise of the cleaver is lost in the nervous orgasm of a million women novelists. In Rome the papal nuncio announces the use of the fountain pen in such cases where the penis will not work. In Calcutta the black sweep is wandering with crumbs in his eyes, touching the untouchable, and eating the uneatable. In the Ghetto the streets are full of juice and the pavements slippery with haddocks’ eyes. In Lisbon there are women as inexhaustible as the Indian Ocean, lying with their legs apart, watching the express hurtle towards them on its metals. In Iceland Eric The Red sets off for the last time with his cargo of skins, wheat, chessmen, cider and porpentines. It is all being washed up towards a madness never before seen. The heretics themselves are appalled, are building themselves Arks from the flotsam of the imagination, and hanging their viscera out for sails; they are trying to escape, choosing what is frugal rather than countenance the ferment here, where life bubbles with the effervescent rhapsodic idiocy of soda from the siphon, and the continents fall away bit by bit, and the weakening Jesu Jesu booms in the Gothic whales—the skirling of Jonahs shut out. Relentless, the watery navel of the world claims everything. The Sargasso of weeds and creepers, where the wise, the children of light, the poor in spirit, the aseptic intellects, the various, the rational, can congregate and put their brains together in a stream of atoms. Not a nimbus is grudged, not a funeral note. Only the sea sucks in its toll of cider bottles, cigar butts, sandwiches, daily papers, and imperial turds. And the snore of the faithful is as murderous as the metronome.…

  In the hotel the old men are dressing for the last supper. Mr. Nicholas is lying in the bath licking his whiskers and playing with himself, while his keeper is turning on the cold tap to cool him off. He will appear, stiff, sanctimonious, legendary, in faultless duds, with a carnation in his lapel. His keeper will feed him and guard the old ladies from shameful remarks. Afterwards he will sit in the lounge, upright, staring at the wall, as if he were being rowed down the Styx, fighting motionless campaigns in his skull. When the postman knocks and the skulls come clattering through the letter-box he will wake and be led, whimpering, to his ro
om. Tonight followed by tomorrow, followed by tonight. In order to avoid the definitive date I take refuge in books, in photographs, in memories of you.

  Nothing is topical except this monkey house of elderly people, and the fantastic loneliness which tells me that I exist. I sit for whole days in a vomit of images, re-creating every gesture of yours, every pose, every remark. In the stale library I devour mouthfuls of paper with words written on it. Sirius, the Dog Star, rising on the dogdays; the Book of Kells, and the soft Irish mouths shaping the script, etc. Tarquin diagnoses this malady as fear: “You are not as strong as me, my dear. Look at me. You would think me fragile, would you not? Yet I support the most tremendous psychic crises without breaking; and here you are, quite strong and healthy, unable to bear your cross without fighting against it. Be a stoic, laddie, be a stoic.” Well, God damn my eyes, I am. At any rate I do my best. On Tuesday I call on Hilda in the late afternoon, and find her sitting at the window among the Victorian relics, trying to write with a crossed nib. Before her on the desk lies a printed Last Will and Testament form. The dusk is falling and the ink is running out. “Listen, ducky,” she says all of a sudden, “you better run along and have a blood test, because I copped it at last.” I stand there looking into her eyes in a frozen perplexity. I am aware all of a sudden of the effort she has made, of the immense patience that has driven her to this desk. Her hand shakes as she writes, but her eyes are quite steady. She has got fifty quid put away, she says, hence the will. She wants her sister in Lincoln to have it for her kiddy; that is the sister who turned her out of doors. “Just in case,” she says, meaning every word, “it’s just in case, see? But I’m healthy for me age. Not much chance of me popping off just yet.” She is not afraid, but numb. The invisible crisis has softened her up suddenly. She is very mild. Sarcoma, sarcoma … the word is flitting through my head.