The Avignon Quintet (128 page)

“In my version,” he said, “I return to Provence with the
ogres
after a war something like this, having retired from the world to a chateau called Verfeuille. It’s unsatisfactory; something about their ill-starred love wasn’t right – you will help me there, I hope. The reality we had lived was more engrossing than the fiction, which was unpardonable. Now we are going back at a different angle, and with a different crew, so to speak.”

“Can’t I opt out, go away, right away?” cried Sutcliffe in exasperation. “To India, say, or China?”

“You want to go back into life and you can’t,” said Blanford with his bitter smile. “Nor can I – it’s back on to the drawing-board, back to the blueprint stage. Back to Avignon! There are only two ways out of Avignon, the way up and the way down, and they are both the same. The two roses belong to the same family and grow on the same stalk – Sade and Laura, the point where extremes meet. Passion sobered by pain, an
amor fati
frozen by the flesh. The old love-triangle on which Plato based the Nuptial Number taken from Pythagoras, a triangle the value of whose hypotenuse is 5.”

“Quack! Quack!” said Sutcliffe irreverently. “You will not distract me in my search for the perfect she, the mistress of the sexual tangent,
les éléments limitrophes
. I demand as my right love-in-idleness, a Laura unconscious of her fate,
femme fatale, féotale, féodale.
”

“Instead you will find only the ‘five-stranded’ Tibetan breath, the ‘mount’ or ‘steed’ of white light, and a titanic silence with no geography. A tall tree with the sap arrested in its veins.”

“But where?”

“In Avignon, rose of all the world.”

FOURTEEN

By the Lake

T
HE DAY DAWNED SO UNUSUALLY WARM OVER THE LAKE
that Blanford grew impatient to be lying thus, gazing across the green lawns to the still blue water. Why not a sortie? His first operation was in two days’ time. “Cade,” he said, “today is my birthday. I want to get a breath of air. I want to go for a push along the lake. I want to celebrate the birth of my mother’s death. Get a chair and a rug, and bring your Bible. You will read to me as you used to do to her.” To his surprise the valet looked almost elated as he bobbed his assent to the idea. “Very good, sir.” Tucked down in rugs, elongated in the rubber cradle, Blanford hardly felt the rubber tyres on the paved Corniche. But he was still drowsy and also lightheaded from calming drugs, and his thoughts evolved in pericopes without a sequential pattern.

“Cade, we shall never see Greek drama as the Greeks themselves saw it.”

“No, sir.”

“For them it was an expiation.”

“Yes, sir. Shall I read? And where from? D’you want ‘In the beginning was the Word’?”

“No. ‘The Lord is My Shepherd’, rather.”

“Very good, sir.”

The words reached deep inside him and he felt his bowels moved, his entrails plucked by their ravenous splendour of language – an English which was no more. And paradoxically while he listened he thought of other things, of Nietzsche’s missing essay on Empedocles, of madness, of evolution, of the emergence of man from the belly of the time-bound woman, and with him all nature. Slime and warmth and water-lulling plants and infusoria and larval fish. The Creator thrusts his hand into the glove, up to his arm, as into a sausage skin, and then withdraws it while a collection of wet organs rushes in to develop into man. A weird assemblage of arms, legs, eyes, teeth, gradually sorting themselves into completeness: a ditto of mental attributes flowed out like electricity playing – sensation, ideation, perception, cognition: the whole held together by the centrifugal forces of the spinning turntable of a world.
Whee
! Then each in its category rose – plant into tree into fish into man, whose mind’s eye would lead him into the mischief of paint, words, music and above all buildings to exteriorise, celebrate, and even house his body – living, as a temple, dead, as a tomb. Hubris came somewhere after this and with it dread. The antlers of the god grew on his temples, he went mad, dared to
see
!

He discovered fire, wine, weapons and tools, but also the stone-fulcrum for building, the enigmatic formula of Pythagoras, the arm of gold. (Every man his own true pyramid.) He could not detach himself enough from the maternal shadow to understand Death and come to terms with it, even to harness it as he harnessed rivers. (The Druids had a way perhaps?)

