The Avignon Quintet (167 page)

The dry copyist’s succinct word for human craving-four letters beginning with an L. Lust? Lost? Last? List? Live? Love? The choice is extensive yet intensive. The whole of this experience, the strange journey, the cave, the zany propositions of the Marxists, exercised a strange effect upon Felix; he felt changed in some profound way, but he could not have said just how. And for once he felt unwilling to discuss the experience, except to make fun of its bizarre side – the thought of Americans with cameras plodding through this field. O’Schwartz had even evolved a scheme by which they could obtain certificates of religious initiation in the Dharma – he had suborned a Californian monk to help him with his scheme. Thus the tourist would have something to show when he got home – apart from his photographs. A diploma!

Something to show! A certificate of higher indolence! Felix recounted this whole spiritual adventure to Galen who listened with an air of pained puzzlement. It was evident that the chances for speculative investment were poor and somewhat chancy with those Chinks – moreover brainwashed Chinks of the left hand! Yet … they were right about tourism, he should suppose, if only communications opened up once more and the war-damage was set to rights. “What does the Prince think?” he asked a little plaintively, and Felix replied, “He is in a bad mood and says that he won’t chance a penny on any Chinese scheme. On the other hand he is reluctant to relinquish the Templar treasure scheme. He still thinks there is hope of a breakthrough towards a real treasure. Myself, I …” His shrugged shoulders were quite eloquent enough. But meanwhile the Prince had come into the room silently and was in time to overhear the exchange. “It is not quite my point of view,” he said rather testily, “but you must remember that I come from a land where the bazaars are absolutely crammed with lying soothsayers. I consulted one in the Grand Bazaar in Cairo in the middle of the night by the weird light of those large hissing acetylene lamps which make everyone look deathly pale, drained of blood! And what Aubrey calls ‘squirms’ of children jumping about like fleas. Now this old man was extremely explicit about this whole venture. He told me I was involved in a treasure-hunting scheme about which I had become somewhat doubtful, wondering whether to abandon hope. He said that I must not give up for at least another six months. He could not tell me whether the treasure really still existed, because he was too far away from the scene, but he suggested that I consult someone who was actually on the spot. That is why I hurried up and planned my arrival for May.”

“Why May specially?” asked Galen and received the laconic reply: “The gipsy festival rounds off May, remember?” Galen did not but he pretended he did. Felix nodded and provided the exact date and the exact place: Les Saintes Maries de la Mer! “I will have our fortunes retold by a gipsy,” said the Prince, “and we’ll see whether to carry on or abandon the whole investment!”

“Fortune-telling?” said Galen somewhat unhappily. “It’s not very
sound
, is it? I mean to say, having your palm read, what?” The Prince nodded his agreement to the proposition. “Nevertheless,” he said with resolution, “there is so much that is questionable about the whole enterprise that one little soothsayer won’t change much. I don’t intend to abandon the
Financial Times
. But the one in Cairo told me I had a partner who was too cautious, believed too much in moderation. Said I must encourage him to risk more. How do you like that?”

Galen put on his wounded look. “Well, I like that!” he said reproachfully, “after all we have put up. As for lying soothsayers, we have had our share with the myth-making of young Quatrefages. And we still don’t know where we are!”

