The Black Book (8 page)

She had never cried out before; never tried to cross the forbidden territory which lies between us. For a half second it was as if, to descend to the stale phrase, my heart was broken. The pain of finding her almost within my reach, demanding comfortable familiarity and tenderness, was almost physical. Here, your romantics will tell you, under the left breast. I wondered all of a sudden what it must feel like to sleep with me, to miss the open reciprocation, the crude vulnerability of the passionate mammal: the warmth that Chamberlain revels in: the bowels of compassion.…

Faugh! But I'm a saurian. Leave me my toadlike composure. I defend my own psychic property like the Devil himself. (“
You never says it, Gregory, you never says it
.”) Poor Gracie, and her lame performing toad! The distance was never crossed. Even now, putting this elegant
ci-gît
over her coffin I do not really regret it. I am that I am.

Here ends Gregory.

But it is true what he says before: a phrase as valid for us all now as it was for him when he wrote it.

Everything is plausible here, because nothing is real. Nothing. The warm schoolrooms with their furniture of little round heads, the hunchback, the black car riding out on the midnight to meet you, the desire, the hours I spend at this desk in a vacant room, with only this diary to testify to Gregory's life. The blank telephone which carries your scent into the room, among this literary bric-à-brac, these mouldering novels, poems, articles, the statues on the snow whose personality I can feel even in my dreams. To fall upon you in an elegy of frenzy, and feel the circles of snowy birds break from your white prison, burst open your breast and begin, falling across the stony body in prismatic regiments. Forgive me.

We meet at night on the downland, in the last territory of the great arterial road. There is that figure which will break from the dark trees and dance into the glare of the headlights in all gaiety. Leather ankle boots, swished wet in the long grass of the fields. The woolly Cossack hat snuggled firmly to the head. Hair blue-black, smooth, brushed cleanly back over the icy lobes of the ears. Cold the fingers which burrow in the lighted dashboard for cigarettes; and the so faintly painted mouth cold in greeting like the friendly cold nose of an animal. Breath spouting a milky spume on the frozen air. This is the dimension I wander in at night, this and the dimension of history. It is hardly reasonable. The children are afraid to look at my face because they might learn something.

Imagination can depict continents, immense humid quags of matter where life pumps its lungs in a last spasm of being before passing down slowly, sponging away into its eternal type of mud. Things without souls which wander among the mossy stumps, hummingbirds, or pterodactyls with klaxon shrieks, blobs of sperm drying in crevices, or the nameless maculae lairing and clinching in mud to produce their types of solitariness. This in the realm of history when the children are sitting deafened by the silence, and the book empties itself out on the desk in many coloured pictures. The carbon forests buried in their weeds and marshes. Pithecanthropus striking fire from a cobble. The rhino calling. The enigmatic fan of planets plotting its graph on the night. The first spark of history struck from a cobble while the ashes of our campfires soften and wrinkle. The children's faces like so many custards! The waters thawing, drawing back. The havoc of the ice ages set suddenly into gear. The earth begins its ablutions. The planets lick themselves clean. The mud of continents scraped, ploughed. Forests picked out and tossed into space like patches of fluff. Endless the migration of apes in little boats, with food and skins and nursery implements. Men with bronze and cattle paddling the Gulf Stream into chaos beside their dugged females. Oh, the terrible loneliness of the ape's mind to see the dawn sweep up from the poles in a prismatic snow, shivering a fan of colours. The flakes settling and thawing on the blue water of oceans. Behind them, lost in a void which has no location, a world: before them—what? The rim of water seeking away into the seasons, consuming time. No hand or olive branch to guide them. The snow ices their hairy shanks and the skins in which they huddle.…

It is like that, primordial in its loneliness, the mood in which I set out to meet you. The history is a sort of fake I invent all day among the children to nerve myself for our meetings. You are sitting out there, under the sweeping skyline of country, with time strapped to your wrist by a leather thong. At your back the aeroplane light swivels its reds and greens on to the grass in many hectic windmills. There is no object in life but to reach that lonely cigarette point in the darkness. All day my own movements struggle toward the darkness. Immense massive manoeuvres against time, so that I am like the underwater photos of a swimmer, parting the thick elements of gloom with slow hands toward the moment of meeting.

I am alive only in the soft glitter of the snow, the turning of switches, the laboured churning of the self-starter. The engine coming awake under my slippered toe, the heavy metal personality of my partner. We are off on the murderous roads, the engine staggering, whining, hot with slipping from gear to accurate gear. The road opens like a throat at Elmers End. I huddle nervously and press down my foot. Bang! down into the suburban country, among a rain of falling tombstones. A hailstorm of masonry falling away to one side. I am immune from danger at last. The lights are passing and falling away, like lambent yellow cushions, always flung, always falling short. Everything is gone at last, our failures, our shabby quarrels, time, illusion, the night, the frenzy, the hysteria. I am in the dark here in a metal shell, blinding away across the earth, these infinite lanes toward her.

