The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  Sutcliffe will write us epitaphs

  In poems acerb and wise

  In rhythms the pendulums adore

  And human metronomes despise.

  Constance turned her smiling head and sighed: “You have not seen as much of death as I have in my work. Finally, I have got on to good terms with the ugly fellow! Somewhere in the middle of the whole thing there comes a sudden luxurious feeling of surrender to inevitability in the dying themselves. It belongs, this mood of gradually deepening amnesia, to the rhythms of plant life. It makes one realise that all love passes into obsolescence in the very act – it illustrates the nothingness we have decorated with our trashy narcissism. A soft withering surrender to a death without throes. Lying alone by oneself there guided by the merciful paralysis of fading thoughts which cradle one and lead on and on and on … until snap! Kiss me. Hold me. And then for some time the echo of an emptiness will follow you about the house, invisible as gravity but as omnipresent, the emphasis on a vanished presence.”

  Yes, Rob’s poems will come all tension-charged with the original perfect illness to undo our knots and make us thrive on images of unimpeded loves … He knows that the flesh cools also like a pot of clay in freshly ovened silence, set out in gardens like women beautiful and purposeless as fruit but just as suave in their archaic silence as the grave.

  Faustus who held all nature in contempt

  Was punished, could not die,

  Instead he went

  Into the limbo of the death-exempt,

  Becoming everything he might have dreamt.

  To him was granted the famous penis with three heads – the Noble Toy of the alchemists. From now on they made love, creaking like old tennis racquets, and he was able to note in his diary that “le temps du monde fini a commencé”.

  I have made a discovery but I can’t tell you what it is because the language in which to express it has not been invented. I know a place but there is no road to it – you must swim or fly-thus the mage Faustus. What’s to be done? Why, we must push on with reality, living in the margins of hope.

  the puckering of a thousand vaginas

  the groans and squeaks of minors

  the booming of ocean liners

  the sighs of aircraft designers

  the concentrations of water diviners

  well blow me down with mortal slyness!

  tickle my arse and call me Chomsky!

  The adjective which is the prop of good prose is the perverter of poetry – except in the limerick which is its proper show-window. Ideally one could write a whole book in this concise and convenient form to sidestep memory’s slow ooze, though perhaps the too rigorous beat of the metronome might lead to monotony. In slower prose one can let packets of silence drift about like mist. Truth is not only stranger but older than … The whole of reality dreamed up by a shaggy little god muttering in his sleep. Eppur si muove! He talks as if he needed hot rivets to clench up his prose – yes, aphorisms like rivets!

  Let him who writes with velvet nib

  Reserve a sigh for Women’s Lib

  Confusions Imp, the God of Love

  Must ask them what they are dreaming of.

  SUT: “Darling, soon they will abolish the male and you will have to consider joining the Sperm Bank, the most select form of civil servant, with a certain guaranteed sperm-count, and a uniform like a treasury official. They wear their gold chain of office proudly, simply. And the girls sigh after them – those who have only known the ministrations of the homely plastic syringe torn from a steel dispenser, the dose kept at blood heat, but often not quite fresh or even out of date. Oh for a real man, a small beef extract of a man to enliven the Effluent Society presided over by Madame Ovary. The taming of the screw.

  “God’s brush!” he cried, “with every lady kissed

  The future is encouraged to exist!”

  “Constance, you overpersuade me – perhaps we are the last specimens of an obsolete cult. (Cuddle the embers of memory and she’ll be thine – so I tell myself.) All is not lost. I sit on the nursery floor of literature surrounded by the dismembered fragments of my juggernaut of a book, wondering how best to assemble this smashed telamon. The débris itself gives off light despite its incoherence. Some wise and disciplined girl like you with those inevitable eyes in shadow, disgusted by the petty transactions of time, suddenly finds plain love and its choice delights; so crowding on all sail she heads for the dark fronts where the great attachments hide. In the heart of the licensed confusion a sense of meaning. All beak and virgin’s claws in girls of renown. Or in old men whose basic valves have shut; despairing silence holds them yet, though all but their earthly sun is set … And love’s umbilicus is cut. Neurosis is the norm for an egopetal culture – Freud exposed the roots as a dentist’s drill exposes the pulp chamber of a tooth – the aching root is guilt over uncommitted sins! Civilisation is a placebo with side-effects.”

  They made love again, secure in this despairing knowledge of a truth their embraces exemplified!

