The Avignon Quintet (42 page)

Later comes an embryology of boredom, we topple into the law of inertia. The sluggish foetus which won’t contract out of the cosy womb life. So process gets slowed down by cowardice and slowly ankyloses. Gangrene sets in. People are born with frozen affects, and stalk the planet like dead men. In cold blood. These are the faceless hominids who cause us so much trouble by acting out what we are repressing with such heroism.

Tobor the poet for example. His young wife fell into a volcano. He never married again, and the girl became dearer and dearer to him as she receded in time. He trailed his sorrow in poems which became as heavy as lead. Finally, having become world famous, he realised one day that what he owed to her was precisely this deliberate consciousness of her death. She could not have done this for his work by simply living on. It was her death which gave his poems pith. He felt so ashamed he stopped writing.

Trash’s body was a breathing bas-relief which might have appealed to a corkscrew on shore-leave. Her red mouth was a sabre-cut of laughter, like a duelling scar. Discussing me with Pia she said: “He’s the sort of guy always trying to make a silk purse out of a horse’s ass.”

If ever I said sex was funny it was only to emphasise the enormous fragility of the enterprise. Spare us this day our classical pruritus.

Have I no right to talk about it? Why, uxorious Raphael, how he loved the act which he did not find lonely – bathed in the candy-floss of women’s bodies. Nowadays all that is needed is the leaden sperm of some deteriorated schizophrenic in order to make people feel at home.

Accused by Toby of deplorable political cynicism, I asked: “What sort of social conscience and political awareness would you expect of Robinson Crusoe?” No answer. He just sat there working his finger in his ear and his foot in his shoe like a sexually aroused tomcat works its tail paddle-fashion. He told me about a friend who left everything and went to Peking where he lived with a girl called Persistent Mosquito Net, a lightly toasted concubine. He beat her till she sang like a lark.

The last word pronounced by Buddha was “diligence”. An uffish thought.

A Cinematograph Company has been pestering me for ideas and I have accordingly worked out an excellent subject: a film about the filming of the Crucifixion. The actual nail-up takes place away in the distance, like in an Italian painting. The three famous actresses who play the chief female parts are sitting under an olive tree playing poker on a collapsible green card-table. Like a scene transplanted from a
maison close
and dumped down here on the Mount of Olives. Their poor straw-rotted hair is tied up tight against dust in garish bandeaux. They have wrinkled skin like old elephants – years of make-up and whisky have made them patchy as a whitewashed wall in summer. They sit and grimly play, waiting for a cue. The world’s girl friends – for this is a super production. They grin yellow, their teeth have been planted in their gums by surgery, but the gums are giving out, and increasing softness has given them precarious grins (pun). Like unreformed whores,
New Testament
whores so to speak, they wearily play on waiting for a client to ring. In the far distance the whole sordid little Thing is taking place. A tiresome Jewish agitator is paying for his conceit. Judas sits under a tree nearby eating an apple. They have given him enormous canines and talons like Fu Manchu. The producer is a cripple, wheeled everywhere in a bathchair. He is epileptic and has frequent fits during the shooting. I promise to supply the subtitles later on.

Women who like furs like Pia show their hidden bent for rapine. A passion for tiger-skins reveals the father-eater. Women who train their hair back into their eyes in order to toss it back every now and then see themselves as ponies – they will ride their men. Pia painted her nails the colour of coagulated blood, Trash hers white.

A dry run for a love affair, a mock-up for a kiss, someone dying of post-operative shock. Love, the old corpse-reviver … Thoughts closely linked like chain-mail that arguments cannot pierce.

Once upon a time he had been much intrigued by the theories which have grown up around the idea of a “double”. Once it seemed proved when she entered his room while he was in bed with a fever and said: “Yesterday you had no fever when I came to you – now your forehead is burning.” But yesterday he had been away in another town. Someone had entered his skin during his absence. Who?

If man did not have his illnesses he would have nothing to shield him from reality – and who could stand that?

Dinner with Banquo in that run-down shadowy chateau in the hills. He appeared to live there alone on his holidays with one negro retainer. Sabine was due to attend but did not turn up which caused the old man some annoyance. “She has become less and less fun as she has grown older and more serious, and I can’t really count on her any more.” He recalled with nostalgia her silly period just after university: walking into Maxim’s with a young lion on the leash. Sitting beside the chauffeur of a Prime Minister dressed as a pantomime dog. Their love-affair created an international scandal. Perhaps it was as well that this period did not prolong itself unduly. “A little celebrity and one subsides into being a character.”

Said that Piers’ uncle has inherited the key to a large Templar treasure, and will not surrender it to Piers who does not know where to lay his hands upon it. He sighed when he spoke of the goodness and beauty of Sylvie, adding: “Though she has very distinct marks of madness in her look one always feels that to call her insane would be to put all ontology to the question.” Smiling in the firelight I saw his brave old face which seemed to have foundered on the reefs of success, the disappointment which money-power brings. He was courteous, he was weary, but he manfully entertained his daughter’s guest, rather pleased to have read one of my books. He offered me horses to ride. But he was very English, very London. I thought of the smoky old hotels where he lodged as a penniless boy from Manchester – they line the Cromwell Road today. Lighted all night. The same night-porters walk the dusty corridors distractedly waving enemas. Even today he slept with the same rueful smile on his face. “Come back,” he said. “I spend a lot of time alone here. Company is good for me.” I said I would. I meant to, but summer passed and the fireflies died and the harvest came and the rains started. I only had one wish by then:

to melt back into the faceless ground

without a sorrow sight or sound

or watch the rosy corpses play

in cinemas by night or day.