That evening I was so certain of the age which lies beyond all this, the new dimension, the novel being — a dim gnosis. I have seen the tonsures moving along the leads at Christchurch where the Saxon river drags its sherds of ice all winter, lame of foot; have seen in peacetime a rosy Abbot come down in the dusk to fish the glacid water for trout, while the lights jump one by one to the tall windows.
Last night Morgan was sitting by the boiler telling me about the asylum in which he was an attendant. Juanita was prowling the corridors, her hair in her eyes, a chopper gleaming in her hands. Lobo was whimpering softly as he smoked. They had arranged a rendezvous by the foothills. It was the last attempt on his part to bring her round. He would rape her there and fill her mouth with sand. He was not quite sure whether he would kill her or not. But when she was there, with the child on her arm, lousy, hungry, red-eyed and sore with prickly heat, the whole focus of normality was restored in a second. He knew then that his weakness was too great ever to make him a murderer. He took the child from her and buried it up to its waist in warm shaly sand, so that it could not escape. And she saw at once what was coming, and began running away from him, groaning as if she were stabbed. He was gaining on her, murderously exultant, almost in reach — when suddenly she threw herself down like an animal, and gathering a handful of sand, scooped it full under the shabby dress; filled her cunt up with it, and lay exhausted, panting, utterly without a word, waiting for the tussle, like a bird. He was so unnerved by this gesture that he began to weep, to bluster, to protest, to shout. And all the while she lay there saying nothing. He exhausted every gesture, every threat, every shade of feeling between madness and death, and still she did not answer. In the end he had to go away and leave her lying there as she was, gathered up like a ball, waiting. Speechless. Terrified. Victorious.
What is history beside this unrolling reality which Lobo offers to me with emotion and cigarettes? The progress through the guts of a beggar. When I am covering you my cranium is packed with images, the whole body of the lost worlds is being poured down that narrow slipway to the absolute; history is launched suddenly for me like a dreadnought, the myth, the prophecy, the gloze, the glyph, the haunted hexameter, the dactyl, the pastoral. The world is crying for it to be restored, but we are offering it only a regression — an escape out of the geometrical rat-trap which is really only temporary. It is not only a question of going back to a myth. The myth will come back to us. That is the tenor of this rainy morning; that is what it is telling me, among its polished components of town and valley and farm. In such moments I can tell you for certain that this is the break-up, the cataclysm, the drop curtain on the world. A new language, a new deity, a new indulgence impend from heaven. No, they are already slipping on us. Forms are dying, becoming obsolete, falling aside. Everyone save the antiquarian is afraid. The man of learning has become a cipher — epicene, neuter — with the equipment of a book reviewer. Everything is drifting up in the Sargasso of progress, swathed and shot with weed, tangled in the fins of fish, bibles and lavatory seats, turds and turbines, shuttlecocks and battledores. In the Abbey they are still marking the places in the hymnbooks, oblivious of the fact that tomorrow we shall have forgotten how to read; in the hospitals the forceps are snapping at the sutures of the child; in the Sunday papers the great men become retromingent, pissing backwards into the mouth of the public and talking about the shapely subsisting beauty of tradition. In London they are dancing round the Walpole, the Faber poets are marking time and ushering in the millennium with a series of elegant squibs, the Lesbians are onanizing with squeals of buttered sperm, and the noise of the cleaver is lost in the nervous orgasm of a million women novelists. In Rome the papal nuncio announces the use of the fountain pen in such cases where the penis will not work. In Calcutta the black sweep is wandering with crumbs in his eyes, touching the untouchable, and eating the uneatable. In the Ghetto the streets are full of juice and the pavements slippery with haddocks’ eyes. In Lisbon there are women as inexhaustible as the Indian Ocean, lying with their legs apart, watching the express hurtle towards them on its metals. In Iceland Eric The Red sets off for the last time with his cargo of skins, wheat, chessmen, cider and porpentines. It is all being washed up towards a madness never before seen. The heretics themselves are appalled, are building themselves Arks from the flotsam of the imagination, and hanging their viscera out for sails; they are trying to escape, choosing what is frugal rather than countenance the ferment here, where life bubbles with the effervescent rhapsodic idiocy of soda from the siphon, and the continents fall away bit by bit, and the weakening Jesu Jesu booms in the Gothic whales — the skirling of Jonahs shut out. Relentless, the watery navel of the world claims everything. The Sargasso of weeds and creepers, where the wise, the children of light, the poor in spirit, the aseptic intellects, the various, the rational, can congregate and put their brains together in a stream of atoms. Not a nimbus is grudged, not a funeral note. Only the sea sucks in its toll of cider bottles, cigar butts, sandwiches, daily papers, and imperial turds. And the snore of the faithful is as murderous as the metronome.…
In the hotel the old men are dressing for the last supper. Mr. Nicholas is lying in the bath licking his whiskers and playing with himself, while his keeper is turning on the cold tap to cool him off. He will appear, stiff, sanctimonious, legendary, in faultless duds, with a carnation in his lapel. His keeper will feed him and guard the old ladies from shameful remarks. Afterwards he will sit in the lounge, upright, staring at the wall, as if he were being rowed down the Styx, fighting motionless campaigns in his skull. When the postman knocks and the skulls come clattering through the letter-box he will wake and be led, whimpering, to his room. Tonight followed by tomorrow, followed by tonight. In order to avoid the definitive date I take refuge in books, in photographs, in memories of you.
Nothing is topical except this monkey house of elderly people, and the fantastic loneliness which tells me that I exist. I sit for whole days in a vomit of images, re-creating every gesture of yours, every pose, every remark. In the stale library I devour mouthfuls of paper with words written on it. Sirius, the Dog Star, rising on the dogdays; the Book of Kells, and the soft Irish mouths shaping the script, etc. Tarquin diagnoses this malady as fear: “You are not as strong as me, my dear. Look at me. You would think me fragile, would you not? Yet I support the most tremendous psychic crises without breaking; and here you are, quite strong and healthy, unable to bear your cross without fighting against it. Be a stoic, laddie, be a stoic.” Well, God damn my eyes, I am. At any rate I do my best. On Tuesday I call on Hilda in the late afternoon, and find her sitting at the window among the Victorian relics, trying to write with a crossed nib. Before her on the desk lies a printed Last Will and Testament form. The dusk is falling and the ink is running out. “Listen, ducky,” she says all of a sudden, “you better run along and have a blood test, because I copped it at last.” I stand there looking into her eyes in a frozen perplexity. I am aware all of a sudden of the effort she has made, of the immense patience that has driven her to this desk. Her hand shakes as she writes, but her eyes are quite steady. She has got fifty quid put away, she says, hence the will. She wants her sister in Lincoln to have it for her kiddy; that is the sister who turned her out of doors. “Just in case,” she says, meaning every word, “it’s just in case, see? But I’m healthy for me age. Not much chance of me popping off just yet.” She is not afraid, but numb. The invisible crisis has softened her up suddenly. She is very mild. Sarcoma, sarcoma … the word is flitting through my head.