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Authors: Lawrence Durrell

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“The presence of oneself!” That is how he begins. “The eternal consciousness of oneself in substance and in psyche. The eternal consciousness of that shadow which hangs behind my shoulder, watching me flourish my ink on this nude paper. What a recipe for immortality! The one self and the other, like twin generals divided in policy, bungling a war. The eternal, abhorrent presence of oneself.” Small green writing, like lacework on the tough pages of the black dummy. Who Gregory
was
I have not properly discovered yet. This tiny basement room was evidently his. At some epoch in history he vanished, leaving behind him a few gross of torn papers, Latin classics, gramophone records, teacups. On the title-page of this book, undated, is the inscription:
Death Gregory, Esq. To his most esteemed and best beloved self, dat dedicatque.
Oblivion has swallowed up this chance eviction, and there remains only the queer speckled personality of this tome, so durable and recent in age (for Tarquin and Clare and Lobo exist here) that it suggests recent visitations. “I cannot be older than a thousand years. I am not speaking of my isolation as yet, which is six by three. The isolation of a coffin. The isolation of a gargoyle hung over a sleeping city.”

The isolation of the snow, he would have added, if he were turning the pages today. The isolation in which the hotel broods, like a baroque incubus.

Here begins an extract from Gregory's diary:

The question with which I trouble myself is the question of the ego, the little me. The I, sitting here in this fuggy room, like a little red-haired, skullcapped Pope, insulting myself in green ink. The red dwarf, the lutin, the troll—the droll and abhorrent self!

Sweets to the sweet. To Lobo sensual lust. And for the journalist inevitably, a journal. A journal! What a delicious excursion it sounds! The path lies ready, the fruit grows on the hedgesides. But the stupendous arrogance of such a record! What should it contain, then? A pedestrian reckoning by the sun, or aphoristic flights, or a momentous study of my excretions covering years? A digest of all three, perhaps. One can hardly tell. No matter. Let us begin with Lobo. To insects sensual lust. And to Lobo a victory over the female, because that is what he wants. I say victory but I mean a rout: a real beating up of his natural enemy, who degrades him by the fact that she carries the puissant, the all-conquering talisman of the vagina about with her. If it were possible to invent a detached vagina, which has an effective life of its own, then Lobo would be a profound misogynist, I am sure.

But consider him, as he sits there, working over the enormous parchment chart of South London. Consider the lily. Every week after a certain lecture, he takes it down from the wall, and gets busy on it with his tools: compasses, protractors, dividers, his India ink which hardens in shining lines along the thoroughfares; his pencil box full of rubbers, tapes, stamps. On the black wood is a garish cockatoo. This reminds him of Peru, though why, he cannot think. In his childhood there were boxes of oranges with this bird painted on them. Perhaps that is the reason. But it reminds him of Lima, sitting out there on the map, a beautiful grey husk of life. Lima, with the parrots and the oranges, and the almond-eyed whores, and the cathedrals, delicate, delicate. I invent this, because though he is incapable of saying it to me, yet he feels it. Dust, the eternal dust along the highroad, and the hucksters, and fine swish motorcars, and lerv. The facile, hot Latin lerv, with its newt's eyes fixed on anyone ready to ease you of a thimbleful of sperm. Sunlight along the lips of the shutters, or the guitars wombing over the Rimac, hot and seasoned. And the sour booming of many steeples, Santo Domingo, San Augustin, La Merced. He imitates their hollow noises, raising his hand and keeping himself in time with his memories.

Fascinating to watch him sitting there, this little brown man, penning his map; his thin girl's fingers with their unpressed cuticles carefully unstopping bottles, cleaning nibs, clutching a penholder as they move forward to letter or draw. Lobo is as much of an enigma to me as this fantastic locality of blind houses and smoke which he is drawing must be to him.

Perhaps the remark about the insect was a little strong, for it is not my business to raise my own standards to the height of an impartial canon. But it seems to me accurate. The female is a catalyst, unrelated to life, to anything but this motor necessity which grows greater day by day. Lobo! Perhaps this all has something to do with his homesickness, his Latin tears and glooms. What I am concerned with is the enigma, not these erotic manoeuvres, all carried out on the plane of nervy, febrile social welfare; the kind of thing Laclos did so vividly. “My God,” he says sometimes, “I think
never
to go with womans any more, never. Why is the mystery? Afterwards what? You are dead, you are disgust.
Smell!
It is impossible. I go along the road, pure as a Catholic, then I see a woman look to me and …” His heavy head bends lower over the chart; the compressions gather in the cheeks under his bossy Inca nose; he is silent, and it is a little difficult to find anything to say in reply.

