The Avignon Quintet (81 page)

To town then, but Avignon itself was as dead as a doornail – even the bakers had not started to warm their ovens, while no cafés were open, not even at the Gare. They tried a last chance and crossed Les Balances on foot, skirting its sordid and gipsy-ridden tenements, worthy more of Cairo than of a European city. They dumped the car at the Papal square. But here too, alas, the little Bar de la Navigation was shut fast. They began to feel dispirited.

But in one of the side-streets near the ancient tanneries with their foul network of canals, they heard the throbbing and pulsing note of a powerful engine or turbine. It sounded like the engine of a ship. “It’s an old friend,” explained Felix, “come and have a look at it! It follows me in my wandering at night, in the first week of the month every six months it ‘does’ this quartier during the hours of darkness. Then it moves on round the clock.” It looked to them like a variety of fire-engine, and it bore the arms of the town painted in gold on its muddy flanks. “What is it?” asked Constance and Felix replied with a knowledgeable air, “It’s the
pompe à merde
. You see, there has never been any main drainage, here all the houses have pits, dry pits for their only sanitation. Well, these are sucked out during the night by this old mastodon of a thing. They are all proud of it. They call it ‘Marius’.”

Mastodon was the word, though it had a long rubber proboscis like that of an elephant which had entered a front door and descended into the cellar where the privies were. The sucking and slobbering were fearful to hear, and the shuddering and drubbing of the pumps fearful to behold – it was like a clumsy animal, sweating and straining at its task, Blanford thought. “It is sucking out the intellectual excrement of the twentieth century in a town which was once Rome. The dry pit of the human imagination perpetually filling up again with the detritus of half-digested hopes and fears, of desires and resolutions.” It was a bad sign he thought, frowning, to see metaphors everywhere; though he was not the only one. Constance said softly, “An anal-oral machine most appropriate to our time. Like the Freudian nursery rhyme.”

But here afflicted by a sudden modesty she decided not to repeat it aloud; she would whisper it to herself instead.

When the bowel was loaded

The birds began to sing;

Wasn’t that a dainty dish

To set before the King?

There was a light in a nearby bistro where the driver of “Marius” was already ordering his coffee and a small marc to drive off the excrementitious odours with which he was forced to live. Well, it was a profession, just like any other.… The others joined him at the z
inc
but Blanford stayed behind, fascinated by the old machine sucking and slobbering its way through the centuries. On one side, the old wrinkled dawn was coming up in coral and nacre, and down here at the same time the stench of excrement was spreading over the whole quartier. Soon it would be time to wind up the rubber hose and drive “Marius” away to its stable, for this kind of sump-cleansing was only done during the night – for the sake of decency, he supposed.

But now he was really tired. A quotation came into his mind.
Inter faesces et urinam nascimur
. Yes, it was appropriate enough. It had been, after all, Augustine’s “City of God”, transplanted once upon a time to this green and innocent country.

*
Nevertheless see Appendix.

Appendix

*
page 18

Full text of the 12 Commandments

 1. 
Faut pomper la momie allégoriquement
.

 2. 
Faut situer le cataplasme de l’art chauve
.

 3. 
Faut analyser le carburant dans les baisers blondes
.

 4. 
Faut faire faire, faute de mieux et au fur et à mesure faire forger
.

 5. 
Faut oindre le gorgonzola du Grand Maître
.

 6. 
Faut respecter le poireau avec son regard déficitaire
.

 7. 
Faut scander les débiles sentimentales avec leurs décalcomanies
.

 8. 
Faut sauter le Pont Neuf pour serrer la main d’une asperge qu’on trouve belle
.

 9. 
Faut caresser inéluctablement la Grande Aubergine de notre jour
.

10. 
Faut pondre des lettres gardées en instance, tombées en rebut, Poste Restante, l’ Amour O crème renversée
.

11. 
Faut dévisager la réalité à force de supposer
.

12. 
Faut cracker les tièdes et décendre les incohérents
.

*
page 210

Readers who remark a slight divergence between so-called “real” history and the order of events adopted in this novel will, it is hoped, accord the author a novelist’s indulgence.

