Lawrence Durrell - The Black Book

The death damp is creeping in again. In the autumn we escape occasionally, like moles, into the upper air, and brood on the extinction settling down over England. This is chiefly to enable Tarquin to write his musical poem: To England. He is participating bravely, he tells me, in the death under the shield: the death which he swears is fattening itself on Our very bones. Go to the country, he tells me, and describe it all for me when you get back. He does not want to see it for himself; is happier in town. That is why you are beside me again, alive to the sweet particularities of the island’s doom, warm of wrist and knee, ankle and elbow.…

Cornfields falling away from the thread of the road in dusty garrisons, leaning, gravid, heavy in the ear. Sunk in them almost submarine, among the gardens, the beautiful farmhouses with the beetle in the wood, churches with pointed windows, mellow stables. Tudor half-timbering, scribbled with creeper; ploughland and arable in jaundiced yellows, mould-browns and purples, spinning away under your fingers in gentle undulations. No, I am quiet and serious. It is all laid out like a page in Gregory’s diary. See, from one end the pen begins to bite, you turn up a long furrow on the paper — a green furrow. The fingers tug slowly like a team of oxen. Behind the steel tooth green figures are coming alive, stretching their arms, and looking around. In this way everything was created.

I am recalling again the terms of our separation: the calendar lying there with the broken back, offering an infinity of smoky evenings. The oblique wishes and hopes of a lifetime gathered together and spent in the space of a few weeks. And now, it seems, I have no more hopes — only acceptance. I keep my mouth shut because my jaw would fall off if I tried to speak.

I am out walking again with Chamberlain in the long evenings: corridor upon stone corridor opening up before us until, for a breath of air and a personal glimpse of trees, we are forced to turn into the park gates. Or else peering at the faded portraits of the Elizabethans in the gallery, while my companion talked vehemently about Lawrence, and his prediluvial madhouse. (“Tut tut, Lawrence? Too vehemently eoan, my dear. Tarquin.”)

Rowing on the lake in the mist; or in the hot nights watching the shadows pass and repass on the walls of Hilda’s bedroom, lighting the washstand, the shelves of belfries, the hanged man in the mirror. The glare of headlights withering her naked body. Reaching you at last over a café table, touching fingers, one’s heart bruised and swollen with despair. The long stabbing waves of parting under the airplane light. The green mouth climbing away upward through my World like a torch, burning away the tissue, the bone and cartilage, nosing among the twittering nerves, annihilating me. Hilda’s big toe, left over from the evening’s entertainment, posted above the bedrail to rot away through eternity, like a traitor’s head on London Bridge. Or Perez whimpering on the table among the students while the current ran like vinegar up his anus. (Rabelais’s curse: May the fire of St. Anthony fly up thy fundament.) Beakers of urine turning milky, throwing up their white filaments. The catheter budding, blossoming. Chamberlain’s drunken face, dazed with the myth he is creating around himself, asking impatiently for the new book of revelation.

All this has made me a little sombre, a little lunatic, to be with you again at last, shut up together in this moving shell of steel. There is an edge on laughter, or even the common topics. I am a little proud of my control. Soon I shall say something, and you will begin to tell me everything — the whole quavering saga of your life — the life which has just begun. You will begin asking those insane questions, where have I been, what have I done, what have I seen, why do I look at you like that, where will this all end? If I am honest with you now, if I give the impression of sincerity, it is because I want something. Inside I am weeping for my generation. I am devising in my mind a legend to convey the madness which created us in crookedness, in dislocation, in tort. We are a generation enwombed. A stillbirth. Like blind puppies we are seeking the way back to the womb, we are trying to wipe away the knowledge of our stillbirth, by a new, a more glorious, more pristine event. We have been expelled from the uterus blind and marrowless, and we grovel back towards it in a hysterical regression of panic. Look, I am burrowing in your lap with my mouth, like an animal. I am hammering down the doors of the womb. Screaming to get back. I would gather myself up like a snail and crawl back miraculously if I could, stuff myself up to your gullet for safety, anywhere, anyhow. This is at least honest. Do not accuse me. When I go mad, and rip the clothes off your trembling body, when I bite your nipples and groan, it is this expiatory half-death I am consummating. It is so necessary and so poignant to fuck you like that, when you are like a tumbled featherbed; when your mouth is clammy with stars, and your soft cunt breathing its velvet, musky pollen over the earth. Then even the trees, the hills, the towns, seem thrown into soft, perfectly defined focus for me. I am absolved. I have thrown up a support trench: a wall of the womb stands between me and the world. Let them probe, let them probe. Let them sound the walls of the belly, let them switch a searchlight on the vagina, I am secure. All my savagery, all my gust, has been thrown down in a little parcel of seed, emptied into this yawning throat of silk. Now I have recovered my control, I am masterful as a bantam, I am cruel. I am the monster you told me about. Very well. Turn your head away. I stand among the trees in my shirt, and smoke. I abhor you because you do not understand my weakness, though you see its symptom. Then you will turn with those stupid, uncomprehending eyes, and say why did I do this, what made me do that, etc. Your mouth hanging open on its hinges, your face shining with sweat and spittle and tears. I shake you off masterfully, disgusted by my love for you. I am hungry I tell you. Yes, when I act in this heartless way it is because I want to make use of you — or because it is teatime. Choose for yourself. Yes, if I have not given you syphilis it is a miracle. In the car I suddenly catch sight of that geological hammer. You brought it with you to do some fieldwork? I am laughing now as if my mind would snap. The whole country is waiting to be tapped with it, sounded for depths! Fieldwork! My humour is restored immediately, I am guiltless, free, the best of friends. And this puzzles you. You cannot make it out. There is not an atomic trace of the monster in me — not a trace. You try to hold out, be severe, austere, reserved, sulky, but I am infecting you, I am permeating you. I lean down over you, and in a breath I fill every artery in your body with psalms. We are shaken with a fit of hysterical weeping. The car wobbles from side to side. The country swings up and down among your breasts with magnificent lamentation. We are so happy that tears are running down our faces. You are given utterly now, captured and trodden and submissive, and if my hands would stop trembling I would light you a cigarette, I would talk sombrely; I would hang on your mouth like a broken jawbone … What a thin border between love and murder!

We slide off the arterial by Banbury, and down the gravel lanes, infinitely serpentine and bumpy. The avenue of chestnuts hides the old mill. A hunchback bridge in red stone. Lolling over, as the springs toss noiselessly, we can hear the clean thumping of the millwheel, sinking to a bass hubbub, and then gone, switched off, snuffed. We do not speak any more except by the language of action. The hedges are alive with insects, and visible drafts of honeysuckle.