The voice of Cade ran on like gravel in the stream of the language; his coarse diction gave the words a robust music of their own. The vowels swelled like sails. Meanwhile Blanford’s mind played hopscotch among the pericopes of fond ideas which might one day inform his prose. “The crisis came when early man first lost sexual periodicity, for then he risked running out of desire. The race was imperilled by his indifference. So the anxious divinity, Nature, invented the specious beautiful crutch of Beauty to spur him on. What could be more unnatural, more delightfully perverse? Looking through each other’s eyes the lovers saw more than the memory of each other, they saw ‘it’, and were at once humbled and captivated. The body knelt to enter the mother-image like a cathedral and to die, so that the fruitful larval worm could hatch its butterfly, the nextborn soul, a child.”

“In the midst of life we are in death,” said Cade.

But, Blanford thought on obstinately, the Greek ideal of Beauty was a wonderful invention, for its value was transferable to other things, projected like a ray from man’s own precious body. Artisan and his artifact improved into art pure. Beauty can reside, like the smell of musk, even in functional machines: substitute-bodies enjoying proportion and bias (callipygous women with haunches rich in
galbe
). Mental orgasm can be approached, abstract as paper-money or music or rain. The poet droops, suffers and invites his Muse – a one-man intensive care unit for the romantic invalid! You cannot look upon Eve future with impunity, for she carries within her the seeds of the idea of Death!

Yet within hours of death bodies begin to unravel like old sweaters, dissipating into random chaos again, mulch, mud,
merde
mind. Hail-hungry ghosts! Shades of the Luteran worm-loaf of the world-view drawn from big intestines with their slimy code. The great dams of consciousness admit only trickles of reality through them – thirst is rife, the waters of life everlasting. On the great treadmill of consciousness what outlook can he have, the poor neuro-Christian twisted out of his original innocence? Cade was silent now, walking with lowered head staring at the ground below his feet. “What are you thinking, Cade? You never say.” But the servant only shook his head in a determined way and showed yellow teeth in a nervous smile.

Sweet as geometry to the troubled heart, Method was born and the magician’s footrule. Mental faculties separated into kinds. Ah, maniacs, so rubicond and exophthalmic! Ah, melancholics, so dark and shaggy and pale from excess of black bile! Love became mania. “Then I saw her ther, my lyttel quene.” Hebephrenia set in like a tide, the helpless laughter of schizoid niggers. Fordolked, my masters, fordolked!
Morfondu
! Knocked for six!

Cade said, “At times she was not herself, sir. She said to me: ‘Cade, I have gone beyond love, now I hate everyone, even my own son.’ I was afraid for her reason.”

Blanford listens, head on one side, and hears his own heart quietly beating under the rug. It was these small unexpected insights which were valuable. One thinks one knows better always; then comes the truth like a thunderbolt. He told himself that love overcomes magic by its very powerlessness. Both Merlin and Prospero gave in, surrendered their weapons at last, repletion was all.

The meaning of meaninglessness is the code of

the Grail

As Merlin divined it, it never can fail.

Once replete with this knowledge he could retire to Esplumior, his island home, to play cards forever with his friend Prospero by the hushing sea. The old game of Fortune, played with a Tarot pack without a Hanged Man! Esplumior!

He heard the voice of Sutcliffe admonishing him: “More work for the Institute of Hallucination and Coitus! You want to combine ratiocinations in a Pelagsian fuck and it won’t work. Even Trash knows that. She told me yesterday: ‘Sperm washes off, honey, but love don’t wash out. It’s with you to the end. You have to wear it out like an old shoe.’” When they met now they would greet each other simultaneously with the words: “
Salut! Bon Viveur et Mort Future! Salut!
”

He had carried with him the clinic cat which purred quietly on his lap under the rug, like a small motor. What a peculiar kind of concentration it is that leads to the artistic product, he thought. One exudes a kind of emblaming fluid, an agonising ectoplasmic exudation, memory. The way a cat coats a mouse with its saliva before swallowing it – anointing it with a slimy coat to make the passage of the gullet easier. Was this the way to invoke shy Psyche, the love-child asleep on his mother’s wedding cake or his father’s coffin?

