Lawrence Durrell - The Black Book

“If one were false,” broods Tarquin, “how nice to put oneself away for the winter. Take out the glass eye, unscrew the legs, the arms. Remove the wig, the teeth, the silver plate in the skull, the tubes in the anus and abdomen, and just climb into bed and wait for summer. In the late spring you could have a good repaint and clean up, and sally forth in August like a late crocus. How lovely it would be.” All day the sullen traffic passes outside the window. Tarquin gloats in darkness, behind drawn blinds. Lies in his winding-sheets, fingering the nail-holes in his feet and hands. On the table lies his latest effort in prose, fresh from the typewriter, and collecting the dust. It begins, startlingly enough, in the dislocated manner of the early Surrealists:

The pudendum of the maid winces as winces only the bowl of bubbled suds and the elfin hopscotch of the street-boy. Never, I say, to myself I say, never. Rising, I turn the tap on, and the soft gaslight ignites the spurious maidenhair. Here, fill your pipe. Shall we smoke blotting paper while our noses bleed ?

He is making experiments in dissociation, he admits coldly, though nothing interests him these days. This is because he cannot get his feet warm. “Chafe my toes for me, will you?” he says, extending a luxurious foot out of the clothes. “But don’t excite me, whatever you do.”

In the apathy of the long evenings we leave Lobo’s little room, where the ghost of guitar chords seems forever to hang, and let ourselves out of the big lighted doors, into the snow-lit landscape outside. It is like a cold dive into water, so numbing that one can hardly breathe or speak. Tarquin walking like a gaunt automaton beside us, exhaling long windy streamers of smoke, like a horse, and whining through his teeth. The Spaniard draws his scarf taut over his mouth, muffling his voice. He is quite hysterical about this German girl, and has lost all control over his hysteria. He can’t eat, he can’t sleep, he can’t do a damned thing without bursting into tears. It makes me very miserable. Tarquin is delighted by these exhibitions. They strike him as immensely good entertainment. Nowadays, if I want to get him outside the front door, I have only to suggest a walk with Lobo.

We have covered the utmost confines of the map in darkness these nights, crossing the bare white roads, the long avenues of smouldering shops, the tram routes, the deserted parks. In my soul there has been such a misery as I have never known before. It is the real stratosphere of emotion, where there seems to be nothing left but the anodyne of cruelty or physical pain. In the darkness Lobo will suddenly begin talking about his German girl, the fearful oaths they swore, and the mixing of their bloods, and all that incomprehensible barbaric palaver which is settling on his memory like a leech. The minutest of gestures, the tilt of her body, the inflexion of a word, will occupy him for an hour, while he describes it, broods on it, even acts on it in his queer dinky little way. Then, suddenly halting in his tracks, as if about to be sick, he will burst into a long throaty sob, and a recitative of broken Spanish. His eyes are hung with huge tears. Tarquin begins to laugh, and I am forced to repeat miserably: “Lobo, for Godsake now, come on, will you?” He leans against the fence and wraps his scarf over his face. He is shaken with huge juicy sobs. Tarquin watches curiously as I try to get him walking again. “Leave me alone,” he croaks, like a child. As I take hold of his shoulders he turns and runs at me as if to strike me on the mouth. “You don’t feel it,” he says angrily, “what I feel it is the misery you don’t know it.” His cheeks are quivering. There is a trembling tear on the end of his nose. A little disgusted, I begin to plead with him. His eyes light up with fury: “You say that you suffer with the girl you know, but I say SHIT The word is no meaning you …”Tarquin lies against the fence silently shaking. I feel I could murder him. Snow is beginning to fall again. Lobo is standing there like a maniac expecting me to defend my capacity for suffering. He hates me for not being able to join him in a wild emotional outburst. Then he turns and begins to lurch down the road again. We follow him at a distance, giving him time to cool down. Tarquin is delighted. “Tally ho, what?” he pipes cheerfully, “tally ho. My feet are warm at last. Are yours?”

In the dimly lighted room, we sit on the floor and watch Perez lift the great living guitar into his hands, and make it sing. His great head is lifted as he sings in a beautiful canine hysteria at the ceiling. He is strangely beautiful. And catching sight of Lobo by the gas fire, his hands over his ears, he suddenly shouts in his perfect English: “Suffer, for heaven’s sake, Azuarius, and be happy. If you can still suffer.” And choking with delight he pulls open his jaws and sings with a terrific vengeance, his features curiously pure-looking, curiously fresh, somehow like a coin.

Tarquin is lying on the operating table. The frost has cobbled up his mouth. He feels nothing yet, is not thawed under the check quilt. “Give me some brandy,” he says, and drops back like an opium addict, to dream of the Mediterranean and the dark boys with whom he should be gathering saffron above Knossos.

In the corner by the fireplace Chamberlain laughs himself almost hysterical over the new magazine. Crouching down with one hand spread sideways in the blaze of the fire he flicks the pages, marvelling. Tarquin affects a huge detachment, lying there with his eyes shut. The little hoots of laughter electrocute him: “My dear old man,” says Chamberlain at last, leaning out towards him in the darkness, “my dear old man. This couldn’t have been written by men, but by plants. Plants, Tarquin!” Tarquin gobbles indistinctly. His chin dissolves and flows slowly down his dressing gown to the bed. The room is full of artificial yawns. “Come,” says Chamberlain, rallying his shock troops. “Come. My dear fellow. Come! ”

We are all sitting there frozen by apathy. Chamberlain fires glances around the room, looking for sympathies. No one gives a damn. Tarquin snuffles something about “palpable literary ability”. “It’s not their ability one questions for a moment,” yells Chamberlain, “it’s their existence.” He pauses in mid leap as if struck by an expanding bullet. We avert our eyes and lie back in our corners sleeping and muttering. Two days since the feast of Saint someone or other, and we are still groggy from the celebrations. The gramophone pours itself endlessly into the room, record after record slung on by the new changing device which Tarquin has just bought. Bach throws out a long rope of counterpoint, but I am too weary to rise to the lure. The room is full of rope. It goes in at your mouth and comes out of your anus in a single long thong. Muttering and shivering we doze in the damp room, like drug addicts.

I recall an infinity of smoky evenings shared with him and since forgotten, the fumes of the pipes hanging in the stiff air of the obsolete billiard room. And the white face preposing axioms, dogma, amputating its own words to lean low over a shot; and the inflated symbols of our abstraction, love, death, desire, etc., clicking and crossing in their meaningless impacts. Chamberlain’s disease is the disease of the dog collar. Outside the accepted fence of ethics he finds himself face to face with his anonymity, and is unable to outstare it. His rhetoric, his stampeding, his fulminations represent an attempt to herd back into the enclosure again. And his discovery of this state of things only produces greater and greater efforts, more steam, more energy. Gregory I admire, though I do not understand him so well. His choice was the trap, because he could not stand the stratosphere. Chamberlain would like to take his own cage with him, and pitch it in the deserted stratosphere of life. He is nothing but a spiritual colonizer, to whom the wilderness is intolerable until it is cultivated, pruned, transformed into a replica of home. He does not respect its own positive laws. He would transplant his own. To such a man there is no meaning in the word “exile”. He will never be an inhabitant of that private pandemonium which Gregory peeped into once before closing the lid. The darkness which I myself am beginning to inhabit, to construct incongruously for myself on the rocky northern cliffs of this Ionian island (perhaps, who can tell, even interpret by the tapping of these metal pothooks on the paper you hold before your eyes).