The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  “I know.”

  “And that mind!”

  “You are talking like a schoolboy!”

  There was no need to reply to that, for I had frankly acknowledged that I was out of my depth for the greater part of his strange “expositions”; even later, when I read the texts of them at leisure I only half-saw, half-agreed … For his “sermons” were recorded and Roneo-copied for the benefit of absent members. In Piers’ hotel room at Avignon there was a ton of these fascicules, some of which I could even remember having heard him deliver in those far-off days. As for Piers, Sabine once said of him: “It is pitiable. He has a thirst for belief. Almost anything might do to satisfy it.” Poor Piers was deeply wounded by this remark, as he was by mine.

  Akkad was so charmed by our tremendous attraction for the oasis-bazaar that he refused to leave us and rejoin his guests, saying: “They will forgive a little lapse. Come, I insist. I will show you round myself.” And this he faithfully did, explaining everything in that calm melodious voice so full of tenderness for these colourful aspects of his native country. It did not really take all that long, but here and there he stopped to exchange greetings or banter with an acquaintance, or listen to a whispered complaint and promise redress for the complainer, so that it was about an hour before we came to the last man, the water-seller with his special little rituals. This one was distributing free water on behalf of a rich man who had been to Mecca and who was known for his charity. The seller, who propped the dark slobbering skin across his shoulders, held out to us the gilded cup from which we all drank, and also held up the mirror to our faces to remind us that we were mortal and must die. An elderly sheik shared this little ceremony with us, and afterwards benignly gave the waterman a coin and made him spurt scented water on his face and beard. So we came at long last, and in leisurely fashion, to the brilliant marquee among the supply-swaying cypresses and clicking date-palms – a really enormous tent about the size of a regimental mess-tent, though the company was not so inordinately numerous.

  We were about twenty or thirty people in all, I guessed, and extremely various, both as to race and colour. There were two pretty Chinese ladies, some old Turks, and then a sprinkling of more modestly dressed people who looked like minor university professors or post-office officials. Some we already knew, like Casimir Ava the tragic actor with his pale eunochoid-velvet complexion and studied poses. The stagecraft of suicide meant everything to him, and everything he read or acted seemed to hint at it; it infected his moods and physical attitudes. You could tell at once that it would end like that, just by looking at those deepset burning disabused eyes. He was Werther. He would win his own title to extinction! None of this did I know at the time; and Piers himself told me little enough about the long private sessions he had with Akkad.

  There was Anne Dunbar the Ambassador’s daughter, Angelo Tomasso the great surgeon, Spiro Harari the jeweller, Jean Makaro the policeman, Luther Fox of the Military Mission, Ahmed Osmanli the banker, and several others whose faces were unfamiliar. Later we were to get to know them well. The general atmosphere was that of a relaxed and pleasant cocktail party in the desert, softly lit and silently served to us by numerous servants, white-gloved and impassive Nubians.

  There was no special suggestion that all the guests belonged to any particular religious or political persuasion; it was simply another social occasion. Conversation was free and unstudied. Introductions took place, people met for the first time – or so it seemed. Banter and low laughter swayed about the huge tent, swayed among the shadows thrown by the brilliant candelabra pendant on their inverted stems above the white napery of the central table. The night smelt of jasmine and hot wax. The sandy floor of the desert was hidden by a thick pile of magnificent carpets which insulated us against the slight evening damps; an elaborate series of dishes, both hot and cold, found their way on to the buffet – all in the best traditions of Egypt. The finesse and the organisation of the feast in such an out-of-the-way spot could not help but set one musing. And so the evening gradually condensed itself harmoniously and prolonged itself through the wines to the coffee and cigars without anything untoward having taken place. I myself, touched by the ardour of Piers, could not help feeling regretfully that this was perhaps all that we were going to be shown of the group’s activities. I don’t know why, I had not much faith in the reality represented by such breakaway sects as gnostics, and I was on my guard against the spuriously romantic. In Egypt it seemed dangerously easy to succumb to the folklore of the place – and this my friend appeared to have done. “Ah! Piers,” I said, looking into his pale and impatient face. “You are in for another disappointment I fear.” He clutched my wrist and shook his head; he was in a fever of excited anticipation, and his eyes followed Akkad everywhere. I loved him most when he was like this – I could read the moods of Sylvie written in his youthful eyes, which kindled almost vengefully under the spur of his emotions. “Patience,” he said, pleadingly, and added: “Here comes Sabine again.” Akkad was talking earnestly to a tall man in uniform.