  EIGHT

  Minisatyrikon

  “IT WAS PURE ROMAN SWANK, IF YOU ASK ME,” SAID LORD Galen comfortably. “When you think that the whole of this huge edifice was brought into being just to convey a current of fresh water twenty-five kilometres away to a waterless Nîmes where the eleventh legion had been sent in as settlers … pure swank, that’s what it was.” They were taking a turn upon the bridge in the fading light, waiting for the festivities to begin, for at long last the great day had arrived for the unveiling of the Templar treasure in the caves. “Perhaps,” said Felix Chatto who had joined the strollers in the dusk, “perhaps,” as he gazed upwards into the evening sky where the felicitous honey-golden arches rose in an unpretentious explicitness, “it didn’t represent very much for their architects – a mere hydraulic work, inescapably functional. Not even a Roman virgin bricked up alive in it as a sacrifice to the goddess of water!” The Prince nodded and added, “As far as we know! But could it not have been to create employment and prevent social discontent, and thus to ingratiate the Roman settlers with their hosts? Surely it was not just showing off, eh? It’s exasperating that one doesn’t know. Nor do we know at what point a purely functional object, a fort, a railway, a dam, becomes suddenly (as if by a change of key) aesthetically precious.” It was not perhaps the place and the time for such aesthetic promptings, for since the prefectorial announcement of a festival and vin d’honneur in honour of the reconstituted niche of Saint Sara the gipsies had taken the hint and started to invade the valley with its tall cliffs and dense forest land which cradled the green river and its fast variable currents lapping at the stone-shingle beaches.

  “We’ll never discover,” said Felix with a sigh. “Many years ago we discovered a Greek monastery with a juke box in it and were carried away by the charm of the unusual in such a remote place. One of the monks had visited America and brought back this cultural object as an ex voto. It was delightful and quite incongruous. Several years later we returned to discover that every monastery on the peninsula had one if not more juke boxes which played canned music all day long at full volume. The singular and charming had become the horrible. How was it? Is the good, the desirable, the admirable, dependent on its rareness and vitiated by quantity? I have often wondered.” Lord Galen felt unhappy, out of his depth. He knew he had little talent for Aristotelean casuistries. “Surely,” he ventured, “more is better than less, as with money?”

  Felix shook his head.

  “Or bacteria?”

  “Oh dear!” said Lord Galen, “I hate this line of reasoning because it never seems to lead anywhere. Would you feel it was a bad thing if Greek monasteries invested more in sanitary equipment? Myself, I should feel it admirable.”

  But while this pious wrangling went on in good-natured fashion Sutcliffe was noting in his commonplace-book the salient facts about the place and time – this might serve Aubrey if for some reason he did not turn up or was late, or whatever. The basic thing was that
all the visitants, of whatever persuasion, were expecting something different from the adventure. For the Prince and his associates material gain, for the Beaux Arts aesthetic, for the gipsies a prophesying oracle, and so on. Even the little doctor and the egregious Quatrefages with his strange epileptoid air and cadaverous physique were expecting something in the nature of a revelation about the Templar mystique, the Templar secret. All these matters would come to a head – with any luck – after midnight when the revellers would be led away from the scene of the festivities towards the dark quarries with their labyrinth of grottoes. As for the gipsies, they knew how to do things with subtlety, to penetrate by infiltration, cart by cart, tribe by tribe. The magic word had been uttered and passed along the bloodstream of the race so that tribes from as far away as the northern Balkans, from Yugoslavia, from Italy and Algeria, had found that there was just sufficient time in hand to send a few representatives to this important event which in the gipsy tongue was known as “an awakening” – that is to say, the inauguration of a tribal saint, a soothsayer and initiator. It was natural that the tribes in and around the city should be pre-eminent as being numerically the most important, and most closely in touch with the authorities. They smoothed out difficulties with the police and the various other departments concerned with public events. So far all the organisational side had been worked out with precision and aimi-ability, though as for the Préfet himself he had passed a sleepless night, for in the middle of it he had awoken from his sleep with a start and a chilly shudder of fright – for he had suddenly realised the fearful fire hazard which the surrounding forest created at the Pont du Gard. And here he had even authorised a brief display of fireworks to salute the risen Saint Sara! His blood ran cold as he realised all that might go wrong … a single imprudence by a smoker, an overturned lamp … With a vague if scared sense of propitiation he rose early that morning and went to mass, but throughout was preoccupied with visions of a Pont du Gard in flames. It was too late to change anything but he called for the fire brigade to send out a strategic work force just in case …

  But nevertheless the whole event had been regarded as a municipal operation of some importance to the town of Avignon (to flatter gipsy pride) and it was envisaged that the whole hamlet and ravine would be occupied by sightseers and participants during the fete. The town pompiers had taken the matter in hand with despatch, beginning with the problem of lighting. Wires had been slung across the gulf with ribbons of coloured bulbs suspended from them, worked off a portable generator in a lorry, so for the first time the whole edifice was lit up against the night sky. This was in addition to its own lighting system which it was able to use on national days and events of a tourist sort. This whole area of swinging illumination created a sort of mesmeric village of light scooped out of the theatrical blue darkness of the night sky. On either side the cliffs mounted with their dense scrub and forests of holm oak, and here the gipsy bands had already taken root. (The blood chilled, for one could not prevent them from lighting small fires on the embers of which they grilled their evening meal!) They had brought all their own equipment with them, trade by trade, tongue by tongue; they travelled in ancient lorries or in slower carts with their verminous armfuls of keen-eyed children. They had even brought their own fleas with them, if one was to believe the municipal police on the subject! And then there was their music which, once the occupation of the site got under way, began to proliferate in a variety of styles and modes with different groups of instruments and differently cadenced songs and airs – whining mandolins purring like cats, quailing ailing violins, trombones like village idiots reciting their themes. And then to follow came the dances of the children. And as this invasion advanced the place was steadily filling up with little stalls where one could buy pasties or roasted meat dishes or fruit or scones, or even trinkets and baskets – fruit of the day-labour of the gipsies, for they neglected no chance to foster their wares. And here, manning other stalls, were farriers who could shoe you a horse or key-cutters who could cut you a set of skeleton keys to open an office safe or knifegrinders who could sharpen your kitchen knives in a flash. And sellers of scarves and lace and brilliant coloured napkins from Turkey or Yugoslavia. And lastly the army of fortune tellers, brilliant as parrots and all professing palmistry …

