Lawrence Durrell - The Black Book

We fall together like figures made of feathers, among the soft snowy dewlaps of the cattle, the steaming commotion of voices and cud. The loose black mouth with its voice of enormous volume. We are surrounded with friendly cattle like a Christmas card picture, on the ground, our bodies emptied out of their clothes. It is a new nativity when I enter her, the enormous city couched between her legs; or a frost-bound lake, absolutely aware of the adventurer, the pilgrim, the colonizer. The snow is falling in my mouth, my ears, my soaked clothes. This is a blunt voyage of the most exquisite reckoning. Enter. She has become an image in rubber, not the smallest bone which will not melt to snow under the steady friction of the penis. The hot thaw spreads raw patches of grass under us: every abstraction now is bleeding away into the snow — death, life, desire. It is so fatal, this act among the cattle. We are engrossed bobbins on a huge loom of terror, knowing nothing, wishing to know nothing of our universe, its machinery. When she comes it’s all pearls and icicles emptied from her womb into the snow. The penis like a dolphin with many muscles and black humour, lolling up to meet the sun. The fig suddenly broken into a sticky tip that is all female. She is laughing hideously. The car is standing among the cattle, no less intelligent than they. Under me is no personality any more but a composite type of all desire. Enter. I do not recognize my arctic sister. Under my heart the delicate tappets of a heart; my penis trapped in an inexorable valve, drawing these shapes and chords out of me inexhaustible, like toothpaste. The cattle are kindly and interested in a gentlemanly way; the car urbane as a metal butler. Under my thews, trapped in bracts and sphincters, a unique destruction. She is weeping. Her spine has been liquefied, drawn out of her. She is filleted, the jaw telescoped with language, eyes glassy. Under my mouth a rouged vagina speaking a barbaric laughter and nibbling my tongue. It is all warm and raw: a spiritual autumn with just that scent of corruption, that much death in it, to make it palatable. A meal of game well-hung pig-scented tangy. Such a venison, more delicate than the gums of babies or little fishes. Open to me once like that and the Poles are shaken out of their orbits, the sky falls down in a fan of planets. I am the owner of the million words, the ciphers, the dead vocabularies. In this immense ceiling of swan’s-down there is nothing left but a laughter that opens heaven: a half-life, running on the batteries. I am eating the snow and drinking your tears. Stand against the hedge to snivel and make water while the shivers run down your spine. You are beautiful all of a sudden. Your fear makes me merry. A very merry Christmas to you and yours. I am saying it insanely over and again. A very merry Christmas to you and yours. She runs at me suddenly with blunt fists raised, shouting wildly. Enormous dark eyes with the green and red lights growing from them. The cattle draw back softly on the carpet. Her tears punch little hot holes in the snow. I am happy. You will go about from now on with an overripe medlar hanging out between your legs, your womb burst like the tip of the Roman fig. But even this brutality goes when I feel the bones against me, malleable and tender as gum; the eager whimpering animal dressed in cloth opening up to me, wider and wider, softer than toffee, until the bland sky is heavy with falling feathers, angels, silk, and there is a sword softly broken off in my bowels. I am lying here quite ruined, like a basketful of spilt eggs, but happy. Vulnerable, but lying in you here, at peace with myself: the tides drawing back from me, gathering up the dirt and scurf of things, the thawed pus and venom, and purifying me. I am at peace. It is all falling away from me, the whole of my life emptied out in you like a pocketful of soiled pennies. The faces of the world, Lobo and Marney, the children, Peters, the car, Gracie, the enormous snow, statues, history, mice, divinity. It is for ever, you are saying wildly, with green lips, red lips, white lips, blue lips, green lips. It is for ever. Our lives stop here like a strip of cinema film. This is an eternal Still life, in the snow, two crooked bodies, eating the second of midnight and snivelling. We will die here in this raw agony of convalescence, by the icebound lake, the city lying quiet among its litter of whimpering, blind steeples.

They must be saying good nights now all over the world. I am saying good-bye to part of my life, no, part of my body. It is irrational. I do not know what to say. If I take your hand it is my own hand I am kissing. The aquarium again, with everything slowed down to the tempo of deep water. Good-bye to my own body under the windmill, weeping in the deep snow, nose, ankle, wrist made of frosty iron again. Help me. O eloquent, just and mighty death. The great anvil of the frost is pounding us. The cattle are afraid. Let me put my hand between your legs for warmth. Speak to my fingers with your delicate mouth, your pillow of flesh. I am a swimmer again, moving in a photograph with great, uncertain, plausible gestures towards you.

I have said good night and drawn the car out slowly homeward. There is no feeling in my hands or feet. As though the locomotive centres had been eaten away. Tired.

Hot scent of oil along the great arterial road. There is not a fraction of my life which is not left behind with you, back there, in the snows.

In the hotel the lights blaze. The stillness of the little death hangs along the corridors. Lobo is locked in his room, his heavy head bent over the chart. At his back the wireless gives out the barnyard orchestrations of jazz. From time to time he will raise his eyes and let them rest on his pencil box. Not thinking, numb, the iris of each eye focusing its dark vent on the Mayan eternity. He will let the tepid piddle of the music squirt coolly over him, without attending to it. He would like to cry. Next door Miss Venable wrestles with insomnia. Dial. Detective novels. Ovaltine. Teacups. The bed-lamp hangs its yellow membrane over her. The novel palls. How easy to pour herself out an overdose of Dial one of these fine winter nights, at the full moon. She tries to think of God. Three stories up Clare is lying in bed. Tarquin stands over him talking. The window is wide open and snow is blowing in on the floor. The yellow eyes are sardonic. Connie has entered into their drama suddenly and instituted a new order of things. To Clare’s salary an increase of three pounds a week; to Tarquin’s lorve a kind of internal strangulation, a hernia. However, he is talking largely. The new view of life etc. “Tell me about her,” he says bravely, his nose quivering. This pathetic pose of indifference amuses Clare. “Tell me!” He wants to be made to wriggle, to be stung, whipped by details. Nowadays he can feel so little, really. “I want us to be friends, Clare dear,” he says shyly. “Tell me everything. Confide in me.”

“Well,” says Clare in his croaking voice, saturnine, “if you must know, she’s a dirty bitch. When I’m not there it’s candles, or hot soap and water in a bottle. See? It’s a corridor, that’s what it is, see? She likes it from behind on Sundays to remind her of her old man Joseph, see?”

Tarquin has to leave before he vomits. In his room he walks about like a shy little girl; he will not speak to anyone. If I had the time and the energy I could be really sorry for him. Connie in that gas-lit flat with the blood running out of her as fast as the port runs down her throat: blood on the towels, the curtains, the bedcovers, the pillow. Blood everywhere — and his little Greek Clare cleaning his white teeth and helping himself from the bulging handbag. Or the night of the party when the gas went out, and you could see suddenly the sonata blotted out by the dark. The piano like a dumb buffalo there, and clare trying to mount her on the piano stool, with strange uncouth movements. Tarquin locks the door of his room every night now to feel safe from the blood. He plays David and Jonathan with his pillow these days but it is no good. It is no good at all.