The Avignon Quintet (20 page)

“Yet when we say nature we really mean rhythm, and the basic rhythm is oestrus, the beating egg in its primal pouch. Naturally having lost the marvellous amnesia of sexual periodicity we live by a time-pining, time-bound, chronology. And we never forget that death sets in with conception. This alters everything, even an element like love. We are making the orgasm more and more conscious. Yet to have loved capably and methodically, to have loved with a sufficiency of attention for the fragility of the thought and the transitoriness of the act – that will teach anyone the truth of what I say about death. Ah, but once your words start to make super-sense you must either stop talking or become a poet. Choose!

“We believe also that every thoughtless or inconsequential act vibrates through the whole universe. And all the time thoughts pass through us in floods, there is no time to touch them with the wand of consciousness, to magnetise them, to redeem them, so to speak. Fish in their shoals pass not more thickly. Yet each one has ideally to be realised separately. How is this possible? Yes, there is a way, we are sure of it. There is a type of realisation which makes this possible. Ah! but the new universe has got cancer, it is evil, that is to say mediocre, to the very marrow, in the biological not the moralistic sense. It is, poor thing, twisted and luckless and out of kilter, foredoomed and star-crossed. Inferior demons have painted it in their likeness. Our hopes of stepping outside this sepulchre are very faint, but they are there. There is a way to comprehend the gnostic’s giant onion of a world, the concentric circles, with the Pleroma beckoning there, the white heart of light, the source of that primal vision which for a second or two can recapture paradise. We can make amends by loving correctly.

“Thank goodness, nature’s machinery is vast and intricate and completely comprehensive. There is no norm, no absolute. Every deviation is allowed for. Yet total freedom is the key we must dare to turn in order to repose her. It was not always thus, and sometimes when we are asleep we dream that it will not always be so. Our intitution gives the lie to so many of the prime notions like
omne animal post coitum triste
and
inter faesces et urinam nascimur
. These ideas belong to the impoverished world of our modern demonology.”

“But how to realise?” It was Piers’ sad voice now that interrogated the sea-hushed silence and Akkad sighed, though he remained smiling still. He said: “A rather cruel paradox centres about the two notions which we express by the words ‘knowing’ and ‘realising’. You can know something and yet not realise it, not having lived it, as we say, for in our inarticulate way we are aware of the distinction. Realisation is a real sigil conferred upon an experience – like a food product which the system has passed without assimilating. And the head knowledge, the conscious product, often vitiates it by coming first, so that even if you realise it and live it, later on it has somehow lost its kinetic value as a motive force which shapes the psyche. Powerful imaginations can be dangerous; they live ideas out so powerfully that when the time comes to ‘realise’ them, to perform with a real woman, say, a Muse, they are either impotent or else experience the taste of ashes. Poor desperate descendant of protoman tries to still his fears by classifying them, by making an index of them. He hopes to delimit them thus, but they extend on all sides of him to infinity. So he spends his time, turning in the trap. Then he decides that there is no way out. But there is, in fact, a secret way of transcending them, of turning them to account. One must begin by pretending in order to end by realising. Pretend that you do not fear by acting fearlessly, at whatever cost. Habit is very powerful. One day you will become what you mime. The parody of goodness can make you really good.”

“And what about suicide?” It was Piers’ voice again, pitched on a humble and trusting note, but again as if addressed to himself.

“You are forbidden to undertake an act of conscious self-destruction. Suicide in the active sense, a bullet in the mouth, that is not what is meant. Everything lies in the act of acceptance, to join finally the spiritual trust of the mature who have tasted the world to the full and wish to be purged of the physical envelope. They join the inner circle and make an act of acceptance – that is what constitutes the gnostic suicide. They accept, then, their own execution, but it is not their own hand that is raised against them. They never know how it is carried out, the sentence, though they are told when; they receive two warnings when their time is running out, and this gives them a chance to put their affairs in order. Then, after a certain time, it can come about at any moment. An executioner and a method has been chosen, as well as a time, but not by themselves. The person who is the instrument is chosen by lot, and is always one who himself has joined the inner circle of the faithful and renounced temporal life. The procedure is one of impeccable order. In the end we imitate process and there is nothing disorderly about process, however much it may seem so. The very concept of order in nature is home-made, the product of our finite minds. In the theology of process, the queen of the sciences, coincidence and contingency rule, but never fortuitously. Never. I know it sounds nonsense, but it is so.”

