The Black Book (20 page)

We slide off the arterial by Banbury, and down the gravel lanes, infinitely serpentine and bumpy. The avenue of chestnuts hides the old mill. A hunchback bridge in red stone. Lolling over, as the springs toss noiselessly, we can hear the clean thumping of the millwheel, sinking to a bass hubbub, and then gone, switched off, snuffed. We do not speak any more except by the language of action. The hedges are alive with insects, and visible drafts of honeysuckle.

The car becomes all of a sudden a gauche relic of another world. A preglacial monstrosity with its sweaty stink of petrol, and hot injections of oil on air so pure. We ditch it in a gravel pit and run out together, hand in hand, spontaneously, down the slopes past the Duke of Cumberland. Yes, downhill in a kind of hectic nympholepsy, the grass snapping at our ankles, the clouds deafening us, and the distant cathedral spire swimming up as if to impale us. The seven winds drummed while we were coming. Now they are silent. Our ears are alert, twisted into little helices of attention, but the valley offers no sound. It lies there like a toy.

We are transfigured, burst open and relieved. We have penetrated the outpost and entered into the novelty of Tarquin's vivid death. It is hard to believe, so I do not mention it. If you can understand the fable that this country is creating around us without drawing on false sentiment, you are to be congratulated. For we have become suddenly heraldic here, where the sunshine plays like august lions and the river rides like a clean collar among the parklands. A hectic post-existence, say, in the ballet of countryside, among the Georgian houses weathered to blood, myopic peacocks, dirigible napery of floccus. It is when I think of what the result was that I am disgusted by the energy we spent, the passion, the tears—to produce this music, which he plays to us one winter evening. Tarquin throwing himself into an interesting attitude, holding the sign manual of death in his fingers.

To England
should have been an abstract of all the hours we spent together in elegy. In a decorated world, confused by banality, by tears and recriminations, they should still put forth an image in the music: as faded photos, or pressed leaves in a book, can surprise by their evocations.

That night, huddled by the fire, listening to the tone poem, its melodic squirts, its lapses into pathos, I realized that he had not managed to translate his legend of death. The death under the shield had become the death of a Wagnerian swan: a romantic confection—the one thing he was trying not to do. The piano was full of galvanic ballerinas, falling in splashes of fluffy extinction around him. The swan with the goitre singing Wagner, its arse keeping time, its mouth full of toothpaste. But the real—death if you like (these abstractions bore me), the doom which he saw settling down over England, which we smelled out and reported true for him—that he has missed. I suppose he will never be able to create it, because he is too much a part of that declension himself. And dead men tell no tales. But when I see the material, the rough slag lying ready to hand, the exploded components of a world gathered ready for the artist—then I am ashamed. If there were not other things to be done, I would try myself. Sheerly punctilio, as it were, dedicated to a rape under a cherry tree and the smell of sperm; and that incomprehension in your eyes. Magic, you say, it was magical? The past is always magical. Store me the images in a velvet casket among the letters with ribbon round them. If I began would you hold the bucket under my head for the vomit of Englishry—the images?

When the children are silent I sit and brood over the crude magma which we wasted on Tarquin. The manufacture of death, if you please, with a few chromatic runs and tremors. If I could write I would gather a mouthful of bone-dry fiddles harsh as scrannel, and out of their monotonous algebra construct a theme. A dry contrapuntal rasping of marsh toads. Nothing should escape, nothing. Every wrinkle of the motor cortex translated into this withered, picric, asp-dry fiddling; every convolution of the brain fibrous with music …

(The Friary where the Middle Ages chops wood. An immense man, bearded to the navel, with laughter like the north wind, and hands of horn. Bones which manipulate the creased flesh with difficulty, as if in gloves. The folded effigies in the crypt among garnished floors and ancient bones, weeping and sweating between cold walls like paralytics agonized for movement. Jesu, Jesu, in the rich hymn, crawling up the walls, putting invisible rings round the pillars, until the doleful arches respond, in diminishing polyphony, “Jesu, Jesu,” and the choir is shaken with sobs—blanched almonds—and the candles go out, and the Thing walks.

