The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  From Sutcliffe’s notebook

  Femme à déguster

  CAUCHEMAR

  Mais pas à boire

  COUCHEMAR

  Homme à délester

  CACHEMERE

  Mais pas à croire

  COCHEMUR

  BLAN: “Here on these quiet lagoons or trotting the dusk mauve sands of the Saintes Maries I learned the truth about the significance of love and its making. ‘Because fashions have changed, and the woman’s freedom is confirmed. She has slipped the hook.’ So Sabine says riding coolly and thoughtfully between us by the rustling sea, ‘And now the new lovers will become at last philosophers. They will realise themselves in mating and sharing the orgasm. Nobody will notice that they are dying of loneliness.’”

  SUT: “Don Juan, eh? No, Bon Juan the new hero. You will walk about in a muse, looking as if you had had your prostate massaged by leprechauns. And when you die you will go straight to the Poets’ Corner of the Abbey. They will write on your plaque: ‘Aubrey was not always his own best friend and sometimes got into intellectual positions his enemies could not have wished for more. Finally, exhausted with so much realising, he farted his way to Paradise.’”

  As for the book it was a hopeless task, for what is to be done with characters who are all the time trying to exchange selves, turn into each other? And then, ascribing a meaning to point-events? There is no meaning and we falsify the truth about reality in adding one. The universe is playing, the universe is only improvising!

  Sutcliffe says, “Who knows all this? You should say, in the interests of clarity.”

  “I leave you to guess.”

  “Sabine?”

  “Yes, walking by the lagoon or in the hot crypt where the bitumen-black waxen figure of Saint Sara stands sending out waves of divination across the fumes of the hot candles. See? There are no sutras, no prayers, no literature to split hairs over. It’s just wish to wish, need to need, like spittle falling on a red-hot iron. You ignite the black doll and she answers any question that does not concern the past or the future! As for me, I am a bit of a fraud and an interloper. Why? Because I joined them out of curiosity – and you can’t really. You have to be born one. So I remained outside, a vehement observer. History rolls on but the gipsy folk follow an unconscious star rhythm, they don’t take part, they invigilate, so to speak. They have refused to codify impulse like the Jews, to profiteer. Now, with the slow breakdown of deterministic Christianity, one wonders if Nietzsche was not right when he said that the Jewish role historically was to unlock the gate from the inside – the ancient intellectual fifth column of radicalism forever at work with its messianic fanaticism gnawing at the roof-tree of tradition and stability. Thus they did for the Goths and now they have done for us. Divide and rue! There is no hint of illiberality or partiality in these notions which are purely philosophic. For us gipsies both Hitler and Stalin were children of the Old Testament executing a blood programme inspired by Moloch. There is nothing to be done to hasten its inevitable disappearance and its transformation into something new, thank goodness! People fall into these thought moulds from copying each other. But we can with justice accuse Christianity of masterminding our intellectual disarray. As for the gipsies, they have made no effort to capitalise on the tragedy of their extermination in the camps as the Jews have done. A total silence is all that has emerged – not a poem, not a song, not a scrap of protest folklore! It’s uncanny. But the old aptitudes hold – basketwork, thieving, prophecy and the telling of fortunes still hold out. The game of destiny.”

  “Ah! That’s what I want to discuss!” said Constance, “because it all seems a pack of lies. The last time we came down here we each had different fortunes, each by a different soothsayer. Surely there must be some constant in the whole business, Sabine?”

  The swarthy woman shook her head and smiled.

  “We each have as many destinies stacked up inside us as a melon has seeds. They live on in potentia so to speak. One does not know which will mature. But after the event one pretends that it was obvious all along. And sometimes the soothsayer is right, chooses right, skries the destiny which manifests itself! You have many discernible destinies – in one you are to die in childbirth; Aubrey divined this though he is no soothsayer, and it figures in the first draft of his novel. In another you will die together – this our tribal Mother saw. It is part of a great accident, something like an earthquake. All of you, all of us, have as many destinies as the sands of the seashore.

