(The Friary where the Middle Ages chops wood. An immense man, bearded to the navel, with laughter like the north wind, and hands of horn. Bones which manipulate the creased flesh with difficulty, as if in gloves. The folded effigies in the crypt among garnished floors and ancient bones, weeping and sweating between cold walls like paralytics agonized for movement. Jesu, Jesu, in the rich hymn, crawling up the walls, putting invisible rings round the pillars, until the doleful arches respond, in diminishing polyphony, “Jesu, Jesu,” and the choir is shaken with sobs — blanched almonds — and the candles go out, and the Thing walks.
In the charnel house lanterns smearing chrome along the walls, where the dance of death twitches men by the ankles, or an invisible hand shuts off the draughts of air to their lungs. The Middle Ages holds his lantern for us to see; an imperturbable Noah, secure in his Ark of salvation. His voice can laugh in this place without fiction, and the north wind blows in and out of his nostrils. Here is enough matter to assemble a hundred poets, a hundred thousand cabinet ministers, a tithe of whores, a swath of pimps, a bevy of ladies, a congregation of plovers, an exalting of larks, a true-love of turtles, a chirm of goldfinches, a rout of nights, a pride of lions, a state of princes, a charge of curates, a prudence of vicars, a superfluity of nuns. When the gates are locked at night, and the Friary sleeps, the figure steps down off the walls and begins to assemble them, numberless bodies, false arms, false legs, wrong jaw and backbone (shaking the serpents from them)… But what matter? I imagine always Schiller’s beautiful teeth, grinning at the lanterns, his head turned this way and that in the first of friends. A ventriloquist idiocy, but no fard on the taut bones of the cheek.
In the Friary we drink valedictory ales, thin but good, and say good-bye all round. A great air of tranquillity about the pointed buildings, printing on heaven; Noah lumbering at my side with the keys. Outside in the road the car waits.)
The three of us are hunched in the front seat of the car together, and Lobo is speaking suddenly, with a kind of panic, about death, and women. How he could never marry. When he was at school history frightened him, he couldn’t think or speak. And when his sister died he went running down the road to Juanita, and fell on the bed, trembling, until she put her hand on him, and drew the panic out of him. They were both trembling as they came in the aura of death, the positive affliction of stillness. The twin pins of the headlights swirling away towards London; and we three, hunched over the engine like witches over a cauldron, while the hills retreated in the distance, and the road was bitten into slopes and crevices. New pairs of lights came out of nothing to meet us and all the while he talked superstitiously of Ponce de León, lying down there in some coral grot, with sea slugs in his eye sockets, and his armour gnawed by water; and the new world opening from his navel like a gash in the womb of humanity. All the salt in the Dead Sea could not weep it away, or recall the enterprise which had caused it; and in some way all this — his ideas of the Pacific falling away among the sands and armour and pikes and burntsienna ruddocks; and a skeleton of Ponce de León, clothed in water, flesh dispersed, his skull a birdcage for hermit crabs — all this, I say, seemed to have some relation to the charnel house with its heaps of puzzled bones lying in jigsaws all around. Why, I cannot tell. But all deaths were made real by that visit of ours. Its scope included every example of the human machine’s ceasing. Where he saw Ponce de León, I could see those millions of others, the puzzled apemen prodding flesh, or grunting under memorial granite. The Mediterranean deep-water bursting with the bones of seamen and fishermen. Bubbles in streamers easing from the throats of Greeks. The continents rising at the tap of my companion’s hammer, obedient as elephants, to crush down the drifting slosh of bodies into a convenient pulp. All this vast energy hangs behind his legendary voice; like some immense paper mill sucking in refuse, old strips of rag and street flotsam, the planet softens us all into scurf, mashes and flattens and gouges the unfeeling vessels into conveniences, and then from the matrix produces and creates and endless roll of toilet paper, coupons, poppies, doilies, cartons, cellophane. “Why do we want to live?” he asks