In the charnel house lanterns smearing chrome along the walls, where the dance of death twitches men by the ankles, or an invisible hand shuts off the draughts of air to their lungs. The Middle Ages holds his lantern for us to see; an imperturbable Noah, secure in his Ark of salvation. His voice can laugh in this place without fiction, and the north wind blows in and out of his nostrils. Here is enough matter to assemble a hundred poets, a hundred thousand cabinet ministers, a tithe of whores, a swath of pimps, a bevy of ladies, a congregation of plovers, an exalting of larks, a true-love of turtles, a chirm of goldfinches, a rout of nights, a pride of lions, a state of princes, a charge of curates, a prudence of vicars, a superfluity of nuns. When the gates are locked at night, and the Friary sleeps, the figure steps down off the walls and begins to assemble them, numberless bodies, false arms, false legs, wrong jaw and backbone (shaking the serpents from them)… But what matter? I imagine always Schiller's beautiful teeth, grinning at the lanterns, his head turned this way and that in the first of friends. A ventriloquist idiocy, but no fard on the taut bones of the cheek.

In the Friary we drink valedictory ales, thin but good, and say good-bye all round. A great air of tranquillity about the pointed buildings, printing on heaven; Noah lumbering at my side with the keys. Outside in the road the car waits.)

The three of us are hunched in the front seat of the car together, and Lobo is speaking suddenly, with a kind of panic, about death, and women. How he could never marry. When he was at school history frightened him, he couldn't think or speak. And when his sister died he went running down the road to Juanita, and fell on the bed, trembling, until she put her hand on him, and drew the panic out of him. They were both trembling as they came in the aura of death, the positive affliction of stillness. The twin pins of the headlights swirling away towards London; and we three, hunched over the engine like witches over a cauldron, while the hills retreated in the distance, and the road was bitten into slopes and crevices. New pairs of lights came out of nothing to meet us and all the while he talked superstitiously of Ponce de León, lying down there in some coral grot, with sea slugs in his eye sockets, and his armour gnawed by water; and the new world opening from his navel like a gash in the womb of humanity. All the salt in the Dead Sea could not weep it away, or recall the enterprise which had caused it; and in some way all this—his ideas of the Pacific falling away among the sands and armour and pikes and burntsienna ruddocks; and a skeleton of Ponce de León, clothed in water, flesh dispersed, his skull a birdcage for hermit crabs—all this, I say, seemed to have some relation to the charnel house with its heaps of puzzled bones lying in jigsaws all around. Why, I cannot tell. But all deaths were made real by that visit of ours. Its scope included every example of the human machine's ceasing. Where he saw Ponce de León, I could see those millions of others, the puzzled apemen prodding flesh, or grunting under memorial granite. The Mediterranean deep-water bursting with the bones of seamen and fishermen. Bubbles in streamers easing from the throats of Greeks. The continents rising at the tap of my companion's hammer, obedient as elephants, to crush down the drifting slosh of bodies into a convenient pulp. All this vast energy hangs behind his legendary voice; like some immense paper mill sucking in refuse, old strips of rag and street flotsam, the planet softens us all into scurf, mashes and flattens and gouges the unfeeling vessels into conveniences, and then from the matrix produces and creates and endless roll of toilet paper, coupons, poppies, doilies, cartons, cellophane. “Why do we want to live?” he asks nervously. He is thinking of the age I can see: the refuse going into mill and being converted into the twentieth-century symbol of death. It is useless. Death takes us one by one. What do we leave for your children, etc.? When Juanita had her first child she was transfigured, swollen with delight and anguish. She became like an animal. She wouldn't sell herself to anyone. “It belongs to him, see? Everything I've got belongs to him. My Juan. If you had married me and the child was yours I would share him with you.” He tells me this with tragic sorrow. He would hang around her lodging. If he could be alone with her he would try to feel her breasts, and she would shake him off with savagery and disgust. The child!
El hombre que ha hecho esto
etc. etc. Sometimes in the night he gets her scent again, and he could kill himself. I am reminded of Marney in the upper room, repeating over and over again, in that strangled duke's voice:
esta hoy mas enferma,
or some such oracular glyph, the meaning of which I long to know. Or Eustace squeezing out his spots in the mirror before going home to lunch. If he doesn't do it, he says, his wife will do it for him. The glass is covered with little spurts of pus which harden, and which he will scrape off with his fingernail when the visibility gets impaired by them. All this is mixed in the image of the paper mill, the planet killing us, and reincarnating us in pulp and discards. Alamort, alamort.

