The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  Sabine laughed suddenly and said: “I cannot guarantee any of this. I have only recently started playing with it as a system. The Tarot.”

  System! In the book they went onto the boat deck after dinner to take the air – the still ambient sterile air. Their quarrel had been a momentous one – they had each said wounding, unforgettable things, things which could never be sponged away, excused, taken back. They were buried deep in the ruins of this collapsed edifice of their marriage, their love. How pale she was! They went slowly aft and stared down at the throbbing white wake which stretched away under the moon to a dark horizon. He tried desperately to think of something clever and healing to say but nothing came to his lips except curses. “I see it all now,” she said in a low voice, and with an inexpressible bitterness. Then with a kind of effortless gesture, gravely as a dancer leaning into her opening steps in time to music, she vaulted the rail, fell, and disappeared. He had made no effort to stop her.

  An alarm bell sounded and for hours now the ship turned, the waters were sprayed by searchlights. Boats were lowered clumsily, accidental manoeuvres of the oars, heads nearly banged, etc. Floats and lifebelts spattered the calm sea, voices crackled and boomed from radio and loudhailer. Nothing came of it all. Yet she had been an excellent swimmer and had won many cups and medals. In the first-class bar where he at last shambled to drink an exhausted cognac the gramophone, albeit tactfully lowered, played “Bye-Bye Blackbird”. To his surprise the whole thing only irritated him; he was ashamed not to feel Pia’s sudden death more acutely. In the book he had called himself Hardbane, an Anglican clergyman.

  Sutcliffe dozed off at last in a mild amazement, to awake much later and find that dawn’s left hand was in the sky. No; he had not pushed Pia, though in the novel someone distressed him by hinting at it. Their quarrels had been overheard. Sabine had thrown the cards down now and was talking in a low voice about travelling through central Europe with the gipsies in order to learn their language. Despite her warmth and cherish he dragged himself awake and betook himself to the bathroom to dress. He embraced her tenderly and extracted a promise to meet him in the afternoon at their first café by the water. And so with confident tread back to his own hotel, tipping the sleeping night-porter royally.

  Once back in his den he pushed open the balcony doors in order to feel nearer to her and crawled sweetly into bed as if into the arms of his mother. What could be more divine than to sleep one’s way forward into a sunlit day on a Venetian canal? He would wake for a stroll and a late breakfast among these stone galleries now made doubly beautiful by the experience she had offered him. But his own sense of prediction was not as acute as hers for that afternoon in the sunny café the waiter handed him a message. A premonition of the envelope’s contents flashed into his mind. Yes, it was so. She was leaving Venice with her father (had she forgotten what he had said to the mirror?) Vaguely she expressed the hope that they might meet again one day, but added, on a minatory note: “I try never to let anyone become indispensable.”

  If anyone had asked him why he laughed so ruefully and struck his knee with his hat he would have replied by quoting Flaubert: “Je ris tout seul comme une compagnie de vagins altérés devant un régiment de phallus.”

  He determined there and then that the whole city lay in ruins about him, and that it would be as well to depart for Avignon at once. To reinforce the decision he sent Toby a telegram and set out to locate a little car to rent for the journey.

  In his little red notebook the following random thoughts formed and were jotted down, like the slow interior overflow of a stanchless music. Often they made no sense at all when he looked them over, but he believed firmly that one should have the courage to write down even what one did not fully understand. Somewhere it was “understood”.

  As follows:

  An excellent lesson in generosity. It was clear that there was no future in an affair for her – I am too old. Steatopygous novelist.

  Trash’s voice echoing all the gluttony of fiddles, so deeply rosined. Coughed on her cigarette smoke like a tuba. The moon glow of her warmth, an emphysema of cordiality. Said: “Robin has enough sympathy to float a ship, honey child.” Alas.

  Sitting at Quartila’s on the canal with Sabine watching the stars flowing by – our loving minds simultaneously ignited by a falling star. “Look!”