  “But as for you, Aubrey, I saw something else of more immediate experience. Suddenly she has discovered in you the love she feared would never exist, since there seemed no hope of you ever snapping out of your coma. Suddenly she realised that if she staked her claim and risked everything you might get reborn, re-created. It was up to her to divine the meaning of the orgasm with complete female ruthlessness, to divine your metaphysical anguish, and then to respond to it – to yield and to conceive, that is what she is trying to do. You have both realised love as a future-manufacturing yoga with a child at stake in it, the consciousness of a child, which will be read in its regard! You know the old Provençal saying that a child anyone can make, but one must round off or perfect its regard (faut parfaire le regard). This hints at the inner vision which will give the child a pithy heart and mind on condition that the dual orgasm is experienced simultaneously. She is going to rescue you!”

  It certainly felt like that, though poor Constance, responding to the analyst in her, explained it all quite differently, indeed somewhat apologetically. “I am at the moment taking the male part, overwhelming you, almost I am castrating you, but the intention is finally to cause you to respond fully to me. You see you are still traumatised by the shock of the explosion and your image of your body is making you mentally cringe, as if you had pain to fear; whereas I know now that the wound is healed and while there are some muscular movements you can’t make there is no more pain or stress. You can go the whole hog and act without thinking or hesitating. Last night I felt you for the first time in control. Sabine is right, we are moving into a fine dual control of the act.” Yet he knew they had Affad to thank for much of this love-lore.

  SAB: “Yes, there are precautions to be taken just as in the making of bread! By progressively conquering the loving amnesia of the orgasm and expanding its area of consciousness – adding more and more meaning to the eyes of the child-future. By this voluntary extension of consciousness you refine your death progressively, the death he will inherit from you. Once you start this process and realise fully what you are doing all stress vanishes, and all unbelief also. You become all of a sudden who you are, thanks to her, and she who she is thanks to you! But you must not make it sound too like a constatation de gendarme or Sutcliffe will be forced to redress the balance in his notebooks which presumably will be one day inherited by Trash. All these pitiful slogans of desire! (After intercourse show him amazement – advice to young brides.)”

  But how to overpraise the gold body of Constance, dusted now by the dust-thunder of the bullrings and splashed with freckles of gold?

  Sweet as a rock-panther one day old

  Just come on heat and mateless

  Melts like a cat in rut unsated

  In vast desires unsublimated

  Freckles of coy gold …

  BLAN: “Why should death have the monopoly, eh? Il faut paufiner la réalité, faut bricoler dans l’immédiat! Why remain a victim of uncouth wishes? As for love among the martial arts you must read my new study of Cleopatra, to learn the secrets of love from her. She buttered her breasts before intercourse while Antony honeyed his valves! Soft probe of human tongue – hysteria is a distress which does not come from blameless kisses exchanged between male and female adversaries. The new lovers have become philosophers and equal to the loneliness they inspire. The tremendous sadness becomes rich though the love seems profitless. Something quite new is happening!”

  These philosophic considerations sound highly sententious, and
one suspects that too many of them could easily spoil your loving to the tune of this lazy night and this quite momentous sleek jazz pouring up among the lamplit trees. Can’t you be content with the soft goads of the simple flesh? Of that wonderful girl Blanford invented he wrote in his book: “Her husbands had tried to ring her like a wild swan but she was subject only to the gravitational tides of the seasons, flying north or south where the blood called, eluding settled ways and settled men. In lonely places I always found her, tide-borne, solitary, perfect, my lover and my deep friend. At night we dined by the light of a single candle, with olives and iced wine.”

  BLAN: “When Sutclifte was born it was a time of grave portents. The doctor said, ‘It is clear he will die young for he has no sense of humour.’ But his French nurse (muse?) leaned over his cot and whispered, ‘They have all brought gifts as spurs to the crib, Zeus a garlic-squeezer, Venus a foreskin-clip of purest gold portending loves without drawback. And now think: the white breast of chicken musky with dusky truffles, stippled like a trout’s belly: a pot of black aromatic olives dense in the sweet introspection of their own dark oil, pâté de foie gras. Admit it, my dear, you are getting an erection!’ The demon du Midi has him by the hair of a Sunday.

