The Avignon Quintet (38 page)

One basic question whimpers and sobs on below all the others: where have we come from? Where are we going?

I feel terrible today, like a parenthesis between two cultures both of which I loathe. The reviews of the new book were all bad or grudging. A critic is a lug-worm in the liver of literature.

It was full winter I recall. My first in Geneva. I had stayed on because of her. I went one evening to collect her for the concert. Deep snow was falling and the wind was as keen as a razor; the frost hurt, and it was almost impossible to stand upright. They had filled the tramlines with sand as a brake to prevent the trams from skidding off in all directions like pebbles on ice. She was waiting for me in the hall of the gloomy aquarium-like apartment house where she had a flat. She was framed in all the splendour of her evening dress and the magnificent fur, against the lighted mirrors of the lift. And she was on
crutches
. In
furs
. She had broken an ankle while skiing. I stared speechlessly at so much beauty and surprise. I almost sobbed with lust.

Where would you imagine all this would end? Three guesses would not be enough. Pia had been impelled to take Trash to every one of the places we had visited together after our marriage. I suppose I had some foolish notion about educating her sensibility, a notion which perhaps she also shared
vis-
à
-vis
Trash. But what could one do with darling Trash? She screamed with laughter at Venice, the Acropolis seemed to her insanitary and all broken up, Cairo made her laugh even more because of the donkeys … Painstakingly Pia waded through the sum of the world’s culture, following in the footsteps of the Master. And so at last they came to Angkor Wat, but by this time Trash was beginning to fall ill; the slow fever was tenacious: was it malaria perhaps? Her teeth rattled in her black face. She had sudden fits of febrile weeping, from pure fatigue. But relentlessly Pia pressed on with her lover. I think that she knew that Lokesvara held the secret to our lives – it was there, curiously enough, that we had really loved each other. You know the Chinese fancy that one has two birthplaces – one the real physical one, and one which is a place of predilection, the place in which one was psychically born. Our love was born in the upper terraces of the Bayon. Those huge mastodon faces carved out of the bare rock, the colour of putty, cigar-ash, graphite, exuding that tremendous calm – the boom of the celestial surf on the shores of the mind. Here she took my hand and held on to it like a terrified child. Slanting stone eyes, thick stone lips, in which the vision turned inwards upon the life of the mind bathing itself in the glow of reality. One realised the sheer fatigue of living in this temporal relativity, and also that it wasn’t necessary. There was a way, expressed by these stone clouds, of sidestepping the time-chain. She said: “I’m terrified with joy, Rob.” And now poor darling she had for company the oblivious lover. The screams of laughter uttered by Trash rang out among the statues. “It’s just the damnedest thing since Cecil B. de Mille,” she must have shouted. And Pia? Did she recapture the old silence and think of me? I see her walking about, pale and withdrawn, perhaps just whistling under her breath as she often did.

The entrance to the Prah Khan stays the mind with its calm surprises. A broad avenue peopled with a line of life-sized genii. On the left the daevas with their calm smiles, slant eyes, and long sweet ears pricked up to catch the music of inner silence. To the right the cold and serious asuras, round eyes, saddle noses and their mouths turned down sardonically. Both lines hold in their negligent hands a gigantic serpent, its seven-headed hood spread, its teeth and elaborate feathered crest alerted, to spread out in fan fashion before the leading figure. It is writhing, trying to escape, but they are calmly holding it to form a balustrade along which one walks, pacing up large grey flagstones. I remember the rustle of dried leaves under our shoes. Lizards like jewels rubbed their eyes and tapped the stone, curious to see strangers.

We did not look at each other because we felt shy. Immediately beyond this kind of snake balustrade the forest opens in all its prolixity; in ancient times there was a lake hereabouts but it has largely dried out, and its marshwater is so thickly covered with waterweed and lilies that it looks like an Irish meadow. You walk stiffly, indeed a trifle ceremoniously, up the long avenue of genii and through the last portal; and then you find yourself unexpectedly in a sort of labyrinth of courtyards, chambers, corridors and vestibules. An occasional shattered statue smiles out of its mutilation like a war-hero. There is a troubling stench of rotting bat manure, rancid and heavy, and in the darker chambers comes the twitter and scutter of these twilight colonies hanging in the darkness making a mewing noise like newborn babies in a clinic devoted to twilight sleep.

Then of course comes Angkor Wat itself, like a quiet but breath-snatching verification of what had gone before. The wide stone causeway stretching over a moat was empty of pilgrims. A feast of water flowers studded the water. Water upon water, trisected by these passages, and on either side green meadows alive with egrets and snowy pelicans. The five-coned towers form a quincunx, and their flanks are scooped into niches in each of which has been placed a smiling buddha shaded by a nine-headed naga like a big palm fan. As you advance the bas-reliefs start contending for your attention with their writhing motifs. Elephants with their trunks locked in deadly combat and their riders hurling arrows: chariots full of gesticulating bowmen: an inextricable swarm of dead and dying, victorious and defeated in the last frenzy of war: bridled tigers: ships with dragon prows advancing methodically over mythological rivers thick with crocodiles and great fishes. This is the world, the real world, munching itself to death. Your world and mine.

