The Avignon Quintet (180 page)

“For months afterwards,” added Sutcliffe, “I dreamed all night of washing my hands in a silver ewer to the baying of a scruffy crowd of subhumans!”

At teatime the old Daimler of the Prince hove in sight with Cade at the wheel; he had come from the Tubain post office with a cargo of mail from the central sorting agency in Avignon which had only half-resumed its civil functions. With these heterogenous letters there was one familiar buff envelope superscribed OHMS and addressed to Smirgel. He had not given the Judge Advocate General his true address but that of Lord Galen since they were friends. It was the magical certificate for which he had been so anxiously waiting. It attested to his innocence of any war crime. He gave a sob as he unfolded the document. Then he tenderly embraced Cade, kissing him on both cheeks. Then he held up the paper and cried, “Look, everybody, this is the certificate of clearance – I am declared innocent, and can resume civil life again as an ordinary citizen of the world! Ah! you can’t know what it means! But as for the treasure we can go ahead now and plan the event in all seriousness.” To their surprise he fell on his knees and said a prayer.

SEVEN

Whether or Not

B
LAN
: “
ADMIT YOU WERE JEALOUS
:
YOU DID NOT LIKE
to see me slipping out of your grasp, did you?”
SUT:
“I admit it. I felt insulted that you would not tell me the truth. I knew full well that you were not in Siena or Venice or Athens …”

BLAN: “NO.
We were hidden in the Camargue in a little cottage lent to us by Sabine. After this strange episode, the kisses and the awakening I suddenly knew that this long-heralded book had nearly formed itself. I would soon be brought to term. Constance would insist. We did as all lovers do, we hid. I did not want you looking over my shoulder. Hence I sent out an inaccurate account of our whereabouts. The silence and the heat were a wonderful backcloth to our loving, while in the evening the gipsies came, or Sabine alone. They brought us a flock of white-manes, the chargers of heaven, with all the runaway tilt of Schubert impromptus, immaculate as our kisses. On horseback we set out across the network of dykes and canals and lakes; into a mauve desert sunset, with a silent Sabine in between us who had much to tell those who asked the right questions. (Man is the earth quantity and woman the sky: man mind, woman intuition.) Several times now I recognised that I nearly died of love in the night for my heart stopped for appreciable lapses of time and I felt myself entering the penumbra of the continuum, to hover for a long while in an unemphatic state of mystical contingency! Genius is silence, everybody knows that. But who can attain it? With every orgasm you drown a little in the future, taste a little immortality despite yourself. And here I was hoping not only to tell the truth but also to free the novel a bit from the shackles of causality with a narrative apparently dislocated and disjointed yet informed by mutually contradictory insights – love at first insight, so to speak, between Constance and myself. An impossible task you always tell me, but the higher the risk the greater the promise! That is the heart of the human paradox. I did not want to fuck her at first, I did not
dare
to want to because there was so much as yet unrehearsed and unrealised between us. And it might never have been brought to book, so to speak, had it not been for touch – for her probing massage of my wounded back, for while her hands were modelling the repair of the flesh we often spoke of the past, and one day she confessed that she had always been in love with me! ‘From the first look we exchanged on the slip at Lyons as we set off down the Rhône. But alas!’ Alas indeed, for I was completely unfledged, completely cowardly, if only because I realised the import ance of that look but could not believe that it meant anything to her. But my adoration must have sunk into her, for all our subsequent lives, the long detour we made, was informed by the force of that single look! Old Shakes, was right – or rather Chris Marlowe. Whoever loved that loved not at first sight? And I was glad retrospectively that I had waited on the event in full cowardice and inexperience rather than risk spoiling it by a
gaffe
, for she too had been physically inexperienced, though of course psychically fully mature and aware of the dilemma. What a calamity ignorance is. And with the war and its separations hovering over us. You have no hold over destiny when you are young. How much better to wait. An enigma is more than a mere puzzle – and a premature marriage can become just intellectual baby-sitting.”

From Sutcliffe’s notebook

BLAN:
“Here on these quiet lagoons or trotting the dusk mauve sands of the Saintes Maries I learned the truth about the significance of love and its making. ‘Because fashions have changed, and the woman’s freedom is confirmed. She has slipped the hook.’ So Sabine says riding coolly and thoughtfully between us by the rustling sea, ‘And now the new lovers will become at last philosophers. They will realise themselves in mating and sharing the orgasm. Nobody will notice that they are dying of loneliness.’”

SUT:
“Don Juan, eh? No, Bon Juan the new hero. You will walk about in a muse, looking as if you had had your prostate massaged by leprechauns. And when you die you will go straight to the Poets’ Corner of the Abbey. They will write on your plaque: ‘Aubrey was not always his own best friend and sometimes got into intellectual positions his enemies could not have wished for more. Finally, exhausted with so much realising, he farted his way to Paradise.’”

As for the book it was a hopeless task, for what is to be done with characters who are all the time trying to exchange selves, turn into each other? And then, ascribing a meaning to point-events? There is no meaning and we falsify the truth about reality in adding one.
The universe is playing, the universe is only improvising!

