The Avignon Quintet (73 page)

In the wild cry of recognition with which Pia greeted this spectacle was mixed all the anguish and reverence she felt for this shabby symbol posed so outrageously upon the window-sill – like a woman too fat to get out or in now, irretrievably stuck, waiting for the fire brigade to rescue her. As a matter of fact they could be heard approaching some streets away, though their customary moaning signals were mixed with the sinister mesh-like sound of caterpillar-tracks upon concrete. A light tank prowled across their line of vision a couple of street corners away. They had been joined by a small group of medical students who were in a high pitch of excitement – they all looked as if they had been drinking.

Now a man had appeared at the window from which the sofa protruded – a sort of janitor it would seem, from his green apron. He had been going round turning off lights and closing open doors. He paused irresolutely for a moment before the sofa, obviously wondering what to do about it. It protruded so far that it was impractical to drag it back, though he seemed at first tempted to try. It was hanging by its back legs above the burning street. The students began to gesticulate and shout in a desultory fashion, though without any clear idea of what might be done to ameliorate the present situation, the smashed lamp standards, the burning books. Suddenly the concierge at the window came to decision. With a heave he disengaged the back legs of the ugly old crocodile and catapulted the whole thing into the street, where it fell upon one of the burning piles of books. The sirens had come much closer. “Quick!” cried Pia, quite beside herself with anxiety, for the sofa had begun to smoulder at the edges. “Quick!” People gazed at each other wondering what she could mean, but she herself had darted forward and caught the old crock by the shoulders, pulling it with a frantic, almost superhuman force, until it was clear of the flames. “We must save it,” she said. “Rob, for Christ’s sake …” Bemused and puzzled as he was he broke into a clumsy run and, without for an instant understanding what their objective might be, helped her tug it clear. Other students now, equally in the dark, came to their aid, and acting like lunatics they picked it up and set off at a trot for the nearest shelter. The whole performance was totally spontaneous and unplanned. It had been sparked by the intensity of her cry and the concentrated passion of her actions – she looked like someone in a trance. Obviously this tattered object was of the utmost value and importance to her. Obligingly the crowd helped her save it and drag it to the relative safety of an air-shelter with a wall where they placed it under a tree. They were all panting and yet somehow exultant. From the other end of the square now burst the police and the fire-engines, dramatic and noise-bearing as a whole opera. It was time to shrink back into the shadows and disappear. They left the old sofa sitting there in the light snowfall.

Events had moved so fast and so dramatically that they themselves were quite out of breath with astonishment at what they had done. “What will you do with it?” cried Sutcliffe now, aware that they could hardly house it in their little hotel, and she thought fiercely for a moment, her pale face bowed. They were already walking fast, almost running, towards their hotel, trying to select untroubled streets where they would not meet patrols. Friends were waiting for them at the hotel – among them the Slav girl – and they ordered coffee in the tiny shabby lounge where they would, as was customary, hear an account of the day’s happenings both in the capital and in the world – the outer world which loomed over their daily minds like a storm cloud. “Whatever happens we must keep it,” said Pia decisively, in the middle of a conversation about something else; and he knew she meant this stupid old sofa for which he himself felt nothing. Had she gone mad? He asked her, but she was already explaining what they had done to her friend whose face lit up with a triumphant and generous approval. The two women, he thought, were as superstitious as savages. What would they plan next?

The outcome was even more unexpected than he had any reason to suppose. Medical students, friends of the Slav, now arrived upon the scene, and they warmly approved of this absolutely medieval gesture. (They would be selling indulgences next!) They were young and impetuous and determined to rescue the totem. The only problem was to decide what should be done with it. There were several lines of thought. One wished to give it houseroom in his flat, another thought it should be carted to the Faculty and placed in the hall – but of course the medical authorities, who had hardly heard of Freud, would have had a fit at the very suggestion. Suddenly Pia pronounced upon the matter with so much vehemence that everyone knew that she would not be gainsaid. “It is mine,” she said, “and I intend to keep it. I shall send it to my brother in Avignon. I have quite decided.” There was no more to say; all that was left was to decide upon the details of transport – how the devil could one send a sofa? Obviously by rail. Yes, but what about transport to the station? Here one of the students, who worked part-time with an undertaker, suggested that he borrow the hearse to transport the holy relic. “Yes! Yes!” she cried and clapped her hands exultantly. “That is what we must do. I shall telephone to him tonight.”

