Lawrence Durrell - The Black Book

“But, Hilda,” I say, “it happened years ago.”

“It’s in the paper, isn’t it?” she demands. “If it’s in the evening paper how can it be old?”

She has been reading the first of a series of articles which reconstructs war history. However. I lie dutifully and try to imagine the Armenian children. Impossible. Corfu. Refugees. The Ionian curling along the buttocks of the island. Armenian choirboys making boots. The words echo horribly. In the night she cannot sleep. “I’m thinkin’ of all them pore kiddies.”

Or Hilda like a great bee moving about in the yellow gaslight, fiddling with her cosmetics, squinting in the pocky mirror. A soft cadaverous pollen blossoms along her cheeks, along the craters of her face. Every line means something. This heavy horse face is the Bible, the Koran, in which I can see all my victories and defeats epitomized. The whole word of my dreams is written over by these lines and wrinkles.

I have become suddenly soft and malleable inside, these days. Hilda looms across life like the image of one of those incestuous loves on which one’s family repulsions are supposed to be fed. I rely on her. I lie and let her wait on me, like an invalid. I am consumed by this wasting consumption of maternal love. I want this slow convalescent childhood to be prolonged for ever. Hilda has created for me a shadow out of the sun where I want to rest.

The time runs downhill on iced feet towards Christmas. A plunge into the crater of time which is chaos, original disorder. This great bed is the ark of desire that drifts quietly down the long corridors of water, down the pockets of dreams, through the veils and mists, waiting for the dove. Towards Christmas, and I am slowly being rolled homeward again, to the womb. The core of me is bound up like a foetus, a weak parcel to be slung again between the loins of my parent. I am drifting down again into the great matrix of lovers, the sunspot where all emotions are liquefied, blended, alloyed into the one all-conquering loneliness. The pungent misery that alone can make me feel. Everything else is tidied up, swept away — like those pieces of steaming meat Morgan gathered in sacks. Cupid’s loaves and fishes. I have nothing now, no emotional luggage, except this quiet convalescent wasting disease, this drawing away into maternity. I give up, am utterly sunk in death. Hilda is the genesis from which I shall be born again on the third day. If I shut my eyes the whole world is blotted out. I live in the womb as a fish in a deep sea. The cool drizzle of blood feeds me. Like Christ in the soft pouch of the virgin’s belly’, I wait in a slow dawdling, fish-like convalescence, for the moment of parting: bright cleavage, the flash, the cold air like the smack of a palm on my mouth. The lanterns, the heralds, the warm suffocation of animal piss and white breath in the byres. To leave this world!

Lying asleep I try to imagine it. The babe hooked out of the uterus, coming up gasping, dizzy, like the fish who perform the silver nimbuses around the heads of the fisherboys. The sudden scorch of sun along every scale. The dazzle of light from a million crooked mirrors. The yell of delirium and fire. Then the same stale hook baited again and dropped into the ocean of chaos. The brown-armed Jesus sits there, the intelligence running along the lithe rod to the pink mouths of the fishes. The fishes idiotically kissing the hooks that await them. Every tremor, every nibble runs down the line like a current to the nerves of the brown arms. He sees nothing. Only the fingers feel the currents of remote life in a dimension unimaginable.

Lying asleep I often wonder whether Christ was not born of a prostitute. Whether the tale of the immaculate conception was not some showy literary metaphor of the day, which we translate wrongly. The symbol of the fish; the ray of light; the messenger: Hagion Pneuma! How tolerable the world might be if we could face an idea like that. Mary and Hilda, with the breath of plenty blowing in their souls, the gourds plumped with riches. The Christ we have made is a fish: a pale intellectual parasite who has gnawed our livers for an aeon. Son of tragic mother, tragic. The soft intellectual fish of the fairytale brooding in silence on the hooks which he would never have the courage to swallow. Jesus a damp scrotum which has lain for two thousand years on the butcher’s slab, under the knife …

The great bed drifts on under the stars. Hilda the great quiet maternal body lying here. The bread of life. Her crude paws seeking along one’s ribs as soft as the sacramental wafer. Memory has many waiting rooms. We have encountered and passed the spirit which broods on these immense waters. There is no fear left now of chaos. I am like an imbecile child visiting the Zoo. I will never be happier for I will never recover from this soft phthisic paralysis, the absorption into the maternal womb. Hilda is the great comforter.

Or screwing her hat down before the great mirror. The mantelpiece is a morgue of wild creatures, stuffed and petrified in glass boxes. Owls with pained expressions and eyebrows. The gas hangs fizzing on the knotted chandelier. My own reflection in the mirror is turned upside down among Hilda’s face creams, cosmetics, underclothes, photographs. The hanged man of the Tarot! Hilda’s great head is rooted to her trunk with heavy thonged sinews. She turns this way and that so that the cords stand out sharply. She purses her mouth up like a giant sucker to take the colour from her pencils.

In the night everything is blotted out except the comfort of this heavy flesh, the comforting pressure of a hand in my hand. I am the infant in the hospital bed: Hilda the incandescent nightlight which cherishes my death-still face in sleep! Paralysed. Even the passion itself has become an idea, a figment without relation to myself, the idiot in the truss. Blind, the vast tide spins us on its back, and desire folds up its tent, and misery blooms quietly in passion which is beyond tears. Beyond tears, and gently rocked on the fathomless paralysis of chaos. The night smells as musty as a phone box. The eyebrows of the owl project a vast travesty of Connie’s face across the dark. I am simply a cheap cosmetic touched to the lips in darkness. I provide a colour which soon smudges, dims, washes away. The newspaper, like a bomb, lies on the chair among my underclothes. O world, be nobler for her sake!

Blind, in the darkness, the faint images of the world project themselves on the wall. The chart of Lobo. The boundary which we are all forbidden to cross. The passion which winged me until I was an exciting skater, covering the thin crust above fathomless blue water. The wounded gulls for the Latin whore. What have I become at last, that the night has bulged, swollen, burst into pieces? The face of the virgin shines vibrantly out of everything, the virgin prostitute of the fable, grimacing painfully under a throbbing star. A flux of little fishes waits in her entrails, eagerly, for the door to fly open on the world. Fishes with a knowing look — intellectual martyrs!

Here I am crucified at last in the dirty bed. The umpire is the owl with Hic Jacet eyebrows. I am at peace at last, fingering the nail holes, like the mad actor. It was a wonderful house tonight. Seven calls before the curtain, not counting the whole-cast ones. Across the trembling, deflated womb of the vision the curtain slips down giddily, bearing the one apocalyptic word: Asbestos. (If any mystics call before I’m through, just show them to the dressing room among the gauds and flowers, will you?)

The great bed drifts on among the planets. The snow has stopped. The sky is familiar again: clean and shining, with a harvest of brilliant prickles. The airs are the impalpable cerements that clean our bodies; the essences of the embalmer soak into our bones. Poor parcels of soft rank flesh, with the wine and cigar smoke blowing in and out of our nostrils, what should we do with the souls that are supposed to inhabit us? The moon is peeled like a billiard ball. Hilda is crying for the Armenian children who are really her own. Shall I tell her that she is Mary? She wouldn’t believe me. That her time is drawing on now for the son of man to be born? One must avoid alarming her. Tomorrow the door of the womb will be rolled back. Tonight, drift on among the familiar constellations and dream. Sufficient unto the day is the woman thereof. Blind, the night has shrunk to the dimensions of the wasted penis — the hollow reed in which life is carried and generated: shrivelled under the taut stars like an empty paint tube.