Lawrence Durrell - The Black Book

Per fretrum febris —by these straits to die! There is nothing here that is more than marginal. Here, take me, and rip me to pieces. Undress me, coat, waistcoat, vest, pants — stratum by stratum. I am again standing naked in front of the mirror, puzzled by the obstructing flesh. The great problem is how to get at the organic root of the trouble. How to locate and diagnose. There, I spread out my genealogical chart before you. The family tree must bear some traces of the ancestral pollution. The paper is black with little monkey-like gregories, climbing from the square loins of their parents. On top of one another like acrobats, the high ones crushing down the lower ones into history. On stepping-stones of our dead selves, etc. Does this bore you? Then join me in a bowl of sherry and some lascivious drawings. Put on some jazz. Let us embrace one another. Let us dice with my false teeth.… Tarquin has started a novel about the life of Jesus. He is excited by his own fertility. He comes down and reads me what he has written. “I’ve made him turn into a woman,” he giggles. “You know the bit in the garden? She is there weeping on the ground. She is so delicate and trembling that John’s bowels are moved. He goes up behind her, not quite knowing what he is doing. She is quite broken and limp, like a smashed bird. Eh? Is that a good touch? Like a smashed bird. Without knowing he puts his hand inside her robe and feels the great heavy lobes of breasts. Lobes, Gregory. Lobes! He turns her over and deflowers her as she lies there weeping and imploring him not to. Eh? Very softly and heavily he enters. Eh? Like Lady Chatterley. John mounting the spouse of Zion, while she weeps over the fallen cities? My God, don’t you think there’s passion in it? John entering the dead bird like a slow heavy battleship? Eh? And all the terrible and agonizing misery of her soul, her tears and all that, turn into the most excruciating, tortured, terrible, blasphemous, piercing delight?” He is trembling all over and biting his nails. Then we both begin to cackle; we are consumed; we lie there and howl until we are nearly sick. The tears are pouring down his face.…

Abstractedly, on the drawing-room carpet, I create the wilderness, the deserts, the stone crop, the thorn. Infinities away I see myself, bloody-footed, stumbling along under the sun. Tarquin is talking, whining, protesting. I could lift my glass and throw the sherry into his white, hairless face. “It is not sex,” he is repeating over and over again, half to himself. “It’s something to do with me.…” It is a monologue to which I am supposed to be attending. His eyes are full of tears. He coughs over the drink and swallows. The music suffocates me. The bow is fiddling across my very nerves. What a terrible ointment for the tears in my womb!

“It’s not sex,” he says, larghetto. The ache of the strings sends little shooting pains through my teeth. The clarinet. The delicate variation. O the bassoon as mellow as port, cherries, cigars, mahogany, black bile. “For a long time I thought it was. But it only disgusts me — even with him. Listen, we borrowed Durrell’s car and went out of London. Imagine us locked in the back seat, O Christ, buggering each other like a couple of billy goats. I thought my heart was broken. I was sick and sick. That’s what gave me the idea to write all this about Jesus.”

A violin in an empty house, remote in its meditations as a ghost. Such a quiet solo voice speaking to creation. It could only come out of a madhouse. The quiet pouring of the selfless action. The scissors snipping away the threads of the brain, quietly, quietly, in secret. And then this music settling like white-hot steel into the mould of my ears, stiffening, gleaming. The variations shuffled coldly out, like a pack of blue and silver cards. A pack of aces. Music to hear, why hearest thou music sadly? The responsive medulla quaking like a custard. O God, there are no tears for this madness, but dry eyes, dry tongue, dry throat, parched scrotum.

“I had a dream last night.” Larghetto. The long curving planes of wormwood, gall, spikes in the liver. “I was in a butcher’s shop. Quite naked, my dear. My scrotum was a yellow leather bag. The kind of moneybag the rich merchant wore in his belt. You know. You’ve seen the medieval pictures. Well, it was tied round the mouth with tape. I undid it and looked inside, and it was full of little parched brown seeds. Before I had time to do it up I was picked up and slapped on the counter, with a sickening thud. And all the seeds fell out and rained down on the floor. I got such a fright that when I woke up I thought for a moment I had wet the bed.”