So it was that, at five in the morning, Mr. Sutcliffe found himself seated with an air of ludicrous amazement in a large black hearse, in front of what to the average passer-by must have seemed something like a very large corpse wrapped up in a brown-paper parcel. They had indeed enveloped the charred old article in several layers of brown paper, the better to label it, and to their surprise there seemed to be no problem about sending it. It would await arrival in Avignon.

Blanford had followed all this hazily, through the heavy meshes of his dream, and he conveyed his approval of the whole initiative through the usual channels – the pulse-beat of the blood. But he had decided that Constance must have the relic, not Piaj; and as he carried more weight in everything to do with real reality, he knew that he could override the present decision, and persuade a carter to take charge of the sofa and ferry it up, not to Verfeuille but to Tu Duc. He said as much and to his surprise Sutcliffe did not demur – it was a measure of his indifference to the relic. He had come to hate the whole science of psychowhatsit, which promised the moon and came unstuck at every corner.

“Very well,
maître,”
he said ironically, “if you say so. How is Paris treating you?”

“A pleasing priapism rules the waves,” said his incoherent and maundering
alter ego
or
summum bonum
. “The croissants are brown as mahogany. I saw her at dusk, reading in a public garden, and I longed to approach her and ask where she had been. She had disappeared for nearly a week. But I dared not. I sat on an adjacent bench and told myself that it was not her, it was just someone who resembled her. She was reading one of my unwritten novels – with pious intensity. Beside her lay a bag with a half-eaten croissant in it. She was sunk in profound thought, I could see that, and would certainly be sulky if approached. I closed my eyes and waited. When at last she got up to go I saw that indeed it was not her but someone who resembled her. The discarded paper bag lay where she had abandoned it. I scattered the croissant for the birds and went home by the lake in order not to give her the illusion of spying on her. But of course when I got back there was, as usual, nobody at the flat.”

Little grains of splendour,

Little knobs of lust,

Make a writer tremble,

Loving is a must

Nor can he dissemble

When his heart is bust.

Let all young women bring me their emulsion,

Gods are born thus with every fond convulsion!

THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA!

He went on foundering more and more deeply in these patches of dream-nightmares which stretched away on all sides of him to the horizon, feeling his mind being feverishly ransacked by the combined fevers of medicine and alcohol. The dark streets of Vienna had been replaced by Paris. Night-watchmen everywhere, a tribe of scowling lurkers, loveless as poets whose minds had become viscous with fatigue, waiting for dawn. Broken glasses, club feet,
arthritis deformans
, huge clubbed thumbs. He kept waving his arms and protesting, trying to obliterate these images of menace, but they persisted, they gained on him.