  As in death, so in dreams, people age at different speeds, and their mathematical position vis-à-vis death at any given moment is not easy to calculate. One swings towards and away from, if one is an artist. Only race I know.

  Her laughter was always hurt in the sound, and the subject had to be choice (Pia).

  Skin smelling of musk melon and small sightless eyes with cataracts (gipsy whore) like a chapel with windows of mother of pearl or (Cairo) coloured and oiled paper.

  Underprivileged hearts lodged in bodies borrowed from nymphs fashioned in gold dust.

  Was told of a blind woman who was set upon by a gang of children and beaten to death in a game of blind man’s buff. My informant was a doctor and when I asked eagerly for details (he had been called) he said: “She was of massive stature and she had the cor bovinum which one always associates with sudden heart failure.”

  Epistolary alpha beta theta … the sweet compaction of biting foreign lips.

  Trash for President!

  Robin for Wingless Victory!

  Pia for Pope Joan

  The stifling love of the two women drove him mad with envy. He was starved, nay, mutilated in his powers of projection. He was terrified that he would be forced to fall back on the great weapon of illness.

  Bad gash in a waiter’s hand from a tin-opener – dark arterial blood dries violet like the ink of emperors and popes.

  Two days later the little car went droning and banging and humming and snoring across the Lombard Plain in the direction of Provence with the amazing man at the wheel. Amazing because still alive and smiling. Amazing because so limitlessly great!

  AN ASTONISHING LETTER

  What a divine journey in the little bull-nosed Morris. We left a plume of white fragrant dust brushing the olives right from Lombardy to Provence, with many fertile breakdowns, many desultory conversations with grease-beclobbered mechanics, the new masters of our civilisation. That is the way Sutcliffe went …

  Cloven by dimples …

  Carried off by an effulgence …

  Disseminated by rumour …

  Embalmed by inadvertence …

  Hung drawn and quartered by Common Consent …

  That was the way poor Sutcliffe went.

  Yes, it is the conversation of spiritually mature mechanics which invests the petrol engine with awesome mystery. And the fragrance of petrol along the dusty roads leading me to Verfeuille where I hoped, by meeting the young brother, to renew some of the sentiments which attached me to the elder sister he so much worshipped. (Honey, Robin is sad as a cat.) What greater joy than to lie under a car with a man who can explain the motions and functions of flywheels?

  The happy filth of garages

  Where men who love their mothers toil

  Like babies who their napkins soil

  The fruit of mirthless marriages.

  What odours rise from grease and oil

  The child being father to the man

  That nobody disparages

  Toiling on horseless carriages.

  In my new book I must put in something in praise of the engine. “Huddled in dirt the reasoning engine lies,” exclaims Rochester. “As this machine is to him Hamlet,” cries Hamlet to Ophelia in the mysterious First Quarto. … No literary allusions, please.

  I have been here several days now, a little sad and disappointed to find a certain constraint between myself and young Bruce; nothing lacks in courtesy and warmth, but there is a lean shadow of constraint which makes me feel how much older I am than these three young people. Nobody has mentioned Pia. Young Tobias is however in full form and gives me life and hope. But the three others – I don’t
know what it is – seem awkward and preoccupied by their situation which sounds so superficially romantic and is in fact extremely complicated in the jumbling of their feelings. I would not propose to write about them for fear of not being able easily to rationalise a situation which even to themselves seems weird, equivocal, anomalous. In the heart of the matter, too, I seem to detect a romantic fraud – for can love exist in any dimension without jealousy? I don’t believe it. Yet in the long explanations that Toby has extracted from them, and retailed to me, that seems to be their case. But the brother and sister … what beauty and vehemence! Bruce is a solid boy in his blond way but nothing like as striking as the other two. They have come from the pages of old Laforgue.

  For the rest I spend all morning on this high balcony overlooking a sweep of olive grove, the young man Piers I can see sitting in the lotus pose in front of the little wooden pavilion smothered in roses. He does a stint of Indian meditation every morning, and speaks of it with endearing solemnity. So does the girl.