Suddenly Sylvie cried out: “Akkad, don’t encourage Piers to take all this too seriously. He mustn’t. He is far too quixotic, far too extreme. It would be very dangerous for somebody with his type of temperament.” Akkad looked at her gravely and said nothing; but now it was Piers who was angry with his sister, his eyes shining. “For God’s sake, Sylvie. You want me to take all this lightly? Akkad is describing my own interior mind, my own character and temperament, and you wish me to regard it as simply a sort of intellectual novelty. I feel I would go to the stake for this.” Sylvie turned to embrace him apologetically but to me she said: “You see? I feared as much.” In a sense this episode marked the point of divergence in all our attitudes to Akkad and his sect; Piers was determined to go on towards deeper knowledge, profounder identification with the gnostics; while I did not wish to advance further than the portals, so to speak, of their system. I felt suddenly detached and indeed a little sad as I watched the brother and sister exchange embraces to put away the memory of this little but deep disagreement. How remote it all seemed, the rest of life as we had been living it! I felt all at once like Robinson Crusoe alone on his island; below us was the drumming sea, all around us were the petrified trees and the melancholy dunes. Somewhere far away was the Alexandria of our memory, with its comfortable flats and shady villas waiting for us. We had become ghosts, uneasily haunting this strip of desert, exchanging momentous fictions about God. It was presumptuous. I lit a cigarette and smoked it thoughtfully, pondering on what Akkad had told us. There were other initiations, he had said, of various degrees of knowledge; but I felt that my own limitations of sensibility were such that I would never advance much further than this first impressive step, which had without any doubt marked my whole future outlook on life. I knew then that Piers would go on, stage by obstinate stage, towards the deepest knowledge; his whole attitude and disposition suggested it. As for Sylvie I did not know.

It was almost dusk when we packed up and set off once more across the desert for Macabru. On the return journey, not a word was spoken. It was as if Akkad had exhausted all the possibilities of language. We had been pumped dry and emptied even of coherent thought. Akkad seemed moody and withdrawn, and of course by now the fatigue of these long rides had begun to tell on us all. It was night when at last the oasis came in sight again, and we were grateful to surrender the fagged horses. Many of the guests had already gone, and the fair was in the process of packing up, of dismantling itself. By tomorrow the old silence would return to Macabru, everything would have disappeared as if by magic. That night we made plans to return to the city on the morrow, ferried by the little aircraft of our host. We ate a leisurely dinner, and took a walk in the little melting township as a gesture of farewell. Something memorable had happened here, which had tugged at our sensibilities. That much we knew.

When we finally returned to the city there was work to be done, people to be met, so that for a week or so we were not able to join forces for more than a few moments in the evening. Then came a long autumn during which Piers launched himself into a course of detailed reading and study in the old Patriarchal Library with its warped wooden floors and leaning landings crammed with Byzantine trophies and manuscripts. Akkad had obtained permission for him to use the great library from the Patriarch himself, whose chief secretary spoke several languages and was himself a scholar capable of steering my friend among the shoals and quicksands of the desert fathers, with their hysterical condemnations of the gnostics, and the fragments of this forgotten faith as outlined by ghostly and enigmatic shapes like Carpocrates and Valentinus. Sylvie and I followed all this as well as we could, but without the candent enthusiasm of her brother who immersed himself wholly in these studies – to a degree that made his absentmindedness something of a joke among his colleagues in Chancery.

