The Avignon Quintet (135 page)

He lay there for a while, smiling and pouting at old memories, while she watched him thoughtfully and reproached herself for the fact that underneath everything – if sincerity counted for anything – she was disposed towards this audience because she half hoped to hear the name of another Alexandrian: her lover, Affad! Even though she knew that they could never have met or had anything to do with each other! Mnemidis had hardly seen the place since his acting gift took him all round the world. “Where to begin?” he repeated wistfully, under his breath. Then after a long pause he drew a deep breath and began: “The thing is this: how could things have been otherwise? What could I do? Have you ever thought about the predicament of being God for example – suppose one were? You couldn’t act otherwise. In my case – ah! listen carefully. In my case I was born without aptitudes or inclinations, and with little enough brains or beauty. I was just
there
, my mind as smooth as an egg, but with no direction, apparently good for nothing, and so society must suffer me. … O God, the emptiness, it leads directly to a state of alienation, one feels the fact of being a sort of cosmic mishap! The intense
boredom
is crushing. In my case it led however to a state of grace. By an accident I discovered a
sortie
. An opening. I found that without being actually great you can slip past the sentries into greatness, without waking the sacred geese …”

A spasm of violent nausea seized him and he turned up his eyes into his head in a frightening grimace which seemed almost epileptoid. It died down slowly, leaving him pale and weary-looking.

“Well?” she said, in order to keep contact.

“Well!” he echoed. “One night at a party, suddenly and quite involuntarily I uttered a false laugh, in a vague desire to amuse. The cracked hysterical laugh of a servant girl. It had such an instant success that I was as if stamped for life as an impersonator. I became in demand at parties where I would laugh until I had everyone shrieking with mirth, or trembling with anxiety for sometimes it went on too long, I could not break it off.” He put his bands to his throat as if exploring old bruises.

“Then gradually the voices came, I developed a whole repertoire, it was like becoming a hotel with someone different in each room. Yes, but you could mix up the keys if you weren’t careful. Laughing professionally before a public – that is something different. I began to voyage among the living and the dead – at the suggestion of my lover, an old man weighed down with his culture. Werther, Kleist, Manfred, Byron, Hamlet, he could not divest himself so he voided them all on me. I did not read anything, you understand, but he directed me and coached me and instructed me so they were more real to me than if I had read them myself. Gradually as I improved in richness I added other touches, sudden frightening grimaces, choking and falling, enacting a shooting star or a flash of lightning. A pistol shot, a groan, a sigh – Casimir developed these thoughts and planted them in me so that I enacted them. But now I had entered a new domain of total joylessness. I felt the strain. You see, right from the beginning this man had enslaved me against my own will. It’s common enough in Egypt, this sort of magic. When I refused his first advances he used magic. His wife Fatima told me long afterwards how it worked – she too was forced by his threats. He forced her to perform fellatio on him, holding her by the chignon, clamped. With his free hand he dialled my number and engaged in a long amorous pleading conversation – leaving me in no doubt as to what was being done to him and by whom. At the moment when he felt his sperm pass into the mouth of Fatima I felt it also for he had visualised my ‘eidolon’ as we say. I cried out and dropped the phone, but it was done. Next day I woke with a headache and a fever and a sore throat. I dreamed of him. I was on fire. Finally I was so exhausted by the mental waves he was sending me – the sheer weight – that I capitulated and asked him to come. I could not wait, I was in a frenzy of capitulation.

“So it came about. He was active and vicious but very clever and a magician with money. But his look was so sad and disabused, his eyes so ignorant of smiling, that it gave one a thrill: one was talking to a dead man, one felt. He used to say, ‘Time is rusting away inside me, my heart is full of barbed wire.’ I no longer hated him, the hate had dulled. I was his slave and I hated only myself. Yet he must
pay
one day, I felt it. I was not surprised when the stranger came from the city with a message. A new era had already begun. The veins in my head had started to swell with water, throbbing: echoing: booming! It was this stranger who asked me if it wasn’t right that Casimir should
pay
, should die. There was no other real solution, it would seem; the little group of his friends had turned against him. They were looking for a passive instrument – that is how he put it. Passive. Instrument. I watched him curiously when he was asleep, he seemed so near to death already. Once he felt my gaze on him and he opened one eye and said: ‘You know this is with my
full
consent? Don’t be afraid to act if they ask!’ Could it be possible that he knew?

