The Avignon Quintet (31 page)

“So it is that we believe that this world, so much misused in its powers which are wholly beneficent, and although worn to a shadow of its former seraphic self, is still accessible on the old terms to a happy few, a minority whose duty is to hold the pass, to fight a Thermopylae of the psyche until perhaps by some lucky switch the emphasis changes again and we can hope that man will no longer be turned to a pillar of salt for turning aside to gaze upon the truth. Is truth redeemable by the direct vision? Yes; we believe it is. Across the abyss of our present despair and darkness the frail light is still there, though it seems always to be flickering out. Of the two forces in play in the world the black is winning, and may win completely. When I am depressed it seems most likely. What can be done to reverse the situation? Nothing, you will say. But there is a kind of nothing which we can do creatively, which will add oxygen instead of diminishing it, which is more fruitful than fruitless. But we can’t do this without facing the basic truth courageously – namely the death of banishment of God and the ascendancy of a usurping power of evil. There we stand.”

The enthusiasm of Piers for this pie-in-the-sky idealism was endearing, but he read into it more than I myself could see. Perhaps I am blinkered by my mental sloth and my curiosity? At any rate these formulations make me quite impatient. I remember Pia saying once: “If one really deeply believes something one shuts up and never dares to speak of it.”

Yesterday, today, tomorrow – the chrysalis of time resolving itself into the butterfly of process and death. In dreams the links seem much more clear than in waking. This week I wrote a long letter to Pia and posted it to the notice-board for messages at the Café Dôme in Montparnasse. You never know. I dreamed of her in two or three old situations and tried laboriously to analyse them when I awoke. As a matter of fact like many women she remained extremely childlike in her feeling-range. A sort of child-wife in many respects. Sometimes there is an organic foundation which stamps such girls as half-developed, and which their psyches echo. The uterus is small, narrow and elastic like that of a child. The breasts are beautifully formed but small also – mere sketches for motherhood. The hips are transversally narrow, the limbs most gracile, the face and often the posture decidedly infantile. Many perverse trends are hidden in all this innocence – one detects a hidden criminality because of the great interest in crime stories and so on …

Among other things I sketched out the story of the great theatrical hamper we carried about with us for so many years. I was always forbidden a glimpse of the contents, and was indeed implored not even to mention its existence. Pia blushed and paled in turns if ever, in a fit of exasperation, I inveighed against its cumbrousness and weight – as when we travelled by sea. It had to go with us. The label said “linen”. I followed my instructions and never asked about it, never spied on her. The soul of honour was I. Then during the period before the crack when she had become progressively more anaesthetic to me sexually (I did not know that she had met Trash already) the singular old wicker hamper came into its own. What do you think it contained?

Mind you, whenever I had to go away for a while, I had a feeling that she opened it, for she moved it into the centre of the bedroom floor wherever we might happen to be. Well, I said to myself, if it keeps her happy to gloat over a lot of linen what business was it of mine? After one flaming row I left the house, however, saying that I was going away for the weekend. Inevitably at the station I repented and took a taxi back to the house intending to make peace with this dear torment of mine. Guess what I found?

She was seated on the floor before a blazing fire. The hamper stood beside her. It was wide open now, the lid thrown back. All around her, sitting on velvet cushions of different brilliant colours, were dolls of all sizes and nationalities in bright costumes. A beautiful miniature tea-set on the floor before the fire contained real Chinese tea. My dramatic entry – I was moist with regret and a heartfelt adoration – caught her in a fearful state of disarray – speechless and pale. But when I saw the dolls I seemed at once to recognise my real rivals and an overwhelming rage seized hold of me. “So that is how it is,” I said, and all the bile of old sterile disputes rose in my throat. I did not clearly know precisely what I had divined in this infantile display, but I knew with certainty that these little homunculi must be put out of the way. They constituted an obstacle to our relationship. I seized one, and then another, and tossed them into the flames. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, grim-faced as a German professor. Pia let out a shriek and fainted, while I continued the pillage of her dolls, which I now realise must have represented a whole lifetime of memory, of childhood. It was worse than murder. But I acted like a maniac in a trance, unaware of the meaning of my acts, aware only of a blasting jealousy. It was like the sack of a town. The poor woman looked with horror-widened eyes at the ogre who was tearing her memories limb from limb and hurling them into the fire: then broke. I had profaned the inner reality of her far childhood.

She lay in this sort of catatonia all night long, and when she did awake in the morning it was with an extravagant fever which set the local doctor talking of typhoid and meningitis. I sat beside her bed, pale, soaping my hands and pleading for forgiveness. But she ignored me, closing her eyes, to sink ever deeper into the sheltering fever which cradled her and which might, if her heart went on beating as it did now, manage to carry her away into the super-silence. So it was that I played my part in provoking her illness – perhaps the greatest part. Clumsy, lumbering Sutcliffe, myself, he, I.

The change in her when she did come round was marked. She had become languid, slow-witted, and protested that she was old and finished. Indeed she looked ten years older. The new crop of worry lines around her eyes I attributed to the calming drugs they gave her. But the tone of her whole spirit had changed. Partly it was revenge, and partly it was that she was in mourning for the destroyed selves, her toys. This mood endured for a good long time, and her skin became greasy and her fine blonde hair lank and toneless. Then the attacks of kleptomania began which precipitated more medical intervention and set us on the road to Vienna where (God be praised!) we learned a very great deal, though not enough to save the wreck of a marriage which had been perhaps imperilled from the beginning by the genetic distribution of the good fairy who divides things into male and female … I was suddenly alone, and now I knew it. And then the return of the native – which was no return at all. It was obvious that things could never again be resumed on the old basis. And in the intervening time I had become aware of so many little tics of character which I had never noticed before. My new scale of judgement, thanks to Joy, was of some help. For example Pia could never spend the whole night in bed with a man; she must get up and go away to another bed after making love. These small and indeed insignificant things only began to become significant for me after the whole Vienna period which was at the same time inspiriting and depressing. I think because I realised that the whole system of Dr. Joy was limited and narrow in operation, though absolutely marvellous within very small limits. But it could or would never arrive at formulating something like a philosophy by which one could live. It was a lever, and as brilliant an invention of our epoch as is the petrol-engine. Anyway.

