Lawrence Durrell - The Black Book

O world, be nobler for her sake!

Items of our peculiar death. This, in the category of epilogues, though the show has not ended.

January brings the first raw cleavage of weathers — a blind hint of the merchandise which begins to fructify under the snow. Foxes’ ears underground, odorous, odorous. From the chalk breasts of Ion an Ionian asphodel. As always, the weather I am continually referring back to is spiritual. Winter is more than an almanac: it is dug in invisibly under the fingernails, in the teeth — into everything that is deciduous, calcine. Winter, as the figures produced by the shadow of the retinal blood vessels on an empty wall. I tell you it is part of the spiritual adventure, like our meeting in the snow, and the great arterials stretching away to God like a psalm; and you, gathered in the snow, a soft cave of flesh. That is why I am marking down these items in the log of that universal death, the English death, which I have escaped. It is lonely work. For each day there is a blank space to be filled. I am not as industrious as Gregory. One thought of you melts down the old fount of words, the runic, the mantic, the mystagogic, so that if I so much as dare to lift a pen I find the nib clogged with a lump of lead. I suffer your absence, but I cannot reconcile myself to it. It is as if part of my spinal column were absent. I cannot stand erect, but slouch like the Pekin man. All night now I am writing.…

Winter morning. The slow painful birth of something raw. Lochia. All hair and embers. A wound across low ridges of cloud. A celestial snail has trailed its slime across this valley. All feeling obliterated. The room, my coffin in immense shadows. At half past five the whisky has given me such a belly-ache I cannot sleep. I draw the curtain and stand before the fire, confused by the explosion of fitful dreams in the consciousness, arms hugged under armpits, watching the morning lift. Toes cold, nose cold, belly cold.

In the vacant bar the ash of the fire must be grey, the empty glasses upended in the sink with the froth stiff in them. I remember with a pang the rowdy company who stood about the blaze, the gold urine fermenting in them. The fine smell of rye whisky, gin. Crisp green pound notes. Acrid cognac that caught one’s throat and moved along the veins in spikes and needles of feeling. At one gold tilt here was a crown of thorns for any Christ among us. The shuffle of boots, and punctual tap of phlegm in the spittoons …

Lobo is away in Germany on holiday. An occasional postcard with an inevitable obscenity on it arrives from him. Tarquin is very interested. “Tell him to describe it in detail,” he says angrily. He wants details. Tarquin himself lies in bed, with a shawl round him, sipping Bovril. He is hurt because Clare has not been to see him. He will stay in bed until the gigolo’s pity is aroused. For weeks, if necessary.…

On the fifth there is a storm. Lightning and vast thunder running along the ribs of the Palace, shivering fire and quake. A woman killed by a roof tile. Driven slates skiddering in the snow like little snow-ploughs.

On the sixth I wake to find the world finally snowed under. Drifts a foot high on the roads, in the gardens, cemeteries, playgrounds. That statuary coy and naked, ankles rooted in the white quilt. Morgan with a red nose, sneezing his head off. Big fires howling in the lounges. Every visitor who opens the front door sends a great ringing blast of air down the corridors. Death creeps in among the other scents which run laughing from one end of the hotel to the other. A breath of cold as piercing as ammonia eats our nostrils.

Altogether a curious expectancy hangs over this day, as if I am expecting something utterly momentous to happen to me. Or perhaps the world. I scan the paper, but there is nothing to justify this premonition. War has not been declared. The nature poet occurs on the middle page. Snow. Bird and holly. Even this is not the expected cataclysm. All the old invocations served up in metre: I can never understand this frightful brand of Englyshe Countrie sentiment, with its inevitable false rhyme which is so much more annoying than no rhyme at all.

The robin hangs upon the bush

A jewel in the winter hush.

Altogether nothing is happening and there is the huge feeling that something has happened or must happen. Traffic disorganized. The postman dispenses his spurious cheer of dishonoured cheques and late greetings. A very merry Yuletide to you and yours. Tarquin will not let me draw his blinds. He knows, he says, that it is a bloody day and prefers to spend it by candlelight.

The robin twirts upon the bough,

The postman has a nasty cough.

But nothing turns up; the anticipated Thing leaves me in suspense. Then.

At teatime, buttering toast in Tarquin’s room, swallowing my spittle at its appetizing flavour, I am approached by Charles, the deaf mute. On his little tablet he has the hieroglyph: “The flat telephone. A lady.”

I hound down those immense corridors like a convict. Everything is silent in the room. I think suddenly of Gregory, I don’t know why. Gregory has just gone up for a breath of air. I put the receiver to my ear and it is cold. You are talking suddenly in that pure animal’s voice. Gracie is lying dead in the bed. It is unrolling through me, your voice with its queer frigid tones, a fugue of snow and cattle, and our bodies like lumber on the white quilt. I am sitting here like a drawn fowl, feeling my viscera dissolve and flow down over my knees to the carpet. You are taking a holiday, you say. A holiday! From what? And, above all, how, when every latitude is swollen with desire and unrest, every meridian poisoned? Here I will show you my wounds like Mercator’s projection. A new cartography. Forgive me, I did not mean it. You cannot help the snow. There are four candles in the room. Yes, and the first edition of Baudelaire. Books? Do not send me a book. Not even the Song of Songs. You cannot sleep with a book! No, there’s no comfort. Hullo, can you hear me? No, not even poetry. The nerve centres are all dead. Send me a scalpel, a bright new scalpel with the cutting edge of prophecy to it. Send me a poleaxe, a humane killer. Why do you not speak to me? Hullo. Are you there? Then go on speaking, because I have nothing to say to you. Nothing. I am being burnt inside with the old damnable bruises. To hell with books, do you hear me? I said nothing. Good-bye. The Italian towns are lying there crippled among the priests and the Mother Church. Give my love to Keats. Are you weeping? After this I shall go to bed and order a bowl of snow. I shall press it to my face with trembling hands. A month from now we shall meet, you say? If I could believe in eternity as a few slips of printed paper with numbers on them, I might find you intelligible. Speak to me. You are speaking but it is like water squirted over a statue. Say something sharp, decisive. Speak me a scalpel or a jack-knife. No, I am quite alone. The laughter? I heard nothing.

As you are about to blurt out something comes the bright cleavage, I return to my buttered toast on the top floor. Premonition fulfilled. I am suddenly aware of the dullness of the evening, the snow closing with its blue breath; old women in their prisons knitting, milk, hassocks, prayer books. Gales of fire in the lounges and old men dressing for dinner. Tarquin in bed, surrounded by the bones of history, dying piecemeal in life, dying. There is no one I can turn to for comfort.

A gale of wind has begun to ripple across the world; the poles are toppling over into the blue fluttering wings of snow like doves. There is a glacier running slowly in my blood. My skin is chapped and rough as canvas.