Lawrence Durrell - The Black Book

On such evenings I am too preoccupied to applaud the maestro, so, recalling that literature is my main interest, he will utter a few lines of the diary aloud, not looking at me, like an incantation. I will ask: “What is that?” I know quite well what it is. “Do you like it?” he will say archly. “Yes. What is it?”

Then we will have an interesting little session of reading aloud. A post-mortem on the psyche, that delicate butterfly which lives behind the pale walls of his abdomen. Or he will read me the famous last chapter of his immense (unwritten) work on Bach, which ends with the terrific epigram: “It remained for Bach to make mathematics humane!” He must really write the other chapters one day soon, he says meditatively, don’t I think? Of course I do. I am obliged to contribute some form of sociability to the session because, after all, it is his room. I cannot face my own. I cannot face the dead books, the stale sheets of poems, badly typed, the littered drawers. The bed, my six-foot tenement, the ceiling where the fantasies hang like bats, and squeak like a million slate pencils. If Lobo will come for a walk I am grateful, with a real humility, for his company. I do not speak much, but it is good to have a companion to walk beside.

On these cold nights Lobo is quite hysterical about Peru, waiting for him out there beyond the ocean. He tells me of the streets with the brothels, warmly lighted, the radios going, the guitars: the innumerable doors with their eye-vents hungry with black eyes. The dark men crossing the streets like ants to their assignations. “It is so easy,” he says mournfully, “so easy.” Compared with this arctic world he warms his hands at Lima.… Ah the Rimac twisting under the bridges, the shawls, the parrots (damn those parrots!), the family friends, so many bloodless hidalgos: the whole machine of traditional family life turning over, faultless. There was a girl friend of the family who used to go down to the seaside with him. Hot sand; his fingers easing out the creamy chords from the guitar, heavy as milk with romance. She was so ardent, so full of response that her kisses scorched a man — made him wriggle like sandworm. He stands under the loopy tower of the Christmas tree in a window to tell me this. Behind us the even more loopy tower of the Palace sweating a rank thaw from its million menstruous boils. His face is transfigured by the memory of her warmth. Tears in his eyes. “She was so hot,” he says suddenly, and shoots out his hand to my wrists, as if his own warmth of feeling could give me an idea of hers … “So hot.” I always remember him like that: standing in his immaculate clothes under a leaning tower, while behind the street swirled away its drifts of snow and driven lamps in foam and emptiness. We are deserted in an ocean of lights. His face is varnished under the brim of his hat, his eyes superb. “Come with me,” he says impulsively. “Let us run away into the sun, dear boy, into the sun, my friend.” He flings his head back as if searching for new planets, new constellations. Transfigured. His walk lilts. Then, the snow begins to fall, insidious white soot, and his elation is quenched. His face sours. The melody has gone out of his footsteps. Sleek, the astronomical manna powders our eyebrows. The wind has driven a nail through my temples. I am stifling. The slow, cumulative concussion of a world of frost crowding upon our world. We get into step homeward. Lights burn dimly behind shutters, without festivity. Wax lights, floating in bowls of childish water, guarding the dead faces of sleeping infants. The snow howls and flutes among the immense concrete corridors, smothering volition, desire. A train scouts the uttermost outposts of the stars, tracing an invisible ambit. Venus and Uranus up there, winking like lighthouses across the white acres. The spiral nebulae spreading wider and wider, like pellets from a celestial shotgun. The earth under us, creaking and ancient, like a rotten apple in the teeth of an urchin. Wendy! A rotten green apple, decaying to the brown of a pierced molar under the snow. Wendy, with the heavy apples in her green shirt, the firm warm bullets of breasts in a snowstorm of reason, killing me. You will understand, lying out there among the ironed-out lakes and fields, you will understand this panic of separation that is hardening my arteries with tears.

Invisible behind this aura, which strikes our heads like a clown’s baton of feathers, trying to fell us, the red giants and the white dwarfs are at play. Galactic imbecility. It is a season of the spirit in which the idea even loses its meaning, loses the bright distinguishing edge, and falls back into its original type, sensation. Words are no good. If you were to die, for instance, it would mean snow. Palpable, luminous, a shadow in ink. And your dying too fatal to reach me when the wind is up among the trees and there is laughter inside the dark houses. When the telephone rings I say to myself: death. But it means nothing. Like a hot iron passed over a tablecloth — the white fabric of your face ironed suddenly into insensibility. I choose this word rather than any other, because in the past it had the most power over me. Now the idea itself is starched and stiffened back into a nothing of white. The elastic snowscape and this atmosphere which we breathe into our lungs like a rusty saw, is all. Is all. Is all …

These abstractions crossing and crossing the drunken mind; and we on a planet, buzzing in space across the alphabetical stars: the creak of the earth curling away into the night like a quoit, like the creak of cable and spar on a ship; and only this mushy carpet on which to tread out our footsteps towards the final wedding with loneliness.

Does the endless iteration of loneliness tire you? It is the one constant in our lives. Even when the night now is spotted with shadows whose dapple seems to present a graph of this emotion. Oh, behind it, I know — somehow behind it in a dimension which I cannot fathom, life still tumbles across the scenes smelling of pageantry, heroic, wet white, blue goitres, clowns, sopranos, fireeaters.… But we shall never reach it.

This is what must be known as a state of war for Lobo. Woman has at last become the focus for the hate and despair which dribble away, day in, day out, like a clap: in the red postman morning, in the afternoons over muffins and postcards, in the dusk with the returning schoolchildren — at night in his private lair with only the monotony of the gas fire to suggest continuity in a life which seems to have stopped like a cheap clock.

Hilda is my only anodyne against the white leprosy of the frost. Like the fool of the Tarot, the crazy joker of the pack, I wander through the events of the way. The imbecile hangs on the mercy of time like a lily on the river. I have no being, strictly, except when I enter that musty little room, frosted softly at night, where Hilda, the giant cauliflower of my dreams, moves about her tasks. Between the artist I, and Hilda the prostitute, there is an immediate correspondence. We recognize and respect each other, as pariahs do; we love each other, but we do not understand each other. Nevertheless we have made a truce. We share the scraps which life pushes up among the flotsam on that bare beach where those other beachcombers like ourselves raven. This room, this four-poster bed is the Sargasso Sea, with the tides hourly pushing up the empty cans of ideas, desire, hunger with sharp edges, hopes, destinies; crowns, trumpets, hymnals, all tangled in the weeds which grope about our bodies in the long nights. Nothing to suggest tomorrow as a plausible reality except a snatch of midnight song leaking from the bulging pinions of a shutter. Nothing to tell us we will rise again on the third day. That we will be made flesh.

The sheets are dirty. The walls are dirty. The soft bloom of gaslight whispers the items of the day’s news. A paper lies on the bed. The lying eye, trying to read it, sees the type blowing past the gas fire, out of the window, like a fine sandstorm. Black signal of the world’s disease — the wasting disease that calls for more and more calamities, more catastrophes, to scald the nerves. The world’s tragedy is Tarquin’s tragedy. He can feel nothing. Hilda’s tragedy is that she can feel too much. Her great cow’s heart thaws at the least thing. An ignorant, blundering Lucrece, she is raped by the first emotion which impacts on her. What? The Turks are slaughtering the Armenian children? O the pore little things. Her tears dribble into dirty handkerchiefs, into her bodice, her shift, her handbag, into the moist torche-cul which hangs behind the lavatory door. “You don’t feel nothing,” she says. “You don’t feel for them pore children, you little bastard.”