“I had started my tricks already – I was imitating his voice on the telephone and ordering things from shops, all in his name. A mountain of jewellery was what I felt I needed to counter my ugliness. He knew but said nothing. As for Fatima, I left her for another occasion, another country, another method. The symptoms were much the same but the powder left no trace in the organs though she had already denounced me by letter, for she had been warned.”

Constance listened with intense concentration to this professional monologue, to this desolate man, empty of all feeling. He went on: “I discovered that even when I was
acting
, I myself was only acting. Where had I gone? My I? My eye?”

The desolation of the liar! He was nodding slowly with the mandarin-like nodding of the morphinomane – though he was not one in real fact. He was only illustrating time running on, running out. “Tick-tock,” he said. “So it goes on. Tick-tock. Do you carry a watch, like all doctors do? May I see it, please?” As a matter of fact she did, in the fob-pocket of her white smock. It was a pretty little timepiece, slightly ovoid, almost egg-shaped. She placed it on the table before him and he took it up with a sort of shy rapture, examining it with close attention, holding it to his ear. Then he swallowed it right before her very eyes and they gazed at each other with silent amazement, for he himself seemed astonished by his own action. It was important not to over-react, as with a child who swallows a peach-stone. She stared. “Why,” she said at last, “did you do that?” and he shook his head with a childish expression of wonder on his face: “I don’t know. I suddenly needed to stop the world. It was stronger than me. I stopped
his
, didn’t I? In spite of our romance I stopped it thoroughly, once and for all. But this wasn’t very clever of me, I admit.”

The hour was up according to the electric clock on the wall and she rose. “I will tell Pierre,” she said. “He will know what to do.”

“I don’t feel like apologising,” he said and his underlip trembled as if he was about to start crying. She pressed the bell and the vast form of the negro appeared in the doorway, smiling. She explained what had happened in the most matter of fact way and seemed by her tone to reassure the sick man for he smiled and nodded. Pierre took his sleeve with a tactful nonchalance and they set off back to the dangerous ward together, walking away circumspectly through the trees. She watched them disappear and then slipped back to her own room, only to find that Schwarz had also gone. A passage from his new book was on the typewriter and she bent down to read it. “But Freud like Darwin was truthful to the point of holiness. Their devout scientific atheism had the necessary rigour to produce results. When you look through a telescope of high magnification you must hold your breath so the image does not waver. Now, how poor the dialogue has become. Not science but semantics rules! Paris, instead of playing a seminal role to replace the murdered Vienna has reaffirmed its lesser role as the capital of fashion in ideas, of superficiality. Spindrift of politics fabricated by educated poltroons with taste.
Barbe à papa
, a candy-floss culture.”

Schwarz had grown increasingly critical of the French röle during the war. “As Darwin himself noted: ‘To reason while observing is fatal – but how useful afterwards!’“ While she read, her colleague himself appeared, with his mildly sardonic air of curiosity and amusement. “Well?” he said, and she gave an account of her session with Mnemidis and his gesture with her watch. He laughed with delight and said: “Poor Pierre will have to spend his days stool-watching until it reappears, if it ever does. How do you know – he may digest it! Thank God, however, for the session seems to have done
you
some good!” As they talked he had placed his fingers upon her pulse. “And your colour is good once more!” Perhaps the demon of this fatigue would pass and her composure be restored by itself? “I have had another insulting letter from Sutcliffe, probably written when he was drunk.” He took up a sheet of official notepaper and read out slowly, “ ‘Schwarz, you bloody man, supporter of lost causes among which Love looms largest, why not try another method? Instead of fretting about
changing
the world, why not realise and accept it as it is, admitting that its order is divine, that reality, of which we are part, realises itself
thus
. Swallow the whole thing whole! If you did, if you do, the great paradox will supervene; the world will automatically and irremediably change itself and of its own accord. Or so they say! Farewell!’”

