Fascinating to watch him sitting there, this little brown man, penning his map; his thin girl’s fingers with their unpressed cuticles carefully unstopping bottles, cleaning nibs, clutching a penholder as they move forward to letter or draw. Lobo is as much of an enigma to me as this fantastic locality of blind houses and smoke which he is drawing must be to him.
Perhaps the remark about the insect was a little strong, for it is not my business to raise my own standards to the height of an impartial canon. But it seems to me accurate. The female is a catalyst, unrelated to life, to anything but this motor necessity which grows greater day by day. Lobo! Perhaps this all has something to do with his homesickness, his Latin tears and glooms. What I am concerned with is the enigma, not these erotic manoeuvres, all carried out on the plane of nervy, febrile social welfare; the kind of thing Laclos did so vividly. “My God,” he says sometimes, “I think never to go with womans any more, never. Why is the mystery? Afterwards what? You are dead, you are disgust. Smell! It is impossible. I go along the road, pure as a Catholic, then I see a woman look to me and …” His heavy head bends lower over the chart; the compressions gather in the cheeks under his bossy Inca nose; he is silent, and it is a little difficult to find anything to say in reply.
Lobo has the fascination of an ancient stamp for me. I can’t get past the thought of this little Latin fellow sitting in his room night after night, working like Lucifer for his degree; and all the while his mind riddled with thoughts of home, like a pincushion. He admits it. “It is my home makes me blue, dear friend. I think in bed of Peru many night and I cannot sleep. I put the wireless till twelve. Then I go mad almost. That bitch nex’ door. I can kill her when I am alone. Listen. Last night I made a little deceit for her. Truly. I weeped in the night. It was quiet. I weeped a little louder. Nothing. I weeped like hell. Really I was lonely, it was true, but not real the tears. I could not make the real tears. Listen, I heard her put the light and sit in the bed looking. I went on with the tears. Then she speaks: Who is it? I was not knowing how to speak. I had no words. Soon she put off the light and lay. No good. I ran to the door and knock it very quietly. I say, It’s only me, Miss Venable. Nothing. I tap tap tap but nothing. I was angry. I sniff like hell, but nothing. No good. The dirty bitch. After that I went to bed and really weep, I wet the pillow all through, I am so angry I could kill.” His eyes dilate earnestly under the sooty lashes. At such memories he becomes pure emotional idealism. Like the Virgin Mary. He will cut himself one of these days for lerv, he says. I confess I did not know what this phrase meant until the night of the festival, when we returned at three to drink a final nightcap in his room. He was pretty drunk.
“Know what I do when a man make me angry?” he asked. He explored the washstand drawer and appeared before me with a knife in his right hand. He was so gentle and friendly that for a second I was afraid. “See this,” he said, and handed it to me as simply as a girl. It was an enormous folding knife, sharpened to great keenness.
“I cut him,” said Lobo unsteadily.
Taking it from me he divided the air which separated us neatly into four portions, grinned beatifically, and replaced the weapon in its secret hiding place. When he talks like this, then, it is an enraged hara-kiri that he plans — or a murder.
But confidence for confidence Lobo finds me a very unsatisfactory person. My humility devastates him. Particularly my complete ignorance on the subject of women. He says in tones of gravity and wonder: “You? A man of forty, an Englishman?” Really, to be frank, if one must be frank, I have had few and unsatisfactory experiences in this direction. Literary affairs with aging Bohemians, in which my ability to compare the style of Huxley to that of Flaubert was considered more important, even in bed, than physical gifts; a stockbroker’s widow; an experimental affair with an experimental painter, in which, again, our mutual respect for the volumetric proportions of Cézanne’s canvases was almost our only bond. Affinities, you might say. I suppose in this direction I must be rather a dead battery until I meet Grace. Lobo is bored. An Englishman of forty? Well it must have been forty years in the wilderness for all the adventures I can recount. Never mind. I comfort myself with Pascal’s remark about the thinking reed.
Chamberlain is not less scathing. This canary-haired zealot, living in one of the flats nearby with a young wife and three dogs, spends his moments happily lecturing us one such esoteric subjects. “Sex, sex, sex,” he exclaims roundly, his manner closely modelled on the style of Lawrence’s letters. “When will we get the bastards to realize?” Fraternizing in the bar-room among the blue spittoons. He is powerful and convincing, standing over his bitter, and appealing to his wife for support, “Glory be to hip, buttock, loin, more ferarum, bestiarum, uterine toboggan, and the whole gamut of physical fun. Don’t you think? What about more bowels of compassion, tenderness, and the real warmth of the guts, eh?”
Really I am scalded by this curious Salvation Army line of talk. Bad taste. Bad taste. Tarquin winces and bleats whenever Chamberlain gets started.
“Let us invent a new order of marriage to revive the dead. Have another beer. Let us start a new theory of connubial copulation which will get the world properly fucked for a change. Tarquin, you’re not listening to me, damn you.”
Tarquin bleats: “Oh, do stop forcing these silly ideas on one, Chamberlain. You simply won’t admit other people’s temperamental differences. Shut up.”
He is mopping the froth off his beer with a discoloured tongue. Chamberlain turns to his wife, who is standing, breathing quietly, like a big retriever: “What do you think? Tell me.” She prefers to smile and ponder rather than think. “There,” says Chamberlain in triumph, “she agrees.”
“All this damned sexual theorizing,” moans Tarquin. “Don’t you think, Gregory? I mean damn it!”
“Don’t you agree with him,” says Chamberlain. “Now, Gregory, you’re quite a good little fellow on your own.”
“Young man,” I say weakly.
“Oh, I know you’re a patriarch in years, but that’s mere chronology. You need to grow a bit.”
“Oh, do stop,” says Tarquin, acutely miserable.
“The trouble with you, my dear,” says Chamberlain, “is that you’re still fighting through the dead mastoid. Now what you need …”
And so on. One revolts from transcribing any more of his chat, because it becomes infectious after a time. His personality is attractive enough to make any dogma plausible and compelling to the imagination. As for Lobo, they spend hours quarrelling about themes domestic and erotic. This always ends in trouble. “Listen, Baudelaire,” says Chamberlain, “you’ve got yourself up a tree. Climb down and take a look round you.” When he really wants to frighten the Spaniard he suggests calling his wife in and putting these problems before her. This is hideous. Lobo’s sense of chivalry squirms at the idea. Tearfully, under his sentimental eyelashes, he says, after Chamberlain has gone: “A beast? Eh? He is beastly. Doesn’t he have the finer feelings? His poor wife, like a prostitute in his home. It is terrible, terrible. He only understands the prostitute, not the real woman. He is terrible.” And a string of Spanish oaths.