The Avignon Quintet (13 page)

Infants are smooth and lack all swank They only have themselves to thank.

Language is all very fine and we cannot do without it but it is at the same time the worst invention of man, corrupting silence, tearing petals off the whole mind. The longer I live the more ashamed I get.

Sorrow is implicit in love as gravitation is implicit in mass.

The mechanism of causality is mighty and mathematically quite inexorable even for mental phenomena.

I sat there among these fragments of the great puzzle of Rob’s unfinished novel whose dismembered fragments littered the muniments room, and heard Toby picking and picking out his one-fingered tune, merciless as a woodpecker. “Sylvie.” She raised her dark head and gazed at me abstractedly, her eyes still full of playing cards and their magic. “Did Piers tell you …?” It was stupid of me to broach the subject at this moment, and Toby gave a grimace of displeasure. But she behaved as if she had not heard. But a moment later she said: “He had considered every possible issue before deciding that he must stick to the rules. His heart was set on it.”

“On what, Sylvie?”

She produced a sad little smile and I could see that she had slipped, so to speak, off the time-track again and into the solipsism of childhood. I put the papers on the table and she read off a phrase from one of them in a low voice: “Me he will devour in the next life whose flesh I eat in this.” I wondered where Piers had found that quotation for his commonplace book; also a verse by a forgotten Elizabethan:

And so it grew and grew

And bore and bore

Until at length it

Grew a gallows that did bear our son.

It must have struck his mind as a reference to her child, Sylvie’s child. She shook the hair out of her eyes and said: “Remember the song the Templars sang?” I shook my head, but truthfully, for I did not know what she meant. In a small ghostly voice she sang “Oranges and Lemons, say the bells of Saint Clements.” A well-enough known nursery song, though I had never heard that it was originated by the Templars. She was very earnest now, and very solemn in her dreamy way, and as the words of the song flowed out she began to enact the scene of the nursery game which we had all played when we were little. “Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head, chop, chop, chop, chop …” With joined fingers she executed a long line of children – guillotine fashion. Then she stopped dead, entranced, gazing at nothing or perhaps only the projection of her private thoughts on the white wall. Then she said: “Everything that happened began at Macabru, you know that. Piers knew it. Macabru changed everything.”

I waited painfully for something further to emerge from this unsatisfactory meeting, but nothing more came; and soon the nurse came with her medicines and the little trolley with the frugal dinner of the patient. Jourdain, too, came and reminded us that we were his guests that evening. He was delighted to see Toby again. But Sylvie was now withdrawn, silent, in the Trappe of her private mind. “In the perspex cube of an unshakable autism.” I stroked her hair and said goodbye, but she did not even look up.

In Jourdain’s study, on his desk, lay the smart black velvet casket with the death-mask. It was at once like and unlike Piers – as though time had played tricks on the image like it plays on memories, distorting them. I think these thoughts might have passed through the doctor’s mind as well for he said: “There always seems to be a shrinkage after death, which has puzzled me repeatedly. The image withers up. I have even tried weighing several people after death to see if this is imaginary or real. Does the personality actually weigh something? Because when it is emptied out a vast disorganisation starts, and the first sign of it is a kind of diminishing. But this is an illusion, the weight does not change.” He was right, for the face of Piers looked shrunk, famished, reduced. Jourdain closed the casket with a snap and said: “Well, there it is. It’s yours.” I thanked him for having thought about the matter. No doubt one day, in the fulness of time, when we had got over the pangs, the first gnawing pangs of his death, it would be pleasant to have him there, in a favourite corner of the room, on a writing desk, in sunlight. I thought for a long moment about the equivocal and enigmatic quality of love and a phrase from a novel by Rob came to mind – Piers had copied it out. “In our age too much freedom has destroyed the fragile cobweb which gave the great human attachments their form and substance – their truth. Health rages in us like a toothache, but fine styles in living, as in writing, have been overtaken by loutishness.”

And what of Macabru?

Two

Macabru

T
HE FOUR RIDERS, ONE OF THEM A WOMAN, WHO SET
off that noon from the Canopic Gate were as young as their mettlesome longlegged horses. The party was guided by a decrepit one-eyed Arab on a somewhat capricious white camel. They were heading for an oasis called Macabru which lay some way to the east of Alexandria. Yes, we were all four somewhat new to the place, and as yet very much under the spell of its skies and its vistas of many-coloured desert – here and there soothed out so like curls freshly combed: here and there so like fresh snow, bearing the perfect imprints of animals’ paws and of birds’ claws. As a matter of fact Sylvie had only recently arrived to stay with her brother at the French Legation, while I was putting up our friend Toby who was on his way back from Palestine to Oxford after a spell of disappointment with his Bible studies. “The more I learn about Our Saviour the less I like him. I am not going to take that sort of Holy Orders anyway.” This was his most recent theme; but in fact already his addiction to drink had marked him down as rather a questionable candidate for the priesthood. When tipsy he was capable of saying anything to anyone, and if it happened to be one of his examiners? At any rate he was one of the four riders – the most amateurish I would suppose, sitting his horse gracelessly, with splayed bottom and toes turned out. He was a very large young man, his face burnt beetroot by the sun, his ears sticking out steeply – which gave him the air of trying to overhear what was being said a mile away. Thick spectacles broke up his features into reflecting planes. His sandy hair stuck out or fell down in his eyes when it needed cutting. He smelt of Lifebuoy soap and exuded a clumsy but effervescent goodwill which was contagious. Only in this case he protested a bit feeling that he had been let in for a long and exhausting ride to little purpose. It is difficult to see why, for in his disappointment with Our Saviour he had turned his sympathetic attention to the heresies of various sects which had departed from the strict canons of Christian theological dogma – so that in some ways he was much better informed about the activities of Akkad than we were.