The bazaars of silence where she dwells

In double childhood, eyes in all the wells.

The end of death is the beginning of sex and vice versa. Children are abstract toys, representations of love, models of time, a resource against nothingness.

Suppose one wrote a book in which all the characters were omniscient, were God? What then? One would have to compose it in a death-mood, as if dawn would bring with it the firing-squad. But this is what the artist
does
! Does poor Constance really grasp what Affad is saying – namely that in trying to render the orgasm conscious he is trying to extend the human understanding of what, up to now, has been regarded as apparently involuntary and unpremeditated? This is real love!

The couple was dead

Ere we were wed

All under the greenwood tree!

Maybe, however, she thinks him simply disinterestedly interested in human virtue but unable to regard it, as so many do, as a guarantee against The Thing – cruel fate which is indifferent to theological distinctions. Stupidity and hypocrisy, the indispensable elements for illness and consequently for religion! O thieve me some happiness, Constance, I am tired of steeplechasing with this tired out old cab horse! My soul camps in the ruins of India while my mind is gathering dolphins’ eggs!
Le double jeux de Rimbaud
! The double game!

The whole strength of the woman comes from a studied self-abasement, an Archimedean fulcrum; and young girls taken warm from under their mothers’ wings, stolen from a warm nest still need mothering awhile. In this pleasant morning drowse he saw them come, hip-swinging, callipygous nautch-dancers,
sécheresses, vengeresses, castratrces de choix
, and he knew that the guillotine was invented by a homosexual Frenchwoman. “Cade!” he said sharply, “Amend thy trousers, for the flies have fled!” She was beautiful with her swarthy rose-black skin and the apricot-fashioned mouth sticky as a fresh hymen – the silkworm’s tacky passage across a mulberry leaf. Kisses that clung and cloyed. What was the name of her father, the old banker who made love to his dog and wintered in Portugal – a caninophile, gone in the tooth, gone in the wind? As Sutcliffe remembered her she wore the white nightdress like a uniform, a carnival disguise, archly, coyly. More appropriate would have been a butcher’s smock with fresh bloodstains from the abattoir! There they sit, while we lie alone and suffer, sticking ripe plums up their arses, as happy as a sackful of rats! Memory is like having a dog on your back gnawing at your eyeballs. Venereal fevers shake the heart’s dark tree. The Happy Few –
ceux qui ont le foutre loyal
!

Realising that all truths are equally false he becomes a posthumous person, makes his shadow melt away. All shadowless men are perfected in their
ghost
! The cinema in the head has fallen silent.

In science the exact is by consent the beautiful and seems new, pristine. In language beauty lies in the explicitness, in the nakedness of thought clothed in a sound. He saw Constance coming towards them across the gardens, waving. Her strange lithe walk was full of an endearing eagerness, an unspoiled freshness of approach as if some new discovery awaited her when she reached you. It was like someone walking a rainbow. She took his hands softly in hers and he said, “You are the only one who realises how frightened I am. Thank you.” She was in love, she was glowing with the experience – one can never disguise it. It seemed so strange, for here they were alive and in their own skins, while round them for miles stretched the dead, the countless dead. Yet, he thought, Constance and I are really equidistant from the darkness on the circle of probability. Tomorrow perhaps an absence, a hole in the darkness which rapidly heals up, closes over. “I know you are,” she said, “and in a way it’s good as a reaction.” The walk with all its fevered ratiocination had tired him and he felt a little tearful. He dabbed his eyes with a tissue while Cade with a sudden surprising tenderness patted his shoulder. “I say to myself all the time, ‘Why die? Why go? It’s so nice here!’” There was no short way to counter this mood of depression, so she said nothing, but helped the valet set him up once more in his mountain of pillows. All of a sudden he felt much better; he was used to such mercuric swings of mood. “The torn notebook you brought back,” he said, “did you look in it?” She had not. “It’s got some of Sam’s jottings in it, among them poems like