  At times the Midi, when first one knows it, seems slightly spurious in terms of its folklore, but a very brief acquaintance with its inhabitants cures this impression. One realises how old and withdrawn and intact Provence really is, and how little it is part of France. It is, rather, a separate Mediterranean nation – perhaps the impression is conveyed by the fact that it is unashamedly pagan in attitude, and a product of an olive culture. It is leaner and thirstier than the north; indeed after Valence where the olives begin the cuisine replaces cream and butter with olive oil, which gives the characteristic tonality of the Mediterranean. And as if to confirm these sudden impressions the inhabitants smile, offer one old-fashioned courtesies and appear never to hurry. They have all the time in the world because Provençal time is not clock-time as we live it in the north.

  Avignon itself is somewhat dirty and dilapidated with its cracked pavements, scavenging cats and chewed walls – in some places the bastions have been worn down by time to stumps like ancient molars. Here and there a higgledy-piggledy mass of twigs on a rooftop marks the site of a raven’s nest, which increases the impression of dishevelled carelesssness. Moreover for a place with such a tolling name it is a mere village, and under some aspects of weather and moonlight reminds one of some lost village on the Steppes. I am quoting Toby a little here, after he described to me a winter spent here with the tinkling river full of ice. Yes, it is a long time since the Popes had everything in hand. Their riches and their profligacy created a factitious life which fattened the reputation of this queer town. Vice and crime flourished with the counter trade in silk and bells. Day after day the long silk processions threaded their way through the monuments. Church bells and saluting guns predominated – the boom and the wingbeats went throbbing over the waters with their famous bridge. It has all vanished, and the innate vulgarity and pretentiousness of the architecture can be seen, for it is no longer decorated by silk gonfalons and mountains of blazing candles.

  How long since Petrarch sighed and sobbed his way into old age, verse after dry verse like the beat of a metronome in the shrinking skull. And yet I believe in great attachments, in the stabbing recognition that assailed him as it assailed Dante. Freud can keep his mouth shut firmly on his cigar. The good poet needs an unripe girl as a Muse. And yet, from one point of view to suffer because of a hollow passion for a middle-class allumeuse – what a tragic fate! Suppose he had won her in marriage only to find that it was like sitting about in wet shoes? A real novelist would find the theme worthy of him.

  No, walking about here in the woods with young Tobias I have been charmed, as indeed everywhere in this country, by the way that the vegetation has invaded everything, colonised it. Summer-houses completely brambled-in by roses and honeysuckle, statues covered in green ivy with only one free ankle left to view, walls where every cranny was a nest and the coming and going of the birds made one feel one was in the heart of virgin jungle. Nightingales – but dozens at a time – chanting in moist woods whose green mosses were bisected by splashing rivulets from the overflow of pure springs. The calm happiness and bounty conferred by tutelary water nymphs or river Gods – and indeed the Rhône was once such a God. Then the silky air, the ambient cool air. The quiet folded-away quality of the chalk and limestone valleys with their sectors of violet dust and red – the signs of a soil rich in bauxite some wiseacre tells me. All prospects lightly powdered with the flowing dust of clay which the hot sun had rendered friable. And the tall bowed skies, so reminiscent of Attic scenes, fill and empty like great sails with the breath of the rogue wind known as mistral which scatters the olives into screens of silver-grey, supples out cypresses like fur, and rushes to explode the spring blossom of almond and plum like a discharge of artillery. The walls of the crooked studio where I have been lodged (in case I need to be alone and write) have prompted me with their yellow photographs to indulge myself with this brief discourse on landscape – it is more or less what I can see from my high window as I glance sideways down across the park towards the Alphilles in one direction: and towards the cross-hatched red-tiled roofs of Avignon in another. These broken planes of red and brown terracotta fan slowly down towards a white scar of river. It is brilliantly sunny, and not in the least cold. Work? We sit for the most part before the great fireplace and eat chestnuts, Toby and I and Bruce. The constraint which I noted yesterday has begun to thaw out; the temper of my relief has shown me that I really came here because I was lonely. These are the penalties of a paper life; my best friends are all correspondents, people I deeply cherish because I seldom or never see them. The old divine Duchess of Tu, for example, writes me voluminous letters almost every week in which she has distilled the essence of her kindly and amoral philosophy of disenchantment. She smokes long green cigars, and once played the banjo in a diplomatic jazz-band. What is intriguing about these letters is the absent-minded tone – for the old darling is trying to write her memoirs in halting and hesitant fashion; sometimes when the flow gets dammed up she turns the next few pages into a letter to me. In this way I can see the gradual shape of a book emerging, and also be amused by her stories of a long life of travel and misadventure. She is the only old lady I know who relentlessly summers at the little town of Cz and this in memory of a love-affair which endured for a decade, only to be cut short by death. Cz! The nightingales in the woods and that weird inflected language.