In the case of Piers who rode a little ahead with his beautiful sister, the question was different – he had fallen under the spell of this strange man. The views of Akkad – for Piers had encountered him quite often at parties in the city during his first few months
en poste
– seemed to him something like a revelation. “I seem to understand everything he says, and I feel I am hearing something absolutely truthful for the first time – so it’s all quite original for me, quite pristine. For the first time, Bruce, I can
believe
in something, a proposition about myself and the world which holds water. It satisfies me, it’s like falling in love.” This is the point at which Toby would groan, but Sylvie would turn her face to mine and kiss me softly. “O to hell with you,” said Piers spurring his horse.

In those days there were no real suburbs – the desert began almost at the gates of Alexandria and with it of course the damp enervating heat which soaked and bathed one, until one could feel the sweat trickling through one’s clothes into one’s very saddle. Our breathing was laboured. There were small villages giving (so many were the mirages) the illusion of being fictions; their reflections rose in the air or settled into the ground. Purely fictitious lakes with minarets surrounded them, turning them into violet islands. Finally one got to disbelieving one’s own eyesight, and in waiting for the truth to emerge – the sordid truth, for the villages were all decayed and fly-blown, and now in the noonday sun for the most part deserted.

In one the Arab guide beckoned us to follow him, with a sort of cheeky grin, as if to promise us an agreeable diversion. There was a naked old man chained to a block of wood set deep in the ground. He seemed dead, but the Arab turned him over with his foot as one turns a strange beatle over. No, he was alive, but mad. He mopped and mowed, smiled and salaamed and mumbled. He was as thin as an insect, but was brimming over with an insane gaiety – the blissful amnesia that all excessive suffering brings. We heard his story. He had been chained here as a punishment for some crime by the local pasha. But time passed, the nature of his crime was forgotten by the village, even the old pasha himself died, and the criminal went slowly mad with the heat and the thirst. But his madness took the form of a tremendous and exalted happiness. He submitted to everything happily. He was in a state of perfect bliss, whatever happened. Perhaps it was due to this that he survived, for the villagers brought him food and water, first out of sympathy and lastly because they felt that he was really a saint. The truth broke upon them.

Now he was cherished and fed, and people came to visit him as if he were an oracle. He had indeed become a saint, and would when he died give the village a yearly festival. Only they had no authority to free him, that would take a great deal of effort and documentation, and there was hardly anyone in the village capable of examining the legal situation or undertaking the necessary paperwork. Meanwhile he was euphoric. He kissed Piers’ toe and went on muttering. The sandheap in which he lay was full of ants, and there seemed no shade for the poor man. But packets of food lay about, and having had a hearty laugh at his compatriot’s plight the Arab guide suddenly turned pious, made him a deep obeisance and then went to fill a pitcher of sweet water for him. One felt helpless and thoroughly disgusted. Normally one bought out one’s horror and embarrassment when face to face with such a spectacle (a beggar covered in sores, say) but in this case what good was money, what good our etiolated town-sympathy? It was hard to know how to curb one’s fury, too, against the guide for having thought up this pleasing little spectacle for us. Suddenly Egypt hit us all like a hammer.

It was a sighing relief to quit the hamlet for the pure desert again. I have said there were no suburbs of the modern city and this is true – but everywhere outside it in the sand of the desert, half buried, were the extensive remains of ancient buildings, shattered archways, smashed causeways and musing lintels, and what often seemed to be partly demolished statues. So that we had some truthful inkling of the original dream-city of the boy Alexander which, according to Pliny, had had a circuit of fifteen miles and had housed three hundred thousand souls. It had gloried in palaces, baths, libraries, temples and gymnasia without number. But we were latecomers to the place, modern scavengers of history upon a scene which had, it seems, long since exhausted all its historical potentialities. It was with something of a melancholy air that Piers (who loved guide books) had read out the preamble to the article about the city in Murray. “Alexandria is situated in 31° 13’ 5” north latitude and 27° 35’ 30” longitude, near Lake Mareotis, on an isthmus which connects with
terra firma
the peninsula that forms the two ports.”

Repeated historical earthquakes have dashed down the monuments and engulfed the place time and time again; at the time of the French invasion the population had declined to some 8,000 souls. But an infusion of new blood and a long world war restored to it much of its lost importance, and by now its central parts had become almost opulent again with villas and gardens in the French Riviera style of building, shady public squares, museums, banks and galleries. Its swollen Arab quarter was now nearly as varied and picturesque as that of Cairo; its brothel quarters were as extensive as well might be in a port which was now used to the regular visits of so many foreign warships. But the past had quite gone, and much had vanished with it. Turning slightly left towards the foaming sealine now through the tinted afternoon light it was only possible to imagine the marches of Alexander through such a haze of shimmering silence, broken only by the curses of his guides and the curious lumpy shuffling noise a camel makes in the dunes. “And yet,” said Piers to whom I can attribute this sentiment, “and yet the outer furnishings of his world are still here – palms, water-wheels, dervishes, desert horses. Always!”