nervously. He is thinking of the age I can see: the refuse going into mill and being converted into the twentieth-century symbol of death. It is useless. Death takes us one by one. What do we leave for your children, etc.? When Juanita had her first child she was transfigured, swollen with delight and anguish. She became like an animal. She wouldn’t sell herself to anyone. “It belongs to him, see? Everything I’ve got belongs to him. My Juan. If you had married me and the child was yours I would share him with you.” He tells me this with tragic sorrow. He would hang around her lodging. If he could be alone with her he would try to feel her breasts, and she would shake him off with savagery and disgust. The child! El hombre que ha hecho esto etc. etc. Sometimes in the night he gets her scent again, and he could kill himself. I am reminded of Marney in the upper room, repeating over and over again, in that strangled duke’s voice: esta hoy mas enferma, or some such oracular glyph, the meaning of which I long to know. Or Eustace squeezing out his spots in the mirror before going home to lunch. If he doesn’t do it, he says, his wife will do it for him. The glass is covered with little spurts of pus which harden, and which he will scrape off with his fingernail when the visibility gets impaired by them. All this is mixed in the image of the paper mill, the planet killing us, and reincarnating us in pulp and discards. Alamort, alamort.
But even Ponce de León fades when, that evening, we three weary travellers creep into the crowded Abbey pews, weary with the exploration of ourselves — the old world of the self — and stand, our faces turned one way, like blind things, under the wild concord of music playing along the slats of the organ pipes. And from the pulpit the derision of a single voice, plump and round with practice, intoning, forever intoning, until our souls are sick and begin to reel under the sheer pressure of pomp. Light, high up there, where the slender pillars buttress one another, fossilized swans, falling in diaper and arc and floss: now crisscross, now lateral, now shafted, coiled, pendent, leaning: O Jesu, Jesu, enough to make the crypt sweat and the autumn cinquefoils flutter among the graves. Our sweet white choir hanging to each note like synchronized corpses in a gallow dance. Breaking rollers of sound, crushed like perfume across the poor shabby things which creep in here like rats, to snap and choke on the poisoned bait. The communion bowl awash with a red sea of bacteria from mouth to mouth slopping dismally; the wafer sticking like gelatin to the roof of the mouth. And above all this noise, above the noise swarming from rafter to batlike rafter, from beam to bolt to nut to beam to bolt to nut to beam, the roar of the chorale; until the sympathetic metal whines along the pulpit, and the whole catacomb tilts, struggling, swarming with our clamant souls, sick for sanctuary, with a “Jesu, Jesu” downward into the bottomless basin where the white Thing washes its feet among the lilies — and the pontifical catamites lower, and set up a whizzing like gnats.…
The negress is clutching my hand, terrified by these barbarities, like a child. The light of the cross is shining on Lobo, in his eyes, on his forehead, like a brand. Everywhere we are surrounded by insects in white. Anselm is standing before the face of the Lord in his dancing fighter’s stance, his great golls working like pistons, his jaw like a ham, his eyes pure shrapnel in their black orbits, Anselm clean of the clap and the drink, fighting the good fight with all his might among the soutanes. It doesn’t matter, he is telling me in a whisper. It doesn’t matter. Juanita burned up her sugar too fast, her teeth fell out, her eyes swelled up. He is terrified the negress will understand what we are saying, but she is in a fright at the Host; her ears are laid back like a whippet’s. I am afraid at any moment she will streak for the black doors. He would never have married her anyway, so it didn’t matter. In the name of the father, son, and Holy Ghost. Yes, it was only accident they met. He never really cared a damn for her, as her. It was only that she was there at every crisis in life, so that after a while it seemed that he would never be free of her. One is never free of one’s past. Amen. She had become, by identification, everything, Lima, the dead sister, the panic, the gulls; and now among the northern ruins he turned back to her, regressed, whimpered for her like a child. Amen.