Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

The figure in the distance climbing down amongst the rocks, their normal, living red dimmed by the neutrality of early morning was very much a part of the storm-exhausted landscape. Himself from Lille, Monsieur Pelletier had come to appreciate the Coast partly because it had returned him to life by driving out the ailment from which he had suffered as a younger man amongst the damp cobbles of his birthplace, but also because he found in the landscape a spiritual refuge from his wife and family, from the intrigues of this village which the more ambitious inhabitants liked to call a ‘town’, as well as from his own thoughts, doubts, fears, especially those incurred by references in the newspapers he had for sale, which he didn’t so much read as flicker through, not wishing his mind to become entangled with their contents, and thus perhaps encourage a return of his malady.

Despite his original interest in the unidentifiable figure climbing down the rocks towards the sea, Monsieur Pelletier now began to shiver, as though one of his less desirable, unidentifiable thoughts was forming in his private landscape. Arrived on the edge of the sea, the unknown person threw off the cape. Whether the stranger, a naked one at that, was a man or a woman, Monsieur Pelletier could not be sure: there were enough folles Anglaises along the Coast to make it a woman; there were plenty of romantic Englishmen and pederast-poets to provide a possible alternative. The equivocal nature of the scene made Monsieur Pelletier shiver worse than ever. Had it not been so early he might have run and borrowed Admiral Gandon’s telescope or the ex-Préfet Delprat’s binoculars, although in those circumstances he would without doubt have had to share the scene with the owner of either instrument, in the one case a lecher, in the other a dry cynic; whereas the newspaper vendor, poetic at heart (he could recite whole yards of Victor Hugo and Chateaubriand) would have wished to keep his incident a wordless poem.

It was all very agitating. There stood the person poised on a rock above the sea. Because a romantic, Monsieur Pelletier saw the naked flesh as white marble, or perhaps ivory overlaid with the palest gold leaf, though if in possession of telescope or binoculars, he might have had to admit to its being a dirty grey in keeping with the tonal landscape. Only for a moment, though. The straight figure raised its arms, composed its hands in the shape of a spire or an arrow, and plunged into the disquieted and disquieting sea. At the same moment a wave, more emotional than the majority let loose in the aftermath of the storm, struck the rusted rail separating the plage from the concrete and asphalt esplanade, from which the spray was catapulted straight into Monsieur Pelletier’s eyes.

Aaahhh! He stood arrested, groaning and grinning with anguish, frustration, astonishment and some measure of fear, all trickling water, grey stubble, mauve gums, and a few prongs of decalcified teeth. Only for an instant his disarray: intense interest made it necessary for him to locate the swimmer’s head.

And there it was, dark against dark. Bobbing intolerably, though the person appeared to be a strong swimmer. It was still impossible for the watcher to decide whether the hair, illuminated by sudden slicks of light, was that of a folle Anglaise or pédérasts romantique , but in whatever form, the swimmer was making for the open sea, thrashing from side to side with strong, sure, professional strokes. It must be a man, Monsieur Pelletier decided, and yet there was a certain poetry of movement, a softness of light surrounding the swimmer, that seduced him into concluding it could only be a woman.

With this inference in mind, he began spinning on the heels of his coarse boots, their nails grating as they ate into the paving. For some reason, he remained distressed. It could have been the news in the damp papers with which his iron stall was cluttered —toujours les Bodies , at work like salt air or termites- or it could be his own re-barbative life: Simone’s fallen womb, Violette Réboa’s ulcer, his own never wholly reliable sputum — or or — the swimmer headed for the open sea and the single hair dividing this from sky (though a Romantic, the newspaper-seller was not a believer) as life from death.

This was it. As the swimmer toiled farther out, Monsieur Pelletier was convinced to the extent that he began to moan, to fumble, then to thrash at himself inside the pepper-and-salt trousers he had worn on and off over the past twenty years, and as he approached his climax, it was in conjunction with his own precariousness, the activities of les Boches in the newspapers, and the action of the obsessed swimmer, so strong, yet so poetic, so hopeful yet so suicidal, as indeed we all are, in our sea of dreams.

At the actual moment when Monsieur Pelletier came in his pants, the light struck through the congestion of oyster tones which had represented the sky until then, and the glistening oyster-forms of cloud slithered apart, so that the waves were streaked with violet and the hyacinth of their normal plumage was restored. Monsieur Pelletier, who had lost sight of the swimmer’s head as he relinquished that of his own throbbing penis, again caught sight of hair in long black strands, undoubtedly a woman’s, the figure describing an arc as it turned, and returned towards the shore, away from the Sargasso of its intentions.

His relief united with the trickle of his own cooling sperm. A single gob, on reaching his kneecap, struck him cold, disgusting to the extent that he spun round, and there was Violette Réboa limping in the direction of the kiosk.

‘ Qui est cette personne, madame ,’ he shrieked at the intruder, ‘ qui nage — sans raison—à cette heure du matin? ’

Madame Réboa’s cod lips prepared to protest at the question she was being asked at the same unseemly hour as the swimmer had chosen for a swim.

‘ Ma foi! ’ she pronounced sulkily.

She had come to buy, or, she hoped, to be given a box of matches.

Neither Madame Réboa nor Monsieur Pelletier believed in each other entirely since the relationship they had enjoyed long ago, before the ulcer started eating into Madame Réboa’s leg.

She now demanded her matches, and Monsieur Pelletier led her as far as, and no farther than, the kiosk’s perimeter. (There were those who said that Violette Réboa’s Joséphine had been got by Aristide Pelletier behind Simone’s back; when it wasn’t TRUE, Simone insisted.)

The fug inside the kiosk was intolerable: over and above the collaboration of methylated spirit, mildewed tobacco, damp news, salt air and rusty iron, there was a smell, or scent rather, of chestnut trees in flower, which only he could distinguish, Monsieur Pelletier liked to think. Or could Madame Réboa too?

Anyway, he kept her out.

And drew her attention seawards, where the swimmer was nearing rocks refurbished with their familiar porphyry by the increasing light. ‘ C’est une fille? Ou un gars? ’

Again Madame Réboa was unable to give an opinion, but announced with seeming irrelevance, ‘ Elle est belle, hein? la femme du fou Grec — qui est elle-même folle — une espèce d’Anglaise — mais gentile … ’ and added as she stumped away, ‘ Ils n’ont pas un rond ’ thus declaring herself firmly against beauty, charm, and madness.

Monsieur Pelletier was relieved to see her go, just as years ago he had been relieved when the outbreak of the ulcer gave him reason for ending a relationship which, though passionate enough, was inspired by lust on either side.

Strangely, it did not occur to Aristide Pelletier that the emotions the swimmer aroused in him might have been occasioned by lust, not even taking into account the trickles of sperm still moist on his groin and thigh. Whether the swimmer were the young wife of the crazy Greek or some unknown woman or youth, neither physical passion, nor even a burst of lust, could enter into a relationship which presented itself as a tremulous abstraction, and which must remain remote from his actual life. In one sense disgusting, his regrettable act of masturbation seemed to express a common malaise, his own and that of the swimmer headed for the open sea, as well as a world despair gathering in the sea-damp newspapers.