The lady in the painting, do you recognise her, under so many layers of childhood, coat after coat of whitewash? It takes a lifetime to learn to die with all you have learned, or else to live with it.

Yes, there we were with our sackload of misfortunes, and there was old Doc Joy with his grave and beautiful formulations – he refused himself every ignoble consolation when thinking about man. We learned, hand over fist, but the more we learned the less hope we had, the deeper the division seemed to go. It exasperated me when Pia told me that she only loved me because I smelt like her father. I suddenly remembered how she used to take up a sweat-shirt (I was a rowing man and still like to take a boat out for a skim): pressing it to her nose, closing her eyes in an absurd rapture. It was no compliment. Her old father, the retired Ambassador, lived on forever in Tangier, stone deaf; going for a drive in his car sometimes, or else passing away a long retirement full of bordeom by playing gin rummy or bridge. A sort of benign cyst of diplomacy who had risen by gravitation and sleek kindnesses. Poor Pia! Other smaller and more touching things. When I had reproached her for something which hung heavy on her conscience she would stand against the wall and cry into the wallpaper, throwing her arm over those poor eyes. And I suddenly saw stretching behind her a long chain of infant misdemeanours expiated by this standing against a wall. In the other life, in the old days, our nurses and our parents punished us in this fashion; and feeling reproved by my cruel words she instantly accepted the blame and expiated the rebuke in this way. It gave me a lump in the throat when she did it.

It was in a way to placate the Gods and assuage a guilty conscience that I recounted all this to the old Duchess last week. Afterwards I was annoyed, at so obviously trying to claim sympathy. She was wise to write back about other things, about how the Duke made her take banjo lessons; also about his terrible fear of being bored. He had come to the conclusion that idle conversation was a sin. Whenever people called he retreated to the end of the garden and sent word that he was praying. As he was supposed to be a devout Catholic …

Another form of expiation was to take up Toby’s invitation to visit the gipsies whose ragged and sordid encampments ring the walls of Avignon – they have been forbidden the interior. Here lying on some filthy straw pallet in the arms of a gipsy girl I can formulate more clearly my explanations of past events – reminded by a gipsy doll pinned to a pillow, as if for an act of sorcery. The doll sent me back to Pia, and then to odd thoughts of association which had been stirred up by the patient mage, Joy. In the layer beneath the dollies (as in a box of chocolates) were stored all sorts of necrophiliac thoughts and tendencies which lead to an exaggerated dread of graves, corpses, etc. These fears are sublimated into love for statues, waxworks, effigies, all dead objects. The reason for the fascination is the appeal of defencelessness. The corpse cannot defend itself. “Listen to that,” I cry to the sleeping gipsy. “The corpse cannot defend itself, nor can the sleeper.”

All round they are cooking over wood fires. The encampments hug the walls, and have been here so long they seem to have grown right into the ramparts. Here they live a sort of raffish troglodytic cave life, these birds of prey who dress like birds of Paradise, and scorn to learn a word of French – or just enough to tell fortunes under the bridge, though their real relish is quick and pleasant whoring.

Well, then, here I am in Avignon; the falling of the grey municipal night over the dusty recreation grounds trampled by the ghosts of public children … I walk among the empty benches and the loops of twisted wire which try in vain to encourage roses. These gardens are unlike the opulent ones on the headland with their marvellous views and splendidly tended greenery. They are more in my mood however, more contemporary.

The centurion walls girdle the sable roofs whose sliding planes take the light at different angles, turning terracotta, tobacco, violet: at times the city looks very much like a brown piecrust cooking away in its stone dish. But now twilight has its own degrees of brown dark, sprinkled in patches of shade on grass or freckling the lemon-tinted bark of the tranquil planes. And everything held superbly in frame by the headlong river which cuts its sinuous path towards the necropolis of Aries. Once, says my historian, Toby, corpses were confined and tipped into the swift river together with the burial fee; they were fished out at the Alyscamps and decently interred. Along the banks of the Rhône where I have been walking stretch the tents and booths of itinerant vendors of toys, coloured ribbons, sugar plums, straw hats and shawls; as well as wares which address themselves to the taste and judgement of agriculturalists – rope, sheep bells, sieves, harness, pitchforks, chemical sprays and fertilisers, ploughs. The garment stalls carried the traditional blue vine-dressers’ outfits, sunhats, and the great willow pitchforks grown in
espalier
at villages like Sauve. Inevitably the gipsies blend into all this, flickering here and there in their bright rags and jingling jewelry to catch unwary clients superstitious enough to cross their dirty palms: or thieving: or whoring openly in the shadow of the bushes which fringe the river. Though here we are relatively far from the sea the advent of the car and the train has brought fish to our doors and in Avignon one can eat the best fresh fish of the Mediterranean. Of course the primitive and dusty old coach roads discourage modern traffic so that in contrast to the tamer country round Nice and Monte we must seem more backward and dusty here. No matter. Things feel more authentic; everything has bone-structure and style. And the land is all the more delightful for being a little unbarbered, unshaven.