Read Online The Black Book by Lawrence Durrell - Free Book Online Page B

between us. For a half second it was as if, to descend to the stale phrase, my heart was broken. The pain of finding her almost within my reach, demanding comfortable familiarity and tenderness, was almost physical. Here, your romantics will tell you, under the left breast. I wondered all of a sudden what it must feel like to sleep with me, to miss the open reciprocation, the crude vulnerability of the passionate mammal: the warmth that Chamberlain revels in: the bowels of compassion.…
    Faugh! But I’m a saurian. Leave me my toadlike composure. I defend my own psychic property like the Devil himself. (“ You never says it, Gregory, you never says it .”) Poor Gracie, and her lame performing toad! The distance was never crossed. Even now, putting this elegant ci-gît over her coffin I do not really regret it. I am that I am.
    Here ends Gregory.

    But it is true what he says before: a phrase as valid for us all now as it was for him when he wrote it.
    Everything is plausible here, because nothing is real. Nothing. The warm schoolrooms with their furniture of little round heads, the hunchback, the black car riding out on the midnight to meet you, the desire, the hours I spend at this desk in a vacant room, with only this diary to testify to Gregory’s life. The blank telephone which carries your scent into the room, among this literary bric-à-brac, these mouldering novels, poems, articles, the statues on the snow whose personality I can feel even in my dreams. To fall upon you in an elegy of frenzy, and feel the circles of snowy birds break from your white prison, burst open your breast and begin, falling across the stony body in prismatic regiments. Forgive me.
    We meet at night on the downland, in the last territory of the great arterial road. There is that figure which will break from the dark trees and dance into the glare of the headlights in all gaiety. Leather ankle boots, swished wet in the long grass of the fields. The woolly Cossack hat snuggled firmly to the head. Hair blue-black, smooth, brushed cleanly back over the icy lobes of the ears. Cold the fingers which burrow in the lighted dashboard for cigarettes; and the so faintly painted mouth cold in greeting like the friendly cold nose of an animal. Breath spouting a milky spume on the frozen air. This is the dimension I wander in at night, this and the dimension of history. It is hardly reasonable. The children are afraid to look at my face because they might learn something.
    Imagination can depict continents, immense humid quags of matter where life pumps its lungs in a last spasm of being before passing down slowly, sponging away into its eternal type of mud. Things without souls which wander among the mossy stumps, hummingbirds, or pterodactyls with klaxon shrieks, blobs of sperm drying in crevices, or the nameless maculae lairing and clinching in mud to produce their types of solitariness. This in the realm of history when the children are sitting deafened by the silence, and the book empties itself out on the desk in many coloured pictures. The carbon forests buried in their weeds and marshes. Pithecanthropus striking fire from a cobble. The rhino calling. The enigmatic fan of planets plotting its graph on the night. The first spark of history struck from a cobble while the ashes of our campfires soften and wrinkle. The children’s faces like so many custards! The waters thawing, drawing back. The havoc of the ice ages set suddenly into gear. The earth begins its ablutions. The planets lick themselves clean. The mud of continents scraped, ploughed. Forests picked out and tossed into space like patches of fluff. Endless the migration of apes in little boats, with food and skins and nursery implements. Men with bronze and cattle paddling the Gulf Stream into chaos beside their dugged females. Oh, the terrible loneliness of the ape’s mind to see the dawn sweep up from the poles in a prismatic snow, shivering a fan of colours. The