The Black Book (17 page)

Clare himself has gone north to stay with his mother. That is why life is unbearable for Tarquin. One day he thinks he'll go to Salzburg for the festival, the next to Antibes, the next to Athos. As a compromise he goes to Brighton, in order to be not more than two hundred miles away from Clare. I see him off at the station. He looks ill and bewildered, standing at the carriage window, as if he were being taken into the next world. His lips tremble. He grips my hand fiercely, afraid to let go. “Perhaps a girl,” he says. “Eh? Listen to me, damn you, when I speak to you. Perhaps I could find fulfilment if I married, eh? A girl. I might find a girl, what do you think? I thought it all out the day I said good-bye to him. I hate journeys. I feel so damn worn out these days. If I had children and settled down, eh? The pull of domesticity and all that stuff, eh?”

The train begins to draw away. I can think of nothing to say to him. “It'll be all right,” I say idiotically. “Don't you worry. It'll be all right.” He leans over clutching my hand, drops it, reaches out, smiles. The distance stretches between us, slowly, fluidly, like chewing gum. He cannot let go on the known world. “O God,” he whispers, “I don't want to go. I don't want to go.” And the engine shrieks. His face moves across the sky like the face of death itself. Fulfilment!

In the hotel the sour carpets putrefy among all that other furniture, real or imaginary I cannot tell. I am no longer sure of the outlines of the real, so that men and women themselves take on a curious impermanence, mixing together like shapes and symbols in a cinema mix-in.

A letter from the underworld, too, which has a curious dusty flavour when I read it here.

“Dear Puck,” you say, “everything is altered now with the first spring things, the first delicate flowers. Everywhere there are delicate arteries thawing, and the earth turns over on her side to let the seeds wake in her. The cottage lies quietly in the shoulder of the hill, under the discipline of day and night. When do we meet?”

I am reminded of Ishtar going down every year into the territories underground, the atmosphere of dust and ashes and silence; and the slow vegetative revival of life, the corn springing from the navel of Osiris. The rain dazzling on the enormous eyelashes of April. The English Seasons, so nostalgic in death, cherishing their decay in heavy loam and delicate rain! It is something unknown. Spring under the ledge of the Ionian weather, that is the image which has swallowed the cottage, the April, the drizzle among the corn; your letter reminds me of the sea among the islands, played out, sluggish, inert like a heavy blue syrup. And there? Dust on the window frames, dust on our hands, our eyebrows, and the racket of machines.

At night Peters tells me about his genius, comparing it to the genius of other men past and present. “One must be a man of the world,” he says shyly, “like Eliot, don't you think?” I offer him those portions of Gregory which contain nostrums against the literary evil eye, and canons for novices:
“Books should be built of one's tissue or not at all. The struggle is not to record experience but to record oneself. The book, then, does not properly exist. There is only my tissue, my guilt, transmuted by God knows what alchemy, into a few pints of green ink and handmade paper. Understand me well. This is the ideal being we call a book. It does not exist. And when I talk in this knowing way I intend you to imagine the work of genius I could write if I put my own principles into practice. Alas! I am too well-read to make the attempt. Or perhaps well-bred
—
because in order to write one must first be convinced that every book ever written was made for one to borrow from. The art is in paying back these loans with interest. And this is harder than it sounds.
”

Well, this is no concern of mine. Gregory's little struggles with his logical self have a flavour of putrefaction here, at the desk behind the door. Whenever I become too conscious of this suburban house, this suburban world, whose symbol is the map Lobo is drawing and never finishes, I leave the stuffy vestry in which Eustace walks and whistles, adds, picks his teeth, sucks his pipe, consults his tin watch, and climb the stairs to the room which is marked “General Knowledge”. There is one solitary occupant: an inky personality which belongs purely to the world of the image. A negress. Miss Smith.

She sits, carefully segregated from the pallid northern pupils of the school, working away at The Life and Times of Chaucer. It is curious. I am compelled to sneak up to the top floor three or four times every day to assure myself that she is still sitting there, lost in the Middle Ages, with the window at her back looking out like a blind eye on the yard wall. Unreal! But what does one expect? You cannot expect her to have the reality of, say, Monday, Hymnbooks, lunch intervals. She does not compete. As I say, she belongs purely to the world of the image. Against her there is only Zanzibar, mandrakes, Marco Polo, El Greco, and the Dead Sea. Try to make her plausible and you will find yourself mixing her in a stew of images, torn limb from limb from the mythologies of Asia. She is my one connection with the lost worlds. I treasure her. I would not know what to say if she left and deprived me of that world of myth which I can see so clearly at work in her.