But turn away from it and you will find an immediate reassurance in the other one. The tranquillity seeps into you as you watch the sun slanting down out of heaven to turn everything soft as ash, violet, mushroom. Yellow-robed monks come out of the monastery of an evening to spend a quiet breath of time sitting by the naga heads; their little ivory faces quite calm and expressionless. Fit descendants of those people on the war frescoes who carry spears or trays or jars, quietly launching themselves into battle with their thick lips and long ears, marching through avenues of trees loaded down by parrots and monkeys. The little calves of the dense grey water buffaloes gambol in the dusk. Pia sits with her hand in mine, but no longer afraid. “I have understood it,” she said, as we rose and began the long walk back to the waiting car.

Yes, I too had understood it; and in a certain sense it helped me rather to understand the rest – that long sad journey of the lovers and the calamity which followed on their heels. But the whole thing exists for me like a series of pell-mell cinematic images thrown down one upon the other. How the rains caught them unawares, how their car broke down in the jungle and how they found no help for a day and a night. And Trash’s fever mounted until she was racked like a black silk golliwog and bathed in sweat. Some Belgians from a Catholic Mission took them into their little cantonment and put them in a grass hut where the insects engendered by the new rain swarmed and pullulated. By the feeble rushlight the little Belgian priest kept vigil with Pia, nodding off to sleep. The rain thrust downwards. There could be no doctor until it stopped and the road was mended. But in two days the noble black heart of Trash gave out while she slept, her crucifix fell from her hand to the rush matting – that is how they knew she had gone. Her body was hurried into the damp black earth to become one with it. And Pia, after sorting out her effects and writing to her brother, wrote me a full account of everything in a tremulous but meticulous hand. It was not for my sake she did this, nor because she wished to plant darts in me, no. It was as if to make herself realise fully the fact of Trash’s death, to let it impact on her, pierce the numbness. She described how Trash’s little wrist-watch went on twitching all night until she could not bear it any longer and tore it off from her wrist. She ran out barefoot into the jungle with some vague idea of attracting a venemous snake to bite her. But all she collected in the streaming rain were the big white leeches the size of a human finger. When she staggered back to the mission she was covered in them. They would not let her tear them away with her fingers because that left a hole and often caused blood-poisoning or infection. But the little fathers came running with rock salt and poured small quantities of it directly onto the nauseating animals. The result was extraordinary. They explode, releasing all the blood they have drunk, and wither away like a toy balloon. Soon she was freed by this method, though covered in gouts of blood – her own. “I drank a great deal of whisky to try and gag the nerves,” she said. It didn’t work, it never does.

I realised when I read the letter that for me the paint was still fresh, her memory green. They say that when you love someone, absence and presence partake of one another; and that you cannot really lose each other until the mainspring, Memory, snaps. Lies! Sophistries! Inventions! When I read this long letter which ended: “You will never hear from me again. Your Pia.” I felt like an old blind dog which had lost its bearings – the dog in the memoirs of Ulysses perhaps.

First I tore the letter across in a fury; then realising that it was certainly the last I would ever receive from Pia I tried laboriously to stick it together again, thinking that it should be placed with the others in the little leather writing case which had once been hers. I read it over slowly again. She had taken over so many of my tics! For example when she got deeply nervous, as I did when I was working on a book, a sea of prohibitions overwhelmed her and she could no longer write cursive; she was forced to print. But this new reading only reignited my fury. I took it to the lavatory with some vague intention of flushing it away for ever, but a sudden ridiculous and involuntary impulse took hold of me so that I tore it up and ate it.

Well, it is deep night once again, and here I am in this rotting city on the snatching curving medieval river. I walk about it sometimes with distaste and boredom. A man sitting at an open front door playing a violin. The Grey Penitents awash from the overflowing canal. An old sexton digging to bury the screams of the dead. And very old people, frail dry-points, in grooved clothes. It makes one think of old civilisations where puberty was treated with tact and custom sheltered sex, aware of its preciousness. Sitting in the leafy square by the Monument des Morts and finding the women grow more desirable with every
pastis
. Perhaps I will turn pederast and go for some slender woolly negro boy from softest Africa
gekommen
.

Woman the most perishable of the vertebrates but so much more hard-wearing than man; somewhere in the kingdom of the fossils there will be an inventory of all this, printed in mud and then rayed upon a stone, to bite slowly into it over countless ages. The big defeats cut so deep that one sees nothing on the surface except the smile. And the big definite experiences come only once, alas!

Yes, you only have one bite at the cherry. The long night is coming and the darkness is explicit. It drinks as tigers drink, in stealth.

If I am still alive tomorrow I shall write to the Duchess.