*
page 258

MENU POUR LE BANQUET DE PRINCE HASSAD AU PONT DU GARD

Consommé glacé à la tortue

Gratin de crevettes roses en bouquet fait

Dame de saumon sauce Léda

Cailles aux pêches du Pont Romain

Médaillons de veau Sarah Bernhardt

Gigot d’agneau Grand Pétrarque

Aubergines en bohémienne

Champignons truffés Sautebrau

Salade Olympio

Plateau de fromages des douze Césars

Fruits rafraîchis des premières cueilles

Crêpes flambées à la façon de Madame Viala du Pont Romain

de Sommiéres

Café et Marc du Grand Daudet

Blanc Aligoté 1927

Rosé de Pierre-feu

Morgon 1937

Champagne Mouton Rothschild

Quinze liqueurs

CONSTANCE

or
Solitary Practices

for Andïs, Henry, Joey

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This book is a fiction and not a history, but it is based on innumerable conversations and a residence of fifteen years in Provence; though here and there I may have taken a liberty with the chronology of an ignoble period, the sum of the matter has a high degree of impressionistic accuracy as a portrait of the French Midi during the late war. I have also studied serious historians like Kenward but owe more to French sources like the books of M. Aimé Vielzeuf of Nîmes.

I originally intended to carry two texts in the appendix – that of the Protocols of Zion, and that of Peter the Great’s Testament. The former, however, is so prolix and cumbersome, as well as being available elsewhere in critical editions, that I abandoned the idea; but the Testament of Peter is such a singular document and so apposite to the times as well as to this book that I decided to leave it in.

In conclusion I would like to acknowledge with gratitude the lynx-eyed surveillance of my text by Mrs Helen Dore which saved me from many errors.

LAWRENCE DURRELL

Contents

Pour Faire Face au Prince des Ténèbres qui a un royaume forme de cinq elements le Père de la Grandeur évoque la Mere de la Vie qui, a son tour, évoque I’Homme Primordial qui a cinq fils: l’Air, le Vent, la Lumière, l’Eau et le Feu
.

Cahiers d’Etudes Cathares,
Narbonne

ONE

In Avignon

I
N THE BEGINNING THE TWO TALL GATE-TOWERS OF MEDIEVAL
Avignon, the Gog and Magog of its civic life, were called
Quiquenparle
and
Quiquengrogne
. Through them the citizens of this minor Rome passed by day and night, just as memories or questions or sensations might pass through the brain of some sleeping Pope. The clappers of the great belfries defied the foul fiend with their rumbling clamour. The shivering vibrations fanned out below them, thinning the blood to deafness for those in the street. It was quite a different matter when the tocsin sounded – it made a gradually increasing roar such as a forest fire might do, or else sounded like the vicious hum of warlike bees in a heating bottle. He had lived so long with them as history that now, half-starved as he was, the very war sirens seemed to resemble them. After the tremendous beating he had endured – to the point of unconsciousness – he had been thrown into a damp cell in the fortress and attached to the wall with such science that he could not completely lie down, for they had hobbled his neck to a ring in the wall, as well as pinioning his elbows. Quatrefages had now reached a stage of blessed amnesia when all his various aches and pains had merged into one great overwhelming distress which elicited its own anaesthesia. He had subsided in ruins on the floor, and leaned his head against the wall; but the rope was just short, by intention. The pressure on his carotid, in a paradoxical sort of way, kept him from going out altogether. He heard the soft rumbling of military vehicles as they mounted the cobbled slope and rolled down into the garrison square; the rubber wheels slithered and the engines roared in and out of gear. For him it was as if a long line of knights were riding away by torchlight upon some heroic Templar adventure; the garble of horses’ hooves upon the cobbled drawbridge bade them goodbye. A sort of vision, born of his fatigue and pain, allowed him to delve into the real subject-matter of his life – for it was he who was documenting the Templar heresy and hoping to run down clues as to the whereabouts of the possibly mythical treasure. Now he had fallen into the hands of the new Inquisition, though the priests of the day wore field-grey and bore swastikas as badges and amulets. With them death had come of age. So this was to be the outcome of his long search – to be tortured to reveal secrets he did not possess! When he laughed in a desperate hysteria they had smacked him across the mouth, knocking his teeth into his throat. But all this came much later.…