Выбрать главу

Their enemies were of a breath-taking elegance — cavalry in white armour which formed and dissolved across the route of their march like clouds. At close range one saw they were men in purple cloaks, embroidered tunics and narrow silk trousers. They wore gold chains round their intricate dark necks and bracelets on their javelin-arms. They were as desirable as a flock of women. Their voices were high and fresh. What a contrast they offered to the slingers, case-hardened veterans of the line, conscious only of winters which froze their sandals to their feet or summers whose sweat dried the leather underfoot until it became as hard as dry marble. A gold bounty and not passion had entrained them in this adventure which they bore with the stoicism of all wage-earners. Life had become a sexless strap sinking deeper and ever deeper into the flesh. The sun had parched and cured them and the dust had rendered them voiceless. The brave plumed helmets with which they had been issued were too hot to wear at midday. Africa, which they had somehow visualized as an extension of Europe — an extension of terms, of references to a definitive past — had already asserted itself as something different: a forbidding darkness where the croaking ravens matched the dry exclamations of spiritless men, and rationed laughter fashioned from breath simply the chittering of baboons.

Sometimes they captured someone — a solitary frightened man out hunting hares — and were amazed to see that he was human like themselves. They stripped his rags and stared at human genitals with an elaborate uncomprehending interest. Sometimes they despoiled a township or a rich man’s estate in the foothills, to dine on pickled dolphin in jars (drunken soldiers feasting in a barn among the oxen, unsteadily wearing garlands of wild nettles and drinking from captured cups of gold or horn). All this was before they even reached the desert….

Where the paths had crossed they had sacrificed to Heracles (and in the same breath murdered the two guides, just to be on the safe side); but from that moment everything had begun to go wrong. Secretly they knew they would never reach the city and invest it. And God! Never let that winter bivouac in the hills be repeated. The fingers and noses lost by frostbite! The raids! In his memory’s memory he could still hear the squeaking munching noise of the sentry’s footsteps all winter in the snow. In this territory the enemy wore fox-skins on their heads in a ravenous peak and long hide tunics which covered their legs. They were silent, belonging uniquely as the vegetation did to these sharp ravines and breath-stopping paths of the great watershed.

With a column on the march memory becomes an industry, manufacturing dreams which common ills unite in a community of ideas based on privation. He knew that the quiet man there was thinking of the rose found in her bed on the day of the Games. Another could not forget the man with the torn ear. The wry scholar pressed into service felt as dulled by battle as a chamberpot at a symposium. And the very fat man who retained the curious personal odour of a baby: the joker, whose sallies kept the vanguard in a roar? He was thinking of a new depilatory from Egypt, of a bed trade-marked Heracles for softness, of white doves with clipped wings fluttering round a banqueting table. All his life he had been greeted at the brothel door by shouts of laughter and a hail of slippers. There were others who dreamed of less common pleasures — hair dusty with white lead, or else schoolboys in naked ranks marching two abreast at dawn to the school of the Harpmaster, through falling snow as thick as meal. At vulgar country Dionysia they carried amid roars the giant leather phallus, but once initiated took the proffered salt and the phallus in trembling silence. Their dreams proliferated in him, and hearing them he opened memory to his consciousness royally, prodigally, as one might open a major artery.

It was strange to move to Justine’s side in that brindled autumn moonlight across such an unwholesome tide of memories: he felt his physical body displacing them by its sheer weight and density. Balthazar had moved to give him room and he was continuing to talk to his wife in low tones. (They drank the wine solemnly and sprinkled the lees on their garments. The generals had just told them they would never get through, never find the city.) And he remembered so vividly how Justine, after making love, would sit cross-legged on the bed and begin to lay out the little pack of Tarot cards which were always kept on the shelf among the books — as if to compute the degree of good fortune left them after this latest plunge into the icy underground river of passion which she could neither subdue nor slake. (‘Minds dismembered by their sexual part’ Balthazar had said once ‘never find peace until old age and failing powers persuade them that silence and quietness are not hostile.’)

Was all the discordance of their lives a measure of the anxiety which they had inherited from the city or the age? ‘Oh my God’ he almost said. ‘Why don’t we leave this city, Justine, and seek an atmosphere less impregnated with the sense of deracination and failure?’ The words of the old poet came into his mind, pressed down like the pedal of a piano, to boil and reverberate around the frail hope which the thought had raised from its dark sleep.*

‘My problem’ he said to himself quietly, feeling his forehead to see if he had a fever ‘is that the woman I loved brought me a faultless satisfaction which never touched her own happiness’: and he thought over all the delusions which were now confirming themselves in physical signs. I mean: he had beaten Justine, beaten her until his arm ached and the stick broke in his hands. All this was a dream of course. Nevertheless on waking he had found his whole arm aching and swollen. What could one believe when reality mocked the imagination by its performance?

At the same time, of course, he fully recognized that suffering, indeed all illness, was itself an acute form of self-importance, and all the teachings of the Cabal came like a following wind to swell his self-contempt. He could hear, like the distant reverberations of the city’s memory, the voice of Plotinus speaking, not of flight away from intolerable temporal conditions but towards a new light, a new city of Light. ‘This is no journey for the feet, however. Look into yourself, withdraw into yourself and look.’ But this was the one act of which he now knew himself for ever incapable.

It is astonishing for me, in recording these passages, to recall how little of all this interior change was visible on the surface of his life — even to those who knew him intimately. There was little to put one’s finger on — only a sense of hollowness in the familiar — as of a well-known air played slightly out of key. It is true that at this period he had already begun to entertain with a prodigality hitherto unknown to the city, even among the richest families. The great house was never empty now. The great kitchen-quarters where we so often boiled ourselves an egg or a glass of milk after a concert or a play — dusty and deserted then — were now held by a permanent garrison of cooks, surgical and histrionic, capped in floury steeples. The upper rooms, tall staircase, galleries and salons echoing to the mournful twining of clocks were patrolled now by black slaves who moved as regally as swans about important tasks. Their white linen, smelling of the goose-iron, was spotless — robes divided by scarlet sashes punctuated at the waist by clasps of gold fashioned into turtles’ heads: the rebus Nessim had chosen for himself. Their soft porpoise eyes were topped by the conventional scarlet flower-pots, their gorilla hands were cased in white gloves. They were as soundless as death itself.