  Meanwhile a central marquee had been run up, extensive as to size, for it was to house most of the notables and provide a centre inside which the Préfet could made his speech in honour of Saint Sara. He never missed the chance of speechifying in public. It was his job as well as his art.

  The nexus of the gipsy organisation was centred in half a dozen old fashioned carts with small windows decorated by brilliant curtains and flashily painted sideboards. They were grouped about the loftiest and most gaudy which was the home of the tribal “Mother”. The smell of joss and whisky hung about in it, to tantalise the noses of those clients who came to consult the old lady about their fortunes. All this smoke from fires and tobacco and cooking and Indian joss-sticks ebbed and flowed with the evening river-winds as they poured softly over the stony sills of the ravines and so downstream.

  “I’m on the look-out for that Sabine lady,” said Lord Galen, “to try to get a really detailed and authoritative reading out of her. She was rather unsatisfactory last time when we went to the Saintes Maries; and yet there was sufficient truth in what she said to be very striking, and give me the hunger to know more if possible.”

  “Did she tell you if you would get the treasure?” asked the Prince curiously. “No! I thought not. Nor me exactly! But she defended her limitations very ably, I thought, by saying that she could only see what lay within her personal competence, just as a human eye can only see a certain distance. Yet I was like you impressed by what she had to say.”

  Felix Chatto who had decided to resign everything to fate and had a poor opinion of fortune telling was nevertheless just as anxious to see Sabine whom he admired deeply and thoroughly appreciated as a conversationalist. He had himself grown up so much and in so many unexpected ways that he felt the need to test out his new maturity upon someone whose sensibility seemed to be the equal of his own, whose notions echoed his. And he could see that the woman was hungry for good conversation in her own tongue which offered her the comforting support of humour and lightness of touch. But where was she? She did not reach the great viaduct until nightfall, owing to some minor trouble with the transport. She had lost a very great deal of weight within the last year or two – indeed, she already knew that she was starting a cancer; but for the moment she had gained much in simple beauty which she could offset with the dramatic apparel of the gipsy tribe in all its brilliant grossness; and her body answered the change, reverting to the old swinging walk of the past, her head slanted to one side, as if she were listening to her own beauty from some inward point of vantage. They heard her hoarse voice in the crowd and exclaimed (or Galen did): “There she is! Let’s waylay her before she gets carried away by the French Préfet!”

  Meet they did, but it seemed that Sabine had been on the lookout for Felix, for she advanced upon them with impulsive speed and took his hands, ignoring the arms of Galen, keen to share a handshake with her. “I must talk to you alone for a moment,” she said breathlessly, “if your friends will permit me. I have something to tell you.” And so saying she drew him aside into the forest and sat him down on a fallen block of golden stone, an ingot broken off the bridge. “When we spoke of Sylvie I did not tell you the whole of what I saw because I realised that there was something capital which you did not yet understand, and that was the provisional nature of prophesy. The fact that I see something does not automatically mean that it will come about, for sometimes it does not; yet statistically it falls out as I see it about seven times out of ten. You questioned me about her illness and her possible death by suicide and I turned the question aside at the time. I wanted time to consult my Mother as to what I had a right to reveal and what not – for I saw quite far into your future, or my version of it.
In that version she does not die that way, but she is buried alive in a mountainous snowdrift somewhere north of Zagreb some years off, some years from now. In between you will experience absolute bliss with her, for you have, by recognising the nature of her so-called illness, given her the courage to reassume her reason. As a young Ambassador I see health and riches and professional success. But this catastrophe comes quite unexpectedly. They are there silent; the uniformed chauffeur is dozing. They are waiting for help to come in order to dig them out. She is playing chess with a pocket chess set. I hear Smoke, the cat, purring contentedly and also the soft tick of the dashboard clock of the great limousine. Help will come, but too late; the rescue team have laboriously dug a tunnel down to the bottom of the drift to remove the bodies but the car is jammed in rocks and incapable of being moved. It will have to stay all winter and wait for the spring thaw. By then of course the moisture will have blurred the contents of her last two notebooks – a great loss to literature, they seem to believe.” All this while holding his wrist and staring down at his palm with a trance-like expression. Then she sighed. “That is all. And now you must please excuse me for a few moments because I think the French have arrived.”