Walker Percy - Lancelot

“Trapped,” said Margot, pulling back slightly from Jacoby’s face.

“Yes! Trapped by being a sharecropper and so hitting out at those people, his—”

“Oppressors.”

“Right! But a moment occurs when all this disappears and the girl through her own femaleness, feminineness, what? turns this moment into something else, that is, a man and a woman—”

“Don’t you mean, Jan,” said Margot, her eyes glowing, “that the girl with her own gift for tenderness and caring converts a moment of violence into a moment of love? Isn’t it a transformation of a political act by an erotic act?”

“Oh, Margot, you are right!” She made him happy. “Exactly. It is a transforming of the political into the erotic.”

Merlin roused slightly. “It is true, I agree. Margot speaks of love. Very well. Love is great. Love conquers all. But here we are content with the erotic — this pair hardly know each other. But the point is that violence, rape or murder, or whatever, is always death-dealing whereas the erotic, in any form at all, is always life-enhancing.”

“Yes! That’s the nice swing, what you say, switch, don’t you see, Margot?” Jacoby turned his black eyes on her. “It is the aristocrat in this case who has the life-enhancing principle and not the sharecropper, as is usually the case, since he is usually shown as coming from the dirt.”

“Soil,” said Margot.

Was he from the Bronx or Brno?

“Yes, and even though she comes from racism, which is equally death-dealing since it is geno—”

“Genocidal. Since a whole race is involved.”

When Janos searched for a word, his eyes roamed past me, through me, to the dark corners of the room. I felt like an actor.

“And the sharecropper is always wavering between the two, the life and death principle. The girl guides him toward life through the erotic. She is his Beatrice.” Bay-ah-tree-chay.

What irritated me was that despite myself I wanted to be noticed by Janos Jacoby — why for God’s sake? for Margot’s sake? and found myself trying to think of something impressive like “cinematographic semiotics.” But when his eyes swept past me, through me, for the fifth time, I gave it up and decided to satisfy my own curiosity.

So I asked him: “What about the scene between the sheriff and the black sharecropper’s daughter?”

“Eh?” Jacoby swung around as if to locate the origin of this unfamiliar voice. “Ah. I am not sure I know what you mean, ah — what about it?” I swear I don’t think he knew my name.

“Well, he is both erotic and racist and therefore both life-enhancing and death-dealing. Having had intercourse with her, which was by no means rape, where does that leave him, canceled out so to speak, half bad half good, back at zero?”

Silence. Jacoby and Merlin looked at each other. Margot, between them, blushed. Was she blushing for me?

Jacoby sighed and shook his head. Merlin undertook to explain. “Wouldn’t you agree, Lance, that there is such a thing as a sexist violent eroticism which is quite as exploitative as rape itself?”

“No. I don’t understand that.”

Again silence. Eyes averted. It was as if there was a turd, somehow mine, on the snowy tablecloth between us.

“Darling, what you don’t realize,” said Margot, blushing and taking my hand across the table, “is that the sheriff is performing an out-and-out sexist act of aggression and treats the black girl as a sex object.”

“I see.” I was looking at Ellis Buell, who was passing the crawfish étouffé. His eyes caught mine. But they were shuttered and did not signify.

After supper I paid my usual visit to Tex and Siobhan. They were in the library on the third floor where my father used to keep his books of Romantic English poetry, Southern history, Robert E. Lee biographies (Robert E. Lee was his saint; he loved him the way Catholics love St. Francis. If the South were Catholic, we’d have long since had an order of St. Robert E. Lee, a stern military Christian order like the monks of Mont-Saint-Michel — hell, I’m not sure we don’t), Louisiana history, Feliciana Parish history, Episcopal Church history, the Waverley novels, Jean Christophe, Saint-Exupéry, Admiral Byrd’s Alone, H. G. Wells’s The Science of Life, the Life of James Bowie —a strange collection in which I could detect no common denominator except a taste for the extraordinary and marvelous, the sentimental, the extraordinary experience, the extraordinary adventure undertaken by a brave few, the extraordinary life of genius, the extraordinary stunt of H. G. Wells in taking on all of life, the extraordinary glory of a lost cause which becomes more extraordinary as it recedes in time and in fact Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia had long since become for him as legendary and mythical as King Arthur and the Round Table. Do you think I was named Lancelot for nothing? The Andrewes was tacked on by him to give it Episcopal sanction, but what he really had in mind and in his heart wanted to be and couldn’t have been more different from was that old nonexistent Catholic brawler and adulterer, Lancelot du Lac, King Ban of Benwick’s son, knight of the Round Table and — here was the part he could never get over — one of only two knights to see the Grail (you, Percival, the other); and above all the extraordinariness of those chaste and incorrupt little Anglican chapels set down in this violent and corrupt land besieged on all sides by savage Indians, superstitious Romans, mealy-mouthed Baptists, howling Holy Rollers.

Siobhan was cross and nervous. She was a bright thin wiry perfect little blonde(!), her beauty spoiled only by clouded eyes and a petulant expression.

Tex fancied they were close, that she couldn’t get along with her mother, that he had saved her from the niggers. Actually he got on her nerves and she’d have been better off with the niggers. He had a fond insistent yet inattentive way with her which parodied affection and didn’t fool her. Indeed, it was as if he were out to irritate her.

She ran to give me a hug and a kiss. I hugged and kissed her back, feeling her thin little bones in her grownup full-length nylon nightgown. She hugged me too hard, making her arms tremble; her clouded blue eyes didn’t quite focus on me. She had learned Tex’s trick of parody. They had been watching a cartoon on TV. “What do you think of that cute little fawn?” he asked several times in his mindless singsong, reaching out for her. He too liked to feel her little bones. At seven she was as sexual a creature as her mother but in a dim clouded approximation of it, as if she had forgotten something or was about to remember it. She could curve her lips richly but her eyes were as opaque as a doll’s. She liked to show her body and would sit, dress pulled up, arms clasping knees, her little biscuit showing.

Did I love Margot? I’m not sure what you mean, what that word means, but it was good between us. The best times were the sudden unprovided times: leaving the office at ten o’clock, three o’clock, any time at all, going home to Belle Isle to pick her up, snatching her out over protests from her restorations, her as sweaty and plaster-powdered as the workmen restoring Belle Isle to a splendor it had never known; she frowning and fussing and reluctant at first, even then torn a little between me and Belle Isle. In the end we both lost out, the house and I, but she happy as I to be in the old Buick convertible beside me, top down, headed anywhere and nowhere, maybe up the Natchez Trace, singing through dark and bright, the perpetual twilight of the deep loess cuts smelling of earth, and out into the little bright meadows and the pine-winey sunlight, the singing cicadas keeping up with us like the Buick’s shadow, she as close as close not forbearing to kiss my neck and cheek over and over again, my hand between her thighs, the radio playing Country Western, which she really liked, hell-bent though she was not to miss a single New Orleans symphony concert; cutoff on a cowpath and sit in the grass, the whiskey and Seven-Up between us, Kristofferson singing and she forgetting Ludwig Beethoven and singing too.