Sutcliffe says, “Who knows all this? You should say, in the interests of clarity.”

“I leave you to guess.”

“Sabine?”

“Yes, walking by the lagoon or in the hot crypt where the bitumen-black waxen figure of Saint Sara stands sending out waves of divination across the fumes of the hot candles. See? There are no sutras, no prayers, no literature to split hairs over. It’s just wish to wish, need to need, like spittle falling on a red-hot iron. You ignite the black doll and she answers any question that does not concern the past or the future! As for me, I am a bit of a fraud and an interloper. Why? Because I joined them out of curiosity – and you can’t really. You have to be born one. So I remained outside, a vehement observer. History rolls on but the gipsy folk follow an unconscious star rhythm, they don’t take part, they invigilate, so to speak. They have refused to codify impulse like the Jews, to profiteer. Now, with the slow breakdown of deterministic Christianity, one wonders if Nietzsche was not right when he said that the Jewish role historically was to unlock the gate from the inside – the ancient intellectual fifth column of radicalism forever at work with its messianic fanaticism gnawing at the roof-tree of tradition and stability. Thus they did for the Goths and now they have done for us. Divide and rue! There is no hint of illiberality or partiality in these notions which are purely philosophic. For us gipsies both Hitler and Stalin were children of the Old Testament executing a blood programme inspired by Moloch. There is nothing to be done to hasten its inevitable disappearance and its transformation into something new, thank goodness! People fall into these thought moulds from copying each other. But we can with justice accuse Christianity of masterminding our intellectual disarray. As for the gipsies, they have made no effort to capitalise on the tragedy of their extermination in the camps as the Jews have done. A total silence is all that has emerged – not a poem, not a song, not a scrap of protest folklore! It’s uncanny. But the old aptitudes hold – basketwork, thieving, prophecy and the telling of fortunes still hold out. The game of destiny.”

“Ah! That’s what I want to discuss!” said Constance, “because it all seems a pack of lies. The last time we came down here we each had different fortunes, each by a different soothsayer. Surely there must be some constant in the whole business, Sabine?”

The swarthy woman shook her head and smiled.

“We each have as many destinies stacked up inside us as a melon has seeds. They live on
in potentia
so to speak. One does not know which will mature. But after the event one pretends that it was obvious all along. And sometimes the soothsayer is right, chooses right, skries the destiny which manifests itself! You have many discernible destinies – in one you are to die in childbirth; Aubrey divined this though he is no soothsayer, and it figures in the first draft of his novel. In another you will die together – this our tribal Mother saw. It is part of a great accident, something like an earthquake. All of you, all of us, have as many destinies as the sands of the seashore.

“But as for you, Aubrey, I saw something else of more immediate experience. Suddenly she has discovered in you the love she feared would never exist, since there seemed no hope of you ever snapping out of your coma. Suddenly she realised that if she staked her claim and risked everything you might get reborn, re-created. It was up to her to divine the meaning of the orgasm with complete female ruthlessness, to divine your metaphysical anguish, and then to respond to it – to yield and to conceive, that is what she is trying to do. You have both realised love as a future-manufacturing yoga with a child at stake in it, the consciousness of a child, which will be read in its regard! You know the old Provençal saying that a child anyone can make, but one must
round off or perfect its regard (faut parfaire le regard)
. This hints at the inner vision which will give the child a pithy heart and mind on condition that the dual orgasm is experienced simultaneously. She is going to rescue you!”

It certainly felt like that, though poor Constance, responding to the analyst in her, explained it all quite differently, indeed somewhat apologetically. “I am at the moment taking the male part, overwhelming you, almost I am castrating you, but the intention is finally to cause you to respond fully to me. You see you are still traumatised by the shock of the explosion and your image of your body is making you mentally cringe, as if you had pain to fear; whereas I know now that the wound is healed and while there are some muscular movements you can’t make there is no more pain or stress. You can go the whole hog and act without thinking or hesitating. Last night I felt you for the first time in control. Sabine is right, we are moving into a fine dual control of the act.” Yet he knew they had Affad to thank for much of this love-lore.

SAB:
“Yes, there are precautions to be taken just as in the making of bread! By progressively conquering the loving amnesia of the orgasm and expanding its area of consciousness – adding more and more meaning to the eyes of the child-future. By this voluntary extension of consciousness you refine your death progressively, the death he will inherit from you. Once you start this process and realise fully what you are doing all stress vanishes, and all unbelief also. You become all of a sudden who you are, thanks to her, and she who she is thanks to you! But you must not make it sound too like a
constatation de gendarme
or Sutcliffe will be forced to redress the balance in his notebooks which presumably will be one day inherited by Trash. All these pitiful slogans of desire! (After intercourse show him amazement – advice to young brides.)”

But how to overpraise the gold body of Constance, dusted now by the dust-thunder of the bullrings and splashed with freckles of gold?

Sweet as a rock-panther one day old

Just come on heat and mateless

Melts like a cat in rut unsated

In vast desires unsublimated