Lobo has the fascination of an ancient stamp for me. I can't get past the thought of this little Latin fellow sitting in his room night after night, working like Lucifer for his degree; and all the while his mind riddled with thoughts of home, like a pincushion. He admits it. “It is my home makes me blue, dear friend. I think in bed of Peru many night and I cannot sleep. I put the wireless till twelve. Then I go mad almost. That bitch nex' door. I can kill her when I am alone. Listen. Last night I made a little deceit for her. Truly. I weeped in the night. It was quiet. I weeped a little louder. Nothing. I weeped like hell. Really I was lonely, it was true, but not real the tears. I could not make the real tears. Listen, I heard her put the light and sit in the bed looking. I went on with the tears. Then she speaks:
Who is it
? I was not knowing how to speak. I had no words. Soon she put off the light and lay. No good. I ran to the door and knock it very quietly. I say,
It's only me, Miss Venable.
Nothing. I tap tap tap but nothing. I was angry. I sniff like hell, but nothing. No good. The dirty bitch. After that I went to bed and really weep, I wet the pillow all through, I am so angry I could kill.” His eyes dilate earnestly under the sooty lashes. At such memories he becomes pure emotional idealism. Like the Virgin Mary. He will cut himself one of these days for lerv, he says. I confess I did not know what this phrase meant until the night of the festival, when we returned at three to drink a final nightcap in his room. He was pretty drunk.

“Know what I do when a man make me angry?” he asked. He explored the washstand drawer and appeared before me with a knife in his right hand. He was so gentle and friendly that for a second I was afraid. “See this,” he said, and handed it to me as simply as a girl. It was an enormous folding knife, sharpened to great keenness.

“I cut him,” said Lobo unsteadily.

Taking it from me he divided the air which separated us neatly into four portions, grinned beatifically, and replaced the weapon in its secret hiding place. When he talks like this, then, it is an enraged hara-kiri that he plans—or a murder.

But confidence for confidence Lobo finds me a very unsatisfactory person. My humility devastates him. Particularly my complete ignorance on the subject of women. He says in tones of gravity and wonder: “You? A man of forty, an Englishman?” Really, to be frank, if one must be frank, I have had few and unsatisfactory experiences in this direction. Literary affairs with aging Bohemians, in which my ability to compare the style of Huxley to that of Flaubert was considered more important, even in bed, than physical gifts; a stockbroker's widow; an experimental affair with an experimental painter, in which, again, our mutual respect for the volumetric proportions of Cézanne's canvases was almost our only bond. Affinities, you might say. I suppose in this direction I must be rather a dead battery until I meet Grace. Lobo is bored. An Englishman of forty? Well it must have been forty years in the wilderness for all the adventures I can recount. Never mind. I comfort myself with Pascal's remark about the thinking reed.

Chamberlain is not less scathing. This canary-haired zealot, living in one of the flats nearby with a young wife and three dogs, spends his moments happily lecturing us one such esoteric subjects. “Sex, sex, sex,” he exclaims roundly, his manner closely modelled on the style of Lawrence's letters. “When will we get the bastards to realize?” Fraternizing in the bar-room among the blue spittoons. He is powerful and convincing, standing over his bitter, and appealing to his wife for support, “Glory be to hip, buttock, loin,
more ferarum, bestiarum,
uterine toboggan, and the whole gamut of physical fun. Don't you think? What about more bowels of compassion, tenderness, and the real warmth of the guts, eh?”

Really I am scalded by this curious Salvation Army line of talk. Bad taste. Bad taste. Tarquin winces and bleats whenever Chamberlain gets started.

“Let us invent a new order of marriage to revive the dead. Have another beer. Let us start a new theory of connubial copulation which will get the world properly fucked for a change. Tarquin, you're not listening to me, damn you.”

Tarquin bleats: “Oh, do stop forcing these silly ideas on one, Chamberlain. You simply won't admit other people's temperamental differences. Shut up.”

He is mopping the froth off his beer with a discoloured tongue. Chamberlain turns to his wife, who is standing, breathing quietly, like a big retriever: “What do you think? Tell me.” She prefers to smile and ponder rather than think. “There,” says Chamberlain in triumph, “she agrees.”

