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.
Or else at night, in the open car, under the milky brilliance of the sky, confess my sins and ponder on the Logos with the precocity of adolescent despair. I have the sensation of dying, from the roots of the toes upward, being consumed like the asphodels after a late season. These downtown women remind me of you. The contortions of a whore will suddenly open your face brightly for me, with the eyes sitting there, hard, crooked, merciless as diamonds. The summer is like a drain, choked with filth and bloody rags. This desk is the pulpit from which I infect the world with my despair. The auditors are in, sticking a friendly spanner into the obsolete machinery of the school. Eustace has begun his duel with me. If he arrives first in the morning he will put every bill, form, receipt, ledger, voucher, on my desk, and absolve himself of guilt. At lunchtime, when he goes, I will direct the whole stream back on to his desk. This game will go on until Petitt the auditor flutters in, with his nose bleeding and quills behind the ear, to settle everything. After that there is nothing to do but listen to Eustace deploring his wife’s fertility. “I just hang me trousers on the bed,” he says poignantly, “and she’s clicked again. It’s not logical. I don’t know what happens. I reely don’t.”