But even Ponce de León fades when, that evening, we three weary travellers creep into the crowded Abbey pews, weary with the exploration of ourselves—the old world of the self—and stand, our faces turned one way, like blind things, under the wild concord of music playing along the slats of the organ pipes. And from the pulpit the derision of a single voice, plump and round with practice, intoning, forever intoning, until our souls are sick and begin to reel under the sheer pressure of pomp. Light, high up there, where the slender pillars buttress one another, fossilized swans, falling in diaper and arc and floss: now crisscross, now lateral, now shafted, coiled, pendent, leaning: O Jesu, Jesu, enough to make the crypt sweat and the autumn cinquefoils flutter among the graves. Our sweet white choir hanging to each note like synchronized corpses in a gallow dance. Breaking rollers of sound, crushed like perfume across the poor shabby things which creep in here like rats, to snap and choke on the poisoned bait. The communion bowl awash with a red sea of bacteria from mouth to mouth slopping dismally; the wafer sticking like gelatin to the roof of the mouth. And above all this noise, above the noise swarming from rafter to batlike rafter, from beam to bolt to nut to beam to bolt to nut to beam, the roar of the chorale; until the sympathetic metal whines along the pulpit, and the whole catacomb tilts, struggling, swarming with our clamant souls, sick for sanctuary, with a “Jesu, Jesu” downward into the bottomless basin where the white Thing washes its feet among the lilies—and the pontifical catamites lower, and set up a whizzing like gnats.…

The negress is clutching my hand, terrified by these barbarities, like a child. The light of the cross is shining on Lobo, in his eyes, on his forehead, like a brand. Everywhere we are surrounded by insects in white. Anselm is standing before the face of the Lord in his dancing fighter's stance, his great golls working like pistons, his jaw like a ham, his eyes pure shrapnel in their black orbits, Anselm clean of the clap and the drink, fighting the good fight with all his might among the soutanes. It doesn't matter, he is telling me in a whisper. It doesn't matter. Juanita burned up her sugar too fast, her teeth fell out, her eyes swelled up. He is terrified the negress will understand what we are saying, but she is in a fright at the Host; her ears are laid back like a whippet's. I am afraid at any moment she will streak for the black doors. He would never have married her anyway, so it didn't matter. In the name of the father, son, and Holy Ghost. Yes, it was only accident they met. He never really cared a damn for her, as her. It was only that she was there at every crisis in life, so that after a while it seemed that he would never be free of her. One is never free of one's past. Amen. She had become, by identification, everything, Lima, the dead sister, the panic, the gulls; and now among the northern ruins he turned back to her, regressed, whimpered for her like a child. Amen.

Afterwards, when we go out through the great doors, it is as if the night had burst open in a dark fruit, so immense and pithy it is, so silent and unshaken. I know then there are no questions to be asked any more, there are no queries to be put to the Host. Everything is washed clean in the stream of faces from the gold doors, the beards, the sacristan, the verger, the whore, the fillock, the slut, the gentry-mort, and the lusk. The light is leaking out among the blue gravestones. Sacred to the memory of Lawrence Lucifer who died this day of August. Offer a candle or a sprig of holly. I am a gnarled backbone of stone, speaking in many hectic lichens, a remote powder in a sheath of tepid lead, out of the reach of iambs or fugue. The whole question, in essence, is acceptance, the depersonalization of self, of the society which one has absorbed. It is not only a question of art, but a question of life. You are altered, affected, transmuted by this orientation. Whatever was your antecedent, your history, that no longer matters to me. I can no longer whimper when your head goes down like a hammer on the white pillow. The strange accidents of bone, the syntax of muscle and cartilage, exist in a relation to something that is no longer history or ideals.

“Lie down and die, frail helmet of dust,” I wrote once; and dying that way you were Sappho, you were Beatrice, curling up like a petal in an Egyptian evening. Death among tombs. Death like the salt whips and discord of the winter sea on the first day of desire. Yes, I am serious. What you are now is a lowest common denominator, agonizingly held for an hour in my vise of bone and blood. Believe me, I have taken nothing from you; or rather, by taking everything from you—everthing irrelevant, confusing, historical—I have made such an unbearable poignance of you, that just to try and utter it would send me mad. That part of what remains, when cupid's loaves and fishes are gathered up, I keep always inside me, like a reserve of strength. I need it in life. I cannot destroy it by writing it—and destroying myself in a pattern of contagious syllables for the dull world. Never, I promise you, never. That much belongs to life. Amen.