  Sabine disengaged herself from the rest of the company and came slowly towards us with that air of simple insolence which was perhaps merely a by-product of her costume – for she was clad again like a sort of gipsy, and had travelled into Cairo with a caravan from Tunis. Her hair and palms were stained with henna and her eyes were dazed and stupefied-looking from belladonna and badly applied kohl. Her feet were bare and dirty, her toenails broken. I felt that she somehow enjoyed disgusting people – there was no reason for wearing fancy dress at such a gathering. She also seemed somehow heavier, more obese, but perhaps this was due simply to the lapping of quilted petticoats which covered her. At any rate she looked very much the crafty gipsy of the oriental fairytales, and the glass of champagne in her hand seemed almost out of place. She stood before us, smiling from one to the other for a moment, and then asked: “Is Toby with you? He said he’d come.” I made a vague gesture in the direction that Toby had taken and she moved off to follow him, shaking her dark stone-carving of a head with a little gesture of impatience and determination. I had never really cared for Sabine and Piers knew it; he watched me watching her with an amused irony. “Say it,” he said at last. “Why don’t you say it?” I sighed at being found out.

  “Very well, I shall say it. Now that I know her her very pretentiousness irritates me – thrusting her profligacy down our throats all the time …” Piers laughed softly at my sanctimonious choice of the words. “A desert father,” he said with his tender yet teasing eye. “Come my dear fellow.” I felt called upon to justify some of the irritation I felt with Sabine. “I am not”, I said, “the only one she irritates. Ask those Jewish merchants who travelled with her in the caravan.” Piers nodded, with a certain indifference. “Moreover”, I went on, “she came and asked me for a consultation, and I found that she was being treated for syphilis with herbs by a camel driver.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s a waste of time, you know perfectly well why not.”

  I think really that it was her utter indifference to her condition which most infuriated me; or was it because of Toby? At any rate I had told her what I knew about 606, and asked Akkad to send her to a specialist. In those days I was in the full flush of my scientific knowledge – unaware that the dogmatic theology of science was itself a kind of folklore, and that even the most perfect specific sometimes failed to work. Youth inclines towards the absolute in everything. I continued my complaint as I watched her dark saturnine head moving among the others, hunting for my friend. “Although she was still highly infectious she took Toby away to the Fayum for a week.”

  “You are wrong about her,” said Piers, “simply because you don’t know all her qualities. I asked her what she thought of Rob Sutcliffe and why she did not marry him, and she said: ‘I have never been able to envisage a love without jealousy and exclusiveness, and have never dared to risk the business.’ I then asked her if that did not make us seem suspect to her and she said yes it
did. ‘You are not real, you are figments of yourselves, love on all fours, amour à quatre pattes. The conventional ménage à trois reversed.’ I admit this wounded me. Then she went on ‘But then love doesn’t need decoding like a cipher.’”

  “She was wrong,” I said. “It does. Like a cipher or a riddle to which the answer is always ambiguous in a Delphic way. Besides, did you think I was not jealous?”

  Toby had told us that Rob Sutcliffe was planning to sketch us into his new novel and I wondered vaguely what his verdict on us might be – in the light of all the freshly turned earth thrown up during his stay in Vienna. My sister had been unsuccessfully psychoanalysed there during a long moment – which was quite sufficient to enable Rob to acquire a bit of the prevailing jargon which made life so distressing for everyone, and conferred such an air of knowledgeable impertinence on the devotees of old Freud. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and these findings about the penetralia of sexual life gave the writer a sort of justification for a native acerbity. Afterwards, when love left him in the lurch and he became the wounded man who was such a trial to us all, he took refuge in a laughter and cynicism which were far from his real nature – a secretive one. He had at last discovered that love had no pith in it, and that the projection of one’s own feelings upon the image of a beloved was in the long run an act of self-mutilation.

  In the flicker of light from a dipping faltering candle I saw that slightly sardonic, slightly disdainful look, and it seemed to me full of a certain enigmatic maturity. Sabine was older than the rest of us – not in years, to be sure: but in judgement and insight. Her voyages and adventures had forged her mind already while we were still upon the threshold of our emotional maturity. The word I was looking for, I suppose, was “sphingine” – I thought of the baleful prehistoric smile of the Mycenaean women. She drew her shawl about her with a sudden gesture of dismissal, of renunciation, and shrugged her strong shoulders. Then she leaned forward to kiss the cheek of Sylvie with a humble gesture and to smile into her eyes. All at once there was something heart-appealing about this strong girl in her buoyant fancy dress – it was the warmth of a burning and candid intelligence. I saw what Sutcliffe had seen.

  Much later of course I came to “recognise” her as one who, in her inner life, had thrown over the intermediaries of convention and reason which might have shielded her social self, in favour of direct vision, direct apprehension. This was the secret of her courage – of everything that made her seem so often outré, unconventional, out of scale. The small-minded found her simply rude and inconsiderate, whereas she was quite simply unaware of the fences they had set up about the notion of conventional behaviour. It was like being colour blind, say, or tone deaf. Once one realised this about her it was possible to make allowances, and to arrive at different conclusions about her. But it wasn’t easy. For example, even now, dressed as she was … And then once she went outside and blew her nose in her fingers to the horror of the servants. But Akkad loved her, Akkad accepted her fully. I once saw them meet, put out their hands like antennae and touch softly, sighing both and smiling with the kind of joyous feeling normal in lovers – which they were not. Yet he loved her because there was never any need to tell her anything, to explain, to expound. At least this is what his looks sought to convey. While in his presence she seemed to become younger and shyer, less assertive, more humble. For her part her meek looks seemed to be saying: “He knows everything, he understands everything – but best of all, he knows that it is of no importance whatsoever. No need to plead, no need to convince.”