You see, I sit beside her for two hours every morning now, expounding Chaucer's language to her, about which I know nothing whatsoever. This is a concession from Eustace. She must get lonely up there, all alone, he says: and no one really understands that blinking Chaucer but me. “And no mucking about with her, my lad,” he adds uncomfortably. “Her father is a famous African judge.”

“Miss Smith,” I say sternly, “are you aware that this language you are learning will be useless to you?”

She cocks her poll down shyly and emits a snigger, laughing behind her hand, as if she were shy of her white teeth. It is fascinating. She laughs at everything, chuckling shyly in her sleeve. It is pure Zanzibar, tiger tiger burning bright, monkeys, pagodas … everything at once. This insatiable giggle of hers gets in among my thoughts, and shakes the world to pieces. A negress in bright clothes, laughing down her sleeve, at a school desk. Chocolate carpets of amusement, hissing between four walls, under a blind window.

Miss Smith powders her face heavily, snapping her flashy crocodile-skin bag open and shut. She plays gracefully with her features above a pocket mirror, like a dissatisfied gazelle at a pool. Her breasts are large and languid inside the European clothes. Her hair has been artfully clipped into the shape of a bob. It reminds one of those stiff topiary privets, clipped into forms, against the natural grain of the foliage. But it is useless. With one laugh I am across Zanzibar, coloured stamps, yellow sharks, vultures, Chaucer, lipstick, Prester John, Ethiopia—moving in the rare air of the image, whose idol she is. It is useless for me to say to her: “I have seen women like you carved in ebony and hung on watch chains.”

She will laugh in her sleeves. Her eyeballs will incandesce. Her red Euro-African mouth will begin to laugh again. It becomes impossible to walk hand in hand with Chaucer on the first Monday morning of the world. The laughter penetrates us, soaks us, winds us in spools of damp humorous macaroni. Beads of Nubian sweat break from the chocolate skin, powdered into a matt surface. Miss Smith sits forever at the centre of a laughing universe, her large languid tits rotating on their own axes—the whizzing omphaloi of locomotion. African worlds of totem and trauma. The shingle deserts, the animals, the arks, the floods, carved in a fanatical rictus of the dark face, bent hair, and the long steady pissing noise under the lid of teeth.

All she can do is laugh in her sleeve and powder that black conk of hers jutting from the heavy helmet of her head; when she pisses, pressed down, squashed over the sound-box, from the laughter spurt jets of hideous darkness, a storm of Zanzibar, like black treacle.…

That focus which attracts us all so much is centred, like a cyclone, over sex. You may think you are looking at her, looking at the idea of her, but really, seeking under her cheap European dress, you are looking at her fertility. The potential stirring of something alive, palpitating, under her dress. The strange stream of sex which beats in the heavy arteries, faster and faster, until the world is shaken to pieces about one's ears, and you are left with an indeterminate vision of the warm African fissure, opened as tenderly as surgery, a red-lipped coon grin … to swallow all the white races and their enervate creeds, their arks, their olive branches.

Always I find myself turning from the pages of Geography, of flora and fauna, of geological surveys, to these studies in ethos. The creeds and mores of a continent, clothed in an iridescent tunic of oil. I turn always to those rivers running between black thighs for ever and for ever. A cathartic Zambesi which never freezes over, fighting its way through, but flowing as chastely as if it were clothed in an iridescent tunic of oil. I turn always to those exquisite horrors, the mutilations and deformations, which cobble the history of the dark continent in little ulcers of madness. Strange streaks here and there you will find: hair-trigger insanities, barely showing, like flaws in ice, but running in a steady, heavy river, the endless tributary of sex. They feed those fecundating rivers of seed which flow between the cool thighs of the Nubian, stiffen in his arteries, and escape in steaming laughter down his sleeve. Look, if you dare, and see the plate-mouthed women of the Congo Basin, more delectable than the pelican. Vaginas turning blue and exploding in dark flowers. The penis slit like a ripe banana. Seed spurting like a million comets. The menstrual catharsis swerving down from the loins, dyeing the black carpets of flesh in the sweet smell, the rich urao of blood. The world of sensation that hums, dynamically, behind the walls of the belly. The slit lips of the vagina opening like a whale for the Jonahs of civilization. The vegetable rites. The prepucophagous family man: the foreskin eater. All this lives in the wool of Miss Smith, plainly visible, but dying.