Flesh robot with cold thighs and fingers of icicle gripping the wheel of the black car, everything is forgotten. It is no use telling me of her inadequacy, her limitations; no good saying her mouth is an ash tray crammed with the butts of reserve, funk, truism, revulsion. I admit it. I admit everything with a great grin of snow. But it is no use. If I can find her moist and open between two sheets anywhere among the seven winds, you can have everything that lives and agonizes between the twin poles. Seriously, I switch off the dashboard and let my soul ride out on to the dark, floating and quivering on the frosty air above the black car; my personality has been snipped from my body now, as if by scissors, to ride along the night wind against any cold star. Everything flows out of me in a long effortless catharsis, pours on to the darkness, licked by the airs. This is the meaning of freedom. My money has poured out of my pockets, my clothes fallen from me, every bit of tissue sloughed. Everything is clear in this struggle to reach her. The car humming like a top, stammering, banging round corners with its insane fixed eyes; the carpet of light racing along the dark arterial roads; the distance being patiently consumed. I am in a kind of fanatical imagery now, unreal, moving through this aquarium of feelings, conscious of nothing but the blood thinning in my veins, and the slow fearful heart.

We fall together like figures made of feathers, among the soft snowy dewlaps of the cattle, the steaming commotion of voices and cud. The loose black mouth with its voice of enormous volume. We are surrounded with friendly cattle like a Christmas card picture, on the ground, our bodies emptied out of their clothes. It is a new nativity when I enter her, the enormous city couched between her legs; or a frost-bound lake, absolutely aware of the adventurer, the pilgrim, the colonizer. The snow is falling in my mouth, my ears, my soaked clothes. This is a blunt voyage of the most exquisite reckoning. Enter. She has become an image in rubber, not the smallest bone which will not melt to snow under the steady friction of the penis. The hot thaw spreads raw patches of grass under us: every abstraction now is bleeding away into the snow—death, life, desire. It is so fatal, this act among the cattle. We are engrossed bobbins on a huge loom of terror, knowing nothing, wishing to know nothing of our universe, its machinery. When she comes it's all pearls and icicles emptied from her womb into the snow. The penis like a dolphin with many muscles and black humour, lolling up to meet the sun. The fig suddenly broken into a sticky tip that is all female. She is laughing hideously. The car is standing among the cattle, no less intelligent than they. Under me is no personality any more but a composite type of all desire. Enter. I do not recognize my arctic sister. Under my heart the delicate tappets of a heart; my penis trapped in an inexorable valve, drawing these shapes and chords out of me inexhaustible, like toothpaste. The cattle are kindly and interested in a gentlemanly way; the car urbane as a metal butler. Under my thews, trapped in bracts and sphincters, a unique destruction. She is weeping. Her spine has been liquefied, drawn out of her. She is filleted, the jaw telescoped with language, eyes glassy. Under my mouth a rouged vagina speaking a barbaric laughter and nibbling my tongue. It is all warm and raw: a spiritual autumn with just that scent of corruption, that much death in it, to make it palatable. A meal of game well-hung pig-scented tangy. Such a venison, more delicate than the gums of babies or little fishes. Open to me once like that and the Poles are shaken out of their orbits, the sky falls down in a fan of planets. I am the owner of the million words, the ciphers, the dead vocabularies. In this immense ceiling of swan's-down there is nothing left but a laughter that opens heaven: a half-life, running on the batteries. I am eating the snow and drinking your tears. Stand against the hedge to snivel and make water while the shivers run down your spine. You are beautiful all of a sudden. Your fear makes me merry.
A very merry Christmas to you and yours.
I am saying it insanely over and again. A very merry Christmas to you and yours. She runs at me suddenly with blunt fists raised, shouting wildly. Enormous dark eyes with the green and red lights growing from them. The cattle draw back softly on the carpet. Her tears punch little hot holes in the snow. I am happy. You will go about from now on with an overripe medlar hanging out between your legs, your womb burst like the tip of the Roman fig. But even this brutality goes when I feel the bones against me, malleable and tender as gum; the eager whimpering animal dressed in cloth opening up to me, wider and wider, softer than toffee, until the bland sky is heavy with falling feathers, angels, silk, and there is a sword softly broken off in my bowels. I am lying here quite ruined, like a basketful of spilt eggs, but happy. Vulnerable, but lying in you here, at peace with myself: the tides drawing back from me, gathering up the dirt and scurf of things, the thawed pus and venom, and purifying me. I am at peace. It is all falling away from me, the whole of my life emptied out in you like a pocketful of soiled pennies. The faces of the world, Lobo and Marney, the children, Peters, the car, Gracie, the enormous snow, statues, history, mice, divinity. It is for ever, you are saying wildly, with green lips, red lips, white lips, blue lips, green lips. It is for ever. Our lives stop here like a strip of cinema film. This is an eternal Still life, in the snow, two crooked bodies, eating the second of midnight and snivelling. We will die here in this raw agony of convalescence, by the icebound lake, the city lying quiet among its litter of whimpering, blind steeples.

They must be saying good nights now all over the world. I am saying good-bye to part of my life, no, part of my body. It is irrational. I do not know what to say. If I take your hand it is my own hand I am kissing. The aquarium again, with everything slowed down to the tempo of deep water. Good-bye to my own body under the windmill, weeping in the deep snow, nose, ankle, wrist made of frosty iron again. Help me. O eloquent, just and mighty death. The great anvil of the frost is pounding us. The cattle are afraid. Let me put my hand between your legs for warmth. Speak to my fingers with your delicate mouth, your pillow of flesh. I am a swimmer again, moving in a photograph with great, uncertain, plausible gestures towards you.

I have said good night and drawn the car out slowly homeward. There is no feeling in my hands or feet. As though the locomotive centres had been eaten away. Tired.

Hot scent of oil along the great arterial road. There is not a fraction of my life which is not left behind with you, back there, in the snows.