Lawrence Durrell - The Black Book

I am recalled from this excursion by a rap at the door. Chamberlain. “What do you think?” he says, throwing his hat on the rack with the air of a matador. “She’s pregnant.” We sit down on the sofa and he collapses with laughter, showing every tooth in his head. Then he sits a while sniffing hysterically, stroking my knee and talking about morning sickness, evening sickness and midnight belly bumping. He is all unnerved, but filled with a kind of fanatical happiness. “So everything seems settled. God! what fools we make of ourselves. All the agony I’ve been through, over a damn ten-centimetre foetus. By the way, I’ve got a marvellous job, two hundred a year more. I’m through with the body mystical and all that stuff from now, I can tell you.…” He is planning a beautiful suburban existence, complete with lawn-mower and greenhouse, I can see that. I have not the will to mutter anything but compliments to him. The child will be stillborn, I know, but I am not allowed to tell him that. I try to see him not as a person but as part of the active world — the world I am trying to create here: the snow, I mean, the blind crooked snow like soft immense drifts of needles, and the unresponsive hotel beds to which my other mimes go at night, expecting to draw comfort from them, but get none. Lobo and Tarquin facing each other over the fire, the muffins, the counterpoint of the third Brandenburg. Two separate continents. Spanish America like the crucifix over the bed the thin gold chain round his hairy little wrist. The rows of coloured shoes in their ballet. Perez, the most elegant loafer of five continents, in whom all languages blend and become accessible, all women become a single archetype. Morgan the comic fiend of the Inferno stoking the boilers of God. Bazain, Farnol, Peters petering out in saltpetre. Or Tarquin, his great grammarian’s cranium spinning like a top in the candle-shine; his great white feet frozen in their furred slippers: participant in a European death as yet incomprehensible to most Europeans. Or Perez, on his huge twinkling feet, sparring with Morgan in front of the boilers at midnight. “Pull your punches, now. Don’t forget,” he says; and this idea Morgan holds in his mind with great difficulty, ponderously, like a dog. But when there is blood soaking into the soft leather of the gloves; blood in a long wave flowing over Perez’ mouth and chin; blood that marks his man wherever he hits him; then the control goes, and the butcher lights up in Morgan. An almost visible light, like candles shining under the skin. And the air is thick with their shuffling bodies, falling, chopped, panting.

Or even Miss Smith, if you like: carried on a pole before the tribe, yet sitting in the corner of the car, tittering at Lobo’s gallantries. Diving into her handbag to produce more powder, which runs off her face into her lap. Talking to Eustace Adams in tones completely inaudible. Being afraid of Marney. And above all mugging up Chaucer’s obscenities solemnly in the notes. Incomprehensible, incomprehensible.

There is a lot about death in this; too much perhaps, for I have subscribed very heavily to Tarquin’s bucket-shop ideals. For him it is really the death — the Bastard Death, if you like, or the Death Under the Shield — really a death to the ultimate cinder; but for us, why, we are vividly alive as yet. That is why this cathedral absolute appals us. Your hands as they turn outward to take flight, for example; the action of the bee, the tree, the fistful of feathers my brother murdered last winter with his gun. All living in an exquisite tactuality by their action, ultimately living. Under the bone the living twigs of the cypress, the beak of the snipe, the foggy klaxons of the mallard coming up across the guns. Or asleep, and the fingers laid about your face, and hair washing up under the house in a long swish, a sea of hair breathing under the windows, over our dreams, into the night. If there is any passion in this writing, anywhere, it is because I am creating a death I almost shared. I mistook if for my own property. I know now, for the first time, where I stand. We are nothing if we cannot convert the dross of temporal death; if we cannot present our cheque at the bank, and receive for our daily death, a fee in good clean sovereigns — images, heat, water, the statues in the park, snow on the hills. The terrific action of the senses. The dead bullion of dying cashed in clean coin day by day, and every morsel of broken tissue redeemed for us; by this love, perhaps, this winter comet, a poem, the landlady, scholarship, Zarian or the shape of Mexico. My battle with the dragon has intoxicated me. Day by day now, increasingly day by day, I can feel the continents running in my veins, the rivers, the oceans balanced in a cone on my navel. I am no longer afraid of this heraldry. I have given myself to it utterly.

“Come,” says old Tarquin, afraid to be left alone in the dimension he has begun to inhabit. “Come, share with me. We shall control the temporal world. We shall be monarchs of all we survey. Look. In this room I have the sum total of all human and esoteric knowledge, printed on paper. Need we ever stir outside to examine the apparent reality? The essential truth lies within us. Come.”

But already I am too concerned with the details of the journey even to answer him. I try sometimes to explain to him what I am feeling, but it is no good. “Why move?” he demands indignantly. “What is wrong with my intellectual attitude, sitting still in the Lotus pose? It is airtight, my dear.”

Well, incomprehensibly enough, I decide to go my own bloody way, whether he understands it or not. I have entered into the personality of the external things, and am sharing their influences. I skate along the borders of the daily trivialities like a ghost, observing but withholding myself from them. There are such things as the Banquet of the Sydenham Cycling Club, for example, which I would write about if I were less tired. There is Honeywoods and the vexed problem of the drainage. There is Marney talking about getting married; and a host of other data for which there is no room. There is Eustace, going down, as he says, “into the valley of the shadow” as his wife has her fourth. There are also the incest ceremonies in the Spice Islands, the five-foot negrito with the everted lips, and races dying out in Iceland because of pelvic rickets.… Above all there is the journey. It has become so real to me that I have developed a sort of evasiveness when refusing invitations. “If I am here ”, I say, “on Tuesday I’d love to come.” Or, “Tuesday? Well, I may not …” Etc., etc. Very soon I shall have to take at least a week-end return to Cherbourg in order to satisfy my friends. Everyone inquires solicitously: “Let me see, you’re going away, aren’t you?” Or, “By the way, when did you say you were leaving?” I shall begin on the first fine day in spring. May will find me scudding southward under the trades, in the direction of the quest — perhaps in the wrong direction. There is only trial and error on a journey like this, and no signposts. The end is somewhere beyond even Ethiopia or Tibet: the land where God is a yellow man, an old philosopher brooding over his swanpan.

In the light of Sunday afternoon this must be read quaintly. On Sundays we have a nice matey card party in Hilda’s room, at the bamboo table with three legs. The wireless is turned on full, and occasionally we get most beautifully incongruous things through it The Ninth Symphony, for example, or an aria for the toothbrush. No one is worried, not even Peters, who feels compelled to acknowledge art even if he has no taste for it. “Ah!” he will say cleverly, “Bach.” He is puzzled when we laugh at him. Imagine it. That stale room with the Ninth Symphony scratching away and Clare smoking his scented fags and polishing his fingernails; and the stuffed owls on the mantelpiece looking so damned critical and deprecating that one could weep with hysteria. Hilda in her scarlet flannel nightgown pouring weak tea for us and losing farthings at vingt-et-un. Or Lobo crossing himself over every natural he gets. I tell you it is a sort of picture for a Spanish almanac.