It is this aura of death which seems exciting to experience, to speculate on, as I watch her sitting in this attic room, surrounded by charts of the prehistoric world in which Chaucer still farts and micturates debonairly. The black and the white latitudes gathered together in one septic focus. Hush! She has no idea of the disease of which she is the victim. Her face is so beautiful among the medieval castles, the hunchbacks, the swans, that even Tarquin is dimly affected by her. From his diary he read me the immortal phrase in which he put down (in clean light Chinese brush strokes) the essence of her. “
Like a black saucer her mind is, shattered among a million white saucers.
” And reading it, walked gravely up and down, fingering his temporal lobes. “Hum. Hum. Yes. To judge by the shape of the cranium I am a man of sudden terrible rages. Hum. Hum. I think”, he said at last, “I would marry her perhaps, what? Do you know anything about her? Would she marry an Englishman of good family? It would be decorative even if I never fucked her, what?”

I am reminded how, sitting here at the desk, I have persuaded her to read aloud to me sometimes. For preference not Chaucer or Lydgate, but the macaronics of Skelton which she seems to find amusing and interesting. Shut your eyes. Her voice, softly timid, comes hoarsely out of her throat, manipulating the wooden symbols of the English, infecting them with strange distortions, a curious scansion which rings a new nerve in the cranium. Strange colours glow in the lyrics, shades of rhythm like drumbeats, semiquavers, quarter-tones, what not. Nascent, even under the gnarled belching world she explores with it turds and turnips, flows the river. The whole Zambesi, poured through a cheap print dress and a tube of dentifrice. The Nile emptied word by word into a glass of milk.

Next door Marney is sitting at his desk, head in arms, listening to the bacilli gnawing at his spine. His hump softens, slackens, spins, breaks in two, and the microbes pour from his vertebrae chirping. He is fighting his dark angel. It is no good. He remembers the woman in the damp room, the anthracite, fog, dirty underclothes, french letters, covered in jam, holsters and machinery. He is forced to his feet, forced to rock down to the lavatory and stand rigidly over the pan, furiously knocking himself off; feeling his breath patter faster and faster in his mouth, the bullets of feeling riddle him from head to foot. He holds his penis away from him, as if it were a potato being cleaned in a sink. Afterwards he is forced to lean his head against the cold wall. Tiny cries of rage and disgust come from him. He is doomed. Tenderly he buttons himself up and climbs the stairs. He is afraid. The dark angel hangs over him. He opens a book on double entry. The cabalistic ritual of the mathematics soothes him. He expounds a problem to himself, moving his lips, fiercely, aware always of the succubus hanging over him. “Yes,” he whispers urgently, “yes, I understand it. Yes.”

The lament for a dead sparrow rolls across the planet like a wheel, attaching itself to chunks of England and Africa alternately: a superimposition of worlds. Imagine Chaucer larded in spit, rolled in carvings and flour, turnips, maypoles, ostrich eggs, totems; paddled downstream among snoozing alligators, noses above stream; stirred by the big toe of the hippo, and served with drumbeats and dog shit in a feudal castle, under canopies by candlelight or rushes.

I tell you, when she reads the world moves into a dimension of pure sensation. Her giant mouth moves up and down the page, fuddled with language like a gorged bee, producing ever more sharply conflicting modulations, snoring rhythms, hamstrings, incisions, tubers; woodwind … And underneath it all, this obsessive river flowing.

I am sitting here with my eyes shut, watching the language cross my imagination, each syllable a colour. A visible notation of images thrown up, theme and counter-theme, all mixed in a crazy fugue. All pouring down towards that original centre of exodus under the coloured dress. The lobster pot of the lost races, into which I am poured with the syllables, drumming down like suds in a sink. The flap of an envelope has shut down over my eyes; I am voluntary, submissive, aching. As I swing down into the darkness I am growing gills again, and an electric tail. My penis swells, turns purple, and my brains drop out of it. I have dropped at last through the grating into the river, have severed the cords behind me, am free to swim in the matrix, the black saucer, knowing nothing. Dimly can feel the sluice of rich gravy drumming along my scales, the slow corrupt delirium of rebirth. Am fed. Dazzling, in the flash of this last moment's reason, I question myself eagerly. Is this amusia, aphasia, agraphia, alexia, aboulia? It is life.