  Aborted Christians drinking blood

  A thirst which dates before the Flood.

  I’m sick of the thirst for becoming,

  The heaving and retching and humming,

  I will turn to a thirst to exist

  And catch up on all that I’ve missed!”

  The private mind is never at rest, and always on the magic frequency of love.

  SUT: “The formula seems to be petit talent et gros cul. Fond as a stableful of horses’ bums polished up to mirror grooms’ grins. They burn. They burn. But nowadays you must bring your own whip. But this is how the gentry do it. With us and our little white palaeolithic chargers it is quite different, for they behave like pets and live loose on the range when they are unsaddled, prodigal of their smiles and headlong tossing of white manes, as if they had leaped out of context and no longer respected the serial order expounded by nature. Think: old men’s sperm makes not old men but infants-in-arms who will grow to form church fathers simmering in the raging paranoia of a punitive God. A thirst for magic rules. The schizoid states are uncrystallised mysticism. The kundalini of the unconscious accidentally touched off and set in motion, like an engine’s pre-ignition; it comes from incautious thinking, incautious wishing.”

  BLAN: “Art for the Prince is the representation of a reality upon a plane surface – an artefact without volume or depth. It will not stand up to interrogation. You risk by poking at it with your questions to go right through the canvas into nothing: or else everything! There are limits even to everything. Bien sûr que non, as you can say in French, using the cryptic Buddhic double negative. As for the woman, she is a psychic scout and pathfinder through the flesh, a lieutenant, the ship’s first mate who divides responsibility with the captain.”

  When the Prince overheard Constance say, “We have started getting a poor quality of human being for whom wisdom has become mere information!” he was entranced and begged her to teach him ethnology. Together they frequented international gatherings and wistfully compared cultures in search of a thread of historic significance. Certain symbols stood out and seemed to hint. The suffering Prometheus, for example, stood with its face to the rock while the vultures fluttered and pecked; while the suffering Christian stood with its back to the cross, arms spread like a radio aerial, with a crown of wild acacia on his head … Two different approaches to human suffering! A professor had said, “The will to self-destruction seems more advanced in the more gifted nations or peoples.” The Prince gave an exclamation of impatience, for he had begun to feel that they would never find what they were looking for in this way. Also the fortune-tellers had predicted the death of the Princess, and he had begun to dream of the funeral cortège – the long procession of Rolls-Royces, nose to stern, stretching some eighteen kilometres along the blazing desert road between Cairo and Alexandria. The screeching water wheels of Egypt are the country’s cicadas. He would soon have to return to her, the one being without whom he did not think he could continue to live. “C’est une affaire de tangences,” somebody had remarked to him in the midst of a cocktail party on the Lake Mareotis. And now that the thought of her dying had become an echo in his mind how boring all other women seemed, how shabby his sprees! They were tergiversatile and showed him their lily-white panjandrums, that was all! (The value of the hypotenuse of the Pythagorean triangle is valued at five!) Yet he must not be unfair. With some he had learned things which profited his love for his own wife, and in one – why, she had opened her legs and revealed the whole secret of the pyramids and, yes, that of entropy also. But there is also a principle of repair which contests the irreversibility of process for a short spell – the omnifact of omnideath, the ubique of human obsolescence. “I want you to go ahead and try out the child, one of your own, it’s a great challenge,” he said to Constance, who replied in somewhat oracular fashion, “Even though you know full well that lovers are selfish as arrows?”

  “Even though! Even though!”

  Blanford took her in his arms, which was still an unfamiliar purchase for the two unfledged hearts, unquiet presences. He said ironically, “With this future I thee wed.” But they knew that the trick had long since been done and it only remained to live it out, to act it out. Reality is desperate for someone to believe in it; hence manifestation which is History’s party frock!

  Dull carnivorous males in love

  A-playing the game of hand-in-glove;

  Projections of our self-esteem

  Reflected into love’s young dream.

  Gonads rehearse the Primal Scream

  Man, sublime mud of all he thinks

  Sleepwalks in darkness with his jinx,

  Gaunt fellatrix with urban curves,

  Each gets the partner he deserves.

