Well, all these incidents have the ring of immense triviality when I think of them, sitting here among the books at night, aware of the statues and the snow outside. Lobo complaining of his latest woman because she farts incessantly while they are in bed, and makes him “disgust”; Perez talking in his perfect demented English about Anne who was so beautiful and who has no teeth in her mouth — just two soft rows of gums. The first shock of kissing her, and finding everything pulp. What an experience, he repeats, for an English Sunday afternoon!
Sunday afternoon! Blinds drawn, snow falling, shops shut. The terrible cadenzas of the late buses under an ice-bound moon. A million miles of boredom stretched tight across the earth by the seventh day of the week. Fornication and lockjaw locked fast in the chilly bedrooms of the poor by the wallpaper, the china washstands, the frames of the pictures. Deliver us from the blind men of Catford. We have meetings in these chilly rooms, but it is a meeting of spectres, so withdrawn into his private pandemonium is each of us. The pelmets hang stiff, as if frozen. The fires are lighted, go out, are relighted. The snow opens lethargy in us like so many razors. Nowadays even the final stages of Tarquin’s disease seem significant of nothing. When he gambols or appears to gambol, when he tosses his head and makes a kittenish epigram there is nothing to do but to answer, “Tweet. Tweet.” This infuriates him. I tell him about Morgan’s conversation with Bazain and he is nearly sick. “Leave me,” he says stiffly, “since you do not share any decent feelings on such a subject. Pugh! Gwen, that dirty little skivvy, smelling of stale piss and grease from the sink! What an idyll, my dear, how can you smile?”
I smile because I can feel nothing. I suspend judgement on everything because so little exists. I am strangled by the days that pass through me, by the human beings I am forced to meet. Nothing, nothing, across these acres of snow and ice, this arctic season, except occasional rages, occasional fits of weeping.
In the drab picture gallery I come upon Chamberlain suddenly. He is sitting under the faded Nat Field, dishevelled, untidy, miserable. I recall that he has been missing for three whole days; no one knows where he vanished to, or why. There was some talk a few days ago in Lobo’s room, but I did not pay much attention to it. The suburban mythology was beginning to bore me. Now it is a pure fluke I have run across him in this deserted gallery, dropping with fatigue and wild-footed. I go up silently to him, fearful that he might try to escape me. His face is very ancient and sleepy-looking; hair matted; his eyes are surrounded in huge developing marks. He does not attempt even to speak, when he first sees me, let alone run away. We sit side by side and stare at the snowy gardens, the loaded hedges, the icicles on the gutters. He says at last he has been walking all day and sleeping in the parks at night. In such weather! He must have lost his job too. The whole gamut of theatre has been running through his mind like a strip of film: himself dying, himself being noble, himself weeping, himself lifting the revolver. All false, false, false. He admits it hoarsely. As for his wife, God knows what she’s doing. “I loathe her,” he says, “but the break-up is terribly painful. You can’t understand that unless you’ve lived with a woman, old man. I adore her.” And so on. Slowly it all comes out — their quarrels, her gradual settling apathy. He is almost composed as he talks, his fingers latch together firmly. “It’s not theatre entirely. I feel half mad. If I had the strength to go mad it would be wonderful, the responsibility, I mean. I would all be out of my hands. They could put me away. But here I am, answerable for my life, don’t you see, damn it? I’m culpable, I’m responsible — I don’t know what to do.”
His curious fatigue-lined face chopping up the syllables. “There are no more theories for me from now. Fuck the illusions and the flourishes. From now on there are only people.” He gets up and starts to walk away. Then he comes back. “Listen, you don’t know where Gregory is by any chance?”
“I never met him,” I say.
He turns and runs lightly down the steps, faunlike, graceful, into the snow, turning up his coat collar. At the gate he gives one furtive look back and begins to run. And all of a sudden it is as if I am bleeding into the snow myself when I face the break-up of that world. Across this sun-blind Adriatic landscape Chamberlain is running blind, cat-foot across the snow to his conclusion. A weird crooked light on the walls of Lobo’s room, on the farmland, the frosty turrets, the land of lakes where you are lying. What is all this misery beside the misery of the hills, the immense agony of the rain, the thaw, the new fruit buried in the earth? There is a spirit outside us all which is affecting me, inciting me to join its poignance, its suffering. I do not know what to call it. I open a book at any place in any weather and begin reading, because I do not want to concern myself with this thing, this …
Death. Death of the bone, the tissue, the thigh, the femur. In the same deep snow a year later at Marble Arch I run upon a face like Chamberlain’s mouthing from a wooden pulpit. A terrible strained shouting in the void of self, and outside — actually outside — a dancing gesticulating leader of the new masses. New styles in the soul’s architecture, new change of heart. Yes, but ideal for ideal. Compensatory action for action. In that shabby arena, surrounded by the lousy, damp, bored, frozen people of Merrie England the speaker offered them an England that was ideally Merrie. We hurried aside in the snow, too involved in each other to bother the blond beaky face: the satyr led captive in his red halter. “Shall the hammer and the sickle take note of a few tears and cherished bottles?”
From this to that other circus where Tarquin plies the fluted drinking glass and carves himself Pan pipes. Let us escape together, you and I, he is always saying. We need not move. Look, here is Knossos, under the blue craters of mountains. Here is de Mandeville’s world. Here is a stone age of the spirit, taciturn as the mammoth. Here is the Egyptian with his palms turned outwards, softly dancing and hymning. The Etruscan treading his delicate invisible rhythms into the earth. Escape! (In a small cardboard box on the mantelpiece, wrapped in cotton wool, he keeps a renal calculus and a bit of dry brown umbilical cord!)