“He has been drinking again I don’t doubt. I think you must really join him one day for a game of billiards.”

Schwarz looked startled. “Blood sports! Me?” He made defensive gestures with his hands. They were finished for the day and uncertain of how to fill up the evening. He thought he would probably go to the cinema, while she thought with dread of her empty flat. It seemed more than ever desirable to unearth some company which might help her to pass the remaining daylight hours without too much room for introspection! Schwarz seemed equally solicitous about her balance. He said, “Constance, when are you going to see the small boy of Affad – the autistic one?” She sat down and reflected. “I don’t know. I am in such a disturbed state at the moment that I thought to let things settle down a bit.”

Schwarz shook his head. “I should start at once,” he said, “at least to make the opening moves. After all, there may be nothing to be done. The children of the rich and purseproud are always in the greatest danger.”

Children!

She remembered Affad declaiming in a mocking voice something like: “Children! you were born to disappoint your parents as we have all been, for our parents built us gilded and padded cages to live happily-ever-after-in – and look what came about: exile, bereavement, folly, voyages, despair, ecstasy, illness, love, death: all life in a single stab like a harlot’s kiss.”

She was thinking sadly of the absent Affad and suddenly coming to herself she saw that Schwarz was contemplating her with solicitude and concern, trying to estimate just where she stood in the face of this crisis in her affairs. “My God! what a shabby profession it is – or perhaps it is us, worn out by the sheer magnitude of the task and the limitations imposed by inadequate knowledge. I have started dishing out pills, the first sign of morbid frustration. And our job is to teach our clients how to rediscover a state of joyful nonchalance in the face of things, something as calm as death but just
not
death … And here we are falling sick ourselves. I’m worried about you. You have become a bore.” Thus Schwarz.

“You mean in love! I know it!”

“But that is not why he left?”

“No. It’s more complicated.”

It was both more complicated and yet quite simple, quite transparent. “You know what I think? I think I will try to patch up my wounded self-esteem by buying that fur coat which I need for the winter. I have been putting it off all the year. It seems just the moment. Do you think it will save the day?”

“Yes. The instinct is sound!” he said, not without a tinge of irony. He was about to add that it was one of Lily’s habits when she felt depressed, but was suddenly assailed by a pang of depression at the thought of her, at the thought of having betrayed her, as he put it to himself. When going to the cinema he tried to avoid the newsreels which preceded the big film, lest they show scenes of the advances into Germany. “And those pictures,” she said, “that’s another reason – I found them on Affad’s desk, the whole exhibition folio spread out on the floor. They are mind-blenching in their horror. It’s quite beyond weeping. One wanted to bang one’s head on the wall from sheer incomprehension. How
could
they? How
could
we?”

Schwarz sighed and drew obscure diagrams on the writing pad at his elbow.

The confusions caused by the onset of war had been great, but had given place to a certain artificial order during the prosecution of it over a period of years. Some sort of haphazard system had emerged based on the prevailing military and political options. Now with the return of a hesitant and fragmentary quasi-peace this factitious order was once more disturbed and on an even wider scale, for the whole world by now had reeled out of orbit under the hammer blows of the sick Germany. The confusions engendered by this peace were almost worse; Switzerland was an oasis of calm, an island, compared to the surrounding hinterland which was so fully occupied with the disbanding of armies, resettlement of disturbed populations, onerous shortages, dislocated communications, broken civic threads everywhere which must be retied, respooled. The terrifying photographs of which she spoke had been taken by the armies as they advanced, and they were of concentration camps and their inmates. Everyone had known about the extermination camps, it is true, but people find things hard to realise, to accept what they might intellectually know. The Red Cross had received all this frightful documentary material with instructions from the military and political arm to give it the widest possible publicity; and to this end the pictures had been enlarged and an exhibition formed which showed the work of the camps in all their dreary horror. The idea was to mount a travelling public exhibition together with an illustrative text in several languages. Blanford had been approached for that and the whole project had been the subject of a number of committee meetings.