He was also capable of downright absurdities like telephoning to me in the middle of an economic press conference to say: “I think I have rediscovered the force of prayer; the thing is
prayer to what?
Remind me to go into this matter tonight.” It
was
rather a problem – prayer to the God of process I presumed? It was hard to keep one’s mind centred on the universe as a giant maggotry when the landscapes and humours of Egypt were so beautiful, and its passing days so enticing; moreover when one was loved. I put down the telephone and turned drowsily on my side towards Sylvie whose sleeping nakedness lay close by me, echoing the curves of my body with her own pliant limbs. Sleeping, but only in that siesta of exhausted half-sleep which is imposed by the languid Egyptian afternoons with their tepid sea-breezes and long calms broken only by the crazy hiccoughs of a tethered ass somewhere. When I closed my eyes the darkness throbbed around us and once more I returned to re-live, re-experience the soft scroll of her tongue which pressed back mine and probed steadily downwards across chest and stomach to settle at last throbbing like a humming bird, on my sex. I held that beautiful head between my palms like something disembodied, and rememorised the dark hair cropped down, and then spurred up into its chignon, the crumpled ears of a new-born lamb, the white teeth and lips upon which I would soon slowly and deliberately graft back my happy kisses. It was hard to come back mentally to the old creaking library with the fleas jumping from the cracks in the floor, the manuscripts crackling, and my friend working over those huge parchment tomes, lost in the non-world of Carpocrates – the negative of the printed world we had thought we knew well, but which now seemed a delusion, and all the more dangerous because it was so enticing. “Kiss me. Again. Once more.” Commands to be obeyed when issued by a woman. There was nothing derived about these pristine acts – everything was newly minted.

Before the winter finally closed in on us Piers managed to implement a scheme he had had in mind for quite a while; he borrowed the French Embassy’s felucca, and on the pretext of an official journey into Upper Egypt got it set to rights. His mission being a small one and his Ambassador an amiable man he was able to combine freedom with pleasure to a degree not usually granted to young diplomats
en poste
. I do not quite know how he justified extending an invitation to me to join the party – but the result was that the three of us found ourselves in cool weather just upriver from Bulaq, outside Cairo, preparing for a journey of two weeks and perhaps more in this handsome craft. The felucca
Nasr
was some forty feet long with two masts and a couple of cabins, and manned by a crew of seven. During a long period of relative neglect by the French it had been used to ferry fruit and wood upriver and had thus become infested with vermin. However for Nile boats no remedy could be easier than to sink it in the shallows for a while, after which it could be pumped out and scrubbed clean with sand and pumice. After a day or so it was dry and ready to load. Piers entered into all the details of the journey with the é
lan
of the born romantic – you would have thought we were mounting an expedition to Polynesia to judge by the quantity of the stores which he ordered – macaroni, rice, oil, tinned foods, fruit, dried vegetables, wines. It made us feel rather ashamed later to see on what short commons the Arab crew lived – but they did not appear to grudge us our rich fare, and probably equalised things up by the amount that they pilfered from us daily and quite shamelessly. But as they were both efficient and kindly we closed an eye to their depredations, only locking up ammunition, tobacco, and such expensive frivolities as cameras and medicines. All in all, it was extremely exciting this manner of setting out on a journey by water, and despite my ironic amusement at Piers’ enthusiasm I secretly envied him and shared a good deal of it. I was elected to be responsible for the medicine cabinet and the armoury – for we intended to do a bit of spot-shooting along the river banks at the end of each day; shooting for the pot so to speak.

One of the cabins was well appointed with a long divan and a heavy central work table, and was spacious enough to offer headroom and a place to put our trunks of provisions. The other had precious locker-space as well as long bunks running round the outside wall. Here we elected to sleep. There was a kind of glassed-in hatch like a conning-tower which we made mosquito proof against the long Nile evenings. All reservations made, she was an elegant and roomy vessel, and the crew were delighted by the novelty of taking aboard foreign passengers – with so many goods to be pilfered. The captain and the mate both lacked an eye, and quarrelled dreadfully; and during these quarrels they exchanged ferocious glances of a macabre kind with their single good eyes.