“All this damned sexual theorizing,” moans Tarquin. “Don't you think, Gregory? I mean damn it!”

“Don't you agree with him,” says Chamberlain. “Now, Gregory, you're quite a good little fellow on your own.”

“Young man,” I say weakly.

“Oh, I know you're a patriarch in years, but that's mere chronology. You need to grow a bit.”

“Oh, do stop,” says Tarquin, acutely miserable.

“The trouble with you, my dear,” says Chamberlain, “is that you're still fighting through the dead mastoid. Now what you need …”

And so on. One revolts from transcribing any more of his chat, because it becomes infectious after a time. His personality is attractive enough to make any dogma plausible and compelling to the imagination. As for Lobo, they spend hours quarrelling about themes domestic and erotic. This always ends in trouble. “Listen, Baudelaire,” says Chamberlain, “you've got yourself up a tree. Climb down and take a look round you.” When he really wants to frighten the Spaniard he suggests calling his wife in and putting these problems before her. This is hideous. Lobo's sense of chivalry squirms at the idea. Tearfully, under his sentimental eyelashes, he says, after Chamberlain has gone: “A beast? Eh? He is beastly. Doesn't he have the finer feelings? His poor wife, like a prostitute in his home. It is terrible, terrible. He only understands the prostitute, not the
real
woman. He is terrible.” And a string of Spanish oaths.

Fog over the gardens. Fog, marching down among the pines, making dim stone those parcels of Greek statuary. In the distance trains burrowing their tunnels of smoke and discord. Lights shine out wanly against the buildings. The red-nosed commercials will be lining up in the bar for their drinks. I can see the whisky running into their red mouths, under the tabby whiskers, like urine. I sit here, in the shadow of the parchment chart, smoking, and eating the soft skin on the sides of my cheeks. The customary madness of the suburban evening comes down over us in many enormous yawns. Ennui. “We do not exist,” says Tarquin. “We do not exist; we are fictions.” And frankly this idea is not as outrageous as it sounds. Toward evening, when I walk down the row of suburban houses, watching the blinds lowered to salute the day's death, with no companion but that municipal donkey the postman, I find myself in a world of illusion whose furniture
can
only be ghosts. In the lounge the veterans sit like Stonehenge under the diffuse light of the lamps. Old women stuck like clumps of cactus in their chairs.
The Times
is spread out over the dead, like washing hung out on bushes to dry. Footsteps and voices alike trodden out in the dusty carpets; and the faint aeolian sofas appealing to the statues. Night. The clock whirrs inside its greenhouse of glass, and the Japanese fans breathe a soft vegetable decay into the room. There is nothing to do, nothing to be done.

In the flat that my body inhabits, the silence is sometimes so heavy that one has the sensation of wading through it. Looking up from the book to hear the soft spondees 6f the gas fire sounding across nothingness, I am suddenly aware of the lives potential in me which are wasting themselves. It is a fancy of mine that each of us contains many lives, potential lives. They are laid up inside us, shall we say, like so many rows of shining metals—railway lines. Riding along one set toward the terminus, we can be aware of those other lines, alongside us, on which we might have travelled—on which we might yet travel if only we had the strength to change. You yawn? This is simply my way of saying I am lonely. It is in these movements, looking up to find the whole night gathered at my elbow, that I question the life I am leading, and find it a little lacking. The quiet statement of a woman's laugh, breaking from the servants' rooms across the silence, afflicts me. I consider myself gravely in mirrors these days. I wear my skullcap a trifle grimly, as if in affirmation of the life I have chosen. Yet at night sometimes I am aware, as of an impending toothache, of the gregarious fibre of me. Dear me. This is becoming fine writing in the manner of the Sitwells. But let me discuss myself a little in green ink, since no one takes the trouble to do so in words of more than one syllable. In the first place, my name is not
Death,
as it ought to be, but
Herbert.
The disgusting, cheesy, Pepysian sort of name which I would pay to change if I were rich enough. Death is part of the little charade I construct around myself to make my days tolerable.
Death Gregory
! How livid the name shines on the title-page of this tome. Borrowed plumes, I am forced to admit in this little fit of furious sincerity. Borrowed from Tourneur or Marston. No matter. The show must go on.

BOOK: The Black Book
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