  I wrote to her a great deal while I was in Vienna, and impressed her very much by retailing many of the more comical elements in psychoanalysis; for example that all bodily openings in the dream are equal to one another. In German the vagina has been called the ear between the legs, and in some circles girls are encouraged to listen with the clitoris! The old dear has never forgotten.

  This to explain myself a bit to myself – for who else is listening? Perhaps that other self who should figure somewhere in the list of viable selves; the self I had somehow hoped to “invest” in my pale and pretty Pia. What a folly to invest in anything! Old Joy invested me with a characteristic Jewish pessimism and monomania. We are dealing with a falling market, our poor little investments become year by year less valuable; I am tempted to launch myself into the rhetoric of the stock market which describes stock as being “mature” or “bearing”, just like fruit trees. But the problem of a private diary whose only function is (like the scales of a violinist) to keep a writer’s hand in, is to determine who is going to be amused by it? In another life poor Sutcliffe will no doubt chortle over these lonely sallies. For the moment they fill in the space before lunch: the days before death.

  Of the inhabitants of Verfeuille the most striking are the two who own it, the brother and sister. They have a frail nobility of aspect and address – there is always something futile, defenceless and endearing about aristocrats. Nothing can be done for them, one feels, except to feel happy about their existence; and this is difficult, for they are often such hell on earth.

  Toby has told me about them, and of course in this rather strait-laced epoch the
ir situation is unusual. There is something unfinished and undefined about them. The word “lovers” always alarms me and fills me with distrust. In my last book a couple not unlike them both began to form and I was forced to remove them because they began to sound implausible. Why, I wonder? Piers and Sylvie have a little the air of people who have played safe from selfishness, remaining deliberately childless. They are a little like babes in the wood, somewhat lost in this rambling house and straggling grounds of a property which they neglect owing to an ignorance of country strategies. The third babe is Bruce, and this adds singularity to the scene, though the whole matter is treated with a completely natural unselfconsciousness which makes it seem as simple as a prism. I reflect on Bruce and Pia alternately: the image of their inversion dwells in my mind and provokes the slow burning fuse of jealousy, for they have achieved happiness thereby. And yet … I cannot doubt the pain of Pia’s fragmented love for yours truly. I watch the young medical student smoking his slow pipe as he plays chess with Piers, who by rights should have been his rival. The girl wanders and reads, swims in the river, or plays the grand piano. The old chateau is full of the shadows of another kind of discontent, however; I gather that grave money troubles lie ahead and that there is a prospect of sudden separation to be faced. Piers may have to work, and the thought makes him sad and preoccupied. He is a small-boned and finely built boy, very French in temper. He is “nervous” in the sense of a thoroughbred horse. Ardent in all things, including friendship. I have wanted for nothing since I arrived. I am at ease with them both for they do not know Pia except by name. Describing their attachment to Toby, Bruce produced rather an interesting simile – likening it to the sexless camaraderie of explorers or mountain climbers, travellers bound by a common voyage.