  Piers followed my glance as well as read my mind as I formulated these thoughts. He said mischievously: “I think that you really envy her, because she makes love à tous les quatre vents without ascribing an absolute value to the act: whereas we three are in the grip of an infatuation which goes on and on. How strange to have lost one’s taste for other people – like losing one’s sense of smell almost: why is there no word for it in English? We have deaf and blind, but nothing to describe the lost sense of smell … or the loss of the other thing for that matter.”

  Akkad was slowly making his way towards us now, and one could feel a sort of leisurely intent in his movements; nor was I wrong, for he came up to take Piers tenderly by the sleeve and place his other hand upon my own arm. “In a little while,” he said, drawing us both together, “we shall invite you to come into the shrine of old Abu Menouf with the rest of us for what will be something like a religious service – or a reading of the psalms. I will be doing the commentary and the exposition. If you get bored, do not hesitate to leave and come back here. No offence will be taken. It is understood that you could be potential members of the group though as yet not set in your resolve. There will be others like you also, so do not feel that you are all alone. It should not be more painful than one of the traditional lectures on the Koran that you have heard, given by a venerable old sheik in Cairo; but of course the subject will be heretical from all points of view.” He laughed soundlessly, and spread his hands out in a gesture of quaint helplessness. “What would you have us to do – sit down under the great lie and accept the rule of one we call the Prince of Darkness?” The tone in which he said this suggested more the deliberations of a stockbroker than the lucubrations of a bigot. He went on in a lower tone: “It is not a question of making a small compromise on behalf of happiness – it cuts far deeper. Once you see the truth the way we see it you simply cannot refuse to accept. You are surrounded, cut off, severed for ever from the world as you have been living it, lost, sunk, foundered …” His tone remained wryly quizzical, sardonic, but his eye was very much alive, with its strange glaucous movements. As for myself, this very absence of a definitive attitude, this shying away from the mantic or the vatic, filled me with misgivings. I was young and anxious to be carried away, to be swept off my feet – just as much as my friend. But in this domain mere logical arguments, mere theological prevarications didn’t seem to me to be what I was looking for. If the sort of conviction that Akkad implied was what we desired, why then rational argument was not the way to foster it. Romantic? Yes. We had every right to be. We dreamed of a perfect conviction of the truth of being which would be independent of arguable proof. Akkad stood before us in his much darned abba – the one he wore to paint his vivid water colours – and smiled his jubilant and dreamy smile. No, it would not do – at least that is how I felt. If the whole sum of human knowledge had to be put to the question then only a prophet of wrath, a poet of wrath, could do it, and could carry us with him over the rapids into the new country which was, according to our friend, waiting to claim us. Something of all this – doubts, hesitations – may have been visible on our faces for Akkad hesitated once more before resuming his more solemn manner. He looked at his slim watch and made an almost imperceptible sign to the major-domo, the tall aristocratic Arab who had met us on the black horse at the entrance to the oasis. The servants began slowly to bring in light silk prayer-mats and small cushions – the colour green predominated. These we placed over our arms as we prepared to leave the tent for the shrine. But we were not as numerous as I had surmised – a full third of the company appeared not to belong to our group, and not therefore to be in the secret of our private congregation about the sepulchre of Abu Menouf. It was, then, an ordinary holiday cocktail party on to which Akkad had grafted the members of his little sect. It was, so to speak, a small intermission in the general celebrations of the Moslem fair, the noise of which we could still hear reverberating outside the brilliant walls of our enclosure. So gradually, without prejudicing the pleasant atmosphere of the party, we sidled towards the entrance, following Akkad, who waited a while at the door and then turned to lead the way.

  A brilliant moon poured its molten light into the lake where the tall reeds, turned ink-black or pure quicksilver according to angle, stood rooted once in their own reflections, then twice in the light clay floor of the depression. The sand of the desert could have been snow. Still as plate glass the whole w
orld, except where here or there an insect incised the glowing surface with its struggles, and sent small wrinkles shoreward. The sky was cloudless – the moon rolled across the surface like a lamb searching for its dam. The desert air struck chill as we wound along the palm-groves towards the shrine. A dim light could be discerned from it, shining through the windows covered in painted wax paper. In and out of darkness we were moonsplashed so that one had little unaccustomed glimpses of each other’s faces. I saw Akkad turned by such an accident into a grim mummy, Sabine smiled with white monkey’s teeth, Casimir Ava shorn of his hair by a trick of the light looked like an old lady at prayer. I had the illusion that our numbers were swelled, not by candidates from the cocktail party, but by other unknown people who had been waiting outside in the darkness, and who now attached themselves to our procession.