Lawrence Durrell - The Black Book

“It is all dead, do you realize?” Tarquin is standing up over me in the firelight, shouting. The light is twinkling on his palate, on his charred molars. “It has all been used up and died. It’s gone. We can’t get back. Gregory, do you realize? It’s the past now.”

His head is cocked sideways to hear the drums again. Then he is shouting again, in that high voice of his. His nose sticks out like a bandaged thumb. “My God, how seldom we realize time. Do you hear me? Eh? And it’s going through us the whole time. We are running through it without realizing it.” Then once again, whining. “Gregory, where are you going to? Please tell me, eh? I must know. I can’t stay here alone, without someone to confide in. Eh?”

We are sitting in the drawing room among the pile of boxes. All day I have been burning the more expensive of the books in the grate. There is still a stench of pigskin hanging in the air. So much for my buried talent. Let it stay buried. I shall clamp the lid down on it. Tarquin is talking again. Excuse me. I must transcribe what he says for posterity. “Is it something wrong? Couldn’t you confide in me for once? Think of the intimate things I have told you before now. Intimate, intimate things I would not divulge to a soul. Gregory, where are you going? You can’t just leave. Tell me.”

What shall I answer? “I am going, my dear Torquatus, to marry Kate. I am going to become a barmaid’s homely plunger. You would like Kate if you met her. She wears a thick rubber washer on her vagina.” I am chuckling as I write this and read him it, syllable by syllable.

“Oh, do stop fooling now and be serious. You’ve been japing enough this evening. Tell me. Eh?”

“I’ve told you.”

There is a long pause. Count twenty.

“Well if you won’t tell me I’ll sulk.”

“I tell you what. I’ll write it all down as a piece of homely fiction and give it to you to read when I leave. With my address on the bottom left-hand corner, by the impression of my ring. The one with the phallus on it. What do you say to that?”

He has begun playing his Wagner on the piano. A Teutonic wet dream. For a minute I feel I would like to drive this pen into his back as he sits there playing. His lifelessness is such a satire on my own. Then suddenly he moves into a hard glittering travesty of Mozart. An uncut furious diamond, which scratches the windowpanes. Fanny walks along the cliff like a ghost, dressed in gullgrey, from the gullet to the loins. Blown back against her body, the material lies on her, clings and blows about her breasts in relief. She lies there like a stone figure in a forgotten desert, doucely outlined by dunes, Such a tenderness in the loins, such a blindness, is required to recall this in music or green writing. My eyes are lead plummets. There is a glass bridge built all of a sudden in my brain. I tread softly for fear of breaking it. My knees are made of isinglass. I am afraid of her. My blood pours out into the soft sand as I kneel beside her. Hot, hot, like lava between the arches of the pelvis. Tarquin has begun playing the medulla obbligato. I remember the blue cracks in Grade’s rictus. The rigor mortis. Most delectable of laws. We shall all of us have the last laugh. When there is nothing to fill the hole between my burst heart and the nearest star I shall still have the divine gesture, the Epicurean pose.

“This barmaid, is she real?” says Tarquin casually. “Or is it another jape? You seem full of japes. All this book burning. Eh? Give me your books. I’ll sell them and stand Lobo a woman. I’ll buy myself a new hat and some music. Eh?”

“You misunderstand the gesture.”

In the evenings we used to talk together. That means nothing to you? I don’t wonder. It was my world. We used to walk together in holiness, damn your uncomprehending face. If there was any passion in the earth then we exhausted it all. Nothing has remained since then. Mrs. Vengeance used to sing “My soul is like a flow-er.” And we used to sit rapt with our fingers linked, the eyes so frank and green, like the eyes of my rocking horse. Close the finely cut head, delicate as my beautiful rocking horse, with the soft cut-away lips, like twin dolphins.

Where are the snows of yesteryear? Thank you Mrs. Vengeance. That was lovely. But where is Fanny, Gracie, old Fanny …? Grins I suppose. A trio of Cheshire cats. Or all melted into the essential grin? The wizened rictus of Lao Tse gouged on the terrific face of death. I remember suddenly her running towards me in the music, offering her wrists. I was a quivering fiddle until she laid that cool pad of her hand on me and dumbed the strings.

Today I noticed the bald patch spreading. Signs of the times. The spreading baldness in my bloodless scalp like red ink on blotting paper. I have composed my last will and testament. In the mirror my eyes seem to incandesce, turn a cold steely blue. It is like looking down the oiled barrel of a gun.

To the green eyes I offer the nostalgic fit of weeping, a rocking horse, a bundle of flowers, a hymnbook, my seal with dolphins on it, and any of the apocryphal testaments.

He who smiles first, laughs last. Fiat voluntas. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, grin without end. Amen.

“You are unjust,” says Chamberlain, his hair in his eyes, his teeth gleaming. “Passion doesn’t flourish like a potted plant.”

He has heard I am leaving, and in a fit of warmth he has come round to say good-bye. I am furious now because I have told him all about Kate. The little secret over which I have been chuckling and hugging myself for the last few weeks. Under his infectious warmth I found the facts slipping from me.… It was so natural to admit the soft impeachment — for Kate is nothing if not a soft impeachment — that now I am furious. “It’s not passion that interests me,” I say.

“I’m sorry,” he says, with a queer quiet humility, utterly unlike him. “I suppose we’re not all alike.” As he leaves he says, a little sentimental, “Drop me a line, will you, if you feel like it?”

I shake my head. The steep flight of stairs detains him for a moment. “You’ll change your mind,” he says, “I have a feeling you will. Good-bye.”

Very well, I return to my desk for the final audit. This diary must be finished before I leave.

I am tempted to write a little about my father, about him standing in a trance hour after hour in his workshop, absorbed and selfless as a bobbin in a loom, going through the motions of creation. But there is nothing alive about this retrospect. The illusion, perhaps. But in reality what a terrible galvanic twitching. It is the world’s disease. The balance has been lost which alone makes action live, which alone creates formidable work. Now there is only the illusion of action. Faster, we cry, faster. After a time the illusion of action is lost, the sense is dulled, the last fearful stalemate of the soul sets in. This is the death I am participating in.

Well, everything is in order, or rather disorder. The hall is blocked with trunks. There is not a single artistic or aesthetic object in them, but they seem very full. The hearth is awash with ashes.

Morgan brings my dinner down with the face of a jailor, and then leaves silently, banging the door. I expect Tarquin to call but he does not. Very well. Stone walls do not a prison make, so I shall eat the cold pork, and crack a Pale Ale on the bows of the departing Viking. Yet, I protest, this place has the atmosphere of a slaughterhouse. This is my wedding breakfast. After it they will come in with their hands behind their backs, shamefaced, like butchers, in their uniforms and tell me to stand up and turn round. I shall feel my arms pinioned. Weeping with relief, I shall allow them to lead me out, a passive sheep, into the little adjacent shed, where IT stands. There I shall be washed in the blood of the Lamb, choked, and given the long clean drop, footfirst, into the absolute. Let them cut out my blackened tongue, and my charred liver, and pickle them for the Museum. Let me tell you a little about Kate, as soberly as fits a condemned man. Firstly, I am very happy. I have poured out my decisions like small change, and selected one clean new sixpence. Kate is the lousiest, tightest, dumbest and most devaluated sixpence that ever came from the mint. Let me not affect this bitterness. It is not real.