But about the gipsies the Prince was not wrong, for already their slow steady infiltration into the province had begun – a leisurely penetration into Avignon and thence into the Camargue. It was probably deliberate, in order not to alarm the country people too much by a violent gipsy presence – though in smaller villages the church bells might be rung and the housewife’s cry go up: “The gipsies are coming!” It was the signal to bolt and bar the granary or the barn, to get your washing off the line, and to withdraw from the window sills such items of common fare as pots of basil or of wild mint, so renowned were they for their light-fingered tactics and the brilliant insolence of their approach to the timid and the law-abiding. They invested the little towns of the Midi as cunningly as freebooters might – for that is what they were. The women would sell baskets or profess to grind your knives for you at your front door: but your eye must be sharp for while one swarthy beauty worked at the knife blades another might slip past you into the house and pilfer. But they were so good-looking and insolent and dressed like birds of paradise that one was always torn between fear and admiration, while the beauty of the women set the sap mounting in the veins of the menfolk. They were not averse to some quick sexual commerce in a barn or in the woods – fair reason for your wife’s anxiety when the cry went up that they had arrived.
They did not seem to care
! That is what went home like a knife-thrust in the heart of the careworn housewife! In their dusky skins and glowing eyes they seemed to express the perils as well as the joys of absolute freedom. Yet for all their being scattered far and wide there was only one festival a year at which they were all joined together to honour their patron saint, the dark-skinned Sara whose grottoes were in the crypt of the little Church of the Saintes Maries de la Mer, the famous village on the sea to which all their steps were now bending. But first they filled up Avignon and for a while created a kind of excited tremor in the life of the merchants and settled folk. A gipsy fiddler in the main square managed to inflame some young couples to dance to his music – he was of a northern strain and sounded Hungarian, or rather his music did. They were getting themselves assembled in their various troupes to await the arrival of their Queen Mother who was somewhere on the road still.

Without her there could be no fete for the moon-people – for the gipsies are lunar folk. So they marked time, reading hands and tea leaves and coffee grounds until she should come.

Gradually, too, the town woke up to their exciting and distressing presence and the inevitable reaction, set in in the form of increased police surveillance and minor harassments and persecutions at camping sites and in urban squares or wherever a cart and a tent appeared. In olden times – yet not so long ago – they would have been arrested, imprisoned or whipped at a cross-roads for flouting the common law, for trespassing and pilfering. Today they only had to endure a minor form of the old rabid persecution – the object being to expel them, force them to move on. There was no need for harsher measures since everyone knew that their objective was not Avignon but Les Saintes, and that they would soon ebb quietly away towards the torrid plains of the Camargue. The town was simply a staging post for the grand march southward. But it offered an extraordinary glimpse into the organisation of this mysterious ethnic group. “In one of your previous lives I learned about them from a girl called Sabine,” said Sutcliffe as they sat before their glasses of wine on the broad terrace above the olive grove. Blanford nodded: “I well remember,” he said, “and I have often wondered what happened to her. They said that she had gone off with a gipsy.” Blanford chuckled. “It was the fashionably romantic thing to say or even to do then: before the war, I mean.” Yet it had been more than that, for Sabine had been told that she was descended from the famous gipsy personage Faa, who was among the first to establish a right of entry into America. Sutcliffe refilled his glass and went on in reminiscent vein: “In my wine-jumbled brain I remember not only her favours, surprisingly tender and vulnerable, but also her conversation. I had vaguely thought of them as persecuted people simply because they would not keep still, would not integrate with settled communities. But the long saga of persecution – I had not realised to the full what that had meant to them. It had formed them and rounded them until their personalities were as solidly obdurate as an ingot. They have become incapable of change.”

The Prince was listening with great attention to this somewhat drunken disquisition. “Nevertheless,” he said, “in Egypt they are a sly and slippery folk-and their name is apparently derived from
gypt
, which is ‘us’. If they are, as you say, unchangeable it is because they
are
change. They are like water and will take any shape, but always stay the same. And by the way, I was talking to a minor functionary of the
mairie
today and he was saying how amazing it was that so many tribes manage to get down to the Saintes for this Saint Sara festival every year. They even come from behind the Iron Curtain as you must have seen from some of the carts. Strange folk!”