  SUT: “Passing down the village street they were reflected in the shop windows, the three mounted figures; the gold leaf of her sunburn glowed against the blonde head like a declaration of intent. Living without awe is living without a full consciousness of reality – of its value. Men without awe will never be wise. Ah! for men who realise that reality consistently outstrips intellectual formulations. Sometimes we could not help seeing the world as a sort of farmyard – with humanity quacking or honking rather than talking. Ontology – the study of being! Ours is perhaps the first civilisation which cannot decide if the answers lie in art or in science. They appear to flow from different centres in the same animal, man. And a man now must realise himself through a sort of religious experience yet stay a man. But if a woman has a religious experience she is obliged to forsake her womanhood and become a nun. Can you have the grin without the cat? I am not sure. A suicide wrote recently, ‘In leaving you I am inheriting the whole world!’ For dinner he had eaten lobsters tender as Christian children and an overloaded conscience is as bad as an overloaded bowel – something has to give! Then bang!”

  They had started to make love as if their embraces were extensions of their thoughts, and he realised the full extent of her power over him; it was a little frightening because he realised that later he would be called upon to take over this power, this domination – it belonged to the male demesne. She was only trying to waken him to his responsibilities. They hardly talked now. The long silent rides were wonderfully tonic beside bulky seas. And their little tavern was as abominable as ever, serving slices of ancient donkey badly cooked and served tepid, covered in rancid oil. The tavern should have been called the Bloodstained Toothpick instead of the Mistral. The proprietor had the specially dead look you see in the eyes of a fly. One knew it was no use arguing because he did not understand. Yet the wine was marvellous. It came from St Saturnin. Suddenly one had thoughts of pith. “Oui, en toi j’ ai bien vendangè ma mere!” he told her. It was a declaration of love of the most absolute kind and
she recognised it as such, good Freudian that she was, or seemed!

  So they rode in sweet symbiosis, while the ravenous blue sea lopped at the land, honed down their horizons of sand, extended its bony contours cradled by the heartfelt blue meniscus which was sky. She had finally convinced him of the existence of lovers as philosophers, and of the need for a joint approach to time through the atom of their love. And this sometimes made them both a bit of a bore. “For me the Aetvologie of Hysteria is the great document of the twentieth century, the great Sutra, so to speak, and the Freudian denial of its truth is quite inexplicable; it is as momentous as the other great philosophic denial (‘Thou shalt deny me thrice!’) which ended with the crucifixion scene.” What she meant was that the child would be clear-eyed and vigorous and unshocked in its beginnings – she knew it must be so. On the other hand … “I had this dream which suggested that it was going to be the ending of the whole book. You went back to Tu Duc to tidy up and I to England in order most appropriately to begin my opus. And there the telephone rang with news of your … I have never accepted the unique word.” “Say it!” “No! It must be lived to be swallowed!”

  Death!

  BLAN: “Your consciousness bears witness to the historic now which you are living while your memory recalls other nows, fading slowly into indistinctness as they move into the prehistory you call the past. This temporal series, indistinct and overlapping, you attach to one individual whom you call ‘I’. But … in the course of a few years, about seven I think, every cell in the body of this ‘I’, this individual, has been modified and even replaced. His thoughts, judgements, emotions, desires have all undergone a similar metamorphosis! What then is the permanence which you designate as an ‘I’? Surely not simply a name which marks his (‘its’?) difference from his (‘its?’) fellow men … A discrete sequence of rather disjointed recollections which begin some time in infancy and terminate with a jolt now, in the present – such is time as a datum of consciousness! (Despite this stone wall, I love you more than myself!) When all this raw material has undergone the strange refining process which we know as physical intuition it is transformed into something close to a meditative state – a version of ‘calm abiding’ as the Tibetans would say, and it becomes an ark or house for the love-child to inhabit, afloat upon the waters of the eternal darkness, backcloth of everything we do or every kiss we exchange. When if ever one has the luck to arrive at an inferential consciousness the steps of the reasoning process that preceded it are no longer necessary; one can let them go! Kick away the ladder, so to speak.”