Here ends Gregory.
There is no news — none whatsoever. The summer went down at last in a hush of bows, and now we are waiting for the first iron statements of winter, the first gruff breath from Tartary. The constellations are pinned out for us like specimens, sharp and malevolent. The Sickle and the Twins, the Pleiades and the Dog Star — Sirius. Now the night breathes authentic lungfuls of arctic air on our bodies. In the hotel gardens the crazy declamation of statues is already frozen. The first chains are being drawn across the flesh of the traveller as the earth leans on her journey. The liners are going out into the night, warm and melodious with lights. And in the long blue spaces of night curious premonitions of death halt in the still air of the playing fields, linger and disperse. The avenger’s hour when even the lovers’ voices turn to vapour, cold bodies in cold beds arch up like bows and stiffen; when deserted on a deserted pier the husband scribbles a postcard to his daughter, and the gloved talons of the blind man spell it out, painfully, in Braille. This is the doldrum, the icy limbo between seasons, between the new self and the old, between the death and the being born. The sky is lyrical with stars but there is no news.
Cross over to Bethlehem. They will be able to tell you for certain whether something will be born from this discord of the elements, or whether the fiat has gone forth; whether this is a pre-nativity or a post-mortem.
It is the particular moment when the pen hangs suspended over the paper, with the absolute phrase hanging in the nib. The phrase that will not be written.
But we have called an armistice for these few days of limbo. We have made a truce in the private and endless war which has been with us for so long. We are hardening our arteries for the last lap, the victory of defeat. Tarquin, of course, has scampered into his cell and locked the door behind him. “I have entrenched myself securely”, he lisps, “against the inclemency of the season. I shall hibernate.” But it seems to me that this winter is not something on which one can lock doors. It exists not only on the painted tradesmen’s cards, but in the individual himself, in the very bones of the protagonist. It is more than the bones of the fingers which have gone dead. What is this fanciful emanation which seems to have turned the blood to custard in our veins? I do not know. The very marrow of speculation has been turned to icy phlegm. The sonorous dewlap of the Brigadier has turned purple. A thirst has stiffened the hocks of the curate. And the sore wattles of the immortal Mrs. Juniper crackle as she walks backwards and forwards in the blazing lounge.
“If one were false,” broods Tarquin, “how nice to put oneself away for the winter. Take out the glass eye, unscrew the legs, the arms. Remove the wig, the teeth, the silver plate in the skull, the tubes in the anus and abdomen, and just climb into bed and wait for summer. In the late spring you could have a good repaint and clean up, and sally forth in August like a late crocus. How lovely it would be.” All day the sullen traffic passes outside the window. Tarquin gloats in darkness, behind drawn blinds. Lies in his winding-sheets, fingering the nail-holes in his feet and hands. On the table lies his latest effort in prose, fresh from the typewriter, and collecting the dust. It begins, startlingly enough, in the dislocated manner of the early Surrealists:
The pudendum of the maid winces as winces only the bowl of bubbled suds and the elfin hopscotch of the street-boy. Never, I say, to myself I say, never. Rising, I turn the tap on, and the soft gaslight ignites the spurious maidenhair. Here, fill your pipe. Shall we smoke blotting paper while our noses bleed?
He is making experiments in dissociation, he admits coldly, though nothing interests him these days. This is because he cannot get his feet warm. “Chafe my toes for me, will you?” he says, extending a luxurious foot out of the clothes. “But don’t excite me, whatever you do.”
In the apathy of the long evenings we leave Lobo’s little room, where the ghost of guitar chords seems forever to hang, and let ourselves out of the big lighted doors, into the snow-lit landscape outside. It is like a cold dive into water, so numbing that one can hardly breathe or speak. Tarquin walking like a gaunt automaton beside us, exhaling long windy streamers of smoke, like a horse, and whining through his teeth. The Spaniard draws his scarf taut over his mouth, muffling his voice. He is quite hysterical about this German girl, and has lost all control over his hysteria. He can’t eat, he can’t sleep, he can’t do a damned thing without bursting into tears. It makes me very miserable. Tarquin is delighted by these exhibitions. They strike him as immensely good entertainment. Nowadays, if I want to get him outside the front door, I have only to suggest a walk with Lobo.
We have covered the utmost confines of the map in darkness these nights, crossing the bare white roads, the long avenues of smouldering shops, the tram routes, the deserted parks. In my soul there has been such a misery as I have never known before. It is the real stratosphere of emotion, where there seems to be nothing left but the anodyne of cruelty or physical pain. In the darkness Lobo will suddenly begin talking about his German girl, the fearful oaths they swore, and the mixing of their bloods, and all that incomprehensible barbaric palaver which is settling on his memory like a leech. The minutest of gestures, the tilt of her body, the inflexion of a word, will occupy him for an hour, while he describes it, broods on it, even acts on it in his queer dinky little way. Then, suddenly halting in his tracks, as if about to be sick, he will burst into a long throaty sob, and a recitative of broken Spanish. His eyes are hung with huge tears. Tarquin begins to laugh, and I am forced to repeat miserably: “Lobo, for Godsake now, come on, will you?” He leans against the fence and wraps his scarf over his face. He is shaken with huge juicy sobs. Tarquin watches curiously as I try to get him walking again. “Leave me alone,” he croaks, like a child. As I take hold of his shoulders he turns and runs at me as if to strike me on the mouth. “You don’t feel it,” he says angrily, “what I feel it is the misery you don’t know it.” His cheeks are quivering. There is a trembling tear on the end of his nose. A little disgusted, I begin to plead with him. His eyes light up with fury: “You say that you suffer with the girl you know, but I say SHIT The word is no meaning you …”Tarquin lies against the fence silently shaking. I feel I could murder him. Snow is beginning to fall again. Lobo is standing there like a maniac expecting me to defend my capacity for suffering. He hates me for not being able to join him in a wild emotional outburst. Then he turns and begins to lurch down the road again. We follow him at a distance, giving him time to cool down. Tarquin is delighted. “Tally ho, what?” he pipes cheerfully, “tally ho. My feet are warm at last. Are yours?”
In the dimly lighted room, we sit on the floor and watch Perez lift the great living guitar into his hands, and make it sing. His great head is lifted as he sings in a beautiful canine hysteria at the ceiling. He is strangely beautiful. And catching sight of Lobo by the gas fire, his hands over his ears, he suddenly shouts in his perfect English: “Suffer, for heaven’s sake, Azuarius, and be happy. If you can still suffer.” And choking with delight he pulls open his jaws and sings with a terrific vengeance, his features curiously pure-looking, curiously fresh, somehow like a coin.
Tarquin is lying on the operating table. The frost has cobbled up his mouth. He feels nothing yet, is not thawed under the check quilt. “Give me some brandy,” he says, and drops back like an opium addict, to dream of the Mediterranean and the dark boys with whom he should be gathering saffron above Knossos.