Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

As the swimmer, as the light, as the colour returned, what could have remained a sordid ejaculation became a triumphant leap into the world of light and colour such as he craved from the landscape he knew, the poetry he had never written, but silently spoke, the love he had not experienced with Simone or Violette — or Mireille Femande Zizi Jacques Louise Jeanne Jacques Jacques Jeanne — a love he knew by heart and instinct, but might never summon up the courage to express, unless perhaps at the point of death.

He had forgotten the swimmer, who had by now climbed out, glittering with archetypal gold and silver, of light and water — life in fact, before the flesh was doused in the sombre cape. Head bowed, hair swinging, the figure began traipsing up the shoulder of the hill and out of sight.

At the same time as the anonymous being was lost in the fuzz of gold above the hyacinth sea, Monsieur Pelletier remembered, and hurried in to where the coffee was boiling over in a series of expostulatory ejaculations on to the resilient flame of the rickety little spirit lamp.

18 mars 1914

Have done my duty by Mrs Golson. The letter is writ, and delivered. Now we can forget about them.

I find to my astonishment that the minutiae are what make life bearable. Love is over-rated. Not affection — affection is to love what the minutiae are to living. Oh yes, you’ve got to have passion, give way to lust, provided no one is destroyed by them. Passion and lust are as necessary as a square meal, whether it’s only a loaf you tear into, or devour a dish of beans, with a goose’s thigh, a chunk of bacon, buried in them.

This is where I differ from my darling. He is nourished by coffee and cigarettes. He provokes passion, but doesn’t enjoy it, except its more perverse refinements. I doubt he has ever experienced lust, which is why he could appreciate the sainted Anna, and why he has created the aesthetic version of me — so different, far more different than he could ever understand. For all his languages he could never understand the one I speak. Oh yes, he does, he does, I know. And doesn’t.

We read each other’s thoughts as clearly as one can follow the snail’s track across the terrace. In spite of it, he crushes me — regularly. Do I crush him, I wonder? Of course I do — oh Lord, yes — I do! Knowing will never prevent it.

For this reason it is so important to concentrate on the minutiae: the mauve-to-silver trail of the snail unaware that he’s going to be crushed, the scrapings from the carrot which hasn’t yet been sliced, the lovely long peeling from the white flesh of the unconscious turnip … (I can thank the defection of Joséphine Réboa for most of these revelations.)

All afternoon I was dragooned at the piano: Jeux d’enfants . Very upright, rigid, I was not rapped across the knuckles with the ruler, only morally. We are the chevaux de bois gyrating, gyrating, the painted nostrils.

I must break away.

Tonight again we have been over the Bogomil heresy without my coming any closer to what essentially it means. Perhaps it’s that way with any heresy, more than most others those of sexuality.

E.: But don’t you think it a ferocious act to burn a heretic?

A.: Depending on the times.

E.: But is a human being less human depending on the times?

A.: Who can say? Anna, a correct, a strict woman, believed it necessary to burn Basil the Bogomil.

E.: Anna your sainted wife believed in the bonfire?

A.: Oh dear no, the Comnena — a forerunner.

E.: Forgive me if I’m confused. Past and present are so interwoven in the Orthodox mind.

(Like cigarette smoke in the kitchen after midnight.)

A.: What you will never understand is the Orthodox mind.

E.: Certainly not in an un-believer like yourself!

A.: One might have believed then — as one does now — in the structure of tradition — of Orthodoxy — as one believes in the visible Church of Ayia Sophia.

E.: And in the Holy Ghost no doubt!

A.: Why do you laugh at the Holy Ghost?

E.: You’re right. One can’t laugh at what is omnipresent.

All the while a storm is raging. One doesn’t reckon on the storms which arise along this serene coast. One thinks of it as a place of convalescence, honeymoons, benign airs and perfumes. Not the potential suicide in half those drifting euphorically among those same airs and perfumes. Over which the Holy Ghost presides, even in the souls of unbelievers, as he does over most marriages, A. to E., Boyd to Joanie Golson, Eadie Twyborn to Edward her Judge. Sometimes the Holy Ghost is a woman, but whether He, She or It, always there, holding the disintegrating structure together (or so we hope in our agnostic hearts) and will not, must not, withdraw.

At one stage there was such a crash the largest olive-tree could have been uprooted, thus proving that the Holy Ghost has indeed withdrawn, I have come to need that olive-tree. My lover/husband kisses me on each nipple and in each armpit before falling back asleep. Drunk with heresies, with Orthodoxy, he cannot reach farther. He is growing frail, but of the two, I am the frailer. I used to imagine I could burn for love, but now to drown for it would be the less obtrusive way out.

At least I’ve written the letter to the Golsons.

19th March

Got up this morning with the intention of being precise, methodical, final. The storm had withdrawn very early. A.’s death-mask was still snoring on the pillow. So as not to disturb it I leave him for other rooms before unlatching any shutters. It is a moment of false dawn before the real. Wind still blowing, if not so frantically. Such light as there is gives the impression of being visibly blown in different directions. Silver bouquets strewn on the surface of a black sea. As after any violent storm, one’s own fears have done the worst damage. My olive-tree is standing. The garden would seem an argument for permanence — only one or two insignificant, dispensable branches lying uncouth amongst the silver tussocks, the hummocks and cushions of lavender, dianthus, southernwood, and thrift. My rented garden. Nothing is mine except for the coaxing I’ve put into it. For that matter, nothing of me is mine, not even the body I was given to inhabit, nor the disguises chosen for it — A. decides on these, seldom without my agreement. The real E. has not yet been discovered, and perhaps never will be.

Oh yes, only return to that point at which I ran from the tennis court, from Marian’s hysterical giggle, her white, sinewy arms, the thud of the felted ball as she drove it at the ivy-throttled screen, disturbed sparrows twittering, ascending.

Around me in this half-light of deserted rooms evidence of the minutiae on which I’m trying to base my doctrine of life. In the false dawn it doesn’t work. The Holy Ghost was never such a ghost. I am perhaps the only stereoscopic object to be found — if I could believe in myself, but I can’t. Moving very slightly on the bathroom tiles was this little ball of hair-combings, which I had thrown at the waste-basket, and missed. All my misses, if they could be gathered up, embodied like this insubstantial ball of hair, would make a monument to futility.

If there were need for that. The fact that I sit here writing as I do, and rereading what I have written , is evidence enough. By now I should be inundated, along with all that I cherish — my old A., our life together, the piano duets, glimpses of thrift and pinks, even my failures in the kitchen (those burnt-out saucepans) sea and light, sea and light.

Already walking down the coast road I regretted my intention, and seeing myself, never more clearly, as I am. I’ve always hated stubbing my bare toes. I’m neither an Australian nor an Orthodox martyr. If I had taken him by the hand, my dear Angelos might have been walking beside me, far more exposed than I, his old testicles swinging in the grey light, towards fulfilment by immersion. Instead, I am alone. Everything important, alas, can only be experienced alone — the rocks I must clamber down before entering this repulsively oily sea.