But doubtless they themselves would look almost as strange
en masse
for they had hired a large red motor bus for the excursion, complete with driver. It was the Prince’s idea, as he had been told of the almost intolerable congestion of traffic caused by the slow-moving carts and the horses – not to mention the vast plumes of dust which rose along the gipsies’ passage, following them like a forest fire. A van such as this would free them from the responsibilities of the road and also keep them all together in a single party. Needless to say, the preparations for the trip involving hampers of elaborate food and wine put everyone into a good humour while the Prince devised ever more wonderful configurations of truffled trifles with which to tease the palates of the pilgrims – for they conceived themselves now as such. After all, they had a purpose, they were voyaging with the intention of invoking Saint Sara, asking her to take a sounding for them in the ocean of futurity. Travelling like this, in a congregation, so to speak, enabled the more loquacious (or simply drunker?) members among them to permit themselves sonorous disquisitions upon whatever subject came to hand. But the thought of the vanished Sabine touched off other reminiscences of gipsy lore and history with which the nostalgic Sutcliffe enlivened the first part of the journey through the flowering meads of high Provence which soon gave place to the sadder, flatter plains of the Camargue – country of marsh and rivulet and lake where flies and mosquitoes abounded, as well as the sturdy brown bulls of the locality which were raised as cockade fighters for the Provençal bull rings. Here too the characteristic cowboy of the land, the
gardien
, prevailed with his broad-brimmed sombrero and the trident which he sported like a sceptre of office. As the straggling columns wound dustily through his land to the sea there was need for constant watchfulness, for the gipsies were light-fingered and pilfered remorselessly while the strangers’ dogs teased the bulls and snapped at the horses – the little white palaeolithic steeds which the poets of the place always saw in terms of a foam flowing over the land like waves on the blue sea which lay ahead, the crown of their journey, the church of Saint Sara.

“I feel wonderful on this wine,” said the relentless double of Blanford. “I may have a tendency to boom a bit. If I do, curb me with a frown, will you?”

“I will. Anyway I see no mystery in the Gyps because I think of them as Jews gone wild. No money sense.”

“Oh dear!” said Lord Galen unhappily. “Now you will start being anti-Jewish. I feel it coming. Change the subject, please!” Sutcliffe poured him out a glass which he drank off.

So they voyaged on in a pleasant state of abstraction, skimming as much as they could along the swarthy columns of “Greek” and “Egyptian” and “Romanian” and “Bulgarian” gipsies, each tribe with its characteristic music and avocation – basketwork for the “French”, pots and pans for the “Greek” farriers.

Some of the horse-drawn caravans were brilliantly painted, speaking of Sicily or England. And by the wayside perched their tents in small encampments where the children lay about like litters of cats and puppies in the bluish dust. The tide, however, flowed steadily towards the sea where the little church of the Saint stuck out its abrupt butt towards the beaches, never quite allowing one to forget that it was originally a fort, a defence against the pirates who ravaged this coast. As for the beaches themselves they had become one great single encampment, as if they had been spawned by the grand Souk of Cairo. Here the various races mingled and bickered, the various musics contended against each other – and also with the noise of the waves forever bursting upon the white sand. “From Messina to the Baltic, from Russia to Spain, this people had been enslaved, tortured, often put to death: their lives were worth nothing. Long past the sixteenth century the persecutions endured. Indeed at that time anyone who frequented or succoured them was listed as a common felon and could be put to death without even the benefit of a jury.” Blanford dredged up this scrap from some old conversation, from perhaps Sabine? Her name had come back to hover about him like a persistent fly: he wondered what had happened to her. And, of course, as is always the case, he was soon to meet her in the flesh again and find out!

So the little bus struggled on through the dust plumes until the broad beaches came in sight, framed by the rocking sealine. Their horses and carts had taken possession of the beaches under the watchful eye of the local cavaliers who by now had become familiars, wandering among the tents on their little white steeds. A great fair was growing up around the event which would end with a religious service and the transport of the three Maries down to the sea on a great wooden trestle banked with flowers; the whole party, bursting with ardour and joyful tears, plunging through the shallows until the sea was breast-high, and the whole cavalcade seemed to float on the water, encircled now by all the fisher boats of the little seaport, appropriately bedecked and beflagged in their honour.