His eventual release from hospital, albeit rather reluctant, was something that he simply had to accept – it would have been malingering to stay comfortably between the sheets with nothing worse than post-alcoholic depression and a touch of shock. The kindly taximan who had knocked him down came to see him and offered him a free ride back into his
quartier
. The young doctor, who was called Bruce, saw no objection. The hospital cashed his cheque without a tremor, leaving him enough change to resume civilian life once more, so to speak. Back then to the empty flat, deposited at the Dôme by his kindly overturner. But once home he became suddenly aware of his weakness, and sat down on the unmade bed with a thump; his desolation continued to manufacture discordant images of loss, but they were more inconsequential now and less forceful. Where could he find some rest – the loneliness in this little box-like flat was intolerable. If he went back to the Coupole or the Sphinx he would be undone. He hid therefore in a local cinema, feeling the fleas jumping about his thighs while he watched the amours of that most congenial of all funny men, W. C. Fields. “Dharling banana, where’s your sense of humour? Fragrant yam, you are my dish.” Wondering vaguely – the subtitles were hairy with age – how all this would translate. Provide your own version.
“Clafoutis imberbe! Potiron du jour!”
When at last he struggled to his feet and sought the exit, night had already fallen, the mauve-magenta night which was part street-lamp and part aerial radiation of white light against the blue-black sky of cheap fur. He was hungry; he scuttled to the Dôme and ate bacon and eggs with energy, gazing round with distaste at all the other representatives of the arts and crafts who surrounded him. Pride of lions, skirl of loafers, extravagance of poets. No, he would go far away, he would eat liquid mud on toast in far-away Turkish khans. Far far from the dungy altars of the Nonconformist mind. He would order a clyster for all parish Prousts of the Charing Cross Road. He would … On the cusp of a mere nod the waiter replenished his glass. He realised that he was still calamitously drunk in a reactivated sort of way. His blood coursed. He was surrounded by Africans with beautiful fuzzy heads and booming tones. They had all come to Paris to gather culture. Here they were, screaming for worm-powders. What was to be done? Great sweet turbines of black flesh innocently cutting slices of Keats or Rimbaud for their evening meal. A wholesome cannibalism when you thought of it.
O Grand Sphincterie des Romains!
O spice routes of the poetic mind which lead to the infernal regions below the subliminal threshold. Metaphors too big for their boots, literature of the S-bend. Wind in an old chimney – fatherly flatus? He should be more modern, go into business.

To shit, to codify a business lunch

A pint of lager and a brunch.

He had ordered various things for which the tally of saucers did not work, so the waiter had issued him with little price slips. It was on one of these that he jotted down a few figures, trying during a coherent patch in his thoughts to mobilise his reason and estimate what his expenses might be when he left Paris on the morrow, as he now intended to do. When it came to pay the waiter tore up these slips as he cleared the table. Then he noticed that they were scribbled over and he turned pale.
“O Monsieur!’
he exclaimed, beside himself with vexation,
“j’ai déchiré vos brouillons!”
He was under the impression that he had inadvertently destroyed the rough notes of some foreign poet of genius. His confusion was touching, his relief when he was reassured on the point, hardly less genuine. Blanford realised that he was madly in love with Paris. He had much to learn from these extraordinary people, for whom the word artist meant so much.

He felt steadier now in wind and limb, and visited the garage where he had left his car, to reassure himself about the servicing, and as to whether he might find it available for him at six in the morning, for he planned to make an early start and perhaps lie for the night at Lyon. All was in order, happily.

He went for one last drink to the Sphinx with the intention of bidding the Martiniquaise goodbye – with the present ambiguous and ill-regulated state of affairs he felt that he should really tell her of his movements, in case Livia reappeared and wished to know where he might be found. But the girl was not there that evening, she had gone to the cinema, though nobody knew which. He wrote her a message and left it with the presiding Mama who regally accepted to see it delivered. Then he drank his drink and departed, making his way back to the sad little flat, so empty now of resonance and tone – as if even its memories of the events which had taken place within its walls had gone dead and stale.

Nor could he sleep – images floated him beyond reach of it. He was hunting down the great rat of the emotions with a heavy stick in a dark house, creeping from staircase to staircase, pausing to listen from time to time. The night was full of the noise of cats feasting on garbage and each other – stale cats, the fitting symbol for temple women, all faceless claws and minds and civet. He threw up the window and stuck his face against the sky – the whole of space, sick as an actress, living in a state of permanent and thoughtless manifestation. He would be glad to get away from the Sphinx where trusting little Benzedrine Papadopoulos opened her twiggy legs to show a black bushy slit with a red silk lining. Farewell to Livia and the dry copyists’ succinct word for craving – four letters beginning with L. Avignon radiated the memory of peace and contentment, and tomorrow he would be on the road once more.