The family tree hangs on the wall beside the wrestlers. My poor aunt Jane owned a bloody nevus. Henry, the third cousin who had made a packet out of estate, was a little berry of a man, with peachdown chops, and patches of fluff behind his ears. His waistcoat would swing open like a door and show you that he was worked by a clock. Tick, tock, tick, tock … His face was a relic of the Sung dynasty. Such a delicate green patina! My mother wore him round her throat. Tick, tock, tick, tock, the white pulse that Henry had given her.

Old Fanny walking the streets of Bournemouth; and young Fanny who killed me on the Black Rock, above Brighton. God, the soft lips and hair and hands. So delicate were our first inexpert attempts at love. Gather her up in the palms of your hands, softly so the powder won’t scale, and feel her flutter. Those queer green stone eyes, like a foal. And the warm loose mouth. The leaning body on the long fine legs, so elegant and insecure like a foal. The long pointed breasts that swung hard against you as the sea birds flew out of her hair, softly whewing, and the tide came licking up over loins. Whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report: if there be any virtue and if there be any praise, think on these things. My face taken up softly between mountains and the cold iceberg coming down upon it, melting in my mouth and nostrils. “Herbert, are you telling a lie?”

“No, Mother.” Mother of God, Mother of Misery, Mother of Jesus, Mother of Man. Aphrodite on the rolling brown horse, triumphant, with the menstrual blood flowing in a wave to her ankles. Old Fanny, with the permanganate bowl, and the store of old soiled rags. “Herbert, will you serve God?” Softly with the white throat beating over the hymnbook, tick, tock, tick, tock, the white pulse Henry had given her. Can I have fallen in steam from between these loins? Cattle breathe on my face, and her breath is more delectable than the cattle, I will not betray her. Save me, seize me, open me, have me. I am a gift that nobody wants. Lesbia, let me be your sparrow.

Very well then, I give in. It is no good trying to conceal it. I am afraid of these simple things, the lusting, the crying out in the night, the blood and the whipcracks, the ring of money, the seed vomiting, the child, the lamb, the eagle, the leper — I am afraid of them all. I am afraid of the great, the terrible simple things.

Old Fanny used to say in her hoarse crazy way: “What’s to be ashamed of, young master? Blushing because of my blood? Bless you, we all have blood.” And the too elegant and deadly Rachel: “You’re undersexed, my dear. It interests most men.” You could almost picture her sealed in a glass case in Tottenham Court Road, while the whole world watched her change them. I quiver like a struck ship when I face these things. Fanny, too, had blood. It was the rule. Newt’s blood. I wouldn’t be surprised if Tarquin did too. But the bowl of permanganate sails up and takes me by the throat. “Herbert, praise the Lord.” “To Him be all honour and glory, Mother.” Chip, chip, chip. My father at work in his apron, hewing out the cornices on the tombstones. Tock, tock, tock, and the fine stone slipping away under the steel. He has made three tombstones, the biggest for himself (In Memoriam), the next biggest for her (tick, tock, tick, tock, the white pulse Henry had given her), and the smallest (Hic Jacet). It never occurred to him that I might grow up. In the greenhouse, secretly as a leopard, he sits and plays Mozart, among the ferns, potted plants, arabesques, and fossils. I shall never meet him again. The terrible plangence of those chords reaches out at me, ten sentimental white carrots of my mother. O God, I am empty inside like the first chaos. My gestures are carried away over the grey sea by the gulls. Fanny and my mother and the ten sentimental carrots laid in my memory to desiccate and powder slowly, and give off this strange nostalgic aroma. My life is unwinding itself inside me like an empty spool. I have become a disc not played. The lid is closed, but I rotate forever in darkness. Fanny, I need nothing but your moth’s face, your furry eyebrows, your devil’s quivering like a pigeon held against the breast. You belong to the picture book, to the gibbous moon, to the tombs, to the pack of knaves. The bowl of your face became the bowl of the sky. There was a psalm due to you, but sitting at my mother’s knee